Now. Let’s review.

You are Essun, the sole surviving orogene in all the world who has opened the Obelisk Gate. No one expected this grand destiny of you. You were once of the Fulcrum, but not a rising star like Alabaster. You were a feral, found in the wild, unique only in that you had more innate ability than the average rogga born by random chance. Though you started well, you plateaued early – not for any clear reason. You simply lacked the urge to innovate or the desire to excel, or so the seniors lamented behind closed doors. Too quick to conform to the Fulcrum’s system. It limited you.

Good thing, because otherwise they’d never have loosened your leash the way they did, sending you forth on that mission with Alabaster. He scared the rust out of them. You, though… they thought you were one of the safe ones, properly broken in and trained to obey, unlikely to wipe out a town by accident. Joke’s on them; how many towns have you wiped out now? One semi-intentionally. The other three were accidents, but really, does that matter? Not to the dead.

Sometimes you dream of undoing it all. Not flailing for the garnet obelisk in Allia, and instead watching happy black children play in the surf of a black-sand beach while you bled out around a Guardian’s black knife. Not being taken to Meov by Antimony; instead, you would’ve returned to the Fulcrum to give birth to Corundum. You’d have lost him after that birth, and you would never have had Innon, but both of them would probably still be alive. (Well. For values of “alive,” if they’d put Coru in a node.) But then you would never have lived in Tirimo, never have borne Uche to die beneath his father’s fists, never have raised Nassun to be stolen by her father, never have crushed your once-neighbors when they tried to kill you. So many lives saved, if only you had stayed in your cage. Or died on demand.

And here, now, long free from the ordered, staid strictures of the Fulcrum, you have become mighty. You saved the community of Castrima at the cost of Castrima itself; this was a small price to pay, compared to the cost in blood that the enemy army would have extracted if they’d won. You achieved victory by unleashing the concatenated power of an arcane mechanism older than (your) written history – and because you are who you are, while learning to master this power, you murdered Alabaster Tenring. You didn’t mean to. You actually suspect he wanted you to do it. Either way, he’s dead, and this sequence of events has left you the most powerful orogene on the planet.

It also means that your tenure as most powerful has just acquired an expiration date, because the same thing is happening to you that happened to Alabaster: You’re turning to stone. Just your right arm, for now. Could be worse. Will be worse, the next time you open the Gate, or even the next time you wield enough of that strange silvery not-orogeny, which Alabaster called magic. You don’t have a choice, though. You’ve got a job to do, courtesy of Alabaster and the nebulous faction of stone eaters who’ve been quietly trying to end the ancient war between life and Father Earth. The job you have to do is the easier of the two, you think. Just catch the Moon. Seal the Yumenes Rifting. Reduce the current Season’s predicted impact from thousands or millions of years back down to something manageable – something the human race has a chance of surviving. End the Fifth Seasons for all time.

The job you want to do, though? Find Nassun, your daughter. Take her back from the man who murdered your son and dragged her halfway across the world in the middle of the apocalypse.

About that: I have good news, and bad news. But we’ll get to Jija presently.

You’re not really in a coma. You are a key component of a complex system, the whole of which has just experienced a massive, poorly controlled start-up flux and emergency shutoff with insufficient cooldown time, expressing itself as arcanochemical phase-state resistance and mutagenic feedback. You need time to… reboot.

This means you’re not unconscious. It’s more like periods of half-waking and half-sleeping, if that makes sense. You’re aware of things, somewhat. The bobbing of movement, occasional jostling. Someone puts food and water into your mouth. Fortunately you have the presence of mind to chew and swallow, because the end of the world on the ash-strewn road is a bad time and place to need a feeding tube. Hands pull on your clothing and something girds your hips – a diaper. Bad time and place for that, too, but someone’s willing to tend you this way, and you don’t mind. You barely notice. You feel no hunger or thirst before they give you sustenance; your evacuations bring no particular relief. Life endures. It doesn’t need to do so enthusiastically.

Eventually the periods of waking and sleep become more pronounced things. Then one day you open your eyes to see the clouded sky overhead. Swaying back and forth. Skeletal branches occasionally occlude it. Faint shadow of an obelisk through the clouds: That’s the spinel, you suspect. Reverted to its usual shape and immensity, ah, and following you like a lonely puppy, now that Alabaster is dead.

Staring at the sky gets boring after a while, so you turn your head and try to understand what’s going on. Figures move around you, dreamlike and swathed in gray-white… no. No, they’re wearing ordinary clothing; it’s just covered with pale ash. And they’re wearing a lot of clothes because it’s cold – not enough to freeze water, but close. It’s nearly two years into the Season; two years without the sun. The Rifting’s putting out a lot of heat up around the equator, but that’s not nearly enough to make up for the lack of a giant fireball in the sky. Still, without the Rifting, the cold would be worse – well below freezing, instead of nearly freezing. Small favors.

In any case, one of the ash-swathed figures seems to notice that you’re awake, or to feel the shift of your weight. A head wrapped in face mask and goggles swivels back to consider you, then faces ahead again. There are murmured words between the two people in front of you, which you don’t understand. They’re not in another language. You’re just half out of it and the words are partially absorbed by the ash falling around you.

Someone speaks behind you. You start and look back to see another goggled, masked face. Who are these people? (It does not occur to you to be afraid. Like hunger, such visceral things are more detached from you now.) Then something clicks and you understand. You’re on a stretcher, just two poles with some stitched hide between them, being carried by four people. One of them calls out, and other calls respond from farther away. Lots of calls. Lots of people.

Another call from somewhere far away, and the people carrying you come to a halt. They glance at each other and set you down with the ease and uniformity of people who’ve practiced doing the same maneuver in unison many times. You feel the stretcher settle onto a soft, powdery layer of ash, over a thicker layer of ash, over what might be a road. Then your stretcher-bearers move away, opening packs and settling down in a ritual that is familiar from your own months on the road. Breaktime.

You know this ritual. You should get up. Eat something. Check your boots for holes or stones, your feet for unnoticed sores, make sure your mask – wait, are you wearing one? If everyone else is… You kept that in your runny-sack, didn’t you? Where is your runny-sack?

Someone walks out of the gloom and ashfall. Tall, plateau-broad, identity stripped by the clothes and mask but restored by the familiar frizzy texture of the ashblow mane. She crouches near your head. “Hnh. Not dead, after all. Guess I lose that bet with Tonkee.”

“Hjarka,” you say. Your voice rasps worse than hers does.

You guess by the flexing of her mask that she grins. It feels odd to perceive her smile without the usual undercurrent of menace from her sharp-filed teeth. “And your brains are probably still intact. I win the bet with Ykka, at least.” She glances around and bellows, “Lerna!”

You try to lift a hand to grab her pants leg. It feels like trying to move a mountain. You ought to be able to move mountains, so you concentrate and get it halfway up – and then forget why you wanted Hjarka’s attention. She glances around then, fortunately, and eyes your upraised hand. It’s shaking with the effort. After a moment’s consideration, she sighs and takes your hand, then looks away as if embarrassed.

“Happening,” you manage.

“Rust if I know. We didn’t need another break this soon.”

Not what you meant, but it takes too much of an effort to try to say the rest. So you lie there, with your hand being held by a woman who clearly would rather be doing anything else, but who’s deigning to show you compassion because she thinks you need it. You don’t, but you’re glad she’s trying.

Two more forms resolve out of the swirl, both recognizable by their familiar shapes. One is male and slight, the other female and pillowy. The narrow one displaces Hjarka at your head and leans in to pull off the goggles that you hadn’t realized you were wearing. “Give me a rock,” he says. It’s Lerna, making no sense.

“What?” you say.

He ignores you. Tonkee, the other person, elbows Hjarka, who sighs and rummages through her bag until she finds something small. She offers it to Lerna.

He lays a hand on your cheek while holding the object up. The thing starts to glow with a familiar tone of white light. You realize it’s a piece of a Castrima-under crystal – lighting up because they do that in contact with orogenes, as Lerna is now in contact with you. Ingenious. Using this light, he leans in and peers closely at your eyes. “Pupils contracting normally,” he murmurs to himself. His hand twitches on your cheek. “No fever.”

“I feel heavy,” you say.

“You’re alive,” he says, as if this is a completely reasonable response. No one is speaking a language you can understand today. “Motor skills sluggish. Cognition…?”

Tonkee leans in. “What did you dream?”

It makes as much sense as Give me a rock, but you try to answer because you’re too out of it to realize you shouldn’t. “There was a city,” you murmur. A bit of ash falls onto your lashes and you twitch. Lerna puts your goggles back on. “It was alive. There was an obelisk above it.” Above it? “In it, maybe. I think.”

Tonkee nods. “Obelisks rarely linger directly over human habitations. I had a friend back at Seventh who had some theories about that. Want to hear them?”

Finally it sinks in that you’re doing something stupid: encouraging Tonkee. You put a mighty effort into glaring at her. “No.”

Tonkee glances at Lerna. “Her faculties seem intact. Little sluggish, maybe, but then she always is.”

“Yes, thank you for confirming that.” Lerna finishes doing whatever he’s doing, and sits back on his heels. “Want to try walking, Essun?”

“Isn’t that kind of sudden?” asks Tonkee. She’s frowning, which is visible even around her goggles. “What with the coma and all.”

“You know as well as I do that Ykka’s not going to give her much more recovery time. It might even be good for her.”

Tonkee sighs. But she’s the one to help when Lerna slides an arm under you, levering you up from prone to sitting. Even this takes an effort of ages. You get dizzy the instant you’re upright, but it passes. Something’s wrong, though. It’s a testament to how much you’ve been through, maybe, that you seem to have developed a permanently crooked posture, your right shoulder sagging and arm dragging as if

as if it is made of

Oh. Oh.

The others stop bothering you as you realize what’s happened. They watch you heft the shoulder, as much as you can, to try to drag your right arm more into view. It’s heavy. Your shoulder hurts when you do this, even though most of the joint is still flesh, because the weight pulls against that flesh. Some of the tendons have transformed, but they’re still attached to living bone. Gritty bits of something chafe within what should be a smooth ball-and-socket. It doesn’t hurt as much as you thought it would, though, after watching Alabaster go through this. So that’s something.

The rest of the arm, from which someone has stripped your shirt and jacket sleeves in order to bare it, has changed nearly past recognition. It’s your arm, you’re pretty sure. Beyond the fact that it’s still attached to your body, it’s got the shape you know like your own – well. Not as graceful and tapered as it used to be when you were young. You were heavyset for a while, and that still shows along the plush-looking forearm and slight sag under your upper arm. The bicep is more defined than it used to be; two years of surviving. The hand is clamped into a fist, the whole arm slightly cocked at the elbow. You always did tend to make fists while you were wrestling with a particularly difficult bit of orogeny.

But the mole, which once sat in the middle of your forearm like a tiny black target, is gone. You can’t turn the arm over for a look at your elbow, so you touch it. The keloid scar from where you once fell is impossible to feel anymore, though it should be slightly raised compared to the skin around it. That level of fine definition has vanished into a texture that is gritty and dense, like unpolished sandstone. Perhaps self-destructively you rub it, but no particles break off beneath your fingertips; it’s more solid than it looks. The color is an even, allover grayish tan that looks nothing like your skin.

“It was like this when Hoa brought you back.” Lerna, who has been silent throughout your examination. His voice is neutral. “He says he needs your permission to, ah…”

You stop trying to rub your stone skin off. Maybe it’s shock, maybe fear has robbed you of shock, maybe you’re really not feeling anything.

“So tell me,” you say to Lerna. The effort of sitting up, and seeing your arm, have restored your wits a little. “In your, uh, professional opinion, what should I do about this?”

“I think you should either let Hoa eat it off, or let one of us take a sledgehammer to it.”

You wince. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”

“I don’t think anything lighter would put a dent in it. You forget I had plenty of chances to examine Alabaster when this was happening to him.”

Out of nowhere, you think of Alabaster having to be reminded to eat because he no longer felt hunger. It’s not relevant, but the thought just pops in there. “He let you?”

“I didn’t give him a choice. I needed to know if it was contagious, since it seemed to be spreading on him. I took a sample once, and he joked that Antimony – the stone eater – would want it back.”

It wouldn’t have been a joke. Alabaster always smiled when he spoke the rawest truths. “And did you give it back?”

“You better believe I did.” Lerna runs a hand over his hair, displacing a small pile of ash. “Listen, we have to wrap the arm at night so that the chill of it doesn’t depress your body temperature. You’ve got stretch marks on the shoulder where it pulls your skin. I suspect it’s deforming the bones and straining the tendons; the joint isn’t built to carry this kind of weight.” He hesitates. “We can take it off now and give it to Hoa later, if you like. I don’t see any reason why you have to… to do it his way.”

You think Hoa is probably somewhere below your feet at this very moment, listening. But Lerna is being oddly squeamish about this. Why? You take a guess. “I don’t mind if Hoa eats it,” you say. You aren’t saying it just for Hoa. You really mean it. “If it will do him good, and get the thing off me in the process, why not?”

Something flickers in Lerna’s expression. His emotionless mask slips, and you see all of a sudden that he’s revolted by the idea of Hoa chewing the arm off your body. Well, put like that, the concept is inherently revolting. It’s too utilitarian a way of thinking about it, though. Too atavistic. You know intimately, from hours spent delving between the cells and particles of Alabaster’s transforming body, what’s happening in your arm. Looking at it, you can all but see the silvery lines of magic realigning infinitesimal particles and energies of your substance, moving this bit so that it’s oriented along the same path as that bit, carefully tightening into a lattice that binds the whole together. Whatever this process is, it’s simply too precise, too powerful, to be chance – or for Hoa’s ingestion of it to be the grotesquerie that Lerna plainly sees. But you don’t know how to explain that to him, and you wouldn’t have the energy to try even if you did.

“Help me up,” you say.

Tonkee gingerly takes hold of the stone arm, helping to support it so it doesn’t shift or flop and wrench your shoulder. She throws a glare at Lerna until he finally gets over himself and slides an arm under you again. Between the two of them, you manage to gain your feet, but it’s hard going. You’re panting by the end, and your knees are distinctly wobbly. The blood in your body is less committed to the cause, and momentarily you sway, dizzy and light-headed. Lerna immediately says, “All right, let’s get her back down.” Abruptly you’re sitting down again, out of breath this time, the arm awkwardly jacking up your shoulder until Tonkee adjusts it. The thing really is heavy.

(Your arm. Not “the thing.” It’s your right arm. You’ve lost your right arm. You’re aware of that, and soon you’ll mourn it, but for now it’s easier to think of it as a thing separate from yourself. An especially useless prosthesis. A benign tumor that needs to be removed. These things are all true. It’s also your rusting arm.)

You’re sitting there, panting and willing the world to stop spinning, when you hear someone else approach. This one’s speaking loudly, calling for everyone to pack up, break’s over, they need to do another five miles before dark. Ykka. You lift your head as she gets close enough, and it’s in this moment that you realize you think of her as a friend. You realize it because it feels good to hear her voice, and to see her resolve out of the swirling ash. Last time you saw her, she was in serious danger of being murdered by hostile stone eaters attacking Castrima-under. That’s one of the reasons you fought back, using the crystals of Castrima-under to ensnare the attackers; you wanted her, and all the other orogenes of Castrima, and by extension all the people of Castrima who depended on those orogenes, to live.

So you smile. It’s weak. You’re weak. Which is why it actually hurts when Ykka turns to you and her lips tighten in what is unmistakably disgust.

She’s pulled the cloth wrapping off the lower half of her face. Beyond her gray-and-kohl eye makeup, which not even the end of the world will stop her from wearing, you can’t make out her eyes behind her makeshift goggles – a pair of spectacles that she’s wrapped rags around to keep ash out. “Shit,” she says to Hjarka. “You’re never going to let me hear the end of it, are you?”

Hjarka shrugs. “Not till you pay up, no.”

You’re staring at Ykka, the tentative little smile freezing off your face.

“She’ll probably make a full recovery,” Lerna says. His voice is neutral in a way that you immediately sense is careful. Walking-over-a-lava-tube careful. “It’ll be a few days before she can keep up on foot, though.”

Ykka sighs, putting a hand on her hip and very obviously rifling through a series of things to say. What she finally settles on is neutral, too. “Fine. I’ll extend the rotation of people carrying the stretcher. Get her walking as soon as possible, though. Everyone carries their own weight in this comm, or gets left behind.” She turns and heads off.

“Yeah, so,” Tonkee says in a low voice, once Ykka’s out of earshot. “She’s a little pissed about you destroying the geode.”

You flinch. “Destroying —” Oh, but. Locking all those stone eaters into the crystals. You meant to save everyone, but Castrima was a machine – a very old, very delicate machine that you didn’t understand. And now you’re topside, traipsing through the ashfall… “Oh, rusting Earth, I did.”

“What, you didn’t realize?” Hjarka laughs a little. It’s got a bitter edge. “You actually thought we were all up here topside, the whole rusting comm traveling north in the ash and cold, for fun?” She strides away, shaking her head. Ykka’s not the only one pissed about it.

“I didn’t…” You start to say, I didn’t mean to, and stop. Because you never mean it, and it never matters in the end.

Watching your face, Lerna lets out a small sigh. “Rennanis destroyed the comm, Essun. Not you.” He’s helping you shift back down into a prone position, but not meeting your eyes. “We lost it the minute we infested Castrima-over with boilbugs to save ourselves. It’s not like they would’ve just gone away, or left anything in the territory to eat. If we’d stayed in the geode, we’d have been doomed, one way or another.”

It’s true, and perfectly rational. Ykka’s reaction, though, proves that some things aren’t about rationality. You can’t take away people’s homes and sense of security in such an immediate, dramatic way, and expect them to consider extended chains of culpability before they get angry about it.

“They’ll get over it.” You blink to find Lerna looking at you now, his gaze clear and expression frank. “If I could, they can. It’ll just take a while.”

You hadn’t realized he had gotten over Tirimo.

He ignores your staring, then gestures to the four people who have gathered nearby. You’re lying down already, so he tucks your stone arm in beside you, making sure the blankets cover it. The stretcher-bearers take up their task again, and you have to clamp down on your orogeny, which – now that you’re awake – insists upon reacting to every lurch as if it’s a shake. Tonkee’s head pokes into view as they start to carry you along. “Hey, it’ll be all right. Lots of people hate me.”

That is entirely unreassuring. It’s also frustrating that you care, and that others can tell you care. You used to be such a steelheart.

But you know why you aren’t, all of a sudden.

“Nassun,” you say to Tonkee.

“What?”

“Nassun. I know where she is, Tonkee.” You try to raise your right hand to catch hers, and there is a sensation that thrums through your shoulder like aching and floating. You hear a ringing sound. It doesn’t hurt, but you privately curse yourself for forgetting. “I have to go find her.”

Tonkee darts a look at your stretcher-bearers, and then in the direction Ykka went. “Speak softer.”

“What?” Ykka knows full well you’re going to want to go find your daughter. That was practically the first thing you ever said to her.

“If you want to be dumped on the side of the rusting road, keep talking.”

That shuts you up, along with the continued effort of restraining your orogeny. Oh. So Ykka’s that pissed.

The ash keeps falling, eventually obscuring your goggles because you don’t have the energy to brush it away. In the gray dimness that results, your body’s need to recover takes precedence; you fall asleep again. The next time you wake and brush the ash off your face, it’s because you’ve been put down again, and there’s a rock or branch or something poking you in the small of the back. You struggle to sit up on one elbow and it’s easier, though you still can’t manage much else.

Night has fallen. Several dozen people are settling onto some kind of rock outcropping amid a scraggly not-quite forest. The outcropping sesses familiar from your orogenic explorations of Castrima’s surroundings, and it helps you place yourself: a bit of fresh tectonic uplift that’s about a hundred and sixty miles north of the Castrima geode. That tells you that the journey from Castrima must have only just begun a few days before, since a large group can only walk so fast; and that there’s only one place you could be going, if you’re headed north. Rennanis. Somehow everyone must know that it’s empty and habitable. Or maybe they’re just hoping that it is, and they’ve got nothing else to hope for. Well, at least on that point, you can reassure them… if they’ll listen to you.

The people around you are setting up campfire circles, cooking spits, latrines. In a few spots throughout the camp, little piles of broken, lumpy Castrima crystals provide additional illumination; good to know there must be enough orogenes left to keep them working. Some of the activity is inefficient where people are unused to it, but for the most part it’s well-ordered. Castrima having more than its share of members who know how to live on the road is turning out to be a boon. Your stretcher-bearers have left you where they dumped you, though, and if anyone’s going to build you a fire or bring you food, they haven’t started yet. You spot Lerna crouching amid a small group of people who are also prone, but he’s busy. Ah, yes; there must have been a lot of wounded after Rennanis’s soldiers got into the geode.

Well, you don’t need a fire, and you’re not hungry, so the others’ indifference doesn’t trouble you for the moment, except emotionally. What does bother you is that your runny-sack is gone. You carried that thing halfway across the Stillness, stashed your old rank-rings in it, even saved it from getting scorched to powder when a stone eater transformed himself in your quarters. There wasn’t much in it that still mattered to you, but the bag itself holds a certain sentimental value, at this point.

Well. Everyone’s lost something.

A mountain suddenly weighs down your nearby perception. In spite of everything, you find yourself smiling. “I wondered when you would show up.”

Hoa stands over you. It’s still a shock to see him like this: a mid-sized adult rather than a small child, veined black marble instead of white flesh. Somehow, though, it’s easy to perceive him as the same person – same face shape, same haunting icewhite eyes, same ineffable strangeness, same whiff of lurking whimsy – as the Hoa you’ve known for the past year. What’s changed, that a stone eater no longer seems alien to you? Only superficial things about him. Everything about you.

“How do you feel?” he asks.

“Better.” The arm pulls when you shift to look up at him, a constant reminder of the unwritten contract between you. “Were you the one who told them about Rennanis?”

“Yes. And I’m guiding them there.”

“You?”

“To the degree that Ykka listens. I think she prefers her stone eaters as silent menaces rather than active allies.”

This pulls a weary laugh out of you. But. “Are you an ally, Hoa?”

“Not to them. Ykka understands that, too, though.”

Yes. This is probably why you’re still alive. As long as Ykka keeps you safe and fed, Hoa will help. You’re back on the road and everything’s a rusting transaction again. The comm that was Castrima lives, but it isn’t really a community anymore, just a group of like-minded travelers collaborating to survive. Maybe it can become a true comm again later, once it’s got another home to defend, but for now, you get why Ykka’s angry. Something beautiful and wholesome has been lost.

Well. You look down at yourself. You’re not wholesome anymore, but what’s left of you can be strengthened; you’ll be able to go after Nassun soon. First things first, though. “We going to do this?”

Hoa does not speak for a moment. “Are you certain?”

“The arm’s not doing me any good, as it is.”

There is the faintest of sounds. Stone grinding on stone, slow and inexorable. A very heavy hand comes to rest on your half-transformed shoulder. You have the sense that, despite the weight, it is a delicate touch by stone eater standards. Hoa’s being careful with you.

“Not here,” he says, and pulls you down into the earth.

It’s only for an instant. He always keeps these trips through the earth quick, probably because longer would make it hard to breathe… and stay sane. This time is little more than a blurring sensation of movement, a flicker of darkness, a whiff of loam richer than the acrid ash. Then you’re lying on another rocky outcropping – probably the same one that the rest of Castrima is settling on, just away from the encampment. There are no campfires here; the only light is the ruddy reflection of the Rifting off the thick clouds overhead. Your eyes adjust quickly, though there’s little to see but rocks and the shadows of nearby trees. And a human silhouette, which now crouches beside you.

Hoa holds your stone arm in his hands gently, almost reverently. In spite of yourself, you sense the solemnity of the moment. And why shouldn’t it be solemn? This is the sacrifice demanded by the obelisks. This is the pound of flesh you must pay for the blood-debt of your daughter.

“This isn’t what you think of it,” Hoa says, and for an instant you worry that he can read your mind. More likely it’s just the fact that he’s as old as the literal hills, and he can read your face. “You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too. This is not the ugly thing it seems.”

It seems like he’s going to eat your arm. You’re okay with it, but you want to understand. “What is it, then? Why…” You shake your head, unsure of even what question to ask. Maybe why doesn’t matter. Maybe you can’t understand. Maybe this isn’t meant for you.

“This is not sustenance. We need only life, to live.”

The latter half of that was nonsensical, so you latch onto the former half. “If it isn’t sustenance, then…?”

Hoa moves slowly again. They don’t do this often, stone eaters. Movement is the thing that emphasizes their uncanny nature, so like humanity and yet so wildly different. It would be easier if they were more alien. When they move like this, you can see what they once were, and the knowledge is a threat and warning to all that is human within you.

And yet. You see what was lost in us, but we gained, too.

He lifts your hand with both his own, one positioned under your elbow, his fingers lightly braced under your closed, cracked fist. Slowly, slowly. It doesn’t hurt your shoulder this way. Halfway to his face he moves the hand that had been under your elbow, shifting it to cup the underside of your upper arm. His stone slides against yours with a faint grinding sound. It is surprisingly sensual, even though you can’t feel a thing.

Then your fist rests against his lips. The lips don’t move as he says, from within his chest, “Are you afraid?”

You consider this for a long moment. Shouldn’t you be? But… “No.”

“Good,” he replies. “I do this for you, Essun. Everything is for you. Do you believe that?”

You don’t know, at first. On impulse you lift your good hand, smooth fingers over his hard, cool, polished cheek. It’s hard to see him, black against the dark, but your thumb finds his brows and traces out his nose, which is longer in its adult shape. He told you once that he thinks of himself as human in spite of his strange body. You belatedly realize that you’ve chosen to see him as human, too. That makes this something other than an act of predation. You’re not sure what it is instead, but… it feels like a gift.

“Yes,” you say. “I believe you.”

His mouth opens. Wide, wider, wider than any human mouth can open. Once you worried his mouth was too small; now it’s wide enough to fit a fist. And such teeth he has, small and even and diamond-clear, glinting prettily in the red evening light. There is only darkness beyond those teeth.

You shut your eyes.

***