All of this happens in the earth. It is mine to know, and to share with you. It is hers to suffer. I’m sorry.

Inside the pearlescent vehicle, the walls are inlaid with elegant vining designs wrought of what looks like gold. Nassun isn’t sure if the metal is purely decorative or has some sort of purpose. The hard, smooth seats, which are pastel colors and shaped something like the shells of mussels that she ate sometimes at Found Moon, have amazingly soft cushions. They are locked to the floor, Nassun finds, and yet it is possible to turn them from side to side or lean back. She cannot fathom what the chairs are made of.

To her greater shock, a voice speaks in the air a moment after they settle in. The voice is female, polite, detached, and somehow reassuring. The language is… incomprehensible, and not remotely familiar. However, the pronunciation of the syllables is no different from that of Sanze-mat, and something about the rhythm of the sentences, their order, fits the expectations of Nassun’s ear. She suspects that part of the first sentence is a greeting. She thinks a word that keeps being repeated, amid a passage that has the air of a command, might be a softening word, like please. The rest, however, is wholly foreign.

The voice speaks only briefly, and then falls silent. Nassun glances at Schaffa and is surprised to see him frowning, eyes narrowed in concentration – though some of that is also tension in his jaw, and a hint of extra pallor around his lips. The silver is hurting him more, and it must be bad this time. Still, he looks up at her in something like wonder. “I remember this language,” he says.

“Those weird words? What did she say?”

“That this…” He grimaces. “Thing. It’s called a vehimal. The announcement says it will depart from this city and begin the transit to Corepoint in two minutes, to arrive in six hours. There was something about other vehicles, other routes, return trips to various… nodes? I don’t remember what that means. And she hopes we will enjoy the ride.” He smiles thinly.

“Oh.” Pleased, Nassun kicks a little in her chair. Six hours to travel all the way to the other side of the planet? But she shouldn’t be amazed by that, maybe, since these are the people who built the obelisks.

There seems to be nothing to do but get comfortable. Cautiously, Nassun unslings her runny-sack and lets it hang from the back of her chair. This causes her to notice that something like lichen grows all over the floor, though it cannot be natural or accidental; the blooms of it spread out in pretty, regular patterns. She stretches down a foot and finds that it is soft, like carpet.

Schaffa is more restless, pacing around the comfortable confines of the… vehimal… and touching its golden veins now and again. It’s slow, methodical pacing, but even that is unusual for him, so Nassun is restless, too. “I have been here,” he murmurs.

“What?” She heard him. She’s just confused.

“In this vehimal. Perhaps in that very seat. I have been here, I feel it. And that language – I don’t remember ever having heard it, and yet.” He bares his teeth suddenly, and thrusts his fingers into his hair. “Familiarity, but no, no… context! No meaning! Something about this journey is wrong. Something is wrong and I don’t remember what.”

Schaffa has been damaged for as long as Nassun has known him, but this is the first time he has seemed damaged to her. He’s speaking faster, words tumbling over one another. There is an oddness to the way his eyes dart around the vehimal interior that makes Nassun suspect he’s seeing things that aren’t there.

Trying to conceal her anxiety, she reaches out and pats the shell-chair beside her. “These are soft enough to sleep in, Schaffa.”

It’s too obvious a suggestion, but he turns to gaze at her, and for a moment the haunted tension of his expression softens. “Always so concerned for me, my little one.” But it stops the restlessness as she’d hoped, and he comes over to sit.

Just as he does – Nassun starts – the woman’s voice speaks again. It’s asking a question. Schaffa frowns and then translates, slowly, “She – I think this is the vehimal’s voice. It speaks to us now, specifically. Not just an announcement.”

Nassun shifts, suddenly less comfortable inside the thing. “It talks. It’s alive?”

“I’m not certain the distinction between living creature and lifeless object matters to the people who built this place. Yet —” He hesitates, then raises his voice to haltingly speak strange words to the air. The voice answers again, repeating something Nassun heard before. She’s not sure where some of the words begin or end, but the syllables are the same. “It says that we are approaching the… transition point. And it asks if we would like to… experience?” He shakes his head, irritable. “To see something. Finding the words in our own tongue is more difficult than understanding what’s being said.”

Nassun twitches with nerves. She draws her feet up into her chair, irrationally afraid of hurting the creature-thing’s insides. She isn’t sure what she means to ask. “Will it hurt, to see?” Hurt the vehimal, she means, but she cannot help also thinking, Hurt us.

The voice speaks again before Schaffa has time to translate Nassun’s question. “No,” it says.

Nassun jumps in pure shock, her orogeny twitching in a way that would have earned her a shout from Essun. “Did you say no?” she blurts, looking around at the vehimal’s walls. Maybe it was a coincidence.

“Biomagestric storage surpluses permit —” The voice slips back into the old language, but Nassun is certain she did not imagine hearing those oddly pronounced words of Sanze-mat. “— processing,” it concludes. Its voice is soothing, but it seems to come from the very walls, and it troubles Nassun that she has nothing to look at, no face to orient on while she’s listening to it. How is it even speaking with no mouth, no throat? She imagines the cilia on the outside of the vehicle somehow rubbing together like insects’ legs, and her skin crawls.

It continues, “Translation —” Something. “— linguistic drift.” That sounded like Sanze-mat, but she doesn’t know what it means. It continues for a few more words, incomprehensible again.

Nassun looks at Schaffa, who’s also frowning in alarm. “How do I answer what it was asking before?” she whispers. “How do I tell it that I want to see whatever it’s talking about?”

In answer, though Nassun had not meant to ask this question directly of the vehimal, the featureless wall in front of them suddenly darkens into round black spots, as if the surface has suddenly sprouted ugly mold. These spread and merge rapidly until half of the wall is nothing but blackness. As if they’re looking through a window into the bowels of the city, but outside the vehimal there’s nothing to see but black.

Then light appears on the bottom edge of this window – which really is a window, she realizes; the entire front end of the vehimal has somehow become transparent. The light, in rectangular panels like the ones that lined the stairway from the surface, brightens and marches forward into the darkness ahead, and by its illumination Nassun is able to see walls arching around them. Another tunnel, this one only large enough for the vehimal, and curving through dark rocky walls that are surprisingly rough-hewn given the obelisk-builders’ penchant for seamless smoothness. The vehimal is moving steadily along this tunnel, though not quickly. Propelled by its cilia? By some other means Nassun cannot fathom? She finds herself simultaneously fascinated and a little bored, if that is possible. It seems impossible that something which goes so slow can get them to the other side of the world in six hours. If all of those hours will be like this, riding a smooth white track through a rocky black tunnel, with nothing to occupy them except Schaffa’s restlessness and a disembodied voice, it will feel much longer.

And then the curve of the tunnel straightens out, and up ahead Nassun sees the hole for the first time.

The hole isn’t large. There’s something about it that is immediately, viscerally impressive nevertheless. It sits at the center of a vaulted cavern, surrounded by more panel lights, which have been set into the ground. As the vehimal approaches, these turn from white to bright red in a way that Nassun decides is another signal of warning. Down the hole is a yawning blackness. Instinctively she sesses, trying to grasp its dimensions – but she cannot. The circumference of the hole, yes; it’s only about twenty feet across. Perfectly circular. The depth, though… she frowns, uncurls from her chair, concentrates. The sapphire tickles at her mind, inviting use of its power, but she resists this; there are too many things in this place that respond to the silver, to magic, in ways she doesn’t understand. And anyway, she’s an orogene. Sessing the depth of a hole should be easy… but this hole stretches deep, deep, beyond her range.

And the vehimal’s track runs right up to the hole, and over its edge.

Which is as it should be, should it not? The goal is to reach Corepoint. Still, Nassun cannot help a surge of alarm that is powerful enough to edge along panic. “Schaffa!” He immediately reaches for her hand. She grips it tightly with no fear of hurting him. His strength, which has only ever been used to protect her, never in threat, is desperately needed reassurance right now.

“I have done this before,” he says, but he sounds uncertain. “I have survived it.”

But you don’t remember how, she thinks, feeling a kind of terror that she doesn’t know the word for.

(That word is premonition.)

Then the edge is there, and the vehimal tips forward. Nassun gasps and clutches at the armrests of her chair – but bizarrely, there is no vertigo. The vehimal does not speed up; its movement pauses for a moment, in fact, and Nassun catches a fleeting glimpse of a few of the thing’s cilia blurring at the edges of the view, as they somehow adjust the trajectory of the vehimal from forward to down. Something else has adjusted with this change, so that Nassun and Schaffa do not fall forward out of their seats; Nassun finds that her back and butt are just as firmly tucked into the chair now as before, even though this is impossible.

And meanwhile, a faint hum within the vehimal, which until now has been too low to be much more than subliminal, abruptly begins to grow louder. Unseen mechanisms reverberate faster in an unmistakable cycling-up pattern. As the vehimal completes its tilt, the view fills with darkness again, but this time Nassun knows it is the yawning black of the pit. There’s nothing ahead anymore. Only down.

“Launch,” says the voice within the vehimal.

Nassun gasps and clutches Schaffa’s hand harder as she is pressed back into her seat then by motion. It isn’t as much momentum as she should be feeling, however, because her every sense tells her that they have just shot forward at a tremendous rate, going much, much faster than even a running horse.

Into the dark.

At first the darkness is absolute, though broken periodically by a ring of light that blurs past as they hurtle through the tunnel. Their speed continues to increase; presently these rings pass so quickly that they are just flashes. It takes three before Nassun is able to discern what she’s seeing and sessing, and then only once she watches a ring as they pass it: windows. There are windows set into the walls of the tunnel, illuminated by the light. There’s living space down here, at least for the first few miles. Then the rings stop, and the tunnel is nothing but dark for a while.

Nassun sesses impending change an instant before the tunnel suddenly brightens. They can see a new, ruddy light that intersperses the rock walls of the tunnel. Ah, yes; they’ve gone far enough down that some of the rock has melted and glows bright red. This new light paints the vehimal’s interior bloody and makes the gold filigree along its walls seem to catch fire. The forward view is indistinct at first, just red amid gray and brown and black, but Nassun understands instinctively what she’s seeing. They have entered the mantle, and her fear finally begins to ebb amid fascination.

“The asthenosphere,” she murmurs. Schaffa frowns at her, but naming what she sees has eased her fear. Names have power. She bites her lip, then finally lets go of Schaffa’s hand to rise and approach the forward view. Up close it’s easier to tell that what she’s seeing is just an illusion of sorts – tiny diamonds of color rising on the vehimal’s inner skin, like a blush, to form a mosaic of moving images. How does it work? She can’t begin to fathom it.

Fascinated, she reaches up. The vehimal’s inner skin gives off no heat, though she knows they are already at a level underground where human flesh should burn up in an instant. When she touches the image on the forward view, it ripples ever so slightly around her finger, like waves in water. Putting her whole hand on a roil of brown-red color, she cannot help smiling. Just a few feet away, on the other side of the vehimal’s skin, is the burning earth. She’s touching the burning earth, thinly removed. She puts her other hand up, presses her cheek against the smooth plates. Here in this strange deadciv contraption, she is part of the earth, perhaps more so than any orogene before her has ever been. It is her, it is in her, she is in it.

When Nassun glances back over her shoulder at Schaffa, he’s smiling, despite the lines of pain around his eyes. It’s different from his usual smile. “What?” she asks.

“The Leadership families of Yumenes believed that orogenes once ruled the world,” he says. “That their duty was to keep your kind from ever regaining that much power. That you would be monstrous rulers of the world, doing back to ordinary folk what had been done to you, if you ever got the chance. I don’t think they were right about any of it – and yet.” He gestures, as she stands there illuminated by the fire of the earth. “Look at you, little one. If you are the monster they imagined you to be… you are also glorious.”

Nassun loves him so much.

It’s why she gives up the illusion of power and goes back to sit beside him. But when she gets close, she sees just how much strain he’s under. “Your head hurts a lot.”

His smile fades. “It’s bearable.”

Troubled, she puts her hands on his shoulders. Dozens of nights of easing his pain have made it easy – but this time when she sends silver into him, the white-hot burn of lines between his cells does not fade. In fact, they blaze brighter, so sharply that Schaffa tenses and pulls away from her, rising to begin pacing again. He has plastered a smile on his face, more of a rictus as he prowls restlessly back and forth, but Nassun can tell that the smile-endorphins are doing nothing.

Why did the lines get brighter? Nassun tries to understand this by examining herself. Nothing of her silver is different; it flows in its usual clearly delineated lines. She turns her silver gaze on Schaffa – and then, belatedly, notices something stunning.

The vehimal is made of silver, and not just fine lines of it. It is surrounded by silver, permeated with it. What she perceives is a wave of the stuff, rippling in ribbons around herself and Schaffa, starting at the nose of the vehicle and enclosing them behind. This sheath of magic, she understands suddenly, is what’s pushing away the heat and pushing back on the pressure and tilting the lines of force within the vehimal so that gravity pulls toward its floor and not toward the center of the earth. The walls are only a framework; something about their structure makes it easier for the silver to flow and connect and form lattices. The gold filigree helps to stabilize the churn of energies at the front of the vehicle – or so Nassun guesses, since she cannot understand all the ways in which these magic mechanisms work together. It’s just too complex. It is like riding inside an obelisk. It’s like being carried by the wind. She had no idea the silver could be so amazing.

But there is something beyond the miracle of the vehimal’s walls. Something outside the vehimal.

At first Nassun isn’t sure what she’s perceiving. More lights? No. She’s looking at it all wrong.

It’s the silver, same as what flows between her own cells. It’s a single thread of silver – and yet it is titanic, curling away between a whorl of soft, hot rock and a high-pressure bubble of searing water. A single thread of silver… and it is longer than the tunnel they have traversed so far. She can’t find either of its ends. It’s wider than the vehimal’s circumference and then some. Yet otherwise it’s just as clear and focused as any one of the lines within Nassun herself. The same, just… immense.

And Nassun understands then, she understands, so suddenly and devastatingly that her eyes snap open and she stumbles backward with the force of the realization, bumping into another chair and nearly falling before she grabs it to hold herself upright. Schaffa makes a low, frustrated sound and turns in an attempt to respond to her alarm – but the silver within his body is so bright that when it flares, he doubles over, clutching at his head and groaning. He is in too much pain to fulfill his duty as a Guardian, or to act on his concern for her, because the silver in his body has grown to be as bright as that immense thread out in the magma.

Magic, Steel called the silver. The stuff underneath orogeny, which is made by things that live or once lived. This silver deep within Father Earth wends between the mountainous fragments of his substance in exactly the same way that they twine among the cells of a living, breathing thing. And that is because a planet is a living, breathing thing; she knows this now with the certainty of instinct. All the stories about Father Earth being alive are real.

But if the mantle is Father Earth’s body, why is his silver getting brighter?

No. Oh no.

“Schaffa,” Nassun whispers. He grunts; he has sagged to one knee, gasping shallowly as he clutches at his head. She wants to go to him, comfort him, help him, but she stands where she is, her breath coming too fast from rising panic at what she suddenly knows is coming. She wants to deny it, though. “Schaffa, p-please, that thing in your head, the piece of iron, you called it a corestone, Schaffa —” Her voice is fluttery. She can’t catch her breath. Fear has nearly closed her throat. No. No. She did not understand, but now she does and she has no idea how to stop it. “Schaffa, where does it come from, that corestone thing in your head?”

The vehimal’s voice speaks again with that greeting language, and then it continues, obscene in its detached pleasantry. “— a marvel, only available —” Something. “— route. This vehimal —” Something. “— heart, illuminated —” Something. “— for your pleasure.”

Schaffa does not reply. But Nassun can sess the answer to her question now. She can feel it as the paltry thin silver that runs through her own body resonates – but that is a faint resonance, from her silver, generated by her own flesh. The silver in Schaffa, in all Guardians, is generated by the corestone that sits lodged in their sessapinae. She’s studied this stone sometimes, to the degree that she is able while Schaffa sleeps and she feeds him magic. It’s iron, but like no other iron she’s ever sessed. Oddly dense. Oddly energetic, though some of that is the magic that it channels into him from… somewhere. Oddly alive.

And when the whole right side of the vehimal dissolves to let its passengers glimpse the rarely seen wonder that is the world’s unfettered heart, it already blazes before her: a silver sun underground, so bright that she must squint, so heavy that perceiving it hurts her sessapinae, so powerful with magic that it makes the lingering connection of the sapphire feel tremulous and weak. It is the Earth’s core, the source of the corestones, and before her it is a world in itself, swallowing the viewscreen and growing further still as they hurtle closer.

It does not look like rock, Nassun thinks faintly, beneath the panic. Maybe that’s just the waver of molten metal and magic all round the vehimal, but the immensity before her seems to shimmer when she tries to focus on it. There’s some solidity to it; as they draw closer, Nassun can detect anomalies dotting the surface of the bright sphere, made tiny by contrast – even as she realizes they are obelisks. Several dozen of them, jammed into the heart of the world like needles in a pincushion. But these are nothing. Nothing.

And Nassun is nothing. Nothing before this.

It’s a mistake to bring him, Steel had said, of Schaffa.

Panic snaps. Nassun runs to Schaffa as he falls to the floor, thrashing. He does not scream, though his mouth is open and his icewhite eyes have gone wide and his every limb, when she wrestles him onto his back, is muscle-stiff. One flailing arm hits her collarbone, flinging her back, and there is a flash of terrible pain, but Nassun barely spares a thought for it before she scrambles back to him. She grabs his arm with both of her own and tries to hold on because he is reaching for his head and his hands are forming claws and his nails are raking at his scalp and face – “Schaffa, no!” she cries. But he cannot hear her.

And then the vehimal goes dark inside.

It’s still moving, though slower. They’ve actually passed into the semisolid stuff of the core, the vehimal’s route skimming its surface – because of course the people who built the obelisks would revel in their ability to casually pierce the planet for entertainment. She can feel the blaze of that silver, churning sun all around her. Behind her, however, the wall-window goes suddenly dim. There’s something just outside the vehimal, pressing against its sheath of magic.

Slowly, with Schaffa writhing in silent agony in her lap, Nassun turns to face the core of the Earth.

And here, within the sanctum of its heart, the Evil Earth notices her back.

When the Earth speaks, it does not do so in words, exactly. This is a thing you know already, but that Nassun only learns in this moment. She sesses the meanings, hears the vibrations with the bones of her ears, shudders them out through her skin, feels them pull tears from her eyes. It is like drowning in energy and sensation and emotion. It hurts. Remember: The Earth wants to kill her.

But remember, too: Nassun wants it just as dead.

So it says, in microshakes that will eventually stir a tsunami somewhere in the southern hemisphere, Hello, little enemy.

(This is an approximation, you realize. This is all her young mind can bear.)

And as Schaffa chokes and goes into convulsions, Nassun clutches at his pain-wracked form and stares at the wall of rusty darkness. She isn’t afraid anymore; fury has steeled her. She is so very much her mother’s daughter.

“You let him go,” she snarls. “You let him go right now.”

The core of the world is metal, molten and yet crushed into solidity. There is some malleability to it. The surface of the red darkness begins to ripple and change as Nassun watches. Something appears that for an instant she cannot parse. A pattern, familiar. A face. It is just a suggestion of a person, eyes and a mouth, shadow of a nose – but then for just an instant the eyes are distinct in shape, the lips lined and detailed, a mole appearing beneath the eyes, which open.

No one she knows. Just a face… where there should be none. And as Nassun stares at this, dawning horror slowly pushing aside her anger, she sees another face – and another, more of them appearing all at once to fill the view. Each is pushed aside as another rises from underneath. Dozens. Hundreds. This one jowled and tired-looking, that one puffy as if from crying, that one openmouthed and screaming in silence, like Schaffa. Some look at her pleadingly, mouthing words she wouldn’t be able to understand even if she could hear.

All of them ripple, though, with the amusement of a greater presence. He is mine. Not a voice. When the Earth speaks, it is not in words. Nevertheless.

Nassun presses her lips together and reaches into the silver of Schaffa and ruthlessly cuts as many of the tendrils etched into his body as she can, right around the corestone. It doesn’t work like it usually does when she uses the silver for surgery. The silver lines in Schaffa reestablish themselves almost instantly, and throb that much harder when they do. Schaffa shudders each time. She’s hurting him. She’s making it worse.

There’s no other choice. She wraps her own threads around his corestone to perform the surgery he would not permit her to do a few months before. If it shortens his life, at least he will not suffer for what is left of it.

But another ripple of amusement makes the vehimal shudder, and a flare of silver blazes through Schaffa that shrugs off her paltry threads. The surgery fails. The corestone is seated as firmly as ever amid the lobes of his sessapinae, like the parasitic thing it is.

Nassun shakes her head and looks around for something, anything else, that might help. She is distracted momentarily by the boil and shift of faces in the surface of the rusty dark. Who are these people? Why are they here, churning amid the Earth’s heart?

Obligation, the Earth returns, in wavelets of heat and crushing pressure. Nassun bares her teeth, struggling against the weight of its contempt. What was stolen, or lent, must be recompensed.

And Nassun cannot help but understand this too, here within the Earth’s embrace, with its meaning thrumming through her bones. The silver – magic – comes from life. Those who made the obelisks sought to harness magic, and they succeeded; oh, how they succeeded. They used it to build wonders beyond imagining. But then they wanted more magic than just what their own lives, or the accumulated aeons of life and death on the Earth’s surface, could provide. And when they saw how much magic brimmed just beneath that surface, ripe for the taking…

It may never have occurred to them that so much magic, so much life, might be an indicator of… awareness. The Earth does not speak in words, after all – and perhaps, Nassun realizes, having seen entirely too much of the world to still have much of a child’s innocence, perhaps these builders of the great obelisk network were not used to respecting lives different from their own. Not so very different, really, from the people who run the Fulcrums, or raiders, or her father. So where they should have seen a living being, they saw only another thing to exploit. Where they should have asked, or left alone, they raped.

For some crimes, there is no fitting justice – only reparation. So for every iota of life siphoned from beneath the Earth’s skin, the Earth has dragged a million human remnants into its heart. Bodies rot in soil, after all – and soil sits upon tectonic plates, plates eventually subduct into the fire under the Earth’s crust, which convect endlessly through the mantle… and there within itself, the Earth eats everything they were. This is only fair, it reasons – coldly, with an anger that still shudders up from the depths to crack the world’s skin and touch off Season after Season. It is only right. The Earth did not start this cycle of hostilities, it did not steal the Moon, it did not burrow into anyone else’s skin and snatch bits of its still-living flesh to keep as trophies and tools, it did not plot to enslave humans in an unending nightmare. It did not start this war, but it will rusting well have. Its. Due.

And oh. Does Nassun not understand this? Her hands tighten in Schaffa’s shirt, trembling as her hatred wavers. Can she not empathize?

For the world has taken so much from her. She had a brother once. And a father, and a mother whom she also understands but wishes she did not. And a home, and dreams. The people of the Stillness have long since robbed her of childhood and any hope of a real future, and because of this she is so angry that she cannot think beyond THIS MUST STOP and I WILL STOP IT —

— so does she not resonate with the Evil Earth’s wrath, herself?

She does.

Earth eat her, she does.

Schaffa has gone still in her lap. There is wetness beneath one of her legs; he’s urinated on himself. His eyes are still open, and he breathes in shallow gasps. His taut muscles still twitch now and again. Everyone breaks, if torture goes on long enough. The mind bears the unbearable by going elsewhere. Nassun is ten years old, going on a hundred, but she has seen enough of the world’s evil to know this. Her Schaffa. Has gone away. And might never, ever, come back.

The vehimal speeds onward.

The view begins to grow bright again as it emerges from the core. Interior lights resume their pleasant glow. Nassun’s fingers curl loosely in Schaffa’s clothes now. She gazes back at the turning mass of the core until the stuff of the sidewall turns opaque again. The forward view lingers, but it, too, begins to darken. They have entered another tunnel, this one wider than the first, with solid black walls somehow holding back the churning heat of the outer core and mantle. Now Nassun senses that the vehimal is tilted up, away from the core. Headed back toward the surface, but this time on the other side of the planet.

Nassun whispers, to herself since Schaffa has gone away, “This has to stop. I will stop it.” She closes her eyes and the lashes stick together, wet. “I promise.”

She does not know to whom she makes this promise. It doesn’t matter, really.

Not long after, the vehimal reaches Corepoint.