The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,91

do, she and he are having a conversation that has nothing to do with the words coming from their mouths. I check; there’s nothing in the ambient, save the fading vibrations of their voices. And yet.

Gallat stares at her. Then the hurt and anger fade from his expression, replaced by weariness. He turns away and snaps, “I need you back at the lab today. There are fluctuations in the subgrid again.”

Kelenli’s face finally moves, her brows drawing down. “I was told I had three days.”

“Geoarcanity takes precedence over your leisure plans, Kelenli.” He glances toward the little house where I and the others cluster, and catches me staring at him. I don’t look away, mostly because I’m so fascinated by his anguish that I don’t think to. He looks fleetingly embarrassed, then irritated. He says to her, with his usual air of impatience, “Biomagestry can only do distance scans outside of the compound, but they say they’re actually detecting some interesting flow clarification in the tuners’ network. Whatever you’ve been doing with them obviously isn’t a complete waste of time. I’ll take them, then, to wherever you were planning to go today. Then you can go back to the compound.”

She glances around at us. At me. My thinker.

“It should be an easy enough trip,” she says to him, while looking at me. “They need to see the local engine fragment.”

“The amethyst?” Gallat stares at her. “They live in its shadow. They see it constantly. How does that help?”

“They haven’t seen the socket. They need to fully understand its growth process—more than theoretically.” All at once she turns away from me, and from him, and begins walking toward the big house. “Just show them that, and then you can drop them off at the compound and be done with them.”

I understand precisely why Kelenli has spoken in this dismissive tone, and why she hasn’t bothered to say farewell before leaving. It’s no more than any of us do, when we must watch or sess another of our network punished; we pretend not to care. (Tetlewha. Your song is toneless, but not silent. From where do you sing?) That shortens the punishment for all, and prevents the conductors from focusing on another, in their anger. Understanding this, and feeling nothing as she walks away, are two very different things, however.

Conductor Gallat is in a terrible mood after this. He orders us to get our things so we can go. We have nothing, though some of us need to eliminate waste before we leave, and all of us need food and water. He lets the ones who need it use Kelenli’s small toilet or a pile of leaves out back (I am one of these; it is very strange to squat, but also a profoundly enriching experience), then tells us to ignore our hunger and thirst and come on, so we do. He walks us very fast, even though our legs are shorter than his and still aching from the day before. We are relieved to see the vehimal he’s summoned, when it comes, so that we can sit and be carried back toward the center of town.

The other conductors ride along with us and Gallat. They keep speaking to him and ignoring us; he answers in terse, one-word replies. They ask him mostly about Kelenli—whether she is always so intransigent, whether he believes this is an unforeseen genegineering defect, why he even bothers to allow her input on the project when she is, for all intents and purposes, just an obsolete prototype.

“Because she’s been right in every suggestion she’s made thus far,” he snaps, after the third such question. “Which is the very reason we developed the tuners, after all. The Plutonic Engine would need another seventy years of priming before even a test-firing could be attempted, without them. When a machine’s sensors are capable of telling you exactly what’s wrong and exactly how to make the whole thing work more efficiently, it’s stupid not to pay heed.”

That seems to mollify them, so they leave him alone and resume talking—though to each other, not to him. I am sitting near Conductor Gallat. I notice how the other conductors’ disdain actually increases his tension, making anger radiate off his skin like the residual heat of sunlight from a rock, long after night has fallen. There have always been odd dynamics to the conductors’ relationships; we’ve puzzled them out as best we could, while not really understanding. Now, however, thanks to Kelenli’s explanation, I