The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,132
that hover so close, so low, their energy pent and not a single one of them acknowledging your touch when you reach for them. They aren’t yours. But although they’ve been primed and readied, yoked to one another in a way that you immediately recognize as Bad News, they’re not doing anything. Something’s put them on hold.
Focus. You clear your throat. “Hoa, where is she?”
When you glance at him, you see he’s adopted a new stance: expression blank, body facing slightly south and east. You follow his gaze, and see something that at first awes you: a bank of buildings, six or seven stories high that you can see, wedge-shaped and blank of feature. It’s easy to tell that they form a ring, and it’s easy to guess what’s at the heart of that ring, even though you can’t see it because of the angle of the buildings. Alabaster told you, though, didn’t he? The city exists to contain the hole.
Your throat locks your breath.
“No,” Hoa says. Okay. You make yourself breathe. She’s not in the hole.
“Where, then?”
Hoa turns to look at you. He does this slowly. His eyes are wide. “Essun … she’s gone into Warrant.”
As Corepoint above, so Warrant below.
Nassun runs through obsidian-carved corridors, close and low ceilinged and claustrophobic. It’s warm down here—not oppressively so, but the warmth is close and omnipresent. The warmth of the volcano, radiating up through the old stone from its heart. She can sess echoes of what was done to create this place, because it was orogeny, not magic, though a more precise and powerful orogeny than anything she’s ever seen. She doesn’t care about any of that, though. She needs to find Schaffa.
The corridors are empty, lit above by more of the strange rectangular lights that she saw in the underground city. Nothing else about this place looks like that place. The underground city felt leisurely in its design. There are hints of beauty in the way the station was built that suggest it was developed gradually, piece by piece, with time for contemplation between each phase of construction. Warrant is dark, utilitarian. As Nassun runs down sloping ramps, past conference rooms, classrooms, mess halls, lounges, she sees that all of them are empty. This facility’s corridors were beaten and clawed out of the shield volcano over a period of days or weeks—hurriedly, though it isn’t clear why. Nassun can tell the hurried nature of the place, somehow, to her own amazement. Fear has soaked into the walls.
But none of that matters. Schaffa is here, somewhere. Schaffa, who’s barely moved for weeks and yet is now somehow running, his body driven by something other than his own mind. Nassun tracks the silver of him, amazed that he’s managed to get so far in the moments that it took her to try to reopen the door he used and then, when it would not open for her, to use the silver to rip it open. But now he is up ahead and—
—so are others. She stops for a moment, panting, suddenly uneasy. Many of them. Dozens … no. Hundreds. And all are like Schaffa, their silver thinner, stranger, and also bolstered from elsewhere.
Guardians. This, then, is where they go during Seasons … but Schaffa has said they will kill him because he is “contaminated.”
They will not. She clenches her fists.
(It does not occur to her that they will kill her, too. Rather, it does, but They will not looms larger in the scope of her reality.)
When Nassun runs through a door at the top of a short stair, however, the close corridor suddenly opens out into a narrow but very long high-ceilinged chamber. It’s high enough that its ceiling is nearly lost in shadow, and its length stretches farther than her eye can see. And all along the walls of this chamber, in neat rows that stack up to the ceiling, there are dozens—hundreds—of strange, square holes. She is reminded of the chambers in a wasp’s nest, except the shape is wrong.
And in every one of them is a body.
Schaffa isn’t far ahead. Somewhere in this room, no longer moving forward. Nassun stops too, apprehension finally overwhelming her driving need to find Schaffa. The silence makes her skin prickle. She cannot help fear. The analogy of the wasp’s nest has stayed with her, and on some level she fears looking into the cells to find a grub staring back at her, perhaps atop the corpse of some creature (person) it has parasitized.