It takes a few days for you to recover enough to walk on your own. As soon as you can, Ykka reappropriates your stretcher-bearers to perform other tasks, which leaves you to hobble along, weak and made clumsy by the loss of your arm. The first few days you lag well behind the bulk of the group, catching up to camp with them only hours after they’ve settled for the night. There isn’t much left of the communal food by the time you go to take your share. Good thing you don’t feel hunger anymore. There aren’t many spaces left to lay out your bedroll, either – though they did at least give you a basic pack and supplies to make up for your lost runny-sack. What spaces there are aren’t good, located near the edges of the camp or off the road altogether, where the danger of attack by wildlife or commless is greater. You sleep there anyway because you’re exhausted. You suppose that if there’s any real danger, Hoa will carry you off again; he seems able to transport you for short distances through the earth with no trouble. Still, Ykka’s anger is a hard thing to bear, in more ways than one.

Tonkee and Hoa lag behind with you. It’s almost like the old days, except that now Hoa appears as you walk, gets left behind as you keep walking, then appears again somewhere ahead of you. Most times he adopts a neutral posture, but occasionally he’s doing something ridiculous, like the time you find him in a running pose. Apparently stone eaters get bored, too. Hjarka stays with Tonkee, so that’s four of you. Well, five: Lerna lingers to walk with you, too, angry at what he perceives as the mistreatment of one of his patients. He didn’t think a recently comatose woman should be made to walk at all, let alone left to fall behind. You try to tell him not to stick with you, not to draw Castrima’s wrath upon himself, but he snorts and says that if Castrima really wants to antagonize the only person in the comm who’s formally trained to do surgery, they don’t deserve to keep him. Which is… well, it’s a very good point. You shut up.

You’re managing better than Lerna expected, at least. That’s mostly because it wasn’t really a coma, and also because you hadn’t lost all of your road conditioning during the seven or eight months that you lived in Castrima. The old habits come back easily, really: finding a steady, if slow, pace that nevertheless eats up the miles; wearing your pack low so that the bulk of its weight braces against your butt rather than pulling on your shoulders; keeping your head down as you walk so that the falling ash doesn’t cover your goggles. The loss of the arm is more a nuisance than a real hardship, at least with so many willing helpers around. Aside from throwing off your balance and plaguing you with phantom itches or aches from fingers or an elbow that doesn’t exist, the hardest part is getting dressed in the morning. It’s surprising how quickly you master squatting to piss or defecate without falling over, but maybe you’re just more motivated after days in a diaper.

So you’re holding your own, just slowly at first, and you’re getting faster as the days go by. But here’s the problem with all of this: You’re going the wrong way.

Tonkee comes over to sit by you one evening. “You can’t leave until we’re a lot further west,” she says without preamble. “Almost to the Merz, I’m thinking. If you want to make it that far, you’re going to have to patch things up with Ykka.”

You glare at her, though for Tonkee, this is discreet. She’s waited till Hjarka is snoring in her bedroll and Lerna’s gone off to use the camp latrine. Hoa is still nearby, standing unsubtle guard over your small group within the comm encampment, the curves of his black marble face underlit by your fire. Tonkee knows he’s loyal to you, though, to the degree that loyalty means anything to him.

“Ykka hates me,” you finally say, after glaring fails to produce anything like chagrin or regret in Tonkee.

She rolls her eyes. “Trust me, I know hate. What Ykka’s got is… scared, and a good bit of mad, but some of that you deserve. You’ve put her people in danger.”

“I saved her people from danger.”

Across the encampment, as if to illustrate your point, you notice someone moving about clunkily. It’s one of the Rennanis soldiers, a few of whom were captured alive after the last battle. They’ve put a pranger on her – a hinged wooden collar round her neck, with holes in the planks holding her arms up and apart, linked by two chains to manacles on her ankles. Primitive but effective. Lerna’s been tending the prisoners’ chafing sores, and you understand they’re allowed to put the prangers aside at night. It’s better treatment than Castrimans would have gotten from Rennanis if the situations were reversed, but still, it makes everything awkward. It’s not like the Rennies can leave, after all. Even without the prangers, if any one of them escapes now, with no supplies and lacking the protection of a large group, they’ll be meat within days. The prangers are just insult on top of injury, and a disquieting reminder to all that things could be worse. You look away.

Tonkee sees you looking. “Yeah, you saved Castrima from one danger and then delivered them into something just as bad. Ykka only wanted the first half of that.”

“I couldn’t have avoided the second half. Should I have just let the stone eaters kill all the roggas? Kill her? If they’d succeeded, none of the geode’s mechanisms would’ve worked anyway!”

“She knows that. That’s why I said it wasn’t hate. But…” Tonkee sighs as if you’re being especially stupid. “Look. Castrima was – is – an experiment. Not the geode, the people. She’s always known it was precarious, trying to make a comm out of strays and roggas, but it was working. She made the old-timers understand that we needed the newcommers. Got everybody to think of roggas as people. Got them to agree to live underground, in a deadciv ruin that could’ve killed us all at any moment. Even kept them from turning on each other when that gray stone eater gave them a reason —”

“I stopped that,” you mutter. But you’re listening.

“You helped,” Tonkee concedes, “but if it had just been you? You know full well it wouldn’t have worked. Castrima works because of Ykka. Because they know she’ll die to keep this comm going. Help Castrima, and Ykka will be on your side again.”

It will be weeks, maybe even months, before you reach the now-vacant Equatorial city of Rennanis. “I know where Nassun is now,” you say, seething. “By the time Castrima gets to Rennanis, she might be somewhere else!”

Tonkee sighs. “It’s been a few weeks already, Essun.”

And Nassun was probably somewhere else before you even woke up. You’re shaking. It’s not rational and you know it, but you blurt, “But if I go now, maybe – maybe I can catch up, maybe Hoa can tune in on her again, maybe I can —” Then you falter silent because you hear the shaky, high-pitched note of your own voice and your mother instincts kick back in, rusty but unblunted, to chide you: Stop whining. Which you are. So you bite back more words, but you’re still shaking, a little.

Tonkee shakes her head, an expression on her face that might be sympathy, or maybe it’s just rueful acknowledgment of how pathetic you sound. “Well, at least you know it’s a bad idea. But if you’re that determined, then you’d better get started now.” She turns away. Can’t really blame her, can you? Venture into the almost certainly deadly unknown with a woman who’s destroyed multiple communities, or stay with a comm that at least theoretically will soon have a home again? That’s barely even a question.

But you should really know better than to try to predict what Tonkee will do. She sighs, after you subside and sit back on the rock you’ve been using for a chair. “I can probably wrangle some extra supplies out of the quartermaster, if I tell them I need to go scout something for the Innovators. They’re used to me doing that. But I’m not sure I can convince them to give me enough for two.”

It’s a surprise to realize how grateful you are, for her – hmm. Loyalty isn’t the word for it. Attachment? Maybe. Maybe it’s just that you’ve been her research subject for all this time already, so of course she’s not going to let you slip away when she’s followed you across decades and half the Stillness.

But then you frown. “Two? Not three?” You thought things were working out with her and Hjarka.

Tonkee shrugs, then awkwardly bends to tuck into the little bowl of rice and beans she has from the communal pot. After she swallows, she says, “I prefer to make conservative estimates. You’d better, too.”

She means Lerna, who seems to be in the process of attaching himself to you. You don’t know why. You’re not exactly a prize, dressed in ash and with no arm, and half the time he seems to be furious with you. You’re still surprised it’s not all the time. He always was a strange boy.

“Anyway, here’s a thing I want you to think about,” Tonkee continues. “What was Nassun doing when you found her?”

And you flinch. Because, damn it, Tonkee has once again said aloud a thing that you would have preferred to leave unsaid, and unconsidered.

And because you remember that moment, with the power of the Gate sluicing through you, when you reached and touched and felt a familiar resonance touch back. A resonance backed, and amplified, by something blue and deep and strangely resistant to the Gate’s linkage. The Gate told you – somehow – that it was the sapphire.

What is your ten-year-old daughter doing playing with an obelisk?

How is your ten-year-old daughter alive after playing with an obelisk?

You think of how that momentary contact felt. Familiar vibration-taste of an orogeny which you’ve been quelling since before she was born and training since she was two – but so much sharper and more intense now. You weren’t trying to take the sapphire from Nassun, but the Gate was, following instructions that long-dead builders somehow wrote into the layered lattices of the onyx. Nassun kept the sapphire, though. She actually fought off the Obelisk Gate.

What has your little girl been doing, this long dark year, to develop such skill?

“You don’t know what her situation is,” Tonkee continues, which makes you blink out of this terrible reverie and focus on her. “You don’t know what kind of people she’s living with. You said she’s in the Antarctics, somewhere near the eastern coast? That part of the world shouldn’t be feeling the Season much yet. So what are you going to do, then, snatch her out of a comm where she’s safe and has enough to eat and can still see the sky, and drag her north to a comm sitting on the Rifting, where the shakes will be constant and the next gas vent might kill everyone?” She looks hard at you. “Do you want to help her? Or just have her with you again? Those two things aren’t the same.”

“Jija killed Uche,” you snap. The words don’t hurt, unless you think about them as you speak. Unless you remember your son’s smell or his little laugh or the sight of his body under a blanket. Unless you think of Corundum – you use anger to press down the twin throbs of grief and guilt. “I have to get her away from him. He killed my son!”

“He hasn’t killed your daughter yet. He’s had, what, twenty months? Twenty-one? That means something.” Tonkee spies Lerna coming back toward you through the crowd, and sighs. “There are just things you ought to think about, is all I’m saying. And I can’t even believe I’m saying it. She’s another obelisk-user, and I can’t even go investigate it.” Tonkee utters a frustrated grumbly sound. “I hate this damn Season. I have to be so rusting practical now.”

You’re surprised into a chuckle, but it’s weak. The questions Tonkee’s raised are good ones, of course, and some of them you can’t answer. You think about them for a long time that night, and in the days thereafter.

Rennanis is nearly into the Western Coastals, just past the Merz Desert. Castrima is going to have to go through the desert to get there, because skirting around it would drastically increase the length of your journey – a difference of months versus years. But you’re making good time through the central Somidlats, where the roads are decently passable and you haven’t been bothered by many raiders or significant wildlife. The Hunters have been able to find a lot of forage to supplement the comm’s stores, including a little more game than before. Unsurprising, since they’re no longer competing against hordes of insects. It’s not enough – small voles and birds just aren’t going to hold a comm of a thousand-plus people for long. But it’s better than nothing.

When you start noticing changes in the land that presage desert – thinning of the skeletal forest, flattening of the topography, a gradual drawing away of the water table amid the strata – you decide that it’s time to finally try to talk to Ykka.

By now you’ve entered a stone forest: a place of tall, sharp-edged black spires that claw irregularly at the sky above and around you as the group edges through its depths. There aren’t many of these in the world. Most get shattered by shakes, or – back when there was a Fulcrum – deliberately destroyed by Fulcrum blackjackets at local comms’ commissioned request. No comm lives in a stone forest, see, and no well-run comm wants one nearby. Apart from stone forests’ tendency to collapse and crush everything within, they tend to be riddled with wet caves and other water-hewn formations that make marvelous homes for dangerous flora and fauna. Or people.

The road runs straight through this stone forest, which is bullshit. That is to say, no one in their right mind would have built a road through a place like this. If a quartent governor had proposed using people’s taxes on this dangerous bit of bandit-bait, that governor would’ve been replaced in the next election… or shanked in the night. So that’s your first clue that something’s off about the place. The second is that there’s not much vegetation in the forest. Not much anywhere this far into the Season, but also no sign that there was ever any vegetation here in the first place. That means this stone forest is recent – so recent that there’s been no time for wind or rain to erode the stone and permit plant growth. So recent that it didn’t exist before the Season.

Clue number three is what your own sessapinae tell you. Most stone forests are limestone, made by water erosion over hundreds of millions of years. This one is obsidian – volcanic glass. Its jagged spikes aren’t straight up and down, but more inwardly curved; there are even a few unbroken arcs stretching over the road. Impossible to see up close, but you can sess the overall pattern: The whole forest is a blossom of lava, solidified mid-blast. Not a line of the road has been knocked out of place by the tectonic explosion around it. Beautiful work, really.

Ykka’s in the middle of an argument with another comm member when you find her. She’s called for a halt about a hundred feet away from the forest, and people are milling about, looking confused about whether this is just a rest stop or whether they should be making camp since it’s relatively late in the day. The comm member is one you finally recognize as Esni Strongback Castrima, the use-caste’s spokesperson. She throws you an uneasy glance as you come to a halt beside them, but then you take off your goggles and mask, and her expression softens. She didn’t recognize you before because you’ve stuffed rags into the sleeve of your missing arm to keep warm. Her reaction is a welcome reminder that not everybody in Castrima is angry with you. Esni is alive because the worst part of the attack – Rennanis soldiers trying to carve a bloody path through the Strongbacks holding Scenic Overlook – ended when you locked the enemy stone eaters into crystals.

Ykka, though, doesn’t turn, although she should easily be able to sess your presence. She says, you think to Esni, though it works for you as well, “I really don’t want to hear any more arguments right now.”

“That’s good,” you say. “Because I understand exactly why you’ve stopped here, and I think it’s a good idea.” It’s a bit louder than it needs to be. You eyeball Esni so she’ll know you mean to have it out with Ykka right now, and maybe Esni doesn’t want to be here for that. But a woman who leads the comm’s defenders isn’t going to scare easily, so you’re not entirely surprised when Esni looks amused and folds her arms, ready to enjoy the show.

Ykka turns to you, slowly, a look of mingled annoyance and incredulity on her face. She says, “Nice to know you approve,” in a tone that sounds anything but pleased. “Not that I actually care if you do.”

You set your jaw. “You sess it, right? I’d call it the work of a four- or five-ringer, except I know now that ferals can have unusual skill.” You mean her. It’s an olive branch. Or maybe just flattery.

She doesn’t fall for it. “We’re going as far as we can before nightfall, and setting up camp in there.” She nods toward the forest. “It’s too big to get through in a day. Maybe we could go around, but there’s something…” Her eyes unfocus, and then she frowns and turns away, grimacing at having revealed a weakness to you. She’s sensitive enough to sess the something, but not to know exactly what she’s sessing.

You’re the one who spent years learning to read underground rocks with orogeny, so you fill in the detail. “There’s a leaf-covered spike trap in that direction,” you say, nodding toward the long-dead grass edging the stone forest on one side. “Beyond it is an area of snares; I can’t tell how many, but I can sess a lot of kinetic tension from wire or rope. If we go around the other way, though, there are partially sheared-off stone columns and boulders positioned at points along the edge of the stone forest. Easy to start a rockslide. And I can sess holes positioned at strategic points along the outer columns. A crossbow, or even an ordinary bow and arrow, could do a lot of damage from there.”

Ykka sighs. “Yeah. So through really is the best way.” She eyes Esni, who must have been arguing for around. Esni sighs, too, and then shrugs, conceding the argument.

You face Ykka. “Whoever made this forest, if they’re still alive, has the skill to precision-ice half the comm in seconds, with little warning. If you’re determined to go through, we’re going to have to set up a watch/chore rotation – the orogenes with better control, I mean, when I say ‘we.’ You need to keep us all awake tonight.”

She narrows her eyes. “Why?”

“Because if any of us are asleep when the attack comes” – you’re pretty sure there’ll be an attack – “we’ll react instinctively.”

Ykka grimaces. She’s not the average feral, but she’s feral enough to know what will likely happen if something causes her to react orogenically in her sleep. Whoever the attacker doesn’t kill, she very well might, completely by accident. “Shit.” She looks away for a moment, and you wonder if she doesn’t believe you, but apparently she’s just thinking. “Fine. We’ll split watches, then. Put the roggas not on watch to work, oh, shelling those wild peas we found a few days back. Or repairing the harnesses the Strongbacks use for hauling. Since we’ll have to be carried on the wagons tomorrow, when we’re too sleepy and useless to walk on our own.”

“Right. And —” You hesitate. Not yet. You can’t admit your weakness to these women, not yet. But. “Not me.”

Ykka’s eyes narrow immediately. Esni throws you a skeptical look, as if to say, And you were doing so well. Quickly you add, “I don’t know what I’m capable of now. After what I did back in Castrima-under… I’m different.”

It’s not even a lie. Without really thinking about it, you reach for your missing arm, your hand fumbling against the sleeve of your jacket. No one can see the stump, but you’re hyperaware of it all of a sudden. Hoa didn’t think much of the way Antimony left visible tooth-marks on Alabaster’s stumps, it turns out. Yours is smooth, rounded, nearly polished. Rusting perfectionist.

Ykka’s gaze follows that self-conscious touch of yours; she winces. “Huh. Yeah, I guess you would be.” Her jaw tenses. “Seems like you can sess all right, though.”

“Yes. I can help keep watch. I just shouldn’t… do anything.”

Ykka shakes her head but says, “Fine. You’ll take last watch of the night, then.”

It’s the least desirable watch – when it’s coldest, now that the night temperatures have started to dip below freezing. Most people would rather be asleep in warm bedrolls. It’s also the most dangerous time of the watch, when any attackers with sense will hit a large group like this in hopes of catching defenders sleepy and sluggish. You can’t decide whether this is a sign of trust, or a punishment. Experimentally, you say, “Can I have a weapon, at least?” You haven’t carried anything since a few months after you left Tirimo, when you traded away your knife for dried rose hips to stave off scurvy.

“No.”

For rust’s sake. You start to fold your arms, remember you can’t when your empty sleeve twitches, and grimace instead. (Ykka and Esni grimace, too.) “What am I supposed to do, then, yell really loud? Are you seriously going to put the comm at risk because of your grudge against me?”

Ykka rolls her eyes. “For rust’s sake.” It’s so much an echo of your own thought that you frown. “Unbelievable. You think I’m pissed about the geode, don’t you?”

You can’t help looking at Esni. She stares at Ykka as if to say, What, you aren’t? It’s eloquent enough for both of you.

Ykka glares, then scrubs at her face and lets out a mortal sigh. “Esni, go… shit, go do something Strongbackish. Essie – here. Come here. Rusting walk with me.” She beckons sharply, in frustration. You’re too confused to be offended; she turns to go and you follow. Esni shrugs and walks away.

The two of you move through the camp in silence for a few moments. Everyone seems keenly aware of the danger that the stone forest presents, so this has become one of the busier rest stops you’ve seen. Some of the Strongbacks are transferring items between the wagons so as to put essentials onto those with sturdier wheels, which will be less heavily loaded. Easier to grab and run under pressure. The Hunters are whittling sharpened poles from some of the dead saplings and branches near the camp. These will be positioned around the perimeter when the comm finally sets up camp, so as to funnel attackers into kill zones. The rest of the Strongbacks are catching naps while they can, knowing they’ll either be patrolling or made to sleep on the outer edges of camp when night falls. Use strong backs to guard them all, says stonelore. Strongbacks who don’t like being human shields can either find a way to distinguish themselves and join another caste, or go join another comm.

Your nose wrinkles as you pass the hastily dug roadside ditch that is currently occupied by six or seven people, with a few of the younger Resistants standing around to do the unhappy duty of shoveling dirt over the results. Unusually, there’s a brief line of people waiting for their turn to squat. Not surprising that so many people need to evacuate their bowels at once; here in the looming shadow of the stone forest, everyone’s on edge. Nobody wants to get caught with their pants down after dark.

You’re thinking you might need to take a turn in the ditch yourself when Ykka surprises you out of this scintillating rumination. “So do you like us yet?”

“What?”

She gestures over the camp. The people of the comm. “You’ve been with Castrima for the better part of a year now. Got any friends?”

You, you think, before you can stop yourself. “No,” you say.

She eyes you for a moment, and guiltily you wonder if she was expecting you to name her. Then she sighs. “Started rolling Lerna yet? No accounting for taste, I guess, but the Breeders say the signs are all there. Me, when I want a man, I pick one who doesn’t talk so much. Women are a surer bet. They know not to ruin the mood.” She starts to stretch, grimacing as she works out a kink in her back. You use the time to get control of the horrified embarrassment on your face. The rusting Breeders obviously aren’t busy enough.

“No,” you say.

“Not yet?”

You sigh. “Not… yet.”

“The rust are you waiting for? The road’s not getting any safer.”

You glare at her. “I thought you didn’t care?”

“I don’t. But giving you shit about it is helping me make a point.” Ykka’s leading you toward the wagons, or so you think at first. Then you move past the wagons, and stiffen in surprise.

Here, seated and eating, are the seven Rennanese prisoners. Even sitting they’re different from the people of Castrima – all of the Rennanese being pure Sanzed or close enough not to matter, bigger than average even for that race, with fully grown ashblow manes or shorn-sided braids or short bottlebrushes to heighten the effect. Their prangers have been put aside for the moment – though the chains linking each prisoner to their set are still in place – and there are a few Strongbacks standing guard nearby.

You’re surprised that they’re eating, since you haven’t made full camp for the night yet. The Strongbacks on guard are eating, too, but that only makes sense; they’ve got a long night ahead of them. The Rennies look up as you and Ykka approach, and that makes you stop in your tracks, because you recognize one of the prisoners. Danel, the general of the Rennanis army. She’s healthy and whole, apart from red marks around her neck and wrists from the pranger. The last time you saw her up close, she was summoning a shirtless Guardian to kill you.

She recognizes you, too, and her mouth flattens into a resigned, ironic line. Then, very deliberately, she nods to you before turning back to her bowl.

Ykka hunkers down to a crouch beside Danel, to your surprise. “So, how’s the food?”

Danel shrugs, still eating. “Better than starving.”

“It’s good,” says another prisoner, across the ring. He shrugs when one of the others glares at him. “Well, it is.”

“They just want us to be able to haul their wagons,” says the man who glared.

“Yeah,” Ykka interrupts. “That’s precisely right. Strongbacks in Castrima get a comm share and a bed, when we have one to give, in exchange for their contribution. What’d you get from Rennanis?”

“Some rusting pride, maybe,” says the glarer, glaring harder.

“Shut up, Phauld,” says Danel.

“These mongrels think they —”

Danel sets her bowl of food down. The glarer immediately shuts up and tenses, his eyes going a little wide. After a moment, Danel picks up her bowl and resumes eating. Her expression hasn’t changed the whole time. You find yourself suspecting that she’s raised children.

Ykka, elbow propped on one knee, rests her chin on her fist and watches Phauld for a moment. To Danel, she says, “So what do you want me to do about that one?”

Phauld immediately frowns. “What?”

Danel shrugs. Her bowl’s empty now, but she runs a finger around its curve to sweep up the last sauce. “Not for me to say anymore.”

“Doesn’t seem very bright.” Ykka purses her lips, considering the man. “Not bad-looking, but harder to breed for brains than looks.”

Danel says nothing for a moment, while Phauld looks from her to Ykka and back in growing incredulity. Then, with a heavy sigh, Danel looks up at Phauld, too. “What do you want me to say? I’m not his commander anymore. Never wanted to be in the first place; I got drafted. Now I don’t rusting care.”

“I can’t believe you,” Phauld says. His voice is too loud, rising in panic. “I fought for you.”

“And lost.” Danel shakes her head. “Now it’s about surviving, adapting. Forget all that crap you heard back in Rennanis about Sanzeds and mongrels; that was just propaganda to unite the comm. Things are different now. ‘Necessity is the only law.’”

“Don’t you rusting quote stonelore at me!”

“She’s quoting stonelore because you don’t get it,” snaps the other man – the one who liked the food. “They’re feeding us. They’re letting us be useful. It’s a test, you stupid shit. To see if we’re willing to earn a place in this comm!”

“This comm?” Phauld gestures around at the camp. His laugh echoes off the rock faces. People look around, trying to figure out if the yelling means there’s some kind of problem. “Do you hear yourself? These people haven’t got a chance. They should be finding somewhere to bunker down, maybe rebuild one of the comms we razed along the way. Instead —”

Ykka moves with a casualness that doesn’t deceive you. Everyone could see this coming, including Phauld, but he’s too stubborn to acknowledge reality. She stands up and unnecessarily brushes ash off her shoulders and steps across the circle and then puts a hand on the crown of Phauld’s head. He tries to twitch back, swatting at her. “Don’t rusting touch —”

But then he stops. His eyes glaze over. Ykka’s done that thing to him – the thing she did to Cutter back in Castrima-under when people were working themselves into an orogene-lynching mob. Because you knew it was coming this time, you’re able to get a better handle on how she does the strange pulse. It’s definitely magic, some kind of manipulation of the thin, silvery filaments that dance and flicker between the motes of a person’s substance. Ykka’s pulse cuts through the knot of threads at the base of Phauld’s brain, just above the sessapinae. Everything’s still intact physically, but magically it’s as if she’s chopped his head off.

He sags backward, and Ykka steps aside to let him flop bonelessly to the ground.

One of the other Rennanis women gasps and scoots back, her chains jangling. The guards glance at each other, uncomfortably, but they’re not surprised; word of what Ykka did to Cutter spread through the comm afterward. A Rennanese man who hasn’t spoken before utters a swift oath in one of the Coaster creole languages; it’s not Eturpic so you don’t understand it, but his fear is clear enough. Danel only sighs.

Ykka sighs, too, looking at the dead man. Then she eyes Danel. “I’m sorry.”

Danel smiles thinly. “We tried. And you said it yourself: He wasn’t very bright.”

Ykka nods. For some reason she glances up at you for a moment. You have no idea what lesson you’re supposed to take from this. “Unlock the manacles,” she says. You’re confused for an instant before you realize it’s an order for the guards. One of them moves over to speak to the other, and they start sorting through a ring of keys. Then Ykka looks disgusted with herself as she says heavily, “Who’s on quartermaster duty today? Memsid? Tell him and some of the other Resistants to come handle this.” She jerks her head toward Phauld.

Everyone goes still. No one protests, though. The Hunters have been finding more game and forage, but Castrima has a lot of people who need more protein than they’ve been getting, and the desert is coming. It was always going to come to this.

After a moment of silence, though, you step over to Ykka. “You sure about this?” you ask softly. One of the guards comes over to unlock Danel’s ankle chains. Danel, who tried to kill every living member of Castrima. Danel, who tried to kill you.

“Why wouldn’t I be?” Ykka shrugs. Her voice is loud enough that the prisoners can hear her. “We’ve been short on Strongbacks since Rennanis attacked. Now we’ve got six replacements.”

“Replacements who’ll stab us – or maybe just you – in the back first chance!”

“If I don’t see them coming and kill them first, yeah. But that would be pretty stupid of them, and I killed the stupidest one for a reason.” You get the sense that Ykka’s not trying to scare the Rennanis people. She’s just stating facts. “See, this is what I keep trying to tell you, Essie: The world isn’t friends and enemies. It’s people who might help you, and people who’ll get in your way. Kill this lot and what do you get?”

“Safety.”

“Lots of ways to be safe. Yeah, there’s now a bigger chance I’ll get shanked in the night. More safety for the comm, though. And the stronger the comm is, the better the chance we’ll all get to Rennanis alive.” She shrugs, then glances around at the stone forest. “Whoever built this is one of us, with real skill. We’re going to need that.”

“What, now you want to adopt…” You shake your head, incredulous. “Violent bandit ferals?”

But then you stop. Because once upon a time, you loved a violent pirate feral.

Ykka watches while you remember Innon and mourn him anew. Then, with remarkable gentleness, she says, “I play a longer game than just making it to the next day, Essie. Maybe you ought to try it for a change.”

You look away, feeling oddly defensive. The luxury of thinking beyond the next day isn’t something you’ve ever had much of a chance to try. “I’m not a headwoman. I’m just a rogga.”

Ykka tilts her head in ironic acknowledgment. You don’t use that word nearly as often as she does. When she says it, it’s pride. When you use it, it’s assault.

“Well, I’m both,” Ykka says. “A headwoman, and a rogga. I choose to be both, and more.” She steps past you, and throws her next words at you over her shoulder, as if they’re meaningless. “You didn’t think about any of us while you were using those obelisks, did you? You thought about destroying your enemies. You thought about surviving – but you couldn’t get beyond that. That’s why I’ve been so pissed at you, Essie. Months in my comm, and still all you are is ‘just a rogga.’”

She walks off then, yelling to everyone in earshot that the rest break is over. You watch until she vanishes amid the stretching, grumbling crowd, then you glance over at Danel, who’s since stood up and is rubbing the red mark on one of her wrists. There’s a carefully neutral look on the woman’s face as she watches you.

“She dies, you die,” you say. If Ykka won’t look after herself, you’ll do what you can for her.

Danel lets out a brief, amused breath. “That’s true whether you threaten me or not. Not like anybody else here would give me a chance.” She throws you a skeptical look, all her Sanzed pride completely intact despite the change in circumstances. “You really aren’t very good at this, are you?”

Earthfires and rustbuckets. You walk away, because if Ykka already thinks less of you for destroying all threats, she’s really not going to like it if you start killing people who annoy you, for sheer pique.

***