The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,63
first drink of water from her canteen is sweet, and the floor feels comfortingly cool, though hard. She’s abruptly sleepy. Well, it is night outside, up on the surface where grasshoppers or cicadas now cavort.
Schaffa rummages in his pack and hands her a slab of dried meat. She sighs and begins the laborious process of gnawing on it. He smiles at her grumpiness, and perhaps to soothe her, he finally answers her question.
“We leave during Seasons because we have nothing to offer to a comm, little one. I cannot have children, for one thing, which makes me a less than ideal community adoptee. However much I might contribute toward the survival of any comm, its investment in me will return only short-term gains.” He shrugs. “And without orogenes to tend, over time, we Guardians become … difficult to live with.”
Because the things in their heads make them want magic all the time, she realizes. And although orogenes make enough of the silver to spare, stills don’t. What happens when a Guardian takes silver from a still? Maybe that’s why Guardians leave—so no one will find out.
“How do you know you can’t have children?” she presses. This is maybe too personal a question, but he has never minded her asking those. “Did you ever try?”
He’s taking a drink from his canteen. When he lowers it, he looks bemused. “It would be clearer to say that I should not,” he says. “Guardians carry the trait of orogeny.”
“Oh.” Schaffa’s mother or father must have been an orogene! Or maybe his grandparents? Anyway, the orogeny didn’t come out in him the way it has in Nassun. His mother—she decides arbitrarily that it was his mother, for no particular reason—never needed to train him, or teach him to lie, or break his hand. “Lucky,” she murmurs.
He’s in the middle of raising the canteen again when he pauses. Something flows over his face. She’s learned to read this look of his in particular, despite the fact that it’s such a rare one. Sometimes he’s forgotten things he wishes he could remember, but right now, he is remembering what he wishes he could forget.
“Not so lucky.” He touches the nape of his neck. The bright, nerve-etched network of searing light within him is still active—hurting him, driving at him, trying to break him. At the center of that web is the shard of corestone that someone put into him. For the first time, Nassun wonders how it was put into him. She thinks about the long, ugly scar down the back of his neck, which she thinks he keeps his hair long to cover. She shivers a little with the implications of that scar.
“I don’t—” Nassun tries to drag her thoughts away from the image of Schaffa screaming while someone cuts him. “I don’t understand Guardians. The other kind of Guardian, I mean. I don’t … They’re awful.” And she cannot even begin to imagine Schaffa being like them.
He doesn’t reply for a while, as they chew through their meal. Then, softly, he says, “The details are lost to me, and the names, and most of the faces. But the feelings remain, Nassun. I remember that I loved the orogenes to whom I was Guardian—or at least, I believed that I loved them. I wanted them to be safe, even if that meant inflicting small cruelties to hold the greater at bay. Anything, I felt, was better than genocide.”
Nassun frowns. “What’s genocide?”
He smiles again, but it is sad. “If every orogene is hunted down and slain, and if the neck of every orogene infant born thereafter is wrung, and if every one like me who carries the trait is killed or effectively sterilized, and if even the notion that orogenes are human is denied … that would be genocide. Killing a people, down to the very idea of them as a people.”
Schaffa inclines his head, acknowledging her unspoken But that’s what’s been happening. “This is the task of the Guardians, little one. We prevent orogeny from disappearing—because in truth, the people of the world would not survive without it. Orogenes are essential. And yet because you are essential, you cannot be permitted to have a choice in the matter. You must be tools—and tools cannot be people. Guardians keep the tool … and to the degree possible, while still retaining the tool’s usefulness, kill the person.”
Nassun stares back at him, understanding shifting within her like an out-of-nowhere niner. It