The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,118

her. “Would you like to know what that artifact is, little tuner?”

I immediately hate her. “Yes, please,” I say.

She takes my hand before Gallat can stop her. It isn’t uncomfortable. Her skin is dry. She leads me over near the stasis column, so that I can now get a good look at the thing that floats above it.

At first I think that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a spherical lump of iron, hovering a few inches above the stasis column’s surface and underlit by its white glow. It is only a lump of iron, its surface crazed with slanting, circuitous lines. A meteor fragment? No. I realize the sphere is moving—spinning slowly on a slightly tilted north-south axis. I look at the warning symbols around the column’s rim and see markers for extreme heat and pressure, and a caution against breaching the stasis field. Within, the markers say, it has re-created the object’s native environment.

No one would do this for a mere lump of iron. I blink, adjust my perception to the sesunal and magical, and draw back quickly as searing white light blazes at and through me. The iron sphere is full of magic—concentrated, crackling, overlapping threads upon threads of it, some of them even extending beyond its surface and outward and … away. I can’t follow the ones that whitter away beyond the room; they extend beyond my reach. I can see that they stretch off toward the sky, though, for some reason. And written in the jittering threads that I can see … I frown.

“It’s angry,” I say. And familiar. Where have I seen something like this, this magic, before?

The woman blinks at me. Gallat groans under his breath. “Houwha—”

“No,” the woman says, holding up a hand to quell him. She focuses on me again with a gaze that is intent now, and curious. “What did you say, little tuner?”

I face her. She is obviously important. Perhaps I should be afraid, but I’m not. “That thing is angry,” I say. “Furious. It doesn’t want to be here. You took it from somewhere else, didn’t you?”

Others in the room have noticed this exchange. Not all of them are conductors, but all of them look at the woman and me in palpable unease and confusion. I hear Gallat holding his breath.

“Yes,” she says to me, finally. “We drilled a test bore at one of the Antarctic nodes. Then we sent in probes that took this from the innermost core. It’s a sample of the world’s own heart.” She smiles, proud. “The richness of magic at the core is precisely what will enable Geoarcanity. That test is why we built Corepoint, and the fragments, and you.”

I look at the iron sphere again and marvel that she stands so close to it. It is angry, I think again, without really knowing why these words come to me. It will do what it has to do.

Who? Will do what?

I shake my head, inexplicably annoyed, and turn to Gallat. “Shouldn’t we get started?”

The woman laughs, delighted. Gallat glowers at me, but he relaxes fractionally when it becomes obvious that the woman is amused. Still, he says, “Yes, Houwha. I think we should. If you don’t mind—”

(He addresses the woman by some title, and some name. I will forget both with the passage of time. In forty thousand years I will remember only the woman’s laugh, and the way she considers Gallat no different from us, and how carelessly she stands near an iron sphere that radiates pure malice—and enough magic to destroy every building in Zero Site.

And I will remember how I, too, dismissed every possible warning of what was to come.)

Gallat takes me back into the cradle room, where I am bidden to climb into my wire chair. My limbs are strapped down, which I’ve never understood because when I’m in the amethyst, I barely notice my body, let alone move it. The sef has made my lips tingle in a way that suggests a stimulant was added. I didn’t need it.

I reach for the others, and find them granite-steady with resolve. Yes.

Images appear on the viewing wall before me, displaying the blue sphere of the Earth, each of the other five tuners’ cradles, and a shot of Corepoint with the onyx hovering ready above it. The other tuners look back at me from their images. Gallat comes over and makes a show of checking the contact points of the wire chair, which are meant to send measurements to the