Deserts are worse than most places, during Seasons. Tonkee lets Ykka know that water will be easy; Castrima’s Innovators have already assembled a number of contraptions they’re calling dew-catchers. The sun won’t be an issue either, thanks to the ash clouds that you never thought you’d have cause to thank. It will be chilly, in fact, though less so by day. You might even get a bit of snow.

No, the danger of deserts during a Season is simply that nearly all animals and insects there hibernate, deep under the sand where it’s still warm. There are those who claim to have figured out a surefire method of digging up sleeping lizards and such, but those are usually scams; the few comms that edge the desert guard such secrets jealously. The surface plants will have already shriveled away or been eaten by creatures preparing for hibernation, leaving nothing aboveground but sand and ash. Stonelore’s advice on entering deserts during Seasons is simply: don’t. Unless you mean to starve.

The comm spends two days camped at the edge of the Merz, preparing, though the truth is – as Ykka has confided in you, while you sat with her sharing your last mellow – there’s really no amount of preparation that will make the journey any easier. People are going to die. You won’t be one of them; it’s a curious feeling knowing that Hoa can whisk you away to Corepoint if there’s any real danger. It’s cheating, maybe. Except it’s not. Except you’re going to help as much as you can – and because you won’t die, you’re going to watch a lot of other people suffer. That’s the least you can do, now that you’ve committed to the cause of Castrima. Bear witness, and fight like earthfires to keep death from claiming more than its share.

In the meantime, the folks on cookfire duty pull double shifts roasting insects, drying tubers, baking the last of the grain stores into cakes, salting meat. After they were fed enough to have some strength, Maxixe’s surviving people turned out to be especially helpful with foraging, since several are locals and remember where there might be abandoned farms or debris from the Rifting shake that hasn’t been too picked over. Speed will be of the essence; survival means winning the race between the Merz’s width and Castrima’s supplies. Because of this, Tonkee – who is increasingly becoming a spokesperson for the Innovators, much to her own disgruntlement – oversees a quick and dirty breakdown and rebuilding of the storage wagons to a new lighter, more shock-resistant design that should pull more easily over desert sand. The Resistants and Breeders redistribute the remaining supplies to make sure the loss of any one wagon, if it must be abandoned, won’t cause some kind of critical shortage.

The night before the desert, you’re hunkered down beside one of the cookfires, still-awkwardly navigating how to feed yourself with one arm, when someone sits down beside you. It startles you a little, and you jerk enough to knock your cornbread off the plate. The hand that reaches into your view to retrieve it is broad and bronze and nicked with combat scars, and there’s a bit of yellow watered silk – filthy and ragged now, but still recognizable as such – looped around the wrist. Danel.

“Thanks,” you say, hoping she won’t use the opportunity to strike up a conversation.

“They say you were Fulcrum once,” she says, handing the cornbread back to you. No such luck, then.

It really shouldn’t surprise you that the people of Castrima have been gossiping. You decide not to care, using the cornbread to sop up another mouthful of stew. It’s especially good today, thickened with corn flour and rich with the tender, salty meat that’s been plentiful since the stone forest. Everybody needs as much fat on them as they can pack away, to prepare for the desert. You don’t think about the meat.

“I was,” you say, in what you hope sounds like a tone of warning.

“How many rings?”

You grimace in distaste, consider trying to explain the “unofficial” rings that Alabaster gave you, consider how far you’ve come beyond even those, consider being humble… and then finally you settle for accuracy. “Ten.” Essun Tenring, the Fulcrum would call you now, if the seniors would bother to acknowledge your current name, and if the Fulcrum still existed. For what it’s worth.

Danel whistles appreciatively. So strange to encounter someone who knows and cares about such things. “They say,” she continues, “that you can do things with the obelisks. That’s how you beat us, at Castrima; I had no idea you’d be able to rile up the bugs that way. Or trap so many of the stone eaters.”

You pretend not to care and concentrate on the cornbread. It’s just a little sweet; the cookfire squad is trying to use up the sugar, to make room for edibles with more nutritional value. It’s delicious.

“They say,” Danel continues, watching you sidelong, “that a ten-ring rogga broke the world, up in the Equatorials.”

Okay, no. “Orogene.”

“What?”

“Orogene.” It’s petty, maybe. Because of Ykka’s insistence on making rogga a use-caste name, all the stills are tossing the word around like it doesn’t mean anything. It’s not petty. It means something. “Not ‘rogga.’ You don’t get to say ‘rogga.’ You haven’t earned that.”

Silence for a few breaths. “All right,” Danel says then, with no hint of either apology or humoring you. She just accepts the new rule. She also doesn’t insinuate again that you’re the person who caused the Rifting. “Point stands, though. You can do things most orogenes can’t. Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You blow a stray ash flake off the baked potato.

“They say,” Danel says, planting her hands on her knees and leaning forward, “that you know how to end this Season. That you’re going to be leaving soon to go somewhere and actually try. And that you’ll need people to go with you, when you do.”

What. You frown at your potato. “Are you volunteering?”

“Maybe.”

You stare at her. “You just got accepted into the Strongbacks.”

Danel regards you for a moment longer, expression unreadably still. You don’t realize she’s wavering, trying to decide whether to reveal something about herself to you, until she sighs and does it. “I’m Lorist caste, actually. Danel Lorist Rennanis, once. Danel Strongback Castrima’s never gonna sound right.”

You must look skeptical as you try to visualize her with black lips. She rolls her eyes and looks away. “Rennanis didn’t need lorists, the headman said. It needed soldiers. And everybody knows lorists are good in a fight, so —”

“What?”

She sighs. “Equatorial lorists, I mean. Those of us who come out of the old Lorist families train in hand-to-hand, the arts of war, and so forth. It makes us more useful during Seasons, and in the task of defending knowledge.”

You had no idea. But – “Defending knowledge?”

A muscle flexes in Danel’s jaw. “Soldiers might get a comm through a Season, but storytellers are what kept Sanze going through seven of them.”

“Oh. Right.”

She makes a palpable effort to not shake her head at Midlatter provincialism. “Anyway. Better to be a general than cannon fodder, since that was the only choice I was given. But I’ve tried not to forget who I really am…” Abruptly her expression grows troubled. “You know, I can’t remember the exact wording of Tablet Three anymore? Or the Tale of Emperor Mutshatee. Just two years without stories, and I’m losing them. Never thought it would happen so fast.”

You’re not sure what to say to that. She looks so grim that you almost want to reassure her. Oh, it’ll be all right now that you’re no longer occupying your mind with the wholesale slaughter of the Somidlats, or something like that. You don’t think you could pull that off without sounding a little snide, though.

Danel’s jaw tightens in a determined sort of way anyway as she looks sharply at you. “I know when I see new stories being written, though.”

“I… I don’t know anything about that.”

She shrugs. “The hero of the story never does.”

Hero? You laugh a little, and it’s got an edge. Can’t help thinking of Allia, and Tirimo, and Meov, and Rennanis, and Castrima. Heroes don’t summon swarms of nightmare bugs to eat their enemies. Heroes aren’t monsters to their daughters.

“I won’t forget what I am,” Danel continues. She’s braced one hand on her knee and is leaning forward, insistent. Somewhere in the last few days, she’s gotten her hands on a knife, and used it to shave the sides of her scalp. It gives her a naturally lean, hungry look. “If I’m possibly the last Equatorial lorist left, then it’s my duty to go with you. To write the tale of what happens – and if I survive, to make sure the world hears it.”

This is ridiculous. You stare at her. “You don’t even know where we’re going.”

“Figured we’d settle the issue of whether I’m going first, but we can skip to the details if you want.”

“I don’t trust you,” you say, mostly in exasperation.

“I don’t trust you, either. But we don’t have to like each other to work together.” Her own plate is empty; she picks it up and waves to one of the kids on cleanup duty to come take it. “It’s not like I have a reason to kill you, anyway. This time.”

And it’s worse that Danel has said this – that she remembers siccing a shirtless Guardian on you and is unapologetic about it. Yes, it was war and, yes, you later slaughtered her army, but… “People like you don’t need a reason!”

“I don’t think you have any real idea who or what ‘people like me’ are.” She’s not angry; her statement was matter-of-fact. “But if you need more reasons, here’s another: Rennanis is shit. Sure, there’s food, water, and shelter; your headwoman’s right to lead you there if it’s true that the city is empty now. Better than commlessness, or rebuilding somewhere with no storecaches. But shit otherwise. I’d rather stay on the move.”

“Bullshit,” you say, frowning. “No comm is that bad.”

Danel just lets out a single bitter snort. It makes you uneasy.

“Just think about it,” she says finally, and gets up to leave.

***

“I agree that Danel should come with us,” Lerna says, later that night when you tell him about the conversation. “She’s a good fighter. Knows the road. And she’s right: she has no reason to betray us.”

You’re half-asleep, because of the sex. It’s an anticlimactic thing now that it’s finally happened. What you feel for Lerna will never be intense, or guilt-free. You’ll always feel too old for him. But, well. He asked you to show him the truncated breast and you did, thinking that would mark the end of his interest in you. The sandy patch is crusty and rough amid the smoother brown of your torso – like a scab, though the wrong color and texture. His hands were gentle as he examined the spot and pronounced it sound enough to need no further bandaging. You told him that it didn’t hurt. You didn’t say that you were afraid you couldn’t feel anything anymore. That you were changing, hardening in more ways than one, becoming nothing but the weapon everyone keeps trying to make of you. You didn’t say, Maybe you’re better off with unrequited love.

But even though you didn’t say any of these things, after the examination he looked at you and replied, “You’re still beautiful.” You apparently needed to hear that a lot more than you realized. And now here you are.

So you process his words slowly because he’s made you feel relaxed and boneless and human again, and it’s a good ten seconds before you blurt, “‘Us’?”

He just looks at you.

“Shit,” you say, and drape an arm over your eyes.

The next day, Castrima enters the desert.

***

There comes a time of greater hardship for you.

All Seasons are hardship, Death is the fifth, and master of all, but this time is different. This is personal. This is a thousand people trying to cross a desert that is deadly even when acid rain isn’t sheeting from the sky. This is a group force-march along a highroad that is shaky and full of holes big enough to drop a house through. Highroads are built to withstand shakes, but there’s a limit, and the Rifting definitely surpassed it. Ykka decided to take the risk because even a damaged highroad is faster to travel than the desert sand, but this takes a toll. Every orogene in the comm has to stay on alert, because anything worse than a microshake while you’re up here could spell disaster. One day Penty, too exhausted to pay attention to her own instincts, steps on a patch of cracked asphalt that’s completely unstable. One of the other rogga kids snatches her away just as a big piece simply falls through the substructure of the road. Others are less careful, and less lucky.

The acid rain was unexpected. Stonelore does not discuss the ways in which Seasons can impact weather, because such things are unpredictable at the best of times. What happens here is not entirely surprising, however. Northward, at the equator, the Rifting pumps heat and particulates into the air. Moisture-laden tropical winds coming off the sea hit this cloud-seeding, energy-infusing wall, which whips them into storm. You remember being worried about snow. No. It’s endless, miserable rain.

(The rain is not so very acid, as these things go. In the Season of Turning Soil – long before Sanze, you would not know of it – there was rain that stripped animals’ fur and peeled the skins off oranges. This is nothing compared to that, and diluted as it is by water. Like vinegar. You’ll live.)

Ykka sets a brutal pace while you’re on the highroad. On the first day everyone makes camp well after nightfall, and Lerna does not come to the tent after you wearily put it up. He’s busy tending half a dozen people who are going lame from slips or twisted ankles, and two elders who are having breathing problems, and the pregnant woman. The latter three are doing all right, he tells you when he finally crawls into your bedroll, near dawn; Ontrag the potter lives on spite, and the pregnant woman has both her household and half the Breeders taking care of her. What’s troubling are the injuries. “I have to tell Ykka,” he says as you push a slab of rain-soaked cachebread and sour sausage into his mouth, then cover him up and make him lie still. He chews and swallows almost without noticing. “We can’t keep going at this pace. We’ll start losing people if we don’t —”

“She knows,” you tell him. You’ve spoken as gently as you can, but it still silences him. He stares until you lie back down beside him – awkwardly, with only one arm, but successfully. Eventually exhaustion overwhelms anguish, and he sleeps.

You walk with Ykka one day. She’s setting the pace like a good comm leader should, pushing no one harder than herself. At the lone midday rest stop, she takes off one boot and you see that her feet are streaked with blood from blisters. You look at her, frowning, and it’s eloquent enough that she sighs. “Never got around to requisitioning better boots,” she says. “These are too loose. Always figured I’d have more time.”

“If your feet rot off,” you begin, but she rolls her eyes and points toward the supply pile in the middle of the camp.

You glance at it in confusion, start to resume your scolding, and then pause. Think. Look at the supply pile again. If every wagon carries a crate of the salted cachebread and another of sausage, and if those casks are pickled vegetables, and those are the grains and beans…

The pile is so small. So little, for a thousand people who have weeks yet to go through the Merz.

You shut up about the boots. Though she gets some extra socks from someone; that helps.

It shocks you that you’re doing as well as you are. You’re not healthy, not exactly. Your menstrual cycle has stopped, and it’s probably not menopause yet. When you undress to basin-wash, which is sort of pointless in the constant rain but habit is habit, you notice that your ribs show starkly beneath loose skin. That’s only partly because of all the walking, though; some of it is because you keep forgetting to eat. You feel tired at the end of the day, but it’s a distant, detached sort of thing. When you touch Lerna – not for sex, you don’t have the energy, but cuddling for warmth saves calories, and he needs the comfort – it feels good, but in an equally detached way. You feel as though you’re floating above yourself, watching him sigh, listening to someone else yawn. Like it’s happening to someone else.

This is what happened to Alabaster, you remember. A detachment from the flesh, as it became no longer flesh. You resolve to do a better job of eating at every opportunity.

Three weeks into the desert, as expected, the highroad veers off to the west. From there on, Castrima must descend to the ground and contend with desert terrain up close and personal. It’s easier, in some ways, because at least the ground isn’t likely to crumble away beneath your feet. On the other hand, sand is harder to walk on than asphalt. Everyone slows down. Maxixe earns his keep by drawing enough of the moisture out of the topmost layer of sand and ash and icing it a few inches down, to firm it up beneath everyone’s feet. It exhausts him to do this on a constant basis, though, so he saves it for the worst patches. He tries to teach Temell how to do the same trick, but Temell’s an ordinary feral; he can’t manage the necessary precision. (You could have done it once. You don’t let yourself think about this.)

Scouts sent forth to try to find a better path all come back and report the same thing: rusting sand-ash-mud everywhere. There is no better path.

Three people got left behind on the highroad, unable to walk any further because of sprains or breaks. You don’t know them. In theory, they’ll catch up once they’ve recovered, but you can’t see how they’ll recover with no food or shelter. Here on the ground it’s worse: a half-dozen broken ankles, one broken leg, one wrenched back among the Strongbacks pulling the wagons, all in the first day. After a while, Lerna stops going to them unless they ask for his help. Most don’t ask. There’s nothing he can do, and everyone knows it.

On a chilly day, Ontrag the potter just sits down and says she doesn’t feel like going any further. Ykka actually argues with her, which you weren’t expecting. Ontrag has passed on her skill of pottery to two younger comm members. She’s redundant, long past childbearing; it should be an easy headwoman’s choice, by the rules of Old Sanze and the tenets of stonelore. But in the end, Ontrag herself has to tell Ykka to shut up and walk away.

It’s a warning sign. “I can’t do this anymore,” you hear Ykka say later, when Ontrag has fallen out of sight behind you. She plods forward, her pace steady and ground-eating as usual, but her head is down, hanks of wet ashblow hair obscuring her face. “I can’t. It isn’t right. It shouldn’t be like this. It shouldn’t just be – there’s more to being Castrima than being rusting useful, for Earth’s sake, she used to teach me in creche, she knows stories, I rusting can’t.”

Hjarka Leadership Castrima, who was taught from an early age to kill the few so the many might live, only touches her shoulder and says, “You’ll do what you have to do.”

Ykka doesn’t say anything for the next few miles, but maybe that’s just because there’s nothing to say.

The vegetables run out first. Then the meat. The cachebread Ykka tries to ration for as long as she can, but the plain fact is that people can’t travel at this speed on nothing. She has to give everyone at least a wafer a day. That’s not enough, but it’s better than nothing – until there is nothing. And you keep walking anyway.

In the absence of all else, people run on hope. On the other side of the desert, Danel tells everyone around a campfire one night, there’s another Imperial Road you can pick up. Easy traveling all the way to Rennanis. It’s a river delta region, too, with good soil, once the breadbasket of the Equatorials. Lots of now-abandoned farms outside of any comm. Danel’s army had good foraging there on its way south. If you can get through the desert, there will be food.

If you can get through the desert.

You know the end to this. Don’t you? How could you be here listening to this tale if you didn’t? But sometimes it is the how of a thing, not just the endgame, that matters most.

So this is the endgame: Of the nearly eleven hundred souls who went into the desert, a little over eight hundred and fifty reach the Imperial Road.

For a few days after that, the comm effectively dissolves. Desperate people, no longer willing to wait for orderly foraging by the Hunters, stagger off to dig through sour soil for half-rotted tubers and bitter grubs and barely chewable woody roots. The land around here is scraggly, treeless, half-desert and half-fertile, long depopulated by the Rennies. Before she loses too many people, Ykka orders camp made on an old farm with several barns that have managed to survive the Season thus far. The walls, apart from basic framing, haven’t fared as well, but then they haven’t collapsed, either. It’s the roofs she wanted, since the rain still falls here on the desert’s edge, though it’s lighter and intermittent. Nice to sleep dry, at last.

Three days, Ykka gives it. During that time, people creep back in ones and twos, some bringing food to share with others too weak to forage. The Hunters who bother to return bring fish from one of the river branches that’s relatively nearby. One of them finds the thing that saves you, the thing that feels like life after all the death behind you: a farmer’s private housecache of cornmeal, sealed in clay urns and kept hidden under the floorboards of the ruined house. You have nothing to mix it with, no milk or eggs or dried meat, just the acid water, but food is that which nourishes, stonelore says. The comm feasts on fried corn mush that night. One urn has cracked and teems with mealybugs, but no one cares. Extra protein.

A lot of people don’t come back. It’s a Season. All things change.

At the end of three days, Ykka declares that anyone still in the camp is Castrima; anyone who hasn’t returned is now ashed out and commless. Easier than speculating on how they might have died, or who might have killed them. What’s left of the group strikes camp. You head north.

***

Was this too fast? Perhaps tragedies should not be summarized so bluntly. I meant to be merciful, not cruel. That you had to live it is the cruelty… but distance, detachment, heals. Sometimes.

I could have taken you from the desert. You did not have to suffer as they did. And yet… they have become part of you, the people of this comm. Your friends. Your fellows. You needed to see them through. Suffering is your healing, at least for now.

Lest you think me inhuman, a stone, I did what I could to help. Some of the beasts that hibernate beneath the sand of the desert are capable of preying on humans; did you know that? A few woke as you passed, but I kept them away. One of the wagons’ wooden axles partially dissolved in the rain and began to sag, though none of you noticed. I transmuted the wood – petrified it, if you prefer to think that way – so that it would last. I am the one who moved the moth-eaten rug in that abandoned farmhouse, so that your Hunter found the cornmeal. Ontrag, who had not told Ykka about the growing pain in her side and chest, or her shortness of breath, did not live long after the comm left her behind. I went back to her on the night that she died, and tuned away what little pain she felt. (You’ve heard the song. Antimony sang it for Alabaster once. I’ll sing it for you, if…) She was not alone, at the end.

Does any of this comfort you? I hope so. I’m still human, I told you. Your opinion matters to me.

Castrima survives; that is also what matters. You survive. For now, at least.

And at last, some while later, you reach the southernmost edge of Rennanis’s territory.

***