Also, you have a lot of experience with children who are secretly monsters.
So you offer your hand. Hoa looks surprised. He stares at it, then at you, and there is something in his gaze that is entirely human, and grateful for your acceptance in that moment. It makes you feel a little more human, too, amazingly.
He takes your hand. His grip seems no weaker despite his wounds, so you pull him along as you turn south and start walking again. The commless woman wordlessly follows, or maybe she’s walking in the same direction, or maybe she just thinks there’s strength in numbers. None of you say anything because there’s nothing to say.
Behind you, in the meadow, the kirkhusa keep eating.
* * *
Beware ground on loose rock. Beware hale strangers. Beware sudden silence.
—Tablet One, “On Survival,” verse three
11
Damaya at the fulcrum of it all
THERE’S AN ORDER TO LIFE in the Fulcrum.
Waking comes with dawn. Since that’s what Damaya always did back on the farm, this is easy for her. For the other grits—and that’s what she is now, an unimportant bit of rock ready to be polished into usefulness, or at least to help grind other, better rocks—waking comes when one of the instructors enters the dormitory and rings a painfully loud bell, which makes them all flinch even if they’re already awake. Everyone groans, including Damaya. She likes this. It makes her feel like she’s part of something.
They rise and make their beds, folding the top sheets military-style. Then they shuffle into the showers, which are white with electric lights and shining with tile, and which smell of herbal cleaners because the Fulcrum hires Strongbacks and commless from Yumenes’ shantytowns to come and clean them. For this and other reasons the showers are wonderful. She’s never been able to use hot water every day like this, tons of it just falling from holes in the ceiling like the most perfect rain ever. She tries not to be obvious about it, because some of the other grits are Equatorials and would laugh at her, the bumpkin overwhelmed by the novelty of easy, comfortable cleanliness. But, well, she is.
After that the grits brush their teeth and come back to the dormitory room to dress and groom themselves. Their uniforms are stiff gray fabric pants and tunics with black piping, girls and boys alike. Children whose hair is long and locked or thin enough to be combed and pulled back must do so; children whose hair is ashblow or kinky or short must make sure it’s shaped neatly. Then the grits stand in front of their beds, waiting while instructors come in and move down the rows for inspection. They want to make sure the grits are actually clean. The instructors check the beds, too, to make sure no one’s peed in theirs or done a shoddy job of folding the corners. Grits who aren’t clean are sent back for another shower—this one cold, with the instructor standing there watching to make sure it’s done right. (Damaya makes sure she’ll never have to do this, because it doesn’t sound fun at all.) Grits who haven’t dressed and groomed themselves or tended the bed properly are sent to Discipline, where they receive punishments suited to the infraction. Uncombed hair gets cut very short; repeat offenders are shaven bald. Unbrushed teeth merit mouthwashing with soap. Incorrect dress is corrected with five switches across the naked buttocks or back, incorrect bedmaking with ten. The switches do not break the skin—instructors are trained to strike just enough—but they do leave welts, which are probably meant to chafe underneath the stiff fabric of the uniforms.
You are representatives of us all, the instructors say, if any grit dares to protest this treatment. When you’re dirty, all orogenes are dirty. When you’re lazy, we’re all lazy. We hurt you so you’ll do the rest of us no harm.
Once Damaya would have protested the unfairness of such judgments. The children of the Fulcrum are all different: different ages, different colors, different shapes. Some speak Sanze-mat with different accents, having originated from different parts of the world. One girl has sharp teeth because it is her race’s custom to file them; another boy has no penis, though he stuffs a sock into his underwear after every shower; another girl has rarely had regular meals and wolfs down every one like she’s still starving. (The instructors keep finding food hidden in and around her bed. They make her eat it, all of it, in front of them, even if it makes her sick.) One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference, and it makes no sense for Damaya to be judged by the behavior of children who share nothing save the curse of orogeny with her.
But Damaya understands now that the world is not fair. They are orogenes, the Misalems of the world, born cursed and terrible. This is what is necessary to make them safe. Anyway, if she does what she’s supposed to, no unexpected things happen. Her bed is always perfect, her teeth clean and white. When she starts to forget what matters, she looks at her right hand, which twinges now and again on cold days, though the bones healed within a few weeks. She remembers the pain, and the lesson that it taught.
After inspection there is breakfast—just a bit of fruit and a piece of sausage in the Sanzed fashion, which they pick up in the dormitory foyer and eat on the way. They walk in small groups to lessons in the various courts of the Fulcrum that the older grits call crucibles, though that’s not what they’re supposed to be called. (There are many things the grits say to each other that they can never say to the adults. The adults know, but pretend they don’t. The world is not fair, and sometimes it makes no sense.)
In the first crucible, which is roofed over, the first hours of the day are spent in chairs with a slateboard and a lecture by one of the Fulcrum’s instructors. Sometimes there are oral examinations, with questions peppered at the grits one by one until someone falters. The grit who falters will have to clean the slateboards. Thus do they learn to work calmly under pressure.
“What was the name of the first Old Sanze emperor?”
“A shake in Erta emits push waves at 6:35 and seven seconds, and vibrational waves at 6:37 and twenty-seven seconds. What is the lag time?” This question becomes more complex if it is asked of older grits, going into logarithms and functions.
“Stonelore advises, ‘Watch for the center of the circle.’ Where is the fallacy in this statement?”
This is the question that lands on Damaya one day, so she stands to answer: “The statement explains how one may estimate the location of an orogene by map,” she says. “It is incorrect—oversimplified—because an orogene’s region of consumption is not circular, it is toroidal. Many people then fail to understand that the zone of effect extends downward or upward as well, and can be deformed in other three-dimensional ways by a skilled orogene.”
Instructor Marcasite nods approval for this explanation, which makes Damaya feel proud. She likes being right. Marcasite continues: “And since stonelore would be harder to remember if it was full of phrases like ‘watch for the inverted fulcrum of a conical torus,’ we get centers and circles. Accuracy is sacrificed in the name of better poetry.”
This makes the class laugh. It’s not that funny, but there’s a lot of nervous tension on quiz days.
After lectures there is lunch in the big open-air court set aside for that purpose. This court has a roof of oiled canvas strips on slats, which can be rolled shut on rainy days—although Yumenes, which is far inland, rarely has such days. So the grits usually get to sit at long bench-tables under a bright blue sky as they giggle and kick each other and call each other names. There’s lots of food to make up for the light breakfast, all of it varied and delicious and rich, though much of it is from distant lands and Damaya does not know what some of it is called. (She eats her share anyway. Muh Dear taught her never to waste food.)
This is Damaya’s favorite time of day, even though she is one of the grits who sit alone at an empty table. Many of the other children do this, she has noticed—too many to dismiss them all as those who’ve failed to make friends. The others have a look to them that she is rapidly learning to recognize—a certain furtiveness of movement, a hesitancy, a tension about the eyes and jawline. Som
e of them bear the marks of their old lives in a more obvious way. There is a gray-haired western Coaster boy who’s missing an arm above the elbow, though he is deft enough at managing without it. A Sanzed girl maybe five years older has the twisting seams of old burn scars all down one side of her face. And then there is another grit even newer than Damaya, whose left hand is in a special leather binding like a glove without fingers, which fastens around the wrist. Damaya recognizes this binding because she wore it herself while her hand healed, during her first few weeks at the Fulcrum.
They do not look at each other much, she and these others who sit off to themselves.
After lunch the grits travel through the Ring Garden in long, silent lines overseen by the instructors so that they will not talk or stare too obviously at the adult orogenes. Damaya does stare, of course, because they’re supposed to. It’s important that they see what awaits them once they begin earning rings. The garden is a wonder, as are the orogenes themselves: adult and elderly of every conformation, all healthy and beautiful—confident, which makes them beautiful. All are starkly forbidding in their black uniforms and polished boots. Their ringed fingers flick and flash as they gesture freely, or turn the pages of books they don’t have to read, or brush back a lover’s curling hair from one ear.
What Damaya sees in them is something she does not understand at first, though she wants it with a desperation that surprises and unnerves her. As those first weeks pass into months and she grows familiar with the routine, she begins to understand what it is that the older orogenes display: control. They have mastered their power. No ringed orogene would ice the courtyard just because some boy shoved her. None of these sleek, black-clad professionals would bat so much as an eyelash at either a strong earthshake, or a family’s rejection. They know what they are, and they have accepted all that means, and they fear nothing—not the stills, not themselves, not even Old Man Earth.
If to achieve this Damaya must endure a few broken bones, or a few years in a place where no one loves or even likes her, that is a small price to pay.
Thus she pours herself into the afternoon training in Applied Orogeny. In the practice crucibles, which are situated within the innermost ring of the Fulcrum complex, Damaya stands in a row with other grits of a similar level of experience. There, under an instructor’s watchful gaze, she learns how to visualize and breathe, and to extend her awareness of the earth at will and not merely in reaction to its movements or her own agitation. She learns to control her agitation, and all the other emotions that can induce the power within her to react to a threat that does not exist. The grits have no fine control at this stage, so none of them are allowed to actually move anything. The instructors can tell, somehow, when they’re about to—and because the instructors all have rings, they can pierce any child’s developing torus in a way that Damaya does not yet understand, administering a quick, stunning slap of icy cold air as a warning. It is a reminder of the seriousness of the lesson—and it also lends credence to a rumor that the older grits have whispered in the dark after lights out. If you make too many mistakes in the lessons, the instructors ice you.
It will be many years before Damaya understands that when the instructors kill an errant student, it is meant not as a goad, but as a mercy.
After Applied comes dinner and free hour, a time in which they may do what they please, allowed in deference to their youth. The newest grits usually fall into bed early, exhausted by the effort of learning to control invisible, semivoluntary muscles. The older children have better stamina and more energy, so there’s laughter and play around the dormitory bunks for a while, until the instructors declare lights-out. The next day, it all begins again.
Thus do six months pass.
* * *
One of the older grits comes over to Damaya at lunch. The boy is tall and Equatorial, though he doesn’t look fully Sanzed. His hair has the ashblow texture, but it’s backwater blond in color. He’s got the broad shoulders and developing bulk of Strongback, which makes her wary at once. She still sees Zab everywhere.
The boy smiles, though, and there is no menace in his manner as he stops beside the small table she inhabits alone. “Can I sit down?”
She shrugs, because she doesn’t want him to but is curious despite herself. He puts down his tray and sits. “I’m Arkete,” he says.
“That’s not your name,” she replies, and his smile falters a little.
“It’s the name my parents gave me,” he says, more seriously, “and it’s the name I intend to keep until they find a way to take it from me. Which they’ll never do because, y’know, it’s a name. But if you’d rather, I’m officially called Maxixe.”
The highest-quality grade of aquamarine, used almost exclusively for art. It suits him; he’s a handsome boy despite his obvious Arctic or Antarctic heritage (she doesn’t care, but Equatorials do), and that makes him dangerous in the sharp-faceted way that handsome big boys have always been. She decides to call him Maxixe because of this. “What do you want?”
“Wow, you’re really working on your popularity.” Maxixe starts eating, resting his elbows on the table while he chews. (But he checks to make sure there are no instructors around to chide him on his manners, first.) “You know how these things are supposed to work, right? The good-looking popular guy suddenly shows interest in the mousy girl from the country. Everyone hates her for it, but she starts to gain confidence in herself. Then the guy betrays her and regrets it. It’s awful, but afterward she ‘finds herself,’ realizes she doesn’t need him, and maybe there’s some other stuff that happens”—he waggles his fingers in the air—“and finally she turns into the most beautiful girl ever because she likes herself. But it won’t work at all if you don’t stammer and blush and pretend you don’t like me.”
She’s utterly confused by this salad of words. It annoys her so much that she says, “I don’t like you.”
“Ouch.” He pantomimes being stabbed in the heart. In spite of herself, his antics do make Damaya relax a little. This makes him grin, in turn. “Ah, that’s better. What, don’t you read books? Or didn’t you have lorists in whatever midlatter hole you came from?”
She doesn’t read books, because she’s not very good at reading yet. Her parents taught her enough to get by, and the instructors have assigned her a weekly regimen of additional reading to improve her skills in this area. But she’s not about to admit that. “Of course we had lorists. They taught us stonelore and told us how to prepare—”
“Urgh. You had real lorists.” The boy shakes his head. “Where I grew up, nobody listened to them except creche teachers and the most boring geomests. What everybody liked instead were the pop lorists—you know, the kind who perform in ampitheaters and bars? Their stories don’t teach anything. They’re just fun.”
Damaya has never heard of this, but maybe it’s some Equatorial fad that never made it to the Nomidlats. “But lorists tell stonelore. That’s the whole point. If these people don’t even do that, shouldn’t they be called… I don’t know, something else?”
“Maybe.” He shrugs and reaches over to steal a piece of cheese from her plate; she’s so flustered by the pop lorist thing that she doesn’t protest. “The real lorists have been complaining about them to the Yumenescene Leadership, but that’s all I know about it. They brought me here two years ago, and I haven’t heard anything since.” He sighs. “I hope the pop lorists don’t go away, though. I like them, even if their stories are a little stupid and predictable. ’Course, their stories are set in real creches, not places like this.” His lips twitch down at the corners as he looks around at their surroundings in faint disapproval.
Damaya knows full well what he means, but she wants to know if he’ll say. “Places like this?”
His eyes slide sidelong back to hers. Flashing his teeth in a smile that probably charms more people than it alarms, he says, “Oh, you know. Beautiful, wonderful, perfect places full of love and light.”
Damaya laughs, then stops hers
elf. Then she’s not sure why she did either.
“Yeah.” The boy resumes eating with relish. “Took me a while to laugh after I got here, too.”
She likes him, a little, after this statement.
He doesn’t want anything, she realizes after a time. He makes small talk and eats her food, which is all right since she was mostly finished anyway. He doesn’t seem to mind when she calls him Maxixe. She still doesn’t trust him, but he just seems to want someone to talk to. Which she can understand.
Eventually he stands and thanks her—“For this scintillating conversation,” which was almost entirely one-sided on his part—and then heads off to rejoin his friends. She puts it out of her mind and goes on about her day.
Except. The next day, something changes.
It starts that morning in the shower, when someone bumps into her hard enough to make her drop her washcloth. When she looks around, none of the boys or girls sharing the shower with her look in her direction, or apologize. She chalks it up to an accident.
When she gets out of the shower, however, someone has stolen her shoes. They were with her clothes, which she’d prepared before the shower and laid out on her bed to speed up the process of getting dressed. She always does this, every morning. Now they’re gone.
She looks for them methodically, trying to make sure she hasn’t forgotten them somewhere even though she knows she hasn’t. And when she looks around at the other grits, who are carefully not looking at her as the instructors call inspection and she can do nothing but stand there in her impeccable uniform and bare feet, she knows what’s happening.
She fails inspection and is punished with a scrub-brushing, which leaves her soles raw and stinging for the rest of the day inside the new shoes they give her.
This is only the beginning.
That evening at dinner, someone puts something in the juice she is given with her meal. Grits with poor table manners are given kitchen duty, which means they have access to everyone’s food. She forgets this, and does not think about the odd taste of the juice until it becomes hard to focus and her head starts hurting. Even then she’s not sure what’s happening, as she stumbles and lurches on her way back to the dormitory. One of the instructors pulls her aside, frowning at her lack of coordination, and sniffs her breath. “How much have you had to drink?” the man asks.
The Fifth Season Page 17