The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,134
nothing of tension or falsehood in it. He isn’t smiling to ease his pain or others’ fears. His mouth opens. She can see all his teeth, he’s laughing although weakly, he’s weeping, too, with relief and joy, and it is the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. She cups his face, mindful of the wound on the back of his neck, and presses her forehead against his, shaking with his soft laughter. She loves him. She just loves him so much.
And because she is touching him, because she loves him, because she is so attuned to his needs and his pain and making him happy, her perception slips into the silver. She doesn’t mean for it to. She just wants to use her eyes to savor the sight of him looking back at her, and her hands to touch his skin, and her ears to hear his voice.
But she is orogene, and she can no longer shut off the sesuna than she can sight or sound or touch. Which is why her smile falters, and her joy vanishes, because the instant she sees how the network of threads within him is already beginning to fade, she can no longer deny that he is dying.
It’s slow. He could last a few weeks or months, perhaps as much as a year, with what’s left. But where every other living thing churns forth its own silver almost by accident, where it flows and stutters and gums up the works between cells, there is nothing between his cells but a trickle. What’s left in him mostly runs along his nervous system, and she can see a glaring, gaping emptiness at what used to be the core of his silver network, in his sessapinae. Without his corestone, as he warned her, he will not last long.
Schaffa’s eyes have drifted shut. He’s asleep, exhausted by pushing his weakened body through the streets. But he isn’t the one who did that, is he? Nassun gets to her feet, shaking, keeping her hands on Schaffa’s shoulders. His heavy head presses against her chest. She stares at the little metal shard bitterly, understanding at once why Father Earth did this to him.
It knows she means to bring the Moon down, and that this will create a cataclysm far worse than the Shattering. It wants to live. It knows Nassun loves Schaffa, and that until now she has seen destroying the world as the only way to give him peace. Now, however, it has remade Schaffa, offering him to Nassun as a kind of living ultimatum.
Now he is free, the Earth taunts by this wordless gesture. Now he can have peace without death. And if you want him to live, little enemy, there is only one way.
Steel never said it couldn’t be done, only that it shouldn’t. Maybe Steel is wrong. Maybe, as a stone eater, Schaffa won’t be alone and sad forever. Steel is mean and awful, which is why no one wants to be with him. But Schaffa is good and kind. Surely he will find someone else to love.
Especially if all the world is stone eaters, too.
Humanity, she decides, is a small price to pay for Schaffa’s future.
Hoa says that Nassun has gone underground, to Warrant where the Guardians lie, and the panic of this is sour in your mouth as you trot around the hole, looking for a way in. You don’t dare ask Hoa to simply transport you to her; Gray Man’s allies lurk everywhere now, and they will kill you as surely as they did Lerna. Allies of Hoa are present, too; you have a blurry memory of seeing two streaking mountains crash into one another, one driving the other off. But until this business with the Moon is settled, going into the Earth is too dangerous. All of the stone eaters are here, you sess; a thousand human-sized mountains in and underneath Corepoint, some of them watching you run through the streets looking for your daughter. All of their ancient factions and private battles will come to a head tonight, one way or another.
Hjarka and the others have followed you, though more slowly; they do not feel your panic. At last you spot one pylon building that’s been opened—cut open, it seems, as if with an enormous knife; three irregular slashes and then someone has made the door fall outward. It’s a foot thick. But beyond it is a wide, low-ceilinged corridor going down into darkness.