The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,135
reach it and stumble to a halt.
“Nassun!” you blurt, because it’s her.
The girl framed by the doorway is taller than you remember by several inches. Her hair is longer now, braided back in two plaits that fall behind her shoulders. You barely recognize her. She stops short at the sight of you, a faint wrinkle of confusion between her brows, and you realize she’s having trouble recognizing you, too. Then realization comes, and she stares as if you are the last thing in the world she expected to see. Because you are.
“Hi, Mama,” Nassun says.
14
I, at the end of days
I AM A WITNESS TO WHAT follows. I will tell this as such.
I watch you and your daughter face each other for the first time in two years, across a gulf of hardship. Only I know what you both have been through. Each of you can judge the other only on presences, actions, and scars, at least for now. You: much thinner than the mother she last saw when she decided to skip creche one day. The desert has weathered you, drying your skin; the acid rain has bleached your locks to a paler brown than they should be, and the gray shows more. The clothes that hang from your body are also bleached by ash and acid, and the empty right sleeve of your shirt has been knotted; it dangles, obviously empty, as you catch your breath. And, also a part of Nassun’s first impression of the post-Rifting you: Behind you stands a group of people who all stare at Nassun, some of them with palpable wariness. You, though, show only anguish.
Nassun is as still as a stone eater. She’s grown only four inches since the Rifting, but it looks to you like a foot. You can see the advent of adolescence upon her—early, but that is the nature of life in lean times. The body takes advantage of safety and abundance when it can, and the nine months she spent in Jekity were good for her. She’s probably going to start menstruating within the next year, if she can find enough food. The biggest changes are immaterial, though. The wariness in her gaze, nothing like the shy diffidence you remember. Her posture: shoulders back, feet braced and square. You told her to stop slouching a million times, and yes, she looks so tall and strong now that she’s standing up straight. So beautifully strong.
Her orogeny sits on your awareness like a weight upon the world, rock-steady and precise as a diamond drill. Evil Earth, you think. She sesses just like you.
It’s over before it’s begun. You sense that as surely as you sess her strength, and both make you desperate. “I’ve been looking for you,” you say. You’ve raised your hand without thinking about it. Your fingers open and twitch and close and open again in a gesture that is half grasping, half plea.
Her gaze goes hooded. “I was with Daddy.”
“I know. I couldn’t find you.” It’s redundant, obvious; you hate yourself for babbling. “Are you … all right?”
She looks away, troubled, and it bothers you that her concern so plainly isn’t you. “I need to … My Guardian needs help.”
You go stiff. Nassun has heard from Schaffa of what he was like, before Meov. She knows, intellectually, that the Schaffa you knew and the Schaffa she loves are wholly different people. She’s seen a Fulcrum, and the ways in which it warped its inmates. She remembers how you used to go stiff, just the way you are now, at even a glimpse of the color burgundy—and finally, here at the end of the world, she understands why. She knows you better now than ever before in her life.
And yet. To her, Schaffa is the man who protected her from raiders—and from her father. He is the man who soothed her when she was afraid, tucked her into bed at night. She has seen him fight his own brutal nature, and the Earth itself, in order to be the parent she needs. He has helped her learn to love herself for what she is.
Her mother? You. Have done none of these things.
And in that pent moment, as you fight past the memory of Innon falling to pieces and the burning ache of broken bones in a hand you no longer possess, with Never say no to me ringing in your head, she intuits the thing that you have, until now, denied: