two good hands for. And Reason Number Three, the most important of the set: You don’t know where to go anymore. Hoa has confirmed that Nassun is on the move, and has been traveling away from the site of the sapphire since you opened the Obelisk Gate. It was too late to find her before you ever woke up.
But there is hope. In the small hours of one morning after Hoa has taken the stone burden of your left breast from you, he says quietly, “I think I know where she’s going. If I’m right, she’ll stop soon.” He sounds uncertain. No, not uncertain. Troubled.
You sit on a rocky outcrop some ways from the encampment, recovering from the … excision. It wasn’t as uncomfortable as you thought it would be. You pulled off your clothing layers to bare the stoned breast. He put a hand on it and it came away from your body, cleanly, into his palm. You asked why he didn’t do that for your arm and he said, “I do what’s most comfortable for you.” Then he lifted your breast to his lips and you decided to become fascinated by the flat, slightly roughened cautery of stone over the space where your breast was. It aches a little, but you’re not sure whether this is the pain of amputation or something more existential.
(Three bites, it takes him, to eat the breast that Nassun liked best. You’re perversely proud to feed someone else with it.)
As you awkwardly pull undershirts and shirts back on with one arm—stuffing one side of your bra with the lightest undershirt so it won’t slip off—you probe after that hint of unease that you heard in Hoa’s voice earlier. “You know something.”
Hoa doesn’t answer at first. You think you’re going to have to remind him that this is a partnership, that you’re committed to catching the Moon and ending this endless Season, that you care about him but he can’t keep hiding things from you like this—and then he finally says, “I believe Nassun seeks to open the Obelisk Gate herself.”
Your reaction is visceral and immediate. Pure fear. It probably isn’t what you should feel. Logic would dictate disbelief that a ten-year-old girl can manage a feat that you barely accomplished. But somehow, maybe because you remember the feel of your little girl thrumming with angry blue power, and you knew in that instant that she understood the obelisks better than you ever will, you have no trouble believing Hoa’s core premise—that your little girl is bigger than you thought.
“It will kill her,” you blurt.
“Very likely, yes.”
Oh, Earth. “But you can track her again? You lost her after Castrima.”
“Yes, now that she is attuned to an obelisk.”
Again, though, that odd hesitation is in his voice. Why? Why would it bother him that—Oh. Oh, rusty burning Earth. Your voice shakes as you understand. “Which means that any stone eater can ‘perceive’ her now. Is that what you’re saying?” Castrima all over again. Ruby Hair and Butter Marble and Ugly Dress, may you never see those parasites again. Fortunately, Hoa killed most of them. “Your kind get interested in us then, right? When we start using obelisks, or when we’re close to being able to.”
“Yes.” Inflectionless, that one soft word, but you know him by now.
“Earthfires. One of you is after her.”
You didn’t think stone eaters were capable of sighing, but sure enough the sound emerges from Hoa’s chest. “The one you call Gray Man.”
Cold runs through you. But yes. You’d guessed already, really. There have been, what, three orogenes in the world lately who mastered connecting to the obelisks? Alabaster and you and now Nassun. Uche, maybe, briefly—and maybe there was even a stone eater lurking about Tirimo back then. Rusting bastard must be terribly disappointed that Uche died by filicide rather than stoning.
Your jaw tightens as your mouth tastes of bile. “He’s manipulating her.” To activate the Gate and transform herself into stone, so that she can be eaten. “That’s what he tried to do at Castrima, force Alabaster, or me, or—rust it, or Ykka, any of us, to try to do something beyond our ability so we might turn ourselves into—” You put a hand on the stone marker of your breast.
“There have always been those who use despair and desperation as weapons.” This is delivered softly, as if in shame.
Suddenly you’re furious with yourself, and your impotence. Knowing that you’re the real target of your own anger doesn’t stop you from taking