The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,109

her more that there is a hole in the thing, at nearly its dead center: a great, yawning darkness like the pinpoint pupil of an eye. It’s too small to tell for now, but Nassun thinks that maybe if she stares at it long enough, she will see stars on the other side of the Moon, through this hole.

Somehow it’s fitting. Whatever happened ages ago to cause the Moon’s loss was surely cataclysmic on multiple levels. If the Earth suffered the Shattering, then the fact that the Moon also bears scars feels normal and right. With a thumb, Nassun rubs the palm of her hand where her mother broke the bones, a lifetime ago.

And yet, when she stands in the roof garden and stares at it for long enough, she begins to find the Moon beautiful. It is an icewhite eye, and she has no reason to think badly of those. Like the silver when it swirls and whorls within something like a snail’s shell. It makes her think of Schaffa—that he is watching over her in his way—and this makes her feel less alone.

Over time, Nassun discovers that she can use the obelisks to get a feel for the Moon. The sapphire is on the other side of the world, but there are others here above the ocean, drawn near in response to her summons, and she has been tapping and taming each in turn. The obelisks help her feel (not sess) that the Moon will soon be at its closest point. If she lets it go, it will pass, and begin to rapidly diminish until it vanishes from the sky. Or she can open the Gate, and tug on it, and change everything. The cruelty of the status quo, or the comfort of oblivion. The choice feels clear to her … but for one thing.

One night, as Nassun sits gazing up at the great white sphere, she says aloud, “It was on purpose, wasn’t it? You not telling me what would happen to Schaffa. So you could get rid of him.”

The mountain that has been lingering nearby shifts slightly, to a position behind her. “I did try to warn you.”

She turns to look at him. At the look on her face, he utters a soft laugh that sounds self-deprecating. This stops, though, when she says, “If he dies, I’ll hate you more than I hate the world.”

It is a war of attrition, she’s begun to realize, and she’s going to lose. In the weeks (?) or months (?) since they came to Corepoint, Schaffa has noticeably deteriorated, his skin developing an ugly pallor, his hair brittle and dull. People aren’t meant to lie unmoving, blinking but not thinking, for weeks on end. She had to cut his hair earlier that day. The bed cleans the dirt out of it, but it’s gotten oily and lately it keeps getting tangled—and the day before, some of it must have wrapped around his arm when she wrestled him onto his belly, cutting off his circulation in a way she didn’t notice. (She keeps a sheet over him, even though the bed is warm and does not need it. It bothers her that he is naked and undignified.) This morning when she finally noticed the problem, the arm was pale and a little gray. She’s loosed it, chafed it hoping to bring the color back, but it doesn’t look good. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if something’s really wrong with his arm. She might lose all of him like this, slowly but surely, little bits of him dying because she was only almost-nine when this Season began and she’s only almost-eleven now and taking care of invalids wasn’t something anyone taught her in creche.

“If he lives,” Steel replies in his colorless voice, “he will never again experience a moment without agony.” He pauses, gray eyes fixed on her face, as Nassun reverberates with his words, with her own denial, with her own growing sick fear that Steel is right.

Nassun gets to her feet. “I n-need to know how to fix him.”

“You can’t.”

She tightens her hands into fists. For the first time in what feels like centuries, part of her reaches for the strata around her. This means the shield volcano beneath Corepoint … but when she “grasps” it orogenically, she finds with some surprise that it is anchored, somehow. This distracts her for a moment as she has to alter her perception to shift to the silver—and there she finds solid,