The Stone Sky (The Broken Earth, #3) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,97

In a volcano, what you’re seeing would be called an eruption column, but the Rifting is not just some solitary vent. It is a thousand volcanoes put end-to-end, an unbroken line of earthfire and chaos from one coast of the Stillness to the other. Tonkee’s been trying to get everyone to call what you’re seeing by its proper term: Pyrocumulonimbus, a massive stormwall cloud of ash and fire and lightning. You’ve already heard people using a different term, however—simply, the Wall. You think that’s going to stick. You suspect, in fact, that if anybody’s still alive in a generation or two to name this Season, they’ll call it something like the Season of the Wall.

You can hear it, faint but omnipresent. A rumble in the earth. A low, ceaseless snarl against your middle ear. The Rifting isn’t just a shake; it is the still-ongoing, dynamic divergence of two tectonic plates along a newly created fault line. The aftershakes from the initial Rifting won’t stop for years. Your sessapinae have been all a-jangle for days now, warning you to brace or run, twitching with the need to do something about the seismic threat. You know better, but here’s the problem: Every orogene in Castrima is sessing what you’re sessing. Feeling the same twitchy urge to react. And unless they happen to be Fulcrum-precise highringers able to yoke other highringers before activating an ancient network of deadciv artifacts, doing something will kill them.

So Ykka is now coming to terms with a truth you’ve understood since you woke up with a stone arm: To survive in Rennanis, Castrima will need the node maintainers. It will need to take care of them. And when those node maintainers die, Castrima will need to find some way to replace them. No one’s talking about that last part yet. First things first.

After a while, Ykka sighs and glances at the open doorway of the building. “Sounds like the fighting’s done.”

“Sounds like,” you say. Silence stretches. A muscle in her jaw tightens. You add, “I’ll go with you.”

She glances at you. “You don’t have to.” You’ve told her about your first time seeing a node maintainer. She heard the still-fresh horror in your voice.

But no. Alabaster showed you the way, and you no longer shirk the duty he’s bestowed upon you. You’ll turn the maintainer’s head, let Ykka see the scarring in the back, explain about the lesioning process. You’ll need to show her how the wire minimizes bedsores. Because if she’s going to make this choice, then she needs to know exactly what price she—and Castrima—must pay.

You will do this—make her see these things, make yourself face it again, because this is the whole truth of what orogenes are. The Stillness fears your kind for good reason, true. Yet it should also revere your kind for good reason, and it has chosen to do only one of these things. Ykka, of all people, needs to hear everything.

Her jaw tightens, but she nods. Esni watches you both, curious, but then she shrugs and turns away as you and Ykka walk into the node facility, together.

The node has a fully stocked storeroom, which you guess is meant to be an auxiliary storage site for the comm itself. It’s more than even hungry, commless Castrima can eat, and it includes things everyone’s been increasingly desperate for, like dried red and yellow fruit and canned greens. Ykka stops people from turning the occasion into an impromptu feast—you’ve still got to make the stores last for Earth knows how long—but that doesn’t prevent the bulk of the comm from getting into a nearly festive mood as everyone bunkers for the night with full bellies for the first time in months.

Ykka posts guards at the entrance to the node maintainer’s chamber—“Nobody but us needs to see that shit,” she declares, and by this you suspect that she doesn’t want any of the comm’s stills getting ideas—and on the storeroom. She puts a triple guard on the goat. There’s an Innovator girl from a farming comm who’s been assigned to figure out how to milk the creature; she manages. The pregnant woman, who lost one of her household mates in the desert, gets first dibs on the milk. This might be pointless. Starvation and pregnancy don’t mesh, either, and she says the baby hasn’t moved in days. Probably best that she lose it now, if she’s going to, here where Lerna’s got antibiotics and sterile instruments available and can at least save the mother’s