The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,32

cold her ears are. There’s nothing in her stomach except the handful of dates she just ate, but the feeling is awful anyway.

Schaffa, uncharacteristically, does not move to comfort her. He only watches her, expression weary but otherwise unreadable.

“I know they can’t do it.” Yes. Speaking helps. Her stomach doesn’t settle, but she no longer feels on the brink of dry heaves. “I know they—the stills—won’t ever stop being afraid. If my father couldn’t—” Queasiness. She jerks her thoughts away from the end of that sentence. “They’ll just go on being scared forever, and we’ll just go on living like this forever, and it isn’t right. There should be a—a fix. It isn’t right that there’s no end to it.”

“But do you mean to impose a fix, little one?” Schaffa asks. It’s soft. He’s guessed already, she realizes. He knows her so much better than she knows herself, and she loves him for it. “Or an end?”

She gets to her feet and starts pacing, tight little circles between his pack and hers. It helps the nausea and the jittery, rising tension beneath her skin that she cannot name. “I don’t know how to fix it.”

But that is not the whole truth, and Schaffa scents lies the way predators scent blood. His eyes narrow. “If you did know how, would you fix it?”

And then, in a sudden blaze of memory that Nassun has not permitted herself to see or consider for more than a year, she remembers her last day in Tirimo.

Coming home. Seeing her father standing in the middle of the den breathing hard. Wondering what was wrong with him. Wondering why he did not quite look like her father, in that moment—his eyes too wide, his mouth too loose, his shoulders hunched in a way that seemed painful. And then Nassun remembers looking down.

Looking down and staring and staring and thinking What is that? and staring and thinking Is it a ball? like the ones that the kids at creche kick around during lunchtime, except those balls are made of leather while the thing at her father’s feet is a different shade of brown, brown with purplish mottling all over its surface, lumpy and leathery and half-deflated but No, it’s not a ball, wait is that an eye? Maybe but it’s so swollen shut that it looks like a big fat coffee bean. Not a ball at all because it’s wearing her brother’s clothes including the pants Nassun put on him that morning while Jija was busy trying to get their lunch satchels together for creche. Uche didn’t want to wear those pants because he was still a baby and liked to be silly so Nassun had done the butt dance for him and he’d laughed so hard, so hard! His laugh was her favorite thing ever, and when the butt dance was over he’d let her put his pants on as a thank-you, which means the unrecognizable deflated ball-thing on the floor is Uche that is Uche he is Uche—

“No,” Nassun breathes. “I wouldn’t fix it. Not even if I knew how.”

She has stopped pacing. She has one arm wrapped around her middle. The other hand is a fist, crammed against her mouth. She spits out words around it now, she chokes on them as they gush up her throat, she clutches her belly, which is full of such terrible things that she must let them out somehow or be torn apart from within. These things have distorted her voice, made it a shaky growl that randomly spikes into a higher pitch and a louder volume, because it’s everything she can do not to just start screaming. “I wouldn’t fix it, Schaffa, I wouldn’t, I’m sorry, I don’t want to fix it I want to kill everybody that hates me—”

Her middle is so heavy that she can’t stand. Nassun drops into a crouch, then to her knees. She wants to vomit but instead she spits words onto the ground between her splayed hands. “G-g-gone! I want it all GONE, Schaffa! I want it to BURN, I want it burned up and dead and gone, gone, NOTHING l-l-left, no more hate and no more killing just nothing, r-rusting nothing, nothing FOREVER—”

Schaffa’s hands, hard and strong, pull her up. She flails against him, tries to hit him. It isn’t malice or fear. She never wants to hurt him. She just has to let some of what’s in her out somehow, or she will go mad. For the first time she