Nassun stands over the body of her father, if one can call a tumbled mass of broken jewels a body. She’s swaying a little, light-headed because the wound in her shoulder – where her father has stabbed her – is bleeding profusely. The stabbing is the outcome of an impossible choice he demanded of her: to be either his daughter or an orogene. She refused to commit existential suicide. He refused to suffer an orogene to live. There was no malice in either of them in that final moment, only the grim violence of inevitability.

To one side of this tableau stands Schaffa, Nassun’s Guardian, who stares down at what is left of Jija Resistant Jekity in a combination of wonder and cold satisfaction. At Nassun’s other side is Steel, her stone eater. It is appropriate to call him that now, hers, because he has come in her hour of need – not to help, never that, but to provide her with something nevertheless. What he offers, and what she has finally realized she needs, is purpose. Not even Schaffa has given her this, but that’s because Schaffa loves her unconditionally. She needs that love, too, oh how she needs it, but in this moment when her heart has been most thoroughly broken, when her thoughts are at their least focused, she craves something more… solid.

She will have the solidity that she wants. She will fight for it and kill for it, because she’s had to do that again and again and it is habit now, and if she is successful she will die for it. After all, she is her mother’s daughter – and only people who think they have a future fear death.

In Nassun’s good hand thrums a three-foot-long, tapering shard of crystal, deep blue and finely faceted, though with some slight deformations near its base that have resulted in something like a hilt. Now and again this strange longknife flickers into a translucent, intangible, debatably real state. It’s very real; only Nassun’s attention keeps the thing in her hands from turning her to colored stone the way it did her father. She’s afraid of what might happen if she passes out from blood loss, so she would really like to send the sapphire back up into the sky to resume its default shape and immense size – but she can’t. Not yet.

There, by the dormitory, are the two reasons: Umber and Nida, the other two Guardians of Found Moon. They’re watching her, and when her gaze lands on them, there is a flicker in the lacing tendrils of silver that drift between the pair. No exchanged words or looks, just that silent communion which would have been imperceptible, if Nassun were anyone but who she was. Beneath each Guardian, delicate silvery tethers wend up from the ground into their feet, connected by the nerve-and-vein glimmer of their bodies to tiny shards of iron embedded in their brains. These taproot-like tethers have always been there, but maybe it’s the tension of the moment that makes Nassun finally notice how thick those lines of light are for each Guardian – much thicker than the one linking the ground to Schaffa. And at last she understands what that means: Umber and Nida are just puppets of a greater will. Nassun has tried to believe better of them, that they are their own people, but here, now, with the sapphire in her hands and her father dead at her feet… some maturations cannot wait for a more convenient season.

So Nassun roots a torus deep within the earth, because she knows that Umber and Nida will sense this. It’s a feint; she doesn’t need the power of the earth, and she suspects they know it. Still, they react, Umber unfolding his arms and Nida straightening from where she’d been leaning on the porch railing. Schaffa reacts, too, his eyes shifting sideways to meet hers. It’s an unavoidable tell that Umber and Nida will notice, but it cannot be helped; Nassun has no piece of the Evil Earth lodged in her brain to facilitate communication. Where matter fails, care makes do. He says, “Nida,” and that is all she needs.

Umber and Nida move. It’s fast – so fast – because the silver lattice within each has strengthened their bones and tightened the cords of their muscles so that they can do what ordinary human flesh cannot. A pulse of negation moves before them with storm-surge inexorability, immediately striking the major lobes of Nassun’s sessapinae numb, but Nassun is already on the offensive. Not physically; she cannot contest them in that sphere of battle, and besides she can barely stand. Will and the silver are all she’s got left.

So Nassun – her body still, her mind violent – snatches at the silver threads of the air around her, weaving them into a crude but efficient net. (She’s never done this before, but no one has ever told her that it can’t be done.) She wraps part of this around Nida, ignoring Umber because Schaffa told her to. And indeed, she understands in the next instant why he told her to concentrate on only one of the enemy Guardians. The silver she’s woven around Nida should catch the woman up fast, like an insect slamming into a spiderweb. Instead, Nida stumbles to a halt, then laughs while threads of something else curl forth from within her and lash the air, shredding the net around her. She lunges for Nassun again, but Nassun – after boggling at the speed and efficacy of the Guardian’s retaliation – snatches stone up from within the earth to spear Nida’s feet. This impedes Nida only a little. She bulls forward, breaking the rock shards off and charging with them still jutting through her boots. One of her hands is held like a claw, the other a flat, finger-stiffened blade. Whichever of them reaches Nassun first will dictate how she begins tearing Nassun apart with her bare hands.

Here Nassun panics. Just a little, because she would lose control of the sapphire otherwise – but some. She can sense a raw, hungry, chaotic reverberation to the silver threads thrumming through Nida, like nothing she’s ever perceived before, and it is somehow, suddenly, terrifying. She doesn’t know what that strange reverberation will do to her, if any part of Nida should touch Nassun’s bare skin. (Her mother knows, though.) She takes a step back, willing the sapphire longknife to move between her and Nida in a defensive position. Her good hand is still on the sapphire’s hilt, so it looks as if she’s brandishing a weapon with a shaking and far-too-slow hand. Nida laughs again, high and delighted, because they can both see that not even the sapphire will be enough to stop her. Nida’s claw-hand flails out, fingers splaying and reaching for Nassun’s cheek even as she weaves like a snake around Nassun’s wild slash —

Nassun drops the sapphire and screams, her dulled sessapinae flexing desperately, helplessly —

But all of the Guardians have forgotten Nassun’s other guardian.

Steel does not appear to move. In one instant he stands as he has for the past few minutes, with his back to the tumbled pile of Jija, expression serene, posture languid as he faces the northern horizon. In the next he is closer, right beside Nassun, having transported himself so quickly that Nassun hears a sharp clap of displaced air. And Nida’s forward momentum abruptly stops as her throat is caught tight within the circle of Steel’s upraised hand.

She shrieks. Nassun has heard Nida ramble for hours in her fluttery voice, and perhaps that’s made her think of Nida as a songbird, chattery and chirruping and harmless. This shriek is the cry of a raptor, savagery turning to fury as she is thwarted from stooping on her prey. She tries to wrench herself back, risking skin and tendon to get loose, but Steel’s grip is as firm as stone. She’s caught.

A sound behind Nassun makes her jerk around. Ten feet from where she stands, Umber and Schaffa have blurred together in hand-to-hand combat. She can’t see what’s happening. They’re both moving too fast, their strikes swift and vicious. By the time her ears process the sounds of a blow, they’ve already shifted to a different position. She can’t even tell what they’re doing – but she is afraid, so afraid, for Schaffa. The silver in Umber flows like rivers, power being steadily fed to him through that glimmering taproot. The thinner streams in Schaffa, however, are a wild chain of rapids and clogs, yanking at his nerves and muscles and flaring unpredictably in an attempt to distract him. Nassun can see by the concentration in Schaffa’s face that he is still in control, and that this is what has saved him; his movements are unpredictable, strategic, considered. Still. That he can fight at all is astonishing.

How he ends the fight, by driving his hand up to the wrist through the underside of Umber’s jaw, is horrifying.

Umber makes an awful sound, jerking to a halt – but an instant later, his hand lunges for Schaffa’s throat again, blurring in its speed. Schaffa gasps – so quickly that it might be just a breath, but Nassun hears the alarm in it – and shunts away the strike, but Umber’s still moving, even though his eyes have rolled back in his head and the movements are twitchy, clumsy. Nassun understands then: Umber’s not home anymore. Something else is, working his limbs and reflexes for as long as crucial connections remain in place. And yes: In the next breath, Schaffa flings Umber to the ground, wrenches his hand free, and stomps on his opponent’s head.

Nassun can’t look. She hears the crunch; that’s enough. She hears Umber actually continue twitching, his movements more feeble but persistent, and she hears the faint rustle of Schaffa’s clothes as he bends. Then she hears something that her mother last heard in a little room in the Guardians’ wing of the Fulcrum, some thirty years before: bone cracking and gristle tearing, as Schaffa works his fingers into the base of Umber’s broken skull.

Nassun can’t close her ears, so instead she focuses on Nida, who’s still fighting to get free from Steel’s unbreakable grip.

“I – I —” Nassun attempts. Her heart’s slowed only a little. The sapphire shakes harder in her hands. Nida still wants to kill her. Steel, who has established himself as merely a possible ally and not a definite one, need only loosen his grip, and Nassun will die. But. “I d-don’t want to kill you,” she manages. It’s even true.

Nida abruptly goes still and silent. The fury in her expression gradually fades to no expression at all. “It did what it had to do, last time,” she says.

Nassun’s skin prickles with the realization that something intangible has changed. She’s not sure what, but she doesn’t think this is quite Nida anymore. She swallows. “Did what? Who?”

Nida’s gaze falls on Steel. There is a faint grinding sound as Steel’s mouth curves into a wide, toothy smile. Then, before Nassun can think of another question to ask, Steel’s grip shifts. Not loosening; turning, with that unnaturally slow motion which perhaps is meant to imitate human movement. (Or mock it.) He draws in his arm and pivots his wrist to turn Nida around, her back to his front. The nape of her neck to his mouth.

“It’s angry,” Nida continues calmly, though now she faces away from both Steel and Nassun. “Yet even now it may be willing to compromise, to forgive. It demands justice, but —”

“It has had its justice a thousand times over,” says Steel. “I owe it no more.” Then he opens his mouth wide.

Nassun turns away, again. On a morning when she has rent her father to pieces, some things remain too obscene for her child’s eyes. At least Nida does not move again once Steel has dropped her body to the ground.

“We cannot remain here,” Schaffa says. When Nassun swallows hard and focuses on him, she sees that he stands over Umber’s corpse, holding something small and sharp in one gore-flecked hand. He gazes at this object with the same detached coldness that he turns upon those he means to kill. “Others will come.”

Through the clarity of near-death adrenaline, Nassun knows that he means other contaminated Guardians – and not half-contaminated ones like Schaffa himself, who have somehow managed to retain some measure of free will. Nassun swallows and nods, feeling calmer now that no one is actively trying to kill her anymore. “Wh-what about the other kids?”

Some of the children in question are standing on the porch of the dormitory, awakened by the concussion of the sapphire when Nassun summoned it into longknife form. They have witnessed everything, Nassun sees. A couple are weeping at the sight of their Guardians dead, but most just stare at her and Schaffa in silent shock. One of the smaller children is vomiting off the side of the steps.

Schaffa gazes at them for a long moment, and then glances sidelong at her. Some of the coldness is still there, saying what his voice does not. “They’ll need to leave Jekity, quickly. Without Guardians, the commfolk are unlikely to tolerate their presence.” Or Schaffa can kill them. That’s what he’s done with every other orogene they’ve met who isn’t under his control. They are either his, or they are a threat.

“No,” Nassun blurts. Speaking to that silent coldness, not to what he’s said. The coldness increases fractionally. Schaffa never likes it when she says no. She takes a deep breath, marshaling a little more calm, and corrects herself. “Please, Schaffa. I just… I can’t take any more.”

This is rank hypocrisy. The decision Nassun has recently made, a silent promise over her father’s corpse, belies it. Schaffa cannot know what she has chosen, but at the corner of her vision, she is painfully aware of Steel’s lingering, blood-painted smile.

She presses her lips together and means it anyway. It isn’t a lie. She can’t take the cruelty, the endless suffering; that’s the whole point. What she means to do will be, if nothing else, quick and merciful.

Schaffa regards her for a moment. Then he twitch-winces a little, as she has seen him do often in the past few weeks. When the spasm passes, he puts on a smile and comes over to her, though first he closes his hand firmly around the metal bit he’s taken from Umber. “How is your shoulder?”

She reaches up to touch it. The cloth of her sleep-shirt is wet with blood, but not sodden, and she can still use the arm. “It hurts.”

“That will last for a time, I’m afraid.” He looks around, then rises and goes to Umber’s corpse. Ripping off one of Umber’s shirtsleeves – one that isn’t as splattered with blood as the other, Nassun notes with distant relief – he comes over and pushes up her sleeve, then helps her tie the strip of cloth around her shoulder. He ties it tight. Nassun knows this is good and will possibly prevent her from needing to have the wound sewn up, but for a moment the pain is worse and she leans against him briefly. He allows this, stroking her hair with his free hand. The gore-flecked other hand, Nassun notes, stays clenched tight around that metal shard.

“What will you do with it?” Nassun asks, staring at the clenched hand. She cannot help imagining something malevolent there, snaking its tendrils forth and looking for another person to infect with the Evil Earth’s will.

“I don’t know,” Schaffa says in a heavy voice. “It’s no danger to me, but I remember that in…” He frowns for a moment, visibly groping for a memory that is gone. “That once, elsewhere, we simply recycled them. Here, I suppose I’ll have to find somewhere isolated to drop it, and hope no one stumbles across it anytime soon. What will you do with that?”

Nassun follows his gaze to where the sapphire longknife, untended, has floated around behind her and positioned itself in the air, hovering precisely a foot away from her back. It moves slightly with her movements, humming faintly. She doesn’t understand why it’s doing that, though she takes some comfort from its looming, quiescent strength. “I guess I should put it back.”

“How did you…?”

“I just needed it. It knew what I needed and changed for me.” Nassun shrugs a little. It’s so hard to explain these things in words. Then she clutches at his shirt with her uninjured hand, because she knows that when Schaffa doesn’t answer a question, it isn’t a good thing. “The others, Schaffa.”

He sighs finally. “I’ll help them prepare packs. Can you walk?”

Nassun’s so relieved that for the moment she feels like she can fly. “Yes. Thank you. Thank you, Schaffa!”

He shakes his head, clearly rueful, though he smiles again. “Go to your father’s house and take anything useful and portable, little one. I’ll meet you there.”

She hesitates. If Schaffa decides to kill the other children of Found Moon… He won’t, will he? He’s said he won’t.

Schaffa pauses, raising an eyebrow above his smile, the picture of polite, calm inquiry. It’s an illusion. The silver is still a lashing whip within Schaffa, trying to goad him into killing her. He must be in astonishing pain. He resists the goad, however, as he has for weeks. He does not kill her, because he loves her. And she can trust nothing, no one, if she does not trust him.

“Okay,” Nassun says. “I’ll see you at Daddy’s.”

As she pulls away from him, she glances at Steel, who has turned to face Schaffa as well. Somewhere in the past few breaths, Steel has gotten the blood off his lips. She doesn’t know how. But he has held out one gray hand toward them – no. Toward Schaffa. Schaffa tilts his head at this for a moment, considering, and then after a moment he deposits the bloody iron shard into Steel’s hand. Steel’s hand flicks closed, then uncurls again, slowly, as if performing a sleight-of-hand trick. But the iron shard is gone. Schaffa inclines his head in polite thanks.

Her two monstrous protectors, who must cooperate on her care. Yet is Nassun not a monster, too? Because the thing that she sensed just before Jija came to kill her – that spike of immense power, concentrated and amplified by dozens of obelisks working in tandem? Steel has called this the Obelisk Gate: a vast and complex mechanism created by the deadciv that built the obelisks, for some unfathomable purpose. Steel has also mentioned a thing called the Moon. Nassun has heard the stories; once, long ago, Father Earth had a child. That child’s loss is what angered him and brought about the Seasons.

The tales offer a message of impossible hope, and a mindless expression that lorists use to intrigue restless audiences. One day, if the Earth’s child ever returns…The implication is that, someday, Father Earth might be appeased at last. Someday, the Seasons might end and all could become right with the world.

Except fathers will still try to murder their orogene children, won’t they? Even if the Moon comes back. Nothing will ever stop that.

Bring home the Moon, Steel has said. End the world’s pain.

Some choices aren’t choices at all, really.

Nassun wills the sapphire to come hover before her again. She can sess nothing in the wake of Umber and Nida’s negation, but there are other ways to perceive the world. And amid the flickering un-water of the sapphire, as it unmakes and remakes itself from the concentrated immensity of silver light stored within its crystal lattice, there is a subtle message written in equations of force and balance that Nassun solves instinctively, with something other than math.

Far away. Across the unknown sea. Her mother may hold the Obelisk Gate’s key, but Nassun learned on the ash roads that there are other ways to open any gate – hinges to pop, ways to climb over or dig under. And far away, on the other side of the world, is a place where Essun’s control over the Gate can be subverted.

“I know where we need to go, Schaffa,” Nassun says.

He eyes her for a moment, his gaze flicking to Steel and back. “Do you, now?”

“Yes. It’s a really long way, though.” She bites her lip. “Will you go with me?”

He inclines his head, his smile wide and warm. “Anywhere, my little one.”

Nassun lets out a long breath of relief, smiling up at him tentatively. Then she deliberately turns her back on Found Moon and its corpses, and walks down the hill without ever once looking back.

***