The Stone Sky Read online

  “No, thank you,” Nassun says again. She doesn’t ask Schaffa for his opinion on this, though he leans against a boulder nearby. She doesn’t need to ask him. That Steel’s interest is wholly in Nassun is obvious. It would be nothing to him to simply forget to bring Schaffa—or lose him along the way to Corepoint. “But could you tell us about this place we have to go? Schaffa doesn’t remember.”

  Steel’s gray gaze shifts to Schaffa. Schaffa smiles back, deceptively serene. Even the silver inside him goes still, just for this moment. Maybe Father Earth doesn’t like Steel, either.

  “It’s called a station,” Steel explains, after a moment. “It’s old. You would call it a deadciv ruin, although this one is still intact, nestled within another set of ruins that aren’t. A long time ago, people used stations, or rather the vehicles kept within them, to travel long distances far more efficiently than walking. These days, however, only we stone eaters and the Guardians remember that the stations exist.” His smile, which hasn’t changed since he appeared, is still and wry. It seems meant for Schaffa somehow.

  “We all pay a price for power,” Schaffa says. His voice is cool and smooth in that way he gets when he’s thinking about doing bad things.

  “Yes.” Steel pauses for just a beat too long. “A price must be paid to use this method of transportation, as well.”

  “We don’t have any money or anything good to barter,” Nassun says, troubled.

  “Fortunately, there are other ways to pay.” Steel abruptly stands at a different angle, his face tilted upward. Nassun follows this, turning, and sees—oh. The sapphire, which has gotten a little closer overnight. Now it’s halfway between them and Jekity.

  “The station,” Steel continues, “is from a time before the Seasons. The time when the obelisks were built. All the lingering artifacts of that civilization recognize the same power source.”

  “You mean …” Nassun inhales. “The silver.”

  “Is that what you call it? How poetic.”

  Nassun shrugs uncomfortably. “I don’t know what else to call it.”

  “Oh, how the world has changed.” Nassun frowns, but Steel does not explain this cryptic statement. “Stay on this road until you reach the Old Man’s Pucker. Do you know where that is?”

  Nassun remembers seeing it on maps of the Antarctics a lifetime ago, and giggling at the name. She glances at Schaffa, who nods and says, “We can find it.”

  “Then I’ll meet you there. The ruin is at the exact center of the grass forest, within the inner ring. Enter the Pucker just after dawn. Don’t dawdle reaching the center; you won’t want to still be in the forest after dusk.” Then Steel pauses, shifting into a new position—one that is distinctly thoughtful. His face is turned off to the side, fingers touching his chin. “I thought it would be your mother.”

  Schaffa goes still. Nassun is surprised by the flash of heat, then cold, that moves through her. Slowly, while sifting through this strange complexity of emotion, she says, “What do you mean?”

  “I expected her to be the one to do this, is all.” Steel doesn’t shrug, but something in his voice suggests nonchalance. “I threatened her comm. Her friends, the people she cares about now. I thought they would turn on her, and then this choice would seem more palatable to her.”

  The people she cares about now. “She’s not in Tirimo anymore?”

  “No. She has joined another comm.”

  “And they … didn’t turn on her?”

  “No. Surprisingly.” Steel’s eyes slide over to meet Nassun’s. “She knows where you are now. The Gate told her. But she isn’t coming, or at least not yet. She wants to see her friends safely settled first.”

  Nassun sets her jaw. “I’m not in Jekity anymore, anyway. And soon she won’t have the Gate, either, so she won’t be able to find me again.”

  Steel turns fully to face her, this movement too slow and human-smooth to be human, though his astonishment seems genuine. She hates it when he moves slowly. It makes her get goose bumps.

  “Nothing lasts forever, indeed,” he says.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Only that I’ve underestimated you, little Nassun.” Nassun instantly dislikes this term of address. He shifts again to the thoughtful pose, fast this time, to her relief. “I think I’d better not do so again.”

  With that, he vanishes. Nassun frowns at Schaffa, who shakes his head. They shoulder their packs and head west.

  2400: Eastern Equatorials (check if node network was thin in this area, because …), unknown comm. Old local song about a nurse who stopped a sudden eruption and pyroclastic flow by turning it to ice. One of her patients threw himself in front of a crossbow bolt to protect her from the mob. Mob let her go; she vanished.

  —Project notes of Yaetr Innovator Dibars

  Syl Anagist: Four

  ALL ENERGY IS THE SAME, through its different states and names. Movement creates heat which is also light that waves like sound which tightens or loosens the atomic bonds of crystal as they hum with strong and weak forces. In mirroring resonance with all of this is magic, the radiant emission of life and death.

  This is our role: To weave together those disparate energies. To manipulate and mitigate and, through the prism of our awareness, produce a singular force that cannot be denied. To make of cacophony, symphony. The great machine called the Plutonic Engine is the instrument. We are its tuners.

  And this is the goal: Geoarcanity. Geoarcanity seeks to establish an energetic cycle of infinite efficiency. If we are successful, the world will never know want or strife again … or so we are told. The conductors explain little beyond what we must know to fulfill our roles. It is enough to know that we—small, unimportant we—will help to set humanity on a new path toward an unimaginably bright future. We may be tools, but we are fine ones, put to a magnificent purpose. It is easy to find pride in that.

  We are attuned enough to each other that the loss of Tetlewha causes trouble for a time. When we join to form our initializing network, it’s imbalanced. Tetlewha was our countertenor, the half wavelengths of the spectrum; without him I am closest, but my natural resonance is a little high. The resulting network is weaker than it should be. Our feeder threads keep trying to reach for Tetlewha’s empty middle range.

  Gaewha is able to compensate for the loss, finally. She reaches deeper, resonates more powerfully, and this plugs the gap. We must spend several days reforging all the network’s connections to create new harmony, but it isn’t difficult to do this, just time-consuming. This isn’t the first time we’ve had to do it.

  Kelenli joins us in the network only occasionally. This is frustrating, because her voice—deep and powerful and foot-tingling in its sharpness—is perfect. Better than Tetlewha’s, wider ranging than all of us together. But we are told by the conductors not to get used to her. “She’ll serve during the actual start-up of the Engine,” one of them says when I ask, “but only if she can’t manage to teach you how to do what she does. Conductor Gallat wants her on standby only, come Launch Day.”

  This seems sensible, on the surface.

  When Kelenli is part of us, she takes point. This is simply natural, because her presence is so much greater than ours. Why? Something in the way she is made? Something else. There is a … held note. A perpetual hollow burn at the midpoint of her balanced lines, at their fulcrum, which none of us understand. A similar burn rests in each of us, but ours is faint and intermittent, occasionally flaring only to quickly fade back to quiescence. Hers blazes steadily, its fuel apparently limitless.

  Whatever this held-note burn is, the conductors have discovered, it meshes beautifully with the devouring chaos of the onyx. The onyx is the control cabochon of the whole Plutonic Engine, and while there are other ways to start up the Engine—cruder ways, workarounds involving subnetworks or the moonstone—on Launch Day we will absolutely need the onyx’s precision and control. Without it, our chances of successfully initiating Geoarcanity diminish greatly … but none of us,
thus far, has had the strength to hold the onyx for more than a few minutes. We observe in awe, however, as Kelenli rides it for a solid hour, then actually seems unfazed when she disengages from it. When we engage the onyx, it punishes us, stripping everything we can spare and leaving us in a shutdown sleep for hours or days—but not her. Its threads caress rather than rip at her. The onyx likes her. This explanation is irrational, but it occurs to all of us, so that’s how we begin to think of it. Now she must teach us to be more likable to the onyx, in her stead.

  When we are done rebalancing and they let us up from the wire chairs that maintain our bodies while our minds are engaged, and we stagger and must lean on the conductors to make it back to our individual quarters … when all of this is done, she comes to visit us. Individually, so the conductors won’t suspect anything. In face-to-face meetings, speaking audible nonsense—and meanwhile, earthspeaking sense to all of us at once.

  She feels sharper than the rest of us, she explains, because she is more experienced. Because she’s lived outside of the complex of buildings that surround the local fragment, and which has comprised the entirety of our world since we were decanted. She has visited more nodes of Syl Anagist than just the one we live in; she has seen and touched more of the fragments than just our local amethyst. She has even been to Zero Site, where the moonstone rests. We are in awe of this.

  “I have context,” she says to us—to me, rather. She’s sitting on my couch. I am sprawled facedown on the window seat, face turned away from her. “When you do, too, you’ll be just as sharp.”

  (It is a kind of pidgin between us, using the earth to add meaning to audible words. Her words are simply, “I’m older,” while a whitter of subsidence adds the nuancing deformation of time. She is metamorphic, having transformed to bear unbearable pressure. To make this telling simpler, I will translate it all as words, except where I cannot.)

  “It would be good if we were as sharp as you now,” I reply wearily. I am not whining. Rebalancing days are always hard. “Give us this context, then, so the onyx will listen and my head can stop hurting.”

  Kelenli sighs. “There’s nothing within these walls on which you can sharpen yourself.” (Crumble of resentment, ground up and quickly scattered. They have kept you so safe and sheltered.) “But I think there’s a way I can help you and the others do that, if I can get you out of this place.”

  “Help me … sharpen myself?”

  (She soothes me with a polishing stroke. It is not a kindness that you are kept so dull.) “You need to understand more about yourself. What you are.”

  I don’t understand why she thinks I don’t understand. “I’m a tool.”

  She says: “If you’re a tool, shouldn’t you be honed as fine as possible?”

  Her voice is serene. And yet a pent, angry jitter of the entire ambient—air molecules shivering, strata beneath us compressing, a dissonant grinding whine at the limit of our ability to sess—tells me that Kelenli hates what I have just said. I turn my head to her and find myself fascinated by the way this dichotomy fails to show in her face. It’s another way she’s like us. We have long since learned not to show pain or fear or sorrow in any space aboveground or below the sky. The conductors tell us we are built to be like statues—cold, immovable, silent. We aren’t certain why they believe we actually are this way; after all, we are as warm to the touch as they. We feel emotion, as they seem to, although we do seem less inclined to display it in face or body language. Perhaps this is because we have earthtalk? (Which they don’t seem to notice. This is good. In the earth, we may be ourselves.) It has never been clear to us whether we were built wrong, or whether their understanding of us is wrong. Or whether either matters.

  Kelenli is outwardly calm while she burns inside. I watch her for so long that abruptly she comes back to herself and catches me. She smiles. “I think you like me.”

  I consider the possible implications of this. “Not that way,” I say, out of habit. I have had to explain this to junior conductors or other staff on occasion. We are made like statues in this way as well—a design implementation that worked in this case, leaving us capable of rutting but disinterested in the attempt, and infertile should we bother. Is Kelenli the same? No, the conductors said she was made different in only one way. She has our powerful, complex, flexible sessapinae, which no other people in the world possess. Otherwise she’s like them.

  “How fortunate that I wasn’t talking about sex.” There’s a drawling hum of amusement from her; it both bothers and pleases me. I don’t know why.

  Oblivious to my sudden confusion, Kelenli gets to her feet. “I’ll be back,” she says, and leaves.

  She doesn’t return for several days. She remains a detached part of our last network, though, so she is present for our wakings, our meals, our defecations, our inchoate dreams when we sleep, our pride in ourselves and each other. It doesn’t feel like watching when she does it, even if she is watching. I cannot speak for the others, but I like having her around.

  Not all of the others do like Kelenli. Gaewha in particular is belligerent about it, and she sends this through our private discussion. “She appears just as we lose Tetlewha? Just as the project concludes? We’ve worked hard to become what we are. Will they praise her for our work, when it’s done?”

  “She’s only a standby,” I say, trying to be the voice of reason. “And what she wants is what we want. We need to cooperate.”

  “So she says.” That is Remwha, who considers himself smarter than the rest of us. (We’re all made to be equally intelligent. Remwha is just an ass.) “The conductors kept her away until now for a reason. She may be a troublemaker.”

  That is foolish, I believe, though I don’t let myself say it even in earthtalk. We are part of the great machine. Anything that improves the machine’s function matters; anything unrelated to this purpose does not. If Kelenli were a troublemaker, Gallat would have sent her to the briar patch with Tetlewha. This is a thing we all understand. Gaewha and Remwha are just being difficult.

  “If she is some sort of troublemaker, that will show itself with time,” I say firmly. That does not end, but at least postpones, the argument.

  Kelenli returns the next day. The conductors bring us together to explain. “Kelenli has asked to take you on a tuning mission,” says the man who comes to deliver the briefing. He’s much taller than us, taller even than Kelenli, and slender. He likes to dress in perfectly matched colors and ornate buttons. His hair is long and black; his skin is white, though not so much as ours. His eyes are like ours, however—white within white. White as ice. We’ve never seen another one of them with eyes like ours. He is Conductor Gallat, head of the project. I think of Gallat as a plutonic fragment—a clear one, diamond-white. He is precisely angled and cleanly faceted and beautiful in a unique way, and he is also implacably deadly if not handled with precision. We don’t let ourselves think about the fact that he’s the one who killed Tetlewha.

  (He isn’t who you think he is. I want Gallat to look like him the way I want you to look like her. This is the hazard of a flawed memory.)

  “A tuning … mission,” Gaewha says slowly, to show that she doesn’t understand.

  Kelenli opens her mouth to speak and then stops, turning to Gallat. Gallat smiles genially at this. “Kelenli’s performance is what we were hoping for with all of you, and yet you’ve consistently underperformed,” he says. We tense, uncomfortable, hyperconscious of criticism, though he merely shrugs. “I’ve consulted with the chief biomagestre, and she’s insistent that there’s no significant difference in your relative abilities. You have the same capability that she has, but you don’t demonstrate the same skill. There are any number of alterations we could make to try to resolve the discrepancy, fine-tuning so to speak, but that’s a risk we’d rather not take so close to launch.”

  We reverberate in one accord for a moment, all of us very glad for this. “She said that she was here to teach us context,” I venture, very carefully.


  Gallat nods to me. “She believes the solution is outside experience. Increased exposure to stimuli, challenging your problem-solving cognition, things like that. It’s a suggestion that has merit and the benefit of being minimally invasive—but for the sake of the project, we can’t send you all out at once. What if something happened? Instead we will split you into two groups. Since there’s only one of Kelenli, that means half of you will go with her now, and half in a week.”

  Outside. We’re going outside. I’m desperate to be in the first group, but we know better than to show desire before the conductors. Tools should not want to escape their box so obviously.

  I say, instead, “We’ve been more than sufficiently attuned to one another without this proposed mission.” My voice is flat. A statue’s. “The simulations show that we are reliably capable of controlling the Engine, as expected.”

  “And we might as well do six groups as two,” adds Remwha. By this asinine suggestion do I know his eagerness. “Will each group not have different experiences? As I understand the … outside … there’s no way to control for consistency of exposure. If we must take time away from our preparations for this, surely it should be done in a way that minimizes risk?”

  “I think six wouldn’t be cost-effective or efficient,” Kelenli says, while silently signaling approval and amusement for our playacting. She glances at Gallat and shrugs, not bothering to pretend that she is emotionless; she simply seems bored. “We might as well do one group as two or six. We can plan the route, position extra guards along the way, involve the nodal police for surveillance and support. Honestly, repeated trips would just increase the chance that disaffected citizens might anticipate the route and plan … unpleasantness.”

  We are all intrigued by the possibility of unpleasantness. Kelenli quells our excited tremors.

  Conductor Gallat winces as she does this; that one struck home. “The potential for significant gains are why you will go,” Conductor Gallat says to us. He’s still smiling, but there’s an edge to it now. Was the word will ever so slightly emphasized? So minute, the perturbations of audible speech. What I take from this is that not only will he let us go, but he has also changed his mind about sending us in multiple groups. Some of this is because Kelenli’s suggestion was the most sensible, but the rest is because he’s irritated with us for our apparent reluctance.