The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,107

too. So Nassun can spend her time with him talking, and asking him to wake up, and telling him that she doesn’t know what to do.

Steel vanishes again. She doesn’t care.

Other stone eaters periodically show up, however, or at least she feels the impact of their presence. She sleeps on the couch, and one morning wakes to find a blanket covering her. It’s just a simple gray thing, but it’s warm, and she’s grateful. When she starts picking apart one of her sausages to get the fat out of it, intending to make tallow—the candles from her runny-sack are getting low—she finds a stone eater in the stairwell, its finger curled in a beckoning gesture. When she follows it, it stops beside a panel covered in curious symbols. The stone eater is pointing toward one in particular. Nassun touches it and it alights with silver, glowing golden and sending threads questing over her skin. The stone eater says something in a language Nassun does not understand before it vanishes, but when she returns to the apartment, it’s warmer, and soft white lights have come on overhead. Touching squares on the wall makes the lights go off.

One afternoon she walks into the apartment to find a stone eater crouched beside a pile of things that look to have come from some comm’s storecache: burlap sacks full of root vegetables and mushrooms and dried fruit, a big round of sharp white cheese, hide bags of packed pemmican, satchels of dried rice and beans, and—precious—a small cask of salt. The stone eater vanishes when Nassun approaches the pile, so she cannot even thank it. She has to blow ash off of everything before she puts it away.

Nassun has figured out that the apartment, like the garden, must have been used until recently. The detritus of another person’s life is everywhere: pants much too big for her in the drawers, a man’s underwear beside them. (One day these are replaced with clothing that fits Nassun. Another stone eater? Or maybe the magic in the apartment is even more sophisticated than she thought.) Books are piled in one of the rooms, many of them native to Corepoint—she’s beginning to recognize the peculiar, clean, not-quite-natural look of Corepoint things. A few, however, are normal-looking, with covers of cracking leather and pages still stinky with chemicals and handwritten ink. Some of the books are in a language she can’t read. Something Coaster.

One, however, is made of the Corepoint material, but its blank pages have been handwritten over, in Sanze-mat. Nassun opens this one, sits down, and begins to read.

WENT

IN THE HOLE

DON’T

don’t bury me

please DON’T, Syen, I love you, I’m sorry, keep me safe, watch my back and I’ll watch yours, there’s no one else who’s as strong as you, I wish so much that you were here, please DON’T

Corepoint is a city in still life.

Nassun begins losing track of time. The stone eaters occasionally speak to her, but most of them don’t know her language, and she doesn’t hear enough of theirs to pick it up. She watches them sometimes, and is fascinated to realize that some of them are performing tasks. She watches one malachite-green woman who stands amid the windblown trees, and belatedly realizes the woman is holding a branch up and to one side, to make it grow in a particular way. All of the trees, which look windblown and yet are a little too dramatic, a little too artful in their splaying and bending, have been shaped thus. It must take years.

And near the edge of the city, down by one of the strange spokelike things that jut out into the water from its edge—not piers, really, just straight pieces of metal that make no sense—another stone eater stands every day with one hand upraised. Nassun just happens to be around when the stone eater blurs and there is a splash and suddenly his upraised hand holds by the tail a huge, wriggling fish that is as long as his body. His marble skin is sheened with wet. Nassun has nowhere in particular to be, so she sits down to watch. After a time, an ocean mammal—Nassun has read of these, creatures that look like fish but breathe air—sidles up to the city’s edge. It is gray-skinned, tube-shaped; there are sharp teeth along its jaw, but these are small. When it pushes up out of the water, Nassun sees that it is very old, and something about the questing movements of its head