The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,43

of the bare-skin killers and there’s more than the usual wrong with that kind. Either way, here’s another ex-blackjacket out here alone, and maybe afraid, and maybe hair-triggered to kill. You know what that’s like, don’t you? But this one hasn’t attacked yet. You have to find some way to make a connection.

“I remember,” you say. It’s soft, a murmur. Like you don’t want to hear even yourself. “I remember the crucibles. The instructors, killing us to save us. Did they m-make you have children, too?” Corundum. Your thoughts jerk away from memories. “Did they—shit.” The hand that Schaffa once broke, your right hand, is somewhere in whatever passes for Hoa’s belly. You still feel it, though. Phantom ache across phantom bones. “I know they broke you. Your hand. All of us. They broke us so they could—”

You hear, very clearly, a soft, horrified inhalation from within the blind.

The torus whips into a blurring, blistering spin, and explodes outward. You’re so close that it almost catches you. That gasp was enough warning, though, and so you’ve braced yourself orogenically, even if you couldn’t do so physically. Physically you flinch and it’s too much for your precarious, one-armed balance. You fall backward, landing hard on your ass—but you’ve been drilled since childhood in how to retain control on one level even as you lose it in another, so in the same instant you flex your sessapinae and simply slap his fulcrum out of the earth, inverting it. You’re much stronger; it’s easy. You react magically, too, grabbing those whipping tendrils of silver that the torus has stirred—and belatedly you realize orogeny affects magic, but isn’t magic itself, in fact the magic flinches away from it; that’s why you can’t work high-level orogeny without negatively impacting your ability to deploy magic, how nice to finally understand! Regardless, you tamp the wild threads of magic back down, and quell everything at once, so that nothing worse than a rime of frost dusts your body. It’s cold, but only on your skin. You’ll live.

Then you let go—and all the orogeny and magic snaps away from you like stretched rubber. Everything in you seems to twang in response, in resonance, and—oh—oh no—you feel the amplitude of the resonance rise as your cells begin to align … and compress into stone.

You can’t stop it. You can, however, direct it. In the instant that you have, you decide which body part you can afford to lose. Hair! No, too many strands, too much of it distant from the live follicles; you can do it but it’ll take too long and half your scalp will be stone by the time you’re done. Toes? You need to be able to walk. Fingers? You’ve only got one hand, need to keep it intact as long as you can.

Breasts. Well, you’re not planning on having more children anyway.

It’s enough to channel the resonance, the stoning, into just one. Have to take it through the glands under the armpit, but you manage to keep it above the muscle layer; that might keep the damage from impairing your movement and breathing. You pick the left breast, to offset your missing right arm. The right breast is the one you always liked better, anyway. Prettier. And then you lie there when it’s done, still alive, hyperaware of the extra weight on your chest, too shocked to mourn. Yet.

Then you’re pushing yourself up, awkwardly, grimacing, as the person in the blind utters a nervous little chuckle and says, “Oh, rust. Oh, Earth. Damaya? It really is you. Sorry about the torus, I was just—You don’t know what it’s been like. I can’t believe it. Do you know what they did to Crack?”

Arkete, says your memory. “Maxixe,” says your mouth.

It’s Maxixe.

Maxixe is half the man he used to be. Physically, anyway.

He’s got no legs below the thighs. One eye, or rather only one that works. The left one is clouded with damage, and it doesn’t track quite with the other. The left side of his head—he’s got almost nothing left of that lovely blond ashblow that you remember, just a knife-hacked bottlebrush—is a mess of pinkish scars, amid which you think the ear is healed shut. The scars have seamed his forehead and cheek, and pull his mouth a little out of true on that side.

Yet he wriggles down from the blind nimbly, walking on his hands and lifting his torso and stumpy legs with sheer muscle as he does so. He’s too good at getting