Amoment in the present, before I speak again of the past.

Amid the heated, fuming shadows and unbearable pressure of a place that has no name, I open my eyes. I’m no longer alone.

Out of the stone, another of my kind pushes forth. Her face is angular, cool, as patrician and elegant as any statue’s should be. She’s shed the rest, but kept the pallor of her original coloring; I notice this at last, after tens of thousands of years. All this reminiscing has made me nostalgic.

In token of which, I say aloud, “Gaewha.”

She shifts slightly, as close as any of us gets to an expression of… recognition? Surprise? We were siblings once. Friends. Since then, rivals, enemies, strangers, legends. Lately, cautious allies. I find myself contemplating some of what we were, but not all. I’ve forgotten the all, just as much as she has.

She says, “Was that my name?”

“Close enough.”

“Hmm. And you were…?”

“Houwha.”

“Ah. Of course.”

“You prefer Antimony?”

Another slight movement, the equivalent of a shrug. “I have no preference.”

I think, Nor do I, but that is a lie. I would never have given my new name to you, Hoa, if not in homage to what I remember of that old name. But I’m woolgathering.

I say, “She is committed to the change.”

Gaewha, Antimony, whoever and whatever she is now, replies, “I noticed.” She pauses. “Do you regret what you did?”

It’s a foolish question. All of us regret that day, in different ways and for different reasons. But I say, “No.”

I expect comment in return, but I suppose there’s really nothing to be said anymore. She makes minute sounds, settling into the rock. Getting comfortable. She means to wait here with me. I’m glad. Some things are easier when not faced alone.

***

There are things Alabaster never told you, about himself.

I know these things because I studied him; he is part of you, after all. But not every teacher needs every protégé to know of his every stumble on the journey to mastery. What would be the point? None of us got here overnight. There are stages to the process of being betrayed by your society. One is jolted from a place of complacency by the discovery of difference, by hypocrisy, by inexplicable or incongruous ill treatment. What follows is a time of confusion – unlearning what one thought to be the truth. Immersing oneself in the new truth. And then a decision must be made.

Some accept their fate. Swallow their pride, forget the real truth, embrace the falsehood for all they’re worth – because, they decide, they cannot be worth much. If a whole society has dedicated itself to their subjugation, after all, then surely they deserve it? Even if they don’t, fighting back is too painful, too impossible. At least this way there is peace, of a sort. Fleetingly.

The alternative is to demand the impossible. It isn’t right, they whisper, weep, shout; what has been done to them is not right. They are not inferior. They do not deserve it. And so it is the society that must change. There can be peace this way, too, but not before conflict.

No one reaches this place without a false start or two.

When Alabaster was a young man, he loved easily and casually. Oh, he was angry, even then; of course he was. Even children notice when they are not treated fairly. He had chosen to cooperate, however, for the time being.

He met a man, a scholar, during a mission he’d been assigned by the Fulcrum. Alabaster’s interest was prurient; the scholar was quite handsome, and charmingly shy in response to Alabaster’s flirtations. If the scholar hadn’t been busy excavating what turned out to be an ancient lore cache, there would be nothing more to the story. Alabaster would have loved him and left him, perhaps with regret, more likely with no hard feelings.

Instead, the scholar showed Alabaster his findings. There were more, Alabaster told you, than just three tablets of stonelore, originally. Also, the current Tablet Three was rewritten by Sanze. It was actually rewritten again by Sanze; it had been rewritten several times prior to that. The original Tablet Three spoke of Syl Anagist, you see, and how the Moon was lost. This knowledge, for many reasons, has been deemed unacceptable again and again down the millennia since. No one really wants to face the fact that the world is the way it is because some arrogant, self-absorbed people tried to put a leash on the rusting planet. And no one was ready to accept that the solution to the whole mess was simply to let orogenes live and thrive and do what they were born to do.

For Alabaster, the lore cache’s knowledge was overwhelming. He fled. It was too much for him, the knowledge that all of this had happened before. That he was the scion of a people abused; that those people’s forebears were, too, in their turn; that the world as he knew it could not function without forcing someone into servitude. At the time he could see no end to the cycle, no way to demand the impossible of society. So he broke, and he ran.

His Guardian found him, of course, three quartents away from where he was supposed to be and with no inkling of where he was going. Instead of breaking his hand – they used different techniques with highringers like Alabaster – Guardian Leshet took him to a tavern and bought him a drink. He wept into his wine and confessed to her that he couldn’t take much more of the world as it was. He had tried to submit, tried to embrace the lies, but it was not right.

Leshet soothed him and took him back to the Fulcrum, and for one year they allowed Alabaster time to recover. To accept again the rules and role that had been created for him. He was content during this year, I believe; Antimony believes it, in any case, and she is the one who knew him best during this time. He settled, did what was expected of him, sired three children, and even volunteered to be an instructor for the higher-ringed juniors. He never got the chance to act on this, however, because the Guardians had decided already that Alabaster could not go unpunished for running away. When he met and fell in love with an older ten-ringer named Hessionite —

I have told you already that they use different methods on highringers.

I ran away, too, once. In a way.

***

It is the day after our return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, and I am different. I look through the nematode window at the garden of purple light, and it is no longer beautiful to me. The winking of the white star-flowers lets me know that some genegineer made them, tying them into the city power network so that they can be fed by a bit of magic. How else to get that winking effect? I see the elegant vinework on the surrounding buildings and I know that somewhere, a biomagest is tabulating how many lammotyrs of magic can be harvested from such beauty. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist – sacred, and lucrative, and useful.

So I am thinking this, and I am in a foul mood, when one of the junior conductors comes in. Conductor Stahnyn, she is called, and ordinarily I like her. She’s young enough to have not yet picked up the worst of the more experienced conductors’ habits. And now as I turn to gaze at her with eyes that Kelenli has opened, I notice something new about her. A bluntness to her features, a smallness to her mouth. Yes, it’s much more subtle than Conductor Gallat’s icewhite eyes, but here is another Sylanagistine whose ancestors clearly didn’t understand the whole point of genocide.

“How are you feeling today, Houwha?” she asks, smiling and glancing at her noteboard as she comes in. “Up to a medical check?”

“I’m feeling up to a walk,” I say. “Let’s go out to the garden.”

Stahnyn starts, blinking at me. “Houwha, you know that’s not possible.”

They keep such lax security on us, I have noticed. Sensors to monitor our vitals, cameras to monitor our movements, microphones to record our sounds. Some of the sensors monitor our magic usage – and none of them, not one, can measure even a tenth of what we really do. I would be insulted if I had not just been shown how important it is to them that we be lesser. Lesser creatures don’t need better monitoring, do they? Creations of Sylanagistine magestry cannot possibly have abilities that surpass it. Unthinkable! Ridiculous! Don’t be foolish.

Fine, I am insulted. And I no longer have the patience for Stahnyn’s polite patronization.

So I find the lines of magic that run to the cameras, and I entangle them with the lines of magic that run to their own storage crystals, and I loop these together. Now the cameras will display only footage that they filmed over the last few hours – which mostly consists of me looking out the window and brooding. I do the same to the audio equipment, taking care to erase that last exchange between me and Stahnyn. I do all of this with barely a flick of my will, because I was designed to affect machines the size of skyscrapers; cameras are nothing. I use more magic reaching for the others to tell a joke.

The others sess what I am doing, however. Bimniwha gets a taste of my mood and immediately alerts the others – because I am the nice one, usually. I’m the one who, until recently, believed in Geoarcanity. Usually Remwha is the resentful one. But right now Remwha is coldly silent, stewing on what we have learned. Gaewha is quiet, too, in despair, trying to fathom how to demand the impossible. Dushwha is hugging themselves for comfort and Salewha is sleeping too much. Bimniwha’s alert falls on weary, frustrated, self-absorbed ears, and goes ignored.

Meanwhile, Stahnyn’s smile has begun to falter, as she only now realizes I’m serious. She shifts her stance, putting hands on her hips. “Houwha, this isn’t funny. I understand you got the chance to leave the other day —”

I have considered the most efficient way to shut her up. “Does Conductor Gallat know that you find him attractive?”

Stahnyn freezes, eyes going wide and round. Brown eyes in her case, but she likes icewhite. I’ve seen how she looks at Gallat, though I never much cared before. I don’t really care now. But I imagine that finding Niess eyes attractive is a taboo thing in Syl Anagist, and neither Gallat nor Stahnyn can afford to be accused of that particular perversion. Gallat would fire Stahnyn at the first whisper of it – even a whisper from me.

I go over to her. She draws back a little, frowning at my forwardness. We do not assert ourselves, we constructs. We tools. My behavior is anomalous in a way that she should report, but that isn’t what has her so worried. “No one heard me say that,” I tell her, very gently. “No one can see what’s happening in this room right now. Relax.”

Her bottom lip trembles, just a little, before she speaks. I feel bad, just a little, for having disturbed her so. She says, “You can’t get far. Th-there’s a vitamin deficiency… You and the others were built that way. Without special food – the food we serve you – you’ll die in just a few days.”

It only now occurs to me that Stahnyn thinks I mean to run away.

It only now occurs to me to run away.

What the conductor has just told me isn’t an insurmountable hurdle. Easy enough to steal food to take with me, though I would die when it ran out. My life would be short regardless. But the thing that truly troubles me is that I have nowhere to go. All the world is Syl Anagist.

“The garden,” I repeat, at last. This will be my grand adventure, my escape. I consider laughing, but the habit of appearing emotionless keeps me from doing so. I don’t really want to go anywhere, to be honest. I just want to feel like I have some control over my life, if only for a few moments. “I want to see the garden for five minutes. That’s all.”

Stahnyn shifts from foot to foot, visibly miserable. “I could lose my position for this, especially if any of the senior conductors see. I could be imprisoned.”

“Perhaps they will give you a nice window overlooking a garden,” I suggest. She winces.

And then, because I have left her no choice, she leads me out of my cell and downstairs, and outside.

The garden of purple flowers looks strange from this angle, I find, and it is an altogether different thing to smell the star-flowers up close. They smell strange – oddly sweet, almost sugary, with a hint of fermentation underneath where some of the older flowers have wilted or been crushed. Stahnyn is fidgety, looking around too much, while I stroll slowly, wishing I did not need her beside me. But this is fact: I cannot simply wander the grounds of the compound alone. If guards or attendants or other conductors see us, they will think Stahnyn is on official business, and not question me… if she will only be still.

But then I stop abruptly, behind a lilting spider tree. Stahnyn stops as well, frowning and plainly wondering what’s happening – and then she, too, sees what I have seen, and freezes.

Up ahead, Kelenli has come out of the compound to stand between two curling bushes, beneath a white rose arch. Conductor Gallat has followed her out. She stands with her arms folded. He’s behind her, shouting at her back. We aren’t close enough for me to hear what he’s saying, though his angry tone is indisputable. Their bodies, however, are a story as clear as strata.

“Oh, no,” mutters Stahnyn. “No, no, no. We should —”

“Still,” I murmur. I mean to say be still, but she quiets anyway, so at least I got the point across.

And then we stand there, watching Gallat and Kelenli fight. I can’t hear her voice at all, and it occurs to me that she cannot raise her voice to him; it isn’t safe. But when he grabs her arm and yanks her around to face him, she automatically claps a hand over her belly. The hand on the belly is a quick thing. Gallat lets go at once, seemingly surprised by her reaction and his own violence, and she moves the hand smoothly back to her side. I don’t think he noticed. They resume arguing, and this time Gallat spreads his hands as if offering something. There is pleading in his posture, but I notice how stiff his back is. He begs – but he thinks he shouldn’t have to. I can tell that when begging fails, he will resort to other tactics.

I close my eyes, aching as I finally, finally, understand. Kelenli is one of us in every way that matters, and she always has been.

Slowly, though, she unbends. Ducks her head, pretends reluctant capitulation, says something back. It isn’t real. The earth reverberates with her anger and fear and unwillingness. Still, some of the stiffness goes out of Gallat’s back. He smiles, gestures more broadly. Comes back to her, takes her by the arms, speaks to her gently. I marvel that she has disarmed his anger so effectively. It’s as if he doesn’t see the way her eyes drift away while he’s talking, or how she does not reciprocate when he pulls her closer. She smiles at something he says, but even from fifty feet away I can see that it is a performance. Surely he can see it, too? But I am also beginning to understand that people believe what they want to believe, not what is actually there to be seen and touched and sessed.

So, mollified, he turns to leave – thankfully via a different path out of the garden than the one Stahnyn and I currently lurk upon. His posture has changed completely; he’s visibly in a better mood. I should be glad for that, shouldn’t I? Gallat heads the project. When he’s happy, we are all safer.

Kelenli stands gazing after him until he is gone. Then her head turns and she looks right at me. Stahnyn makes a choked sound beside me, but she is a fool. Of course Kelenli will not report us. Why would she? Her performance was never for Gallat.

Then she, too, leaves the garden, following Gallat.

It was a last lesson. The one I needed most, I think. I tell Stahnyn to take me back to my cell, and she practically moans with relief. When I’m back and I have unwoven the magics of the monitoring equipment, and sent Stahnyn on her way with a gentle reminder not to be a fool, I lie down on my couch to ponder this new knowledge. It sits in me, an ember causing everything around it to smolder and smoke.

***

And then, several nights after we return from Kelenli’s tuning mission, the ember catches fire in all of us.

It is the first time that all of us have come together since the trip. We entwine our presences in a layer of cold coal, which is perhaps fitting as Remwha sends a hiss through all of us like sand grinding amid cracks. It’s the sound/feel/sess of the sinklines, the briar patch. It’s also an echo of the static emptiness in our network where Tetlewha – and Entiwha, and Arwha, and all the others – once existed.

This is what awaits us when we have given them Geoarcanity, he says.

Gaewha replies, Yes.

He hisses again. I have never sessed him so angry. He has spent the days since our trip getting angrier and angrier. But then, so have the rest of us – and now it’s time for us to demand the impossible. We should give them nothing, he declares, and then I feel his resolve sharpen, turn vicious. No. We should give back what they have taken.

Eerie minor-note pulses of impression and action ripple through our network: a plan, at last. A way to create the impossible, if we cannot demand it. The right sort of power surge at just the right moment, after the fragments have been launched but before the Engine has been spent. All the magic stored within the fragments – decades’ worth, a civilization’s worth, millions of lives’ worth – will flood back into the systems of Syl Anagist. First it will burn out the briar patches and their pitiful crop, letting the dead rest at last. Next the magic will blast through us, the most fragile components of the great machine. We’ll die when that happens, but death is better than what they intended for us, so we are content.

Once we’re dead, the Plutonic Engine’s magic will surge unrestricted down all the conduits of the city, frying them beyond repair. Every node of Syl Anagist will shut down – vehimals dying unless they have backup generators, lights going dark, machinery stilling, all the infinite conveniences of modern magestry erased from furnishings and appliances and cosmetics. Generations of effort spent preparing for Geoarcanity will be lost. The Engine’s crystalline fragments will become so many oversized rocks, broken and burnt and powerless.

We need not be as cruel as they. We can instruct the fragments to come down away from the most inhabited areas. We are the monsters they created, and more, but we will be the sort of monsters we wish to be, in death.

And are we agreed, then?

Yes. Remwha, furious.

Yes. Gaewha, sorrowful.

Yes. Bimniwha, resigned.

Yes. Salewha, righteous.

Yes. Dushwha, weary.

And I, heavy as lead, say, Yes.

So we are agreed.

Only to myself do I think, No, with Kelenli’s face in my mind’s eye. But sometimes, when the world is hard, love must be harder still.

***

Launch Day.

We are brought nourishment – protein with a side of fresh sweet fruit, and a drink that we are told is a popular delicacy: sef, which turns pretty colors when various vitamin supplements are added to it. A special drink for a special day. It’s chalky. I don’t like it. Then it is time to travel to Zero Site.

Here is how the Plutonic Engine works, briefly and simply.

First we will awaken the fragments, which have sat in their sockets for decades channeling life-energy through each node of Syl Anagist – and storing some of it for later use, including that which was force-fed to them through the briar patches. They have now reached optimum storage and generation, however, each becoming a self-contained arcane engine of its own. Now when we summon them, the fragments will rise from their sockets. We’ll join their power together in a stable network and, after bouncing it off a reflector that will amplify and concentrate the magic still further, pour this into the onyx. The onyx will direct this energy straight into the Earth’s core, causing an overflow – which the onyx will then shunt into Syl Anagist’s hungry conduits. In effect, the Earth will become a massive plutonic engine too, the dynamo that is its core churning forth far more magic than is put into it. From there, the system will become self-perpetuating. Syl Anagist will feed upon the life of the planet itself, forever.

(Ignorance is an inaccurate term for what this was. True, no one thought of the Earth as alive in those days – but we should have guessed. Magic is the by-product of life. That there was magic in the Earth to take… We should all have guessed.)

Everything we have done, up to now, has been practice. We could never have activated the full Plutonic Engine here on Earth – too many complications involving the obliqueness of angles, signal speed and resistance, the curvature of the hemisphere. So awkwardly round, planets. Our target is the Earth, after all; lines of sight, lines of force and attraction. If we stay on the planet, all we can really affect is the Moon.

Which is why Zero Site has never been on Earth.

Thus in the small hours of the morning we are brought to a singular sort of vehimal, doubtless genegineered from grasshopper stock or something similar. It is diamond-winged but also has great carbon-fiber legs, steaming now with coiled, stored power. As the conductors usher us aboard this vehimal, I see other vehimals being made ready. A large party means to come with us to watch the great project conclude at last. I sit where I am told, and all of us are strapped in because the vehimal’s thrust can sometimes overcome geomagestric inertial… Hmm. Suffice it to say, the launch can be somewhat alarming. It is nothing compared to plunging into the heart of a living, churning fragment, but I suppose the humans think it a grand, wild thing. The six of us sit, still and cold with purpose as they chatter around us, while the vehimal leaps up to the Moon.

On the Moon is the moonstone – a massive, iridescent white cabochon embedded in the thin gray soil of the place. It is the largest of the fragments, fully as big as a node of Syl Anagist itself; the whole of the Moon is its socket. Arranged around its edges sits a complex of buildings, each sealed against the airless dark, which are not so very different from the buildings we just left. They’re just on the Moon. This is Zero Site, where history will be made.

We are led inside, where permanent Zero Site staff line the halls and stare at us in proud admiration, as one admires precision-made instruments. We are led to cradles that look precisely like the cradles used every day for our practices – although this time, each of us is taken to a separate room of the compound. Adjoining each room is the conductors’ observation chamber, connected via a clear crystal window. I’m used to being observed while I work – but not used to being brought into the observation room itself, as happens today for the very first time.

There I stand, short and plainly dressed and palpably uncomfortable amid tall people in rich, complex clothing, while Gallat introduces me as “Houwha, our finest tuner.” This statement alone proves that either the conductors really have no clue how we function, or that Gallat is nervous and groping for something to say. Perhaps both. Dushwha laughs a cascading microshake – the Moon’s strata are thin and dusty and dead, but not much different from the Earth’s – while I stand there and mouth pleasant greetings, as I am expected to do. Maybe that’s what Gallat really means: I’m the tuner who is best at pretending that he cares about conductor nonsense.

Something catches my attention, though, as the introductions are made and small talk is exchanged and I concentrate on saying correct things at correct times. I turn and notice a stasis column near the back of the room, humming faintly and flickering with its own plutonic energies, generating the field that keeps something within stable. And floating above its cut-crystal surface —

There is a woman in the room who is taller and more elaborately dressed than everyone else. She follows my gaze and says to Gallat, “Do they know about the test bore?”

Gallat twitches and looks at me, then at the stasis column. “No,” he says. He doesn’t name the woman or give her a title, but his tone is very respectful. “They’ve been told only what’s necessary.”

“I would think context is necessary, even with your kind.” Gallat bristles at being lumped in with us, but he says nothing in response to it. The woman looks amused. She bends down to peer into my face, although I’m not that much shorter than her. “Would you like to know what that artifact is, little tuner?”

I immediately hate her. “Yes, please,” I say.

She takes my hand before Gallat can stop her. It isn’t uncomfortable. Her skin is dry. She leads me over near the stasis column, so that I can now get a good look at the thing that floats above it.

At first I think that what I’m seeing is nothing more than a spherical lump of iron, hovering a few inches above the stasis column’s surface and underlit by its white glow. It is only a lump of iron, its surface crazed with slanting, circuitous lines. A meteor fragment? No. I realize the sphere is moving – spinning slowly on a slightly tilted north-south axis. I look at the warning symbols around the column’s rim and see markers for extreme heat and pressure, and a caution against breaching the stasis field. Within, the markers say, it has re-created the object’s native environment.

No one would do this for a mere lump of iron. I blink, adjust my perception to the sesunal and magical, and draw back quickly as searing white light blazes at and through me. The iron sphere is full of magic – concentrated, crackling, overlapping threads upon threads of it, some of them even extending beyond its surface and outward and… away. I can’t follow the ones that whitter away beyond the room; they extend beyond my reach. I can see that they stretch off toward the sky, though, for some reason. And written in the jittering threads that I can see… I frown.

“It’s angry,” I say. And familiar. Where have I seen something like this, this magic, before?

The woman blinks at me. Gallat groans under his breath. “Houwha —”

“No,” the woman says, holding up a hand to quell him. She focuses on me again with a gaze that is intent now, and curious. “What did you say, little tuner?”

I face her. She is obviously important. Perhaps I should be afraid, but I’m not. “That thing is angry,” I say. “Furious. It doesn’t want to be here. You took it from somewhere else, didn’t you?”

Others in the room have noticed this exchange. Not all of them are conductors, but all of them look at the woman and me in palpable unease and confusion. I hear Gallat holding his breath.

“Yes,” she says to me, finally. “We drilled a test bore at one of the Antarctic nodes. Then we sent in probes that took this from the innermost core. It’s a sample of the world’s own heart.” She smiles, proud. “The richness of magic at the core is precisely what will enable Geoarcanity. That test is why we built Corepoint, and the fragments, and you.”

I look at the iron sphere again and marvel that she stands so close to it. It is angry, I think again, without really knowing why these words come to me. It will do what it has to do.

Who? Will do what?

I shake my head, inexplicably annoyed, and turn to Gallat. “Shouldn’t we get started?”

The woman laughs, delighted. Gallat glowers at me, but he relaxes fractionally when it becomes obvious that the woman is amused. Still, he says, “Yes, Houwha. I think we should. If you don’t mind —”

(He addresses the woman by some title, and some name. I will forget both with the passage of time. In forty thousand years I will remember only the woman’s laugh, and the way she considers Gallat no different from us, and how carelessly she stands near an iron sphere that radiates pure malice – and enough magic to destroy every building in Zero Site.

And I will remember how I, too, dismissed every possible warning of what was to come.)

Gallat takes me back into the cradle room, where I am bidden to climb into my wire chair. My limbs are strapped down, which I’ve never understood because when I’m in the amethyst, I barely notice my body, let alone move it. The sef has made my lips tingle in a way that suggests a stimulant was added. I didn’t need it.

I reach for the others, and find them granite-steady with resolve. Yes.

Images appear on the viewing wall before me, displaying the blue sphere of the Earth, each of the other five tuners’ cradles, and a shot of Corepoint with the onyx hovering ready above it. The other tuners look back at me from their images. Gallat comes over and makes a show of checking the contact points of the wire chair, which are meant to send measurements to the Biomagestric division. “You’re to hold the onyx, today, Houwha.”

From another building of Zero Site, I feel Gaewha’s small twitch of surprise. We’re very attuned to one another today. I say, “Kelenli holds the onyx.”

“Not anymore.” Gallat keeps his head down as he speaks, unnecessarily reaching over to check my straps, and I remember him reaching the same way to pull Kelenli back to him, in the garden. Ah, I understand, now. All this while he has been afraid to lose her… to us. Afraid to make her just another tool in the eyes of his superiors. Will they let him keep her, after Geoarcanity? Or does he fear that she, too, will be thrown into the briar patch? He must. Why else make such a significant change to our configuration on the most important day in human history?

As if to confirm my guess, he says, “Biomagestry says you now show more than sufficient compatibility to hold the connection for the required length of time.”

He’s watching me, hoping I won’t protest. I realize suddenly that I can do so. With so much scrutiny on Gallat’s every decision today, important people will notice if I insist that the new configuration is a bad idea. I can, simply by raising my voice, take Kelenli from Gallat. I can destroy him, as he destroyed Tetlewha.

But that’s a foolish, pointless thought, because how can I exercise my power over him without hurting her? I’m going to hurt her enough as it is, when we turn the Plutonic Engine back on itself. She should survive the initial convulsion of magic; even if she’s in contact with any of the devices that flux, she has more than enough skill to shunt the feedback away. Then in the aftermath, she’ll be just another survivor, made equal in suffering. No one will know what she really is – or her child, if it ends up like her. Like us. We will have set her free… to struggle for survival along with everyone else. But that is better than the illusion of safety in a gilded cage, is it not?

Better than you could ever have given her, I think at Gallat.

“All right,” I say. He relaxes minutely.

Gallat leaves my chamber and goes back into the observation room with the other conductors. I am alone. I am never alone; the others are with me. The signal comes that we should begin, as the moment seems to hold its breath. We are ready.

First the network.

Attuned as we are, it is easy, pleasurable, to modulate our silverflows and cancel out resistance. Remwha plays yoke, but he hardly needs to goad any of us to resonate higher or lower or to pull at the same pace; we are aligned. We all want this.

Above us, yet easily within our range, the Earth seems to hum, too. Almost like a thing alive. We have been to Corepoint and back, in our early training; we have traveled through the mantle and seen the massive flows of magic that churn naturally up from the iron-nickel core of the planet. To tap that bottomless font will be the greatest feat of human accomplishment, ever. Once, that thought would have made me proud. Now I share this with the others and a shiverstone micaflake glimmer of bitter amusement ripples through all of us. They have never believed us human, but we will prove by our actions today that we are more than tools. Even if we aren’t human, we are people. They will never be able to deny us this again.

Enough frivolity.

First the network, then the fragments of the Engine must be assembled. We reach for the amethyst because it is nearest on the globe. Though we are a world away from it, we know that it utters a low held note, its storage matrix glowing and brimful with energy as we dive, up, into its torrential flow. Already it has stopped suckling the last dregs from the briar patch at its roots, becoming a closed system in itself; now it feels almost alive. As we coax it from quiescence into resonant activity, it begins to pulse, and then finally to shimmer in patterns that emulate life, like the firing of neurotransmitters or the contractions of peristalsis. Is it alive? I wonder this for the first time, a question triggered by Kelenli’s lessons. It is a thing of high-state matter, but it coexists simultaneously with a thing of high-state magic made in its image – and taken from the bodies of people who once laughed and raged and sang. Is there anything left of their will in the amethyst?

If so… would the Niess approve of what we, their caricature children, mean to do?

I can spare no more time for such thoughts. The decision has been made.

So we expand this macro-level start-up sequence throughout the network. We sess without sessapinae. We feel the change. We know it in our bones – because we are part of this engine, components of humanity’s greatest marvel. On Earth, at the heart of every node of Syl Anagist, klaxons echo across the city and warning pylons blaze red warnings that can be seen from far away as one by one, the fragments begin to thrum and shimmer and detach from their sockets. My breath quickens when I, resonant within each, feel the first peeling-away of crystal from rougher stone, the drag as we alight and begin pulsing with the state-change of magic and then begin to rise —

(There is a stutter here, quick and barely noticeable in the heady moment, though glaring through the lens of memory. Some of the fragments hurt us, just a little, when they detach from their sockets. We feel the scrape of metal that should not be there, the scratch of needles against our crystalline skin. We smell a whiff of rust. It’s quick pain and quickly forgotten, as with any needle. Only later will we remember, and lament.)

— rise, and hum, and turn. I inhale deeply as the sockets and their surrounding cityscapes fall away below us. Syl Anagist shunts over to backup power systems; those should hold until Geoarcanity. But they are irrelevant, these mundane concerns. I flow, fly, fall up into rushing light that is purple or indigo or mauve or gold, the spinel and the topaz and the garnet and the sapphire – so many, so bright! So alive with building power.

(So alive, I think again, and this thought sends a shudder through the network, because Gaewha was thinking it, too, and Dushwha, and it is Remwha who takes us to task with a crack like a slipstrike fault: Fools, we will die if you don’t focus! So I let this thought go.)

And – ah, yes, framed there on-screen, centered in our perception like an eye glaring down at its quarry: the onyx. Positioned, as Kelenli last bade it, above Corepoint.

I am not nervous, I tell myself as I reach for it.

The onyx isn’t like the other fragments. Even the moonstone is quiescent by comparison; it is only a mirror, after all. But the onyx is powerful, frightening, the darkest of dark, unknowable. Where the other fragments must be sought and actively engaged, it snatches at my awareness the instant I come near, trying to pull me deeper into its rampant, convecting currents of silver. When I have connected to it before, the onyx has rejected me, as it has done for all the others in turn. The finest magests in Syl Anagist could not fathom why – but now, when I offer myself and the onyx claims me, suddenly I know. The onyx is alive. What is just a question in the other fragments has been answered here: It sesses me. It learns me, touching me with a presence that is suddenly undeniable.

And in the very moment when I realize this and have enough time to wonder fearfully what these presences think of me, their pathetic descendant made from the fusion of their genes with their destroyers’ hate —

— I perceive at last a secret of magestry that even the Niess simply accepted rather than understood. This is magic, after all, not science. There will always be parts of it that no one can fathom. But now I know: Put enough magic into something nonliving, and it becomes alive. Put enough lives into a storage matrix, and they retain a collective will, of sorts. They remember horror and atrocity, with whatever is left of them – their souls, if you like.

So the onyx yields to me now because, it senses at last, I too have known pain. My eyes have been opened to my own exploitation and degradation. I am afraid, of course, and angry, and hurt, but the onyx does not scorn these feelings within me. It seeks something else, however, something more, and finally finds what it seeks nestled in a little burning knot behind my heart: determination. I have committed myself to making, of all this wrongness, something right.

That’s what the onyx wants. Justice. And because I want that too —

I open my eyes in flesh. “I’ve engaged the control cabochon,” I report for the conductors.

“Confirmed,” says Gallat, looking at the screen where Biomagestry monitors our neuroarcanic connections. Applause breaks out among our observers, and I feel sudden contempt for them. Their clumsy instruments and their weak, simple sessapinae have finally told them what is as obvious to us as breathing. The Plutonic Engine is up and running.

Now that the fragments have all launched, each one rising to hum and flicker and hover over two hundred and fifty-six city-nodes and seismically energetic points, we begin the ramp-up sequence. Among the fragments, the pale-colored flow buffers ignite first, then we upcycle the deeper jewel tones of the generators. The onyx acknowledges sequence initialization with a single, heavy blat of sound that sends ripples across the Hemispheric Ocean.

My skin is tight, my heart a-thud. Somewhere, in another existence, I have clenched my fists. We have done so, across the paltry separation of six different bodies and two hundred and fifty-six arms and legs and one great black pulsing heart. My mouth opens (our mouths open) as the onyx aligns itself perfectly to tap the ceaseless churn of earth-magic where the core lies exposed far, far below. Here is the moment that we were made for.

Now, we are meant to say. This, here, connect, and we will lock the raw magical flows of the planet into an endless cycle of service to humankind.

Because this is what the Sylanagistines truly made us for: to affirm a philosophy. Life is sacred in Syl Anagist – as it should be, for the city burns life as the fuel for its glory. The Niess were not the first people chewed up in its maw, just the latest and cruelest extermination of many. But for a society built on exploitation, there is no greater threat than having no one left to oppress. And now, if nothing else is done, Syl Anagist must again find a way to fission its people into subgroupings and create reasons for conflict among them. There’s not enough magic to be had just from plants and genegineered fauna; someone must suffer, if the rest are to enjoy luxury.

Better the earth, Syl Anagist reasons. Better to enslave a great inanimate object that cannot feel pain and will not object. Better Geoarcanity. But this reasoning is still flawed, because Syl Anagist is ultimately unsustainable. It is parasitic; its hunger for magic grows with every drop it devours. The Earth’s core is not limitless. Eventually, if it takes fifty thousand years, that resource will be exhausted, too. Then everything dies.

What we are doing is pointless and Geoarcanity is a lie. And if we help Syl Anagist further down this path, we will have said, What was done to us was right and natural and unavoidable.

No.

So. Now, we say instead. This, here, connect: pale fragments to dark, all fragments to the onyx, and the onyx… back to Syl Anagist. We detach the moonstone from the circuit entirely. Now all the power stored in the fragments will blast through the city, and when the Plutonic Engine dies, so will Syl Anagist.

It begins and ends long before the conductors’ instruments even register a problem. With the others joined to me, our tune gone silent as we settle and wait for the feedback loop to hit us, I find myself content. It will be good not to die alone.

***

But.

But.

Remember. We were not the only ones who chose to fight back that day.

This is a thing I will realize only later, when I visit the ruins of Syl Anagist and look into empty sockets to see iron needles protruding from their walls. This is an enemy I will understand only after I have been humbled and remade at its feet… but I will explain it now, so that you may learn from my suffering.

I spoke to you, not long ago, of a war between the Earth and the life upon its surface. Here is some enemy psychology: The Earth sees no difference between any of us. Orogene, still, Sylanagistine, Niess, future, past – to it, humanity is humanity. And even if others had commanded my birth and development; even if Geoarcanity has been a dream of Syl Anagist since long before even my conductors were born; even if I was just following orders; even if the six of us meant to fight back… the Earth did not care. We were all guilty. All complicit in the crime of attempting to enslave the world itself.

Now, though, having pronounced us all guilty, the Earth handed out sentences. Here, at least, it was somewhat willing to offer credit for intent and good behavior.

This is what I remember, and what I pieced together later, and what I believe. But remember – never forget – that this was only the beginning of the war.

***

We perceive the disruption first as a ghost in the machine.

A presence alongside us, inside us, intense and intrusive and immense. It slaps the onyx from my grasp before I know what’s happening, and silences our startled signals of What? and Something is wrong and How did that happen? with a shockwave of earthtalk as stunning to us as the Rifting will one day be to you.

Hello, little enemies.

In the conductors’ observation chamber, alarms finally blare. We are frozen in our wire chairs, shouting without words and being answered by something beyond our comprehension, so Biomagestry only notices a problem when suddenly nine percent of the Plutonic Engine – twenty-seven fragments – goes offline. I do not see Conductor Gallat gasp and exchange a horrified look with the other conductors and their esteemed guests; this is speculation, knowing what I know of him. I imagine that at some point he turns to a console to abort the launch. I also do not see, behind them, the iron sphere pulse and swell and shatter, destroying its stasis field and peppering everyone in the chamber with hot, needle-sharp iron shards. I do hear the screaming that follows while the iron shards burn their way up veins and arteries, and the ominous silence afterward, but I have my own problems to deal with in this particular moment.

Remwha, he of the quickest wit, slaps us from our shock with the realization that something else is controlling the Engine. No time to wonder who or why. Gaewha perceives how and signals frantically: The twenty-seven “offline” fragments are still active. In fact, they have formed a kind of subnetwork – a spare key. This is how the other presence has managed to dislodge the onyx’s control. Now all of the fragments, which generate and contain the bulk of the Plutonic Engine’s power, are under hostile foreign control.

I am a proud creature at my core; this is intolerable. The onyx was given to me to hold – and so I seize it again and shove it back into the connections that comprise the Engine, dislodging the false control at once. Salewha slams down the shockwaves of magic that this violent disruption causes, lest they ricochet throughout the Engine and touch off a resonance that will – well, we don’t actually know what such resonance would do, but it would be bad. I hold on throughout the reverberations of this, my teeth bared back in the real world, listening while my siblings cry out or snarl with me or gasp amid the aftershakes of the initial upheaval. Everything is confusion. In the realm of flesh and blood, the lights of our chambers have gone out, leaving only emergency panels to glow around the edges of the room. The warning klaxons are incessant, and elsewhere in Zero Site I can hear equipment snapping and rattling with the overload that we have put into the system. The conductors, screaming in the observation chamber, cannot help us – not that they ever could. I don’t know what’s happening, not really. I know only that this is a battle, full of moment-to-moment confusion as all battles are, and from here forth nothing is quite clear —

That strange presence that has attacked us pulls hard against the Plutonic Engine, trying to dislodge our control once more. I shout at it in wordless geyserboil magmacrack fury. Get out of here! I rage. Leave us alone!

You started this, it hisses into the strata, trying again. When this fails, however, it snarls in frustration – and then locks, instead, into those twenty-seven fragments that have gone so mysteriously offline. Dushwha senses the hostile entity’s intent and tries to grasp some of the twenty-seven, but the fragments slip through their grasp as if coated with oil. This is true enough, figuratively speaking; something has contaminated these fragments, leaving them fouled and nearly impossible to grasp. We might manage it with concerted effort, one by one – but there is no time. And until then, the enemy holds the twenty-seven.

Stalemate. We still hold the onyx. We hold the other two hundred and twenty-nine fragments, which are ready to fire the feedback pulse that will destroy Syl Anagist – and ourselves. We’ve postponed that, however, because we cannot leave matters like this. Where did this entity, so angry and phenomenally powerful, come from? What will it do with the obelisks that it holds? Long moments pass in pent silence. I cannot speak for the others, but I, at least, begin to think there will be no further attacks. I have always been such a fool.

Into the silence comes the amused, malicious challenge of our enemy, ground forth in magic and iron and stone.

Burn for me, says Father Earth.

***

I must speculate on some of what follows, even after all these ages spent seeking answers.

I can narrate no more because in the moment everything was nigh-instantaneous, and confusing, and devastating. The Earth changes only gradually, until it doesn’t. And when it fights back, it does so decisively.

Here is the context. That first test bore that initiated the Geoarcanity project also alerted the Earth to humanity’s efforts to take control of it. Over the decades that followed, it studied its enemy and began to understand what we meant to do. Metal was its instrument and ally; never trust metal for this reason. It sent splinters of itself to the surface to examine the fragments in their sockets – for here, at least, was life stored in crystal, comprehensible to an entity of inorganic matter in a way that mere flesh was not. Only gradually did it learn how to take control of individual human lives, though it required the medium of the corestones to do so. We are such small, hard-to-grasp creatures, otherwise. Such insignificant vermin, apart from our unfortunate tendency to sometimes make ourselves dangerously significant. The obelisks, though, were a more useful tool. Easy to turn back on us, like any carelessly held weapon.

Burndown.

Remember Allia? Imagine that disaster times two hundred and fifty-six. Imagine the Stillness perforated at every nodal point and seismically active site, and the ocean, too – hundreds of hot spots and gas pockets and oil reservoirs breached, and the entire plate-tectonic system destabilized. There is no word for such a catastrophe. It would liquefy the surface of the planet, vaporizing the oceans and sterilizing everything from the mantle up. The world, for us and any possible creature that might ever evolve in the future to hurt the Earth, would end. The Earth itself would be fine, however.

We could stop it. If we wanted to.

I will not say we weren’t tempted, when faced with the choice between permitting the destruction of a civilization, or of all life on the planet. Syl Anagist’s fate was sealed. Make no mistake: We had meant to seal it. The difference between what the Earth wanted and what we wanted was merely a matter of scale. But which is the way the world ends? We tuners would be dead; the distinction mattered little to me in that moment. It’s never wise to ask such a question of people who have nothing to lose.

Except. I did have something to lose. In those eternal instants, I thought of Kelenli, and her child.

Thus it was that my will took precedence within the network. If you have any doubt, I’ll say it plainly now: I am the one who chose the way the world ended.

I am the one who took control of the Plutonic Engine. We could not stop Burndown, but we could insert a delay into the sequence and redirect the worst of its energy. After the Earth’s tampering, the power was too volatile to simply pour back into Syl Anagist as we’d originally planned; that would have done the Earth’s work for us. That much kinetic force had to be expended somewhere. Nowhere on the planet, if I meant for humanity to survive – but here were the Moon and the moonstone, ready and waiting.

I was in a hurry. There was no time to second-guess. The power could not reflect from the moonstone, as it was meant to; that would only increase the power of Burndown. Instead, with a snarl as I grabbed the others and forced them to help me – they were willing, just slow – we shattered the moonstone cabochon.

In the next instant, the power struck the broken stone, failed to reflect, and began to chew its way through the Moon. Even with this to mitigate the blow, the force of impact was devastating in itself. More than enough to slam the Moon out of orbit.

The backlash of misusing the Engine this way should have simply killed us, but the Earth was still there, the ghost in the machine. As we writhed in our death throes, all of Zero Site crumbling apart around us, it took control again.

I have said that it held us responsible for the attempt on its life, and it did – but somehow, perhaps through its years of study, it understood that we were tools of others, not actors of our own volition. Remember, too, that the Earth does not fully understand us. It looks upon human beings and sees short-lived, fragile creatures, puzzlingly detached in substance and awareness from the planet on which their lives depend, who do not understand the harm they tried to do – perhaps because they are so short-lived and fragile and detached. And so it chose for us what seemed, to it, a punishment leavened with meaning: It made us part of it. In my wire chair, I screamed as wave upon wave of alchemy worked over me, changing my flesh into raw, living, solidified magic that looks like stone.

We didn’t get the worst of it; that was reserved for those who had offended the Earth the most. It used the corestone fragments to take direct control of these most dangerous vermin – but this did not work as it intended. Human will is harder to anticipate than human flesh. They were never meant to continue.

I will not describe the shock and confusion I felt, in those first hours after my change. I will not ever be able to answer the question of how I returned to Earth from the Moon; I remember only a nightmare of endless falling and burning, which may have been delirium. I will not ask you to imagine how it felt to suddenly find oneself alone, and tuneless, after a lifetime spent singing to others like myself. This was justice. I accept it; I admit my crimes. I have sought to make up for them. But…

Well. What’s done is done.

In those last moments before we transformed, we did successfully manage to cancel the Burndown command to the two hundred and twenty-nine. Some fragments were shattered by the stress. Others would die over the subsequent millennia, their matrices disrupted by incomprehensible arcane forces. Most went into standby mode, to continue drifting for millennia over a world that no longer needed their power – until, on occasion, one of the fragile creatures below might send a confused, directionless request for access.

We could not stop the Earth’s twenty-seven. We did, however, manage to insert a delay into their command lattices: one hundred years. What the tales get wrong is only the timing, you see? One hundred years after Father Earth’s child was stolen from him, twenty-seven obelisks did burn down to the planet’s core, leaving fiery wounds all over its skin. It was not the cleansing fire that the Earth sought, but it was still the first and worst Fifth Season – what you call the Shattering. Humankind survives because one hundred years is nothing to the Earth, or even to the expanse of human history, but to those who survived the fall of Syl Anagist, it was just time enough to prepare.

The Moon, bleeding debris from a wound through its heart, vanished over a period of days.

And…

I never saw Kelenli, or her child, again. Too ashamed of the monster I’d become, I never sought them out. She lived, though. Now and again I heard the grind and grumble of her stone voice, and those of her several children as they were born. They were not wholly alone; with the last of their magestric technology, the survivors of Syl Anagist decanted a few more tuners and used them to build shelters, contingencies, systems of warning and protection. Those tuners died in time, however, as their usefulness ended, or as others blamed them for the Earth’s wrath. Only Kelenli’s children, who did not stand out, whose strength hid in plain sight, continued. Only Kelenli’s legacy, in the form of the lorists who went from settlement to settlement warning of the coming holocaust and teaching others how to cooperate, adapt, and remember, remains of the Niess.

It all worked, though. You survive. That was my doing, too, isn’t it? I did my best. Helped where I could. And now, my love, we have a second chance.

Time for you to end the world again.

***