The attack comes, like clockwork, near dawn.

Everyone’s ready for it. The camp is about a third of the way into the stone forest, which is as far as Castrima was able to get before full darkness made further progress treacherous. The group should be able to get all the way through the forest before sunset the next day – assuming everyone lives through the night.

Restlessly you prowl the camp, and you are not the only one to do so. The Hunters are supposed to all be sleeping, since during the day they act as scouts as well as ranging afield to forage and catch game. You see quite a few of them awake, too. The Strongbacks are supposed to be sleeping in shifts, but all of them are up, as are a good number of the other castes. You spot Hjarka sitting atop a pile of baggage, her head down and eyes shut, but otherwise her legs are braced for a quick lunge and there’s a glassknife in each hand. Her fingers haven’t loosened with sleep.

It’s a stupid time to attack, given all this, but there isn’t a better one, so apparently your assailants decide to work with what they’ve got. You’re the first to sess it, and you’re pivoting on the ball of one foot and shouting a warning even as you narrow your perception and drop into that space of mind from which you can command volcanoes. A fulcrum, deep and strong, has been rooted in the earth nearby. You follow it to the midpoint of its potential torus, the center of the circle, like a hawk sighting prey. Right side of the road. Twenty feet into the stone forest, out of line of sight amid the wends and drooping greenery. “Ykka!”

She appears at once from wherever she was sitting amid the tents. “Yeah, felt it.”

“Not active yet.” By this you mean that the torus hasn’t begun to draw heat or movement from the ambient. But that fulcrum is deep as a taproot. There’s not much seismic potential gathered in this region – and indeed, much of the pressure on the lower-level strata has been absorbed by the creation of the stone forest. Still, there’s always heat if you go deep enough, and this is deep. Solid. Fulcrum-precise.

“We don’t have to fight,” Ykka yells, suddenly, into the forest. You start, though you shouldn’t. You’re shocked that she was serious, though you really should know better by now. She stalks forward, body taut, knees bent as if she’s about to sprint into the forest, hands held out before her and fingertips wiggling.

It’s easier now to reach for magic, though you still focus on the stump of your own arm to begin, out of habit. It will never feel natural for you to use this instead of orogeny, but at least your perception shifts quickly. Ykka’s way ahead of you. Wavelets and arcs of silver dance along the ground around her, mostly in front of her, spreading and flickering as she draws them up from the ground and makes them hers. What little vegetation you can sess in the stone forest makes it easier; the seedling vines and light-starved mosses act like wires, channeling and aligning the silver into patterns that make sense. Are predictable. Are searching… ah. You tense in the same moment that Ykka does. Yes. There.

Above that deep-rooted fulcrum, at the center of a torus that has not yet begun to spin, crouches a body etched out in silver. For the first time, in comparison, you notice that an orogene’s silver is both brighter and less complex than that of the plants and insects around it. The same… er, amount, if that word applies, if not capacity or potential or aliveness, but not the same design. This orogene’s silver is concentrated into a relative few bright lines that all align in similar directions. They don’t flicker, and neither does his torus. He – you guess that, but it feels right – is listening.

Ykka, another outline of precise, concentrated silver, nods in satisfaction. She climbs up on top of some of the wagon cargo so her voice will carry better.

“I’m Ykka Rogga Castrima,” she calls. You guess that she points at you. “She’s a rogga, too. So’s he.” Temell. “So are those kids over there. We don’t kill roggas here.” She pauses. “You hungry? We’ve got a little to spare. You don’t need to try to take it.”

That fulcrum doesn’t budge.

Something else does, though – from the other side of the stone forest, as thin, attenuated agglomerations of silver suddenly blur into chaotic movement and come charging toward you. Other raiders; Evil Earth, you were all so focused on the rogga that you didn’t even notice the ones behind you. You hear them now, though, voices rising, cursing, feet pounding on ashy sand. The Strongbacks near the barrier of stakes on that side cry warning. “They’re attacking,” you call.

“No shit,” Ykka snaps, drawing a glassknife.

You retreat to within the tent circle, acutely aware of your vulnerability in a way that’s strange and deeply unpleasant. It’s worse because you can still sess, and because your instincts prompt you to respond when you see where you could help. A cluster of attackers comes at a part of the perimeter that’s light on stakes and defenders, and you open your eyes so you can actually see them trying to fight their way in. They’re typical commless raiders – filthy, emaciated, dressed in an ash-faded combination of rags and newer, pilfered clothing. You could take out all six in half a breath, with a single precision torus.

But you can also feel how… what? How aligned you are. Ykka’s silver is concentrated like that of the other roggas you’ve observed, but hers is still layered, jagged, a little jittery. It flows every-which-way within her as she jumps down from the cargo wagon and shouts for people to help the sparse Strongbacks near that cluster of raiders, running to help herself. Your magic flows with smooth clarity, every line matching perfectly in direction and flow to every other line. You don’t know how to change it back to the way it was, if that’s even possible. And you know instinctively that using the silver when you’re like this will pack every particle of your body together as neatly as a mason lays a wall of bricks. You’ll be stone the same way.

So you fight your instincts and hide, much as that rankles. There are others here, crouching amid the central circle of tents – the comm’s smaller children, its bare handful of elders, one woman so pregnant that she can’t move with any real flexibility even though she’s got a loaded crossbow in her hands, two knife-wielding Breeders who’ve obviously been charged with defending her and the children.

When you poke your head up to observe the fighting, you catch a glimpse of something stunning. Danel, having appropriated one of the spear-whittled sticks that form the fence, is using it to carve a bloody swath through the raiders. She’s phenomenal, spinning and stabbing and blocking and stabbing again, twirling the stick in between attacks as if she’s fought commless a million times. That’s not just being an experienced Strongback; that’s something else. She’s just too good. But it follows, doesn’t it? Not like Rennanis made her the general of their army for her charm.

It isn’t much of a fight in the end. Twenty or thirty scrawny commless against trained, fed, prepared comm members? This is why comms survive Seasons, and why long-term commlessness is a death sentence. This lot was probably desperate; there can’t have been much traffic along the road in the past few months. What were they thinking?

Their orogene, you realize. That’s who they expected to win this fight for them. But he’s still not moving, orogenically or physically.

You get up, walking past the lingering knots of fighting. Self-consciously adjusting your mask, you step off the road and slip through the perimeter stakes, moving into the deeper darkness of the stone forest. The firelight of the camp leaves you night-blind, so you stop a moment to allow your eyes to adjust. No telling what kinds of traps the commless have left here; you shouldn’t be doing this alone. Again you’re surprised, though, because between one blink and the next, you suddenly begin to see in silver. Insects, leaf litter, a spiderweb, even the rocks – all of it now flickers in wild, veined patterns, their cells and particulates etched out by the lattice that connects them.

And people. You stop as you make them out, well camouflaged against the silver bloom of the forest. The rogga is still where he’s been, a brighter etching against more delicate lines. But there are also two small shapes crouched in a cavelet, about twenty feet further into the forest. Two other bodies, somehow high overhead atop the jagged, curving rocks of the forest. Lookouts, maybe? None of them move much. Can’t tell if they’ve seen you, or if they’re watching the battle somehow. You’re frozen, startled by this sudden shift in your perception. Is this some by-product of learning to see silver in yourself and the obelisks? Maybe once you can do that, you see it everywhere. Or maybe you’re hallucinating all of it now, like an afterimage against your eyelids. After all, Alabaster never mentioned being able to see like this – but then, when did Alabaster ever try to be a good teacher?

You grope forward for a bit, hand out in front of you in case it is some kind of illusion, but if so, it’s at least an accurate one. While it’s strange to put your foot down on a lattice of silver, after a while you get used to it.

The orogene’s distinctive lattice and that still-held torus aren’t far, but he’s somewhere higher up than the ground. Maybe ten feet above where you stand. This is explained somewhat when the ground abruptly slopes upward and your hand touches stone. Your regular vision has adapted enough that you can see there’s a pillar here, crooked and probably climbable, at least by someone who’s got more than one arm. So you stop at the foot of it and say, “Hey.”

No response. You become aware of breathing: quick, shallow, pent. Like someone who’s trying not to be heard breathing.

“Hey.” Squinting in the dark, you finally make out some kind of structure of stacked branches and old boards and debris. A blind, maybe. From up there in the blind, it must be possible to see the road. Sight doesn’t matter for the average orogene; untrained ones can’t direct their power at all. A Fulcrum-trained orogene, though, needs line of sight to be able to distinguish between freezing useful supplies, or just freezing the people defending same.

Something shifts in the blind above you. Has there been a catch in the breathing? You try to think of something to say, but all that’s in your head is a question: What’s a Fulcrum-trained orogene doing among the commless? Must have been out on an assignment when the Rifting occurred. Without a Guardian – or he’d be dead – so that means he’s fifth ring or higher, or maybe a three- or four-ringer who’s lost their higher-ranked partner. You envision yourself, if you’d been on the road to Allia when the Rifting struck. Knowing your Guardian might come for you, but gambling that he might instead write you off for dead… no. That ends the imagining right there. Schaffa would have come for you. Schaffa did come for you.

But that was between Seasons. Guardians supposedly do not join comms when Seasons come, which means they die – and, in fact, the only Guardian you’ve seen since the Rifting was that one with Danel and the Rennanis army. She died in the boilbug storm that you invoked, and you’re glad of it, since she was one of the bare-skin killers and there’s more than the usual wrong with that kind. Either way, here’s another ex-blackjacket out here alone, and maybe afraid, and maybe hair-triggered to kill. You know what that’s like, don’t you? But this one hasn’t attacked yet. You have to find some way to make a connection.

“I remember,” you say. It’s soft, a murmur. Like you don’t want to hear even yourself. “I remember the crucibles. The instructors, killing us to save us. Did they m-make you have children, too?” Corundum. Your thoughts jerk away from memories. “Did they – shit.” The hand that Schaffa once broke, your right hand, is somewhere in whatever passes for Hoa’s belly. You still feel it, though. Phantom ache across phantom bones. “I know they broke you. Your hand. All of us. They broke us so they could —”

You hear, very clearly, a soft, horrified inhalation from within the blind.

The torus whips into a blurring, blistering spin, and explodes outward. You’re so close that it almost catches you. That gasp was enough warning, though, and so you’ve braced yourself orogenically, even if you couldn’t do so physically. Physically you flinch and it’s too much for your precarious, one-armed balance. You fall backward, landing hard on your ass – but you’ve been drilled since childhood in how to retain control on one level even as you lose it in another, so in the same instant you flex your sessapinae and simply slap his fulcrum out of the earth, inverting it. You’re much stronger; it’s easy. You react magically, too, grabbing those whipping tendrils of silver that the torus has stirred – and belatedly you realize orogeny affects magic, but isn’t magic itself, in fact the magic flinches away from it; that’s why you can’t work high-level orogeny without negatively impacting your ability to deploy magic, how nice to finally understand! Regardless, you tamp the wild threads of magic back down, and quell everything at once, so that nothing worse than a rime of frost dusts your body. It’s cold, but only on your skin. You’ll live.

Then you let go – and all the orogeny and magic snaps away from you like stretched rubber. Everything in you seems to twang in response, in resonance, and – oh – oh no – you feel the amplitude of the resonance rise as your cells begin to align… and compress into stone.

You can’t stop it. You can, however, direct it. In the instant that you have, you decide which body part you can afford to lose. Hair! No, too many strands, too much of it distant from the live follicles; you can do it but it’ll take too long and half your scalp will be stone by the time you’re done. Toes? You need to be able to walk. Fingers? You’ve only got one hand, need to keep it intact as long as you can.

Breasts. Well, you’re not planning on having more children anyway.

It’s enough to channel the resonance, the stoning, into just one. Have to take it through the glands under the armpit, but you manage to keep it above the muscle layer; that might keep the damage from impairing your movement and breathing. You pick the left breast, to offset your missing right arm. The right breast is the one you always liked better, anyway. Prettier. And then you lie there when it’s done, still alive, hyperaware of the extra weight on your chest, too shocked to mourn. Yet.

Then you’re pushing yourself up, awkwardly, grimacing, as the person in the blind utters a nervous little chuckle and says, “Oh, rust. Oh, Earth. Damaya? It really is you. Sorry about the torus, I was just – You don’t know what it’s been like. I can’t believe it. Do you know what they did to Crack?”

Arkete, says your memory. “Maxixe,” says your mouth.

It’s Maxixe.

***

Maxixe is half the man he used to be. Physically, anyway.

He’s got no legs below the thighs. One eye, or rather only one that works. The left one is clouded with damage, and it doesn’t track quite with the other. The left side of his head – he’s got almost nothing left of that lovely blond ashblow that you remember, just a knife-hacked bottlebrush – is a mess of pinkish scars, amid which you think the ear is healed shut. The scars have seamed his forehead and cheek, and pull his mouth a little out of true on that side.

Yet he wriggles down from the blind nimbly, walking on his hands and lifting his torso and stumpy legs with sheer muscle as he does so. He’s too good at getting around without legs; must have been doing it for a while now. He makes it over to you before you’re able to climb to your feet. “It really is you. I thought, I heard you were only fourth ring, did you really punch through my torus? I’m a sixer. Six! But that’s how I knew, see, you still sess the same, still quiet on the outside and rusting furious on the inside, it really is you.”

The other commless are starting to creep down from their spires and such. You tense as they appear – scarecrow figures, thin and ragged and stinking, watching you from stolen or homemade goggles and above wraparound masks that obviously used to be somebody’s clothes. They do not attack, however. They gather and watch you with Maxixe.

You stare as he circles you, levering himself along rapidly. He’s wearing commless rags, long-sleeved and layered, but you can see how big his shoulder and arm muscles are under the tattered cloth. The rest of him is scrawny. The gauntness of his face is painful to see, but it’s clear what his body has prioritized during the long hungry months.

“Arkete,” you say, because you remember that he always preferred the name he was born with.

He stops circling and peers at you for a moment, head tilted. Maybe this helps him see better with one functioning eye. The look on his face tells you off, though. He’s not Arkete, any more than you are Damaya. Too much has changed. Maxixe it is, then.

“You remembered,” he says, though. In that moment of stillness, this eye in his previous storm of words, you glimpse the thoughtful, charming boy you remember. Even though the coincidence of this is almost too much to digest. The only thing stranger would be running into… the brother you actually forgot you had, until just now. What was his name? Earthfires, you’ve forgotten that, too. But you probably wouldn’t recognize him, if you saw him. The grits of the Fulcrum were your siblings, in pain if not in blood.

You shake your head to focus, and nod. You’re on your feet now, dusting leaf litter and ash off your butt, though awkwardly around the pulling weight on your chest. “I’m surprised I remembered, too. You must have made an impression.”

He smiles. It’s lopsided. Only half his face works the way it should. “I forgot. Tried hard to, anyway.”

You set your jaw, steeling yourself. “I’m – sorry.” It’s pointless. He probably doesn’t even remember what you’re sorry about.

He shrugs. “Doesn’t matter.”

“It does.”

“No.” He looks away for a moment. “I should have talked to you, after. Shouldn’t have hated you the way I did. Shouldn’t have let her, them, change me. But I did, and now… none of that matters.”

You know exactly which “her” he’s referring to. After that whole incident with Crack, bullying that exposed a whole network of grits just trying to survive and a larger network of adults exploiting their desperation… You remember. Maxixe, returning to the grit barracks one day with both his hands broken.

“Better than what they did to Crack,” you murmur, before it occurs to you not to say this.

Yet he nods, unsurprised. “Went to a node station once. It wasn’t her. Rust knows what I was thinking… But I wanted to search them all. Before the Season.” He utters a ragged, bitter chuckle. “I didn’t even like her. Just needed to know.”

You shake your head. Not that you don’t understand the impulse; you’d be lying if you said you hadn’t thought it, too, in the years since you learned the truth. Go to all the stations. Figure out some way to restore their damaged sessapinae and set them free. Or kill them as a kindness; ah, you’d have been such a good instructor, if the Fulcrum had ever given you a chance. But of course you did nothing. And of course Maxixe didn’t do anything to save the node maintainers, either. Only Alabaster ever managed that.

You take a deep breath. “I’m with them,” you say, jerking your head back toward the road. “You heard what the headwoman said. Orogenes welcome.”

He sways a little, there on his stumps and arms. It’s hard to see his face in the dark. “I can sess her. She’s the headwoman?”

“Yeah. And everyone in the comm knows it. They’re – This comm is —” And you take a deep breath. “We. Are a comm that’s trying to do something different. Orogenes and stills. Not killing each other.”

He laughs, which sets off a few moments of coughing. The other stick figures chuckle, too, but it’s Maxixe’s cough that worries you. It’s dry, hacking, pebbly; not a good sound. He’s been breathing too much ash without a mask. It’s loud, too. If the Hunters aren’t nearby, watching and perhaps ready to shoot him and his people, you’ll eat your runny-sack.

At the end of the coughing fit, he tilts his head up at you again, with an amused look in his eye. “I’m doing the same thing,” he drawls. With his chin, he points toward his gathered people. “These rusters stick with me because I’m not going to eat them. They don’t fuck with me because I’ll kill them. There: peaceful coexistence.”

You look around at them and frown. Hard to see their expressions. “They didn’t attack my people, though.” Or they’d be dead.

“Nah. That was Olemshyn.” Maxixe shrugs; it makes his whole body move. “Half-Sanzed bastard. Got kicked out of two comms for ‘anger management issues,’ he said. He would’ve gotten us all killed raiding, so I told anybody who wanted to live and could stand me to come follow me, and we did our own thing. This side of the forest is ours, that side was theirs.”

Two commless tribes, not one. Maxixe’s hardly qualifies, though; only a handful of people besides himself? But he said it: Those who could endure living with a rogga went with him. That just didn’t turn out to be a lot of people.

Maxixe turns and climbs halfway up to the blind again, so that he can sit down and also be on an eye level with you. He lets out another rattly cough from the effort of doing this. “I figure he was expecting me to hit you lot,” he continues, once the cough subsides. “That’s how we usually do it: I ice ’em, his group grabs what it can before I and mine can show up, we both get enough to go on a little longer. But I was all fucked up from what your headwoman said.” He looks away, shaking his head. “Olemshyn should’ve broken off once he saw I wasn’t going to ice you, but, well. I did say he was gonna get them killed.”

“Yeah.”

“Good riddance. What happened to your arm?” He’s looking at you now. He can’t see your left breast, even though you’re slouching a little to the left. It hurts, weighing on your flesh.

You counter, “What happened to your legs?”

He smiles, lopsidedly, and doesn’t answer. Neither do you.

“So, not killing each other.” Maxixe shakes his head. “And that’s actually working out?”

“So far. We’re trying, anyway.”

“Won’t work.” Maxixe shifts again and darts another look at you. “How much did it cost you, to join them?”

You don’t say nothing, because that’s not what he’s asking, anyway. You can see the bargain he’s made for survival here: his skills in exchange for the raiders’ limited food and dubious shelter. This stone forest, this death trap, is his doing. How many people did he kill for his raiders?

How many have you killed, for Castrima?

Not the same.

How many people were in Rennanis’s army? How many of them did you sentence to be steam-cooked alive by insects? How many ash-mounds dot Castrima-over now, each with a hand or booted foot poking out?

Not the rusting same. That was them or you.

Just like Maxixe, trying to survive. Him or them.

You set your jaw to silence this internal argument. There isn’t time for this.

“We can’t —” you attempt, then shift. “There are other ways besides killing. Other… We don’t just have to be… this.” Ykka’s words, awkward and oily with hypocrisy from your mouth. And are those words even true anymore? Castrima no longer has the geode to force cooperation between orogene and still. Maybe it’ll all fall apart tomorrow.

Maybe. But until then, you force yourself to finish. “We don’t have to be what they made us, Maxixe.”

He shakes his head, staring at the leaf litter. “You remember that name, too.”

You lick your lips. “Yeah. I’m Essun.”

He frowns a little at this, perhaps because it isn’t a stone-themed name. That’s why you picked it. He doesn’t question it, though. At last he sighs. “Rusting look at me, Essun. Listen to the rocks in my chest. Even if your headwoman will take half a rogga, I’m not going to last much longer. Also —” Because he’s sitting, he can use his hands; he gestures around at the other scarecrow figures.

“No comm will let us in,” says one of the smaller figures. You think that’s a woman’s voice, but it’s so hoarse and weary you can’t tell. “Don’t even play that game.”

You shift, uncomfortable. The woman is right; Ykka might be willing to take in a commless rogga, but not the rest. Then again, you can never figure out quite what Ykka will do. “I can ask.”

Chuckles all around, jaded and thin and tired. A few more rattly coughs in addition to Maxixe’s. These people are starved nearly to death, and half of them are sick. This is pointless. Still. To Maxixe, you say, “If you don’t come with us, you’ll die here.”

“Olemshyn’s people had most of the supplies. We’ll go take ’em.” That sentence ends on a pause: the opening bid in a bargain. “And it’s all of us, or none of us.”

“Up to the headwoman,” you say, refusing to commit. But you know haggling when you hear it. His Fulcrum-trained orogeny in exchange for comm membership for him and his handful, with the deal sweetened by the raiders’ supplies. And he’s fully prepared to walk away if Ykka can’t meet his opening price. It bothers you. “I’ll also put in a good word for your character, or at least your character thirty years ago.”

He smiles a little. Hard not to see that smile as patronizing. Look at you, trying to make this something more than it is. You’re probably projecting. “I also know a little about the area. Might be useful, since you’re obviously going somewhere.” He jerks his chin toward firelight reflecting off the crags closer to the road. “You are going somewhere?”

“Rennanis.”

“Assholes.”

Which means the Rennanis army must have come through the area on its way south. You let yourself smile. “Dead assholes.”

“Huh.” He squints his good eye. “They’ve been smashing comms all over the area. That’s why we’ve had such a hard time; no trade caravans to raid once the Rennies were done. I did sess something weird in the direction they went, though.”

He falls silent, watching you, because of course he knows. Any rogga with rings should have sessed the activity of the Obelisk Gate when you ended the Rennanis-Castrima war so decisively. They might not have known what they were sessing, and unless they knew magic, they wouldn’t have perceived the totality of it even if they’d known, but they would have at least picked up the backwash.

“That… was me,” you say. It’s surprisingly hard to admit.

“Rusting Earth, Da – Essun. How?”

You take a deep breath. Extend a hand to him. So much of your past keeps coming back to haunt you. You can never forget where you came from, because it won’t rusting let you. But maybe Ykka’s got the right of it. You can reject these dregs of your old self and pretend that nothing and no one else matters… or you can embrace them. Reclaim them for what they’re worth, and grow stronger as a whole.

“Let’s go talk to Ykka,” you say. “If she adopts you – and your people, I know – I’ll tell you everything.” And if he’s not careful, you’ll end up teaching him how to do it, too. He’s a six-ringer, after all. If you fail, someone else will have to take up the mantle.

To your surprise, he regards your hand with something akin to wariness. “Not sure I want to know everything.”

It makes you smile. “You really don’t.”

He smiles lopsidedly. “You don’t want to know everything that’s happened to me, either.”

You incline your head. “Deal, then. Only the good parts.”

He grins. One of his teeth is missing. “That’s too short to even make a good pop lorist tale. Nobody would buy a story like that.”

But. Then he shifts his weight and lifts his right hand. The skin is thick as horn, beyond callused, and filthy. You wipe your hand on your pants without thinking, after. His people chuckle at this.

Then you lead him back toward Castrima, into the light.

***