He groans and presses the heels of his hands to his forehead as if to push away a headache, or maybe drive it deeper. Then he curses in that language she heard him use before. She still doesn’t recognize it, but she’s even more certain that it’s one of the Coaster creoles—which is odd, given that he says he was bred and raised at the Fulcrum. Then again, somebody had to raise him for those first few years before he got old enough to be dumped in the grit pool. She’s heard that a lot of the eastern Coaster races are dark-skinned like him, too, so maybe they’ll hear the language being spoken once they get to Allia.
“If you don’t go with me, I’ll go alone,” he snaps, finally speaking in Sanze-mat. And then he gets up, fumbling around for his clothing and pulling it on, like he’s serious. Syenite stares as he does this, because he’s shaking so hard he can hardly stand up straight. If he gets on a horse in this condition, he’ll just fall off.
“Hey,” she says, and he continues his feverish preparations as if he can’t hear her. “Hey.” He jerks and glares, and belatedly she realizes he didn’t hear her. He’s been listening to something entirely different all this time—the earth, his inner crazy, who knows. “You’re going to kill yourself.”
“I don’t care.”
“This is—” She gets up, goes over to him, grabs his arm just as he’s reaching for the saddle. “This is stupid, you can’t—”
“Don’t you tell me what I can’t do.” His arm is wire in her hand as he leans in to snarl the words into her face. Syen almost jerks back… but up close she sees his bloodshot whites, the manic gleam, the blown look of his pupils. Something’s wrong with him. “You’re not a Guardian. You don’t get to order me around.”
“Have you lost your mind?” For the first time since she’s met him, she’s… uneasy. He used her orogeny so easily, and she has no idea how he did it. He’s so skinny that she could probably beat him senseless with relative ease, but he’d just ice her after the first blow.
He isn’t stupid. She has to make him see. “I will go with you,” she says firmly, and he looks so grateful that she feels bad for her earlier uncomplimentary thoughts. “At first light, when we can take the switchback pass down to the lowroads without breaking our horses’ legs and our own necks. All right?”
His face constricts with anguish. “That’s too long—”
“We’ve already slept all day. And when you talked about this before, you said it was a two-day ride. If we lose the horses, how much longer will it take?”
That stops him. He blinks and groans and stumbles back, thankfully away from the saddle. Everything’s red in the light of sunset. There’s a rock formation in the distance behind him, a tall straight cylinder of a thing that Syenite can tell isn’t natural at a glance; either it was pushed up by an orogene, or it’s yet another ancient ruin, better camouflaged than most. With this as his backdrop, Alabaster stands gazing up at the sky as if he wants to start howling. His hands flex and relax, flex and relax.
“The node,” he says, at last.
“Yes?” She stretches the word out, trying not to let him hear the humoring the crazy man note of her voice.
He hesitates, then takes a deep breath. Another, calming himself. “You know shakes and blows never just come out of nowhere like that. The trigger for this one, the shift that disrupted that hot spot’s equilibrium, was the node.”
“How can you—” Of course he can tell, he’s a ten-ringer. Then she catches his meaning. “Wait, you’re saying the node maintainer set that thing off?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” He turns to her, his hands flexing into fists again. “Now do you see why I want to get there?”
She nods, blankly. She does. Because an orogene who spontaneously creates a supervolcano does not do so without generating a torus the size of a town. She cannot help but look out over the forest, in the direction of the node. She can’t see anything from here, but somewhere out there, a Fulcrum orogene has killed everything in a several-mile radius.
And then there’s the possibly more important question, which is: Why?
“All right,” Alabaster blurts suddenly. “We need to leave first thing in the morning, and go as fast as we can. It’s a two-day trip if we take it easy, but if we push the horses—” He speeds up his words when she opens her mouth, and rides over her objection like a man obsessed. “If we push them, if we leave before dawn, we can get there by nightfall.”
It’s probably the best she’s going to get out of him. “Dawn, then.” She scratches at her hair. Her scalp is gritty with road dust; she hasn’t been able to wash in three days. They were supposed to pass over Adea Heights tomorrow, a mid-sized comm where she would’ve pressed to stay at an inn… but he’s right. They have to get to that node. “We’ll have to stop at the next stream or roadhouse, though. We’re low on water for the horses.”
He makes a sound of frustration at the needs of mortal flesh. But he says, “Fine.”
Then he hunkers down by the coals, where he picks up one of the cooled mela and cracks it open, eating with his fingers and chewing methodically. She doubts he tastes it. Fuel. She joins him to eat the other mela, and the rest of the night passes in silence, if not restfulness.
The next day—or really, later in the night—they saddle up and start cautiously toward the switchback road that will take them off the highroad and down to the lands below. By the time they reach ground level the sun’s up, so at that point Alabaster takes the lead and pushes his horse to a full canter, interspersed with walking jags to let them rest. Syen’s impressed; she’d thought he would just kill the horses in the grip of whatever urgency possesses him. He’s not stupid, at least. Or cruel.
So at this pace they make good time along the more heavily traveled and intersecting lowroads, where they bypass light carters and casual travelers and a few local militia units—all of whom quickly make way for them, as Syen and Alabaster come into view. It’s almost ironic, she thinks: Any other time, their black uniforms would make others give them a wide berth because no one likes orogenes. Now, however, everyone must have felt what almost happened with the hot spot. They clear the way eagerly now, and there is gratitude and relief in their faces. The Fulcrum to the rescue. Syen wants to laugh at them all.
They stop for the night and sleep a handful of hours and start again before dawn, and still it’s almost full dark by the time the node station appears, nestled between two low hills at the top of a winding road. The road’s not much better than a dirtpacked wilderness trail with a bit of aged, cracking asphalt laid along it as a nod to civilization. The station itself is another nod. They’ve passed dozens of comms on the way here, each displaying a wild range of architecture—whatever’s native to the region, whatever fads the wealthier comm members have tried to bring in, cheap imitations of Yumenescene styles. The station is pure Old Empire, though: great looming walls of deep red scoria brick around a complex comprising three small pyramids and a larger central one. The gates are some kind of steely metal, which makes Syen wince. No one puts metal gates on anything they actually want to keep secure. But then, there’s nothing in the station except the orogene who lives here, and the staff that supports him or her. Nodes don’t even have storecaches, relying instead on regular resupply caravans from nearby comms. Few would want to steal anything within its walls.
Syen’s caught off guard when Alabaster abruptly reins his horse well before they reach the gates, squinting up at the station. “What?”
“No one’s coming out,” he says, almost to himself. “No one’s moving beyond the gate. I can’t hear anything coming from inside. Can you?”
She hears only silence. “How many people should be here? The node maintainer, a Guardian, and…?”
“Node maintainers don’t need Guardians. Usually there’s a small troop of six to ten soldiers, Imperials, posted at the station to protect the maintainer. Cooks and the like to serve them. And there’s always at least one doctor.”
So many headscratchers i
n so few words. An orogene who doesn’t need a Guardian? Node maintainers are below fourth ring; lowringers are never allowed outside the Fulcrum without Guardians, or at least a senior to supervise. The soldiers she understands; sometimes superstitious locals don’t draw much distinction between Fulcrum-trained orogenes and any other kind. But why a doctor?
Doesn’t matter. “They’re probably all dead,” she says—but even as she says this, her reasoning falters. The forest around them should be dead, too, for miles around, trees and animals and soil flash-frozen and thawed into slush. All the people traveling the road behind them should be dead. How else could the node maintainer have gotten enough power to disturb that hot spot? But everything seems fine from here, except the silence of the node station.
Abruptly Alabaster spurs his horse forward, and there’s no time for more questions. They ride up the hill and toward the locked, closed gates that Syen can’t see a way to open, if there’s no one inside to do it for them. Then Alabaster hisses and leans forward and for an instant a blistering, narrow torus flickers into view—not around them, but around the gate. She’s never seen anyone do that, throw their torus somewhere else, but apparently tenth-ringers can. Her horse utters a nervous little whicker at the sudden vortex of cold and snow before them, so she reins it to a halt, and it shies back a few extra steps. In the next moment something groans and there is a cracking sound beyond the gate. Alabaster lets the torus go as one of the big steel doors drifts open; he’s already dismounting.
“Wait, give it time to warm up,” Syen begins, but he ignores her and heads toward the gates, not even bothering to watch his step on the slippery frost-flecked asphalt.
Rusting Earthfires. So Syen dismounts and loops the horses’ reins around a listing sapling. After the day’s hard ride she’ll have to let them cool down before she feeds or waters them, and she should rub them down at least—but something about this big, looming, silent building unnerves her. She’s not sure what. So she leaves the horses saddled. Just in case. Then she follows Alabaster in.
It’s quiet inside the compound, and dark. No electricity for this backwater, just oil lamps that have gone out. There’s a big open-air courtyard just past the metal main gates, with scaffolds on the inner walls and nearby buildings to surround any visitors on all sides with convenient sniper positions. Same kind of oh-so-friendly entryway as any well-guarded comm, really, though on a much smaller scale. But there’s no one in this courtyard, although Syen spies a table and chairs to one side where the people who usually stand guard must have been playing cards and eating snacks not so long ago. The whole compound is silent. The ground is scoria-paved, scuffed and uneven from the passage of many feet over many years, but she hears no feet moving on it now. There’s a horse shed on one side of the courtyard, but its stalls are shut and still. Boots covered in dried mud line the wall nearest the gate; some have been tossed or piled there rather than positioned neatly. If Alabaster’s right about Imperial soldiers being stationed here, they’re clearly the sort who aren’t much for inspection-readiness. Figures; being assigned to a place like this probably isn’t a reward.
Syen shakes her head. And then she catches a whiff of animal musk from the horse shed, which makes her tense. She smells horses, but can’t see them. Edging closer—her hands clench before she makes herself unclench them—she peers over the first stall’s door, then glances into the other stalls for a full inventory.
Three dead horses, sprawled on their sides in the straw. Not bloating yet, probably because only the animals’ limbs and heads are limp with death. The barrel of each corpse is crusted with ice and condensation, the flesh still mostly hard-frozen. Two days’ thaw, she guesses.
There’s a small scoria-bricked pyramid at the center of the compound, with its own stone inner gates—though these stand open for the time being. Syenite can’t see where Alabaster’s gone, but she guesses he’s within the pyramid, since that’s where the node maintainer will be.
She climbs up on a chair and uses a nearby bit of matchflint to light one of the oil lamps, then heads inside herself—moving faster now that she knows what she’ll find. And yes, within the pyramid’s dim corridors she sees the soldiers and staffers who once lived here: some sprawled in mid-run, some pressed against the walls, some lying with arms outstretched toward the center of the building. Some of them tried to flee what was coming, and some tried to get to its source to stop it. They all failed.
Then Syen finds the node chamber.
That’s what it has to be. It’s in the middle of the building, through an elegant archway decorated with paler rose marble and embossed tree-root designs. The chamber beyond is high and vaulted and dim, but empty—except at the room’s center, where there’s a big… thing. She would call it a chair, if it was made of anything but wires and straps. Not very comfortable-looking, except in that it seems to hold its occupant at an easy recline. The node maintainer is seated in it, anyway, so it must be—
Oh. Oh.
Oh bloody, burning Earth.
Alabaster’s standing on the dais that holds the wire chair, looking down at the node maintainer’s body. He doesn’t look up as she comes near. His face is still. Not sad, or bleak. Just a mask.
“Even the least of us must serve the greater good,” he says, with no irony in his voice.
The body in the node maintainer’s chair is small, and naked. Thin, its limbs atrophied. Hairless. There are things—tubes and pipes and things, she has no words for them—going into the stick-arms, down the goggle-throat, across the narrow crotch. There’s a flexible bag on the corpse’s belly, attached to its belly somehow, and it’s full of—ugh. The bag needs to be changed.
She focuses on all this, these little details, because it helps. Because there’s a part of her that’s gibbering, and the only way she can keep that part internal and silent is to concentrate on everything she’s seeing. Ingenious, really, what they’ve done. She didn’t know it was possible to keep a body alive like this: immobile, unwilling, indefinite. So she concentrates on figuring out how they’ve done it. The wire framework is a particular bit of genius; there’s a crank and a handle nearby, so the whole aparatus can be flipped over to facilitate cleaning. The wire minimizes bedsores, maybe. There’s a stench of sickness in the air, but nearby is a whole shelf of bottled tinctures and pills; understandable, since it would take better antibiotics than ordinary comm-made penicillin to do something like this. Perhaps one of the tube things is for putting that medicine into the node maintainer. And this one is for pushing in food, and that one is for taking away urine, oh, and that cloth wrapping is for sopping up drool.
But she sees the bigger picture, too, in spite of her effort to concentrate on the minutiae. The node maintainer: a child, kept like this for what must have been months or years. A child, whose skin is almost as dark as Alabaster’s, and whose features might be a perfect match for his if they weren’t so skeletal.
“What.” It’s all she can say.
“Sometimes a rogga can’t learn control.” Now she understands that his use of the slur is deliberate. A dehumanizing word for someone who has been made into a thing. It helps. There’s no inflection in Alabaster’s voice, no emotion, but it’s all there in his choice of words. “Sometimes the Guardians catch a feral who’s too old to train, but young enough that killing’s a waste. And sometimes they notice someone in the grit pool, one of the especially sensitive ones, who can’t seem to master control. The Fulcrum tries to teach them for a while, but if the children don’t develop at a pace the Guardians think is appropriate, Mother Sanze can always find another use for them.”
“As—” Syen can’t take her eyes off the body’s, the boy’s, face. His eyes are open, brown but clouded and gelid in death. She’s distantly surprised she’s not vomiting. “As this? Underfires, Alabaster, I know children who were taken off to the nodes. I didn’t… this doesn’t…”
Alabaster unstiffens. She hadn’t realized how stiff he was holding himself until he bends enou
gh to slide a hand under the boy’s neck, lifting his oversize head and turning it a little. “You should see this.”
She doesn’t want to, but she looks anyway. There, across the back of the child’s shaved head, is a long, vining, keloided scar, embellished with the dots of long-pulled stitches. It’s just at the juncture of skull and spine.
“Rogga sessapinae are larger and more complex than those of normal people.” When she’s seen enough, Alabaster drops the child’s head. It thumps back into its wire cradle with a solidity and carelessness that makes her jump. “It’s a simple matter to apply a lesion here and there that severs the rogga’s self-control completely, while still allowing its instinctive use. Assuming the rogga survives the operation.”
Ingenious. Yes. A newborn orogene can stop an earthshake. It’s an inborn thing, more certain even than a child’s ability to suckle—and it’s this ability that gets more orogene children killed than anything else. The best of their kind reveal themselves long before they’re old enough to understand the danger.
But to reduce a child to nothing but that instinct, nothing but the ability to quell shakes…
She really should be vomiting.
“From there, it’s easy.” Alabaster sighs, as if he’s giving an especially boring lecture at the Fulcrum. “Drug away the infections and so forth, keep him alive enough to function, and you’ve got the one thing even the Fulcrum can’t provide: a reliable, harmless, completely beneficial source of orogeny.” Just as Syenite can’t understand why she’s not sick, she’s not sure why he’s not screaming. “But I suppose someone made the mistake of letting this one wake up.”
His eyes flick away, and Syenite follows Alabaster’s gaze to the body of a man over by the far wall. This one’s not dressed like one of the soldiers. He’s wearing civilian clothes, nice ones.
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