The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,81

is faster to travel than the desert sand, but this takes a toll. Every orogene in the comm has to stay on alert, because anything worse than a microshake while you’re up here could spell disaster. One day Penty, too exhausted to pay attention to her own instincts, steps on a patch of cracked asphalt that’s completely unstable. One of the other rogga kids snatches her away just as a big piece simply falls through the substructure of the road. Others are less careful, and less lucky.

The acid rain was unexpected. Stonelore does not discuss the ways in which Seasons can impact weather, because such things are unpredictable at the best of times. What happens here is not entirely surprising, however. Northward, at the equator, the Rifting pumps heat and particulates into the air. Moisture-laden tropical winds coming off the sea hit this cloud-seeding, energy-infusing wall, which whips them into storm. You remember being worried about snow. No. It’s endless, miserable rain.

(The rain is not so very acid, as these things go. In the Season of Turning Soil—long before Sanze, you would not know of it—there was rain that stripped animals’ fur and peeled the skins off oranges. This is nothing compared to that, and diluted as it is by water. Like vinegar. You’ll live.)

Ykka sets a brutal pace while you’re on the highroad. On the first day everyone makes camp well after nightfall, and Lerna does not come to the tent after you wearily put it up. He’s busy tending half a dozen people who are going lame from slips or twisted ankles, and two elders who are having breathing problems, and the pregnant woman. The latter three are doing all right, he tells you when he finally crawls into your bedroll, near dawn; Ontrag the potter lives on spite, and the pregnant woman has both her household and half the Breeders taking care of her. What’s troubling are the injuries. “I have to tell Ykka,” he says as you push a slab of rain-soaked cachebread and sour sausage into his mouth, then cover him up and make him lie still. He chews and swallows almost without noticing. “We can’t keep going at this pace. We’ll start losing people if we don’t—”

“She knows,” you tell him. You’ve spoken as gently as you can, but it still silences him. He stares until you lie back down beside him—awkwardly, with only one arm, but successfully. Eventually exhaustion overwhelms anguish, and he sleeps.

You walk with Ykka one day. She’s setting the pace like a good comm leader should, pushing no one harder than herself. At the lone midday rest stop, she takes off one boot and you see that her feet are streaked with blood from blisters. You look at her, frowning, and it’s eloquent enough that she sighs. “Never got around to requisitioning better boots,” she says. “These are too loose. Always figured I’d have more time.”

“If your feet rot off,” you begin, but she rolls her eyes and points toward the supply pile in the middle of the camp.

You glance at it in confusion, start to resume your scolding, and then pause. Think. Look at the supply pile again. If every wagon carries a crate of the salted cachebread and another of sausage, and if those casks are pickled vegetables, and those are the grains and beans …

The pile is so small. So little, for a thousand people who have weeks yet to go through the Merz.

You shut up about the boots. Though she gets some extra socks from someone; that helps.

It shocks you that you’re doing as well as you are. You’re not healthy, not exactly. Your menstrual cycle has stopped, and it’s probably not menopause yet. When you undress to basin-wash, which is sort of pointless in the constant rain but habit is habit, you notice that your ribs show starkly beneath loose skin. That’s only partly because of all the walking, though; some of it is because you keep forgetting to eat. You feel tired at the end of the day, but it’s a distant, detached sort of thing. When you touch Lerna—not for sex, you don’t have the energy, but cuddling for warmth saves calories, and he needs the comfort—it feels good, but in an equally detached way. You feel as though you’re floating above yourself, watching him sigh, listening to someone else yawn. Like it’s happening to someone else.

This is what happened to Alabaster, you remember. A detachment from the flesh, as it became no