It’s commendable that Hjarka just looks impressed and not alarmed when you open your eyes and turn to her. “Nice,” she says. “So you can ice someone without killing everyone around you. But if every rogga could do that, people wouldn’t have a problem with roggas.”
You really hate that rusting word, no matter what Ykka thinks.
And you’re not sure you agree with Hjarka’s assessment. People have problems with roggas for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with orogeny. You open your mouth to reply—and then stop. Because now you can see the trap Hjarka’s set, the only way this conversation’s going to end, and you don’t want to go there… but there’s no avoiding it. Rusting fuck.
So that’s how you end up in charge of a brand-new Fulcrum, sort of.
“Stupid,” Alabaster says.
You sigh. “I know.”
It’s the next day, and another conversation about the principles of the unreal—how an obelisk works, how their crystalline structure emulates the strange linkages of power between the cells of a living being, and how there are theories about things even smaller than cells, somehow, even though no one has seen them or can prove that they exist.
You have these conversations with Alabaster every day, in between your morning work shift and evening politicking, because he is filled with a sense of urgency spurred by his own impending mortality. The sessions don’t last long, because Alabaster has limited strength. And the conversations so far haven’t been very useful, mostly because Alabaster is a terrible teacher. He barks orders and gives lectures, never answering your questions when you ask them. He’s impatient and snappish. And while some of this can be chalked up to the pain that he’s in, the rest is just Alabaster being himself. He really hasn’t changed.
You are frequently surprised at how much you’ve missed him, the irascible old ass. And because of this, you hold your temper… for a while, anyway.
“Someone’s got to teach the younger ones, anyway,” you say. Most of the comm’s orogenes are children or adolescents, simply because most ferals don’t survive childhood. You’ve heard rumors that some of the older orogenes are teaching them, helping them learn not to ice things when they stub their toes, and it helps that Castrima is as stable as the Equatorials once were. But that’s ferals teaching ferals. “And if I fail to do whatever it is you keep insisting that I do—”
“None of them are worth rust. You’d sess that yourself, if you’d bothered to pay any attention to them. It’s not just about skill, it’s also natural talent; that’s the whole reason the Fulcrum made us breed, Essun. And most of them will never be able to get past energy redistribution.” This is the term that the two of you have concocted for orogeny done with heat and kinetics—the Fulcrum’s way. What Alabaster is now trying to teach you, and what you’re struggling to learn because it relies on things that make no sense whatsoever, is something you’ve started calling magic redistribution. That isn’t right, either; it’s not redistribution, but it’ll do until you understand it better.
Alabaster’s still on about the orogeny class you’ve agreed to teach, and the children who will fill it. “It’s a waste of your time to teach them.”
This dismissal, inexplicably, starts to eat through your patience. “It’s never a waste of time to educate others.”
“Spoken like a simple creche teacher. Oh, wait.”
It’s a cheap shot, disrespecting the vocation that gave you years of camouflage. You should let it go, but it feels like salt on a glass-cut and you snap. “Stop. It.”
Alabaster blinks, then scowls to the degree that he can. “I don’t have a great deal of time for coddling, Syen—”
“Essun.” Right now, here, it matters. “And I don’t rusting care if you’re dying. You don’t get to talk to me like this.” And you get up, because suddenly you’re rusting done.
He stares at you. Antimony is there as always, supporting him in silence, and her eyes shift to you for a moment. You think you read surprise in them, but that’s probably just projection. “You don’t care if I’m dying.”
“No, I don’t. Why the rust should I? You don’t care if any of the rest of us die. You did this to us.” Lerna, at the other end of the room, glances up and frowns, and you remember to lower your voice. “You’ll kick off sooner and more easily than the rest of us. We get to starve to death, well after you’re dust in the ash. And if you can’t be bothered to actually teach me anything, then fuck you; I’ll figure out how to fix things myself!”
So you’re halfway across the infirmary, your steps brisk and your hands fisted at your sides, when he snaps, “Walk out that door and you will starve to death. Stay and you have a chance.”
You keep walking, yelling over your shoulder, “You figured it out!”
“It took me ten years! And—fucking, flaking rust, you hardheaded, steel-hearted—”
The geode jolts. Not just the infirmary building but the whole damned thing. You hear cries of alarm outside, and that does it. You stop and clench your fists and slam a counter-torus against the fulcrum that he’s positioned just underneath Castrima. It doesn’t dislodge his; you’re still not precise enough for that, and anyway you’re too angry to try very hard. The movement stops, however—whether because you stopped it or because you’ve surprised him so much that he stopped it, you don’t care.
Then you turn back, storming at him in such a fury that Antimony vanishes and is suddenly standing beside him, a silent sentinel warning. You don’t care about her, and you don’t care that Alabaster is bent again, making a low strained wheezing sound, or any of it.
“Listen to me, you selfish ass,” you snarl, bending down so the stone eater will be the only one to hear. ’Baster’s shaking, in visible pain, and a day ago that would’ve been enough to stop you. Now you’re too angry for pity. “I have to live here even if you’re just waiting to die, and if you make these people hate us because you can’t rein it in—”
Wait. You trail off, distracted. This time you can see the change as it happens to his arm—the left one, which had been longer. The stone of him creeps along slowly, steadily, making a minute hissing sound as it transmutes flesh into something else. And nearly against your will you shift your sight as he has taught you, searching between the gelid bubbles of him for those elusive tendrils of connection. You see, suddenly, that they are brighter, almost like silver metal, tightening into a lattice and aligning in new ways that you’ve never seen before.
“You’re such an arrogant ruster,” he snarls through his teeth. This breaks through your astonishment about his arm, replacing it with affront that he of all people has called you arrogant. “Essun. You act like you’re the only one who’s made mistakes, the only one who ever died inside and had to keep going. You don’t know shit, won’t listen to shit—”
“Because you won’t tell me anything! You expect me to listen to you, but you don’t share, you just demand and proclaim and, and—and I’m not a child! Evil Earth, I wouldn’t even speak to a child this way!”