“That was wrong,” Schaffa says. His voice is so soft she can barely hear it. She turns to look at him in surprise. He is staring at the ground, and there is a strange look on his face. Not the usual wandering, confused look that he gets sometimes. This is something he actually remembers, and his expression is… guilty? Rueful. Sad. “It’s wrong to hurt someone you love, Nassun.”
Nassun stares at him. Her own breath catches, and she doesn’t notice until her chest aches and she is forced to suck in air. It’s wrong to hurt someone you love. It’s wrong. It’s wrong. It has always been wrong.
Then Schaffa lifts a hand to her. She takes it. He pulls, and she falls willingly, and then she is in his arms and they are very tight and strong around her the way her father’s have not been since before he killed Uche. In that moment, she does not care that Schaffa cannot possibly love her, when he has known her for only a few weeks. She loves him. She needs him. She will do anything for him.
With her face pressed into Schaffa’s shoulder, Nassun sesses it when the silver flicker happens again. This time, in contact with him, she also feels the slight flinch of his muscles. It is barely a fluctuation, and might be anything: a bug bite, a shiver in the cooling evening breeze. Somehow, though, she realizes that it is actually pain. Frowning against his uniform, Nassun cautiously reaches toward that strange place at the back of Schaffa’s head, where the silver threads come from. They are hungry, the threads, somehow; as she gets closer to them, they lick at her, seeking something. Curious, Nassun touches them, and sesses… what? A faint tug. Then she is tired.
Schaffa flinches again and pulls back, holding her at arm’s length. “What are you doing?”
She shrugs awkwardly. “You needed it. You were hurting.”
Schaffa turns his head from side to side slowly, not in negation, but as if checking for something he expects to be there, which is now gone. “I am always hurting, little one. It’s part of what Guardians are. But…” His expression is wondering. By this, Nassun knows the pain is gone, at least for now.
“You’re always hurting?” She frowns. “Is it that thing in your head?”
His gaze snaps back to her immediately. She has never been afraid of his icewhite eyes, even now as they turn very cold. “What?”
She points at the back of her own skull. It is where the sessapinae are located, she knows from lectures on biomestry in creche. “There’s a little thing in you. Here. I don’t know what it is, but I sessed it when I met you. When you touched my neck.” She blinks, understanding. “You took something then to make it bother you less.”
“Yes. I did.” He reaches around her head now, and sets two of his fingers just at the top of her spine, beneath the back edge of her skull. This touch is not as relaxed as other times he has touched her. The two fingers are stiffened, held as if he’s pantomiming a knife.
Only he isn’t pantomiming, she realizes. She remembers that day in the forest when they reached Found Moon and the bandits attacked them. Schaffa is very, very strong—easily strong enough to push two fingers through bone and muscle like paper. He wouldn’t have needed a rock to break her hand.
Schaffa’s gaze searches hers and finds that she understands precisely what he’s thinking about doing. “You aren’t afraid.”
She shrugs.
“Tell me why you aren’t.” His voice brooks no disobedience.
“Just…” She cannot help shrugging again. She can’t really figure out how to say it. “I don’t… I mean, if you have a good reason?”
“You have no inkling of my reasons, little one.”
“I know.” She scowls, more out of frustration with herself than anything else. Then an explanation occurs to her. “Daddy didn’t have a reason when he killed my little brother.” Or when he knocked her off the wagon. Or any of the half-dozen times he’s looked at Nassun and thought about killing her so obviously that even a ten-year-old can figure it out.
An icewhite blink. What happens then is fascinating to watch: Slowly Schaffa’s expression thaws from the contemplation of her murder into wonder again, and a sorrow so deep that it makes a lump come to Nassun’s throat. “And you have seen so much purposeless suffering that at least being killed for a reason can be borne?”
He’s so much better at talking. She nods emphatically.
Schaffa sighs. She feels his fingers waver. “But this is not a thing that can be known beyond my order. I let a child live once, who saw, but I should not have. And we both suffered for my compassion. I remember that.”
“I don’t want you to suffer,” Nassun says. She puts her hands on his chest, wills the silver flickers within him to take more. They begin to drift toward her. “It always hurts? That isn’t right.”
“Many things ease the pain. Smiling, for example, releases specific endorphins, which—” He jerks and takes his hand from the back of her neck, grabbing her hands and pulling them away from him just as the silver threads find her. He actually looks alarmed. “That will kill you!”
“You’re going to kill me anyway.” This seems sensible to her.
He stares. “Earth of our fathers and mothers.” But with that, slowly, the killing tension begins to bleed out of his posture. After a moment, he sighs. “Never speak of—of what you sess in me, around the others. If the other Guardians learn that you know, I may not be able to protect you.”
Nassun nods. “I won’t. Will you tell me what it is?”
“Someday, perhaps.” He gets to his feet. Nassun hangs on to his hand when he tries to pull away. He frowns at her, bemused, but she grins and swings his hand a little, and after a moment he shakes his head. Then they head back into the compound, and that is the first day Nassun thinks of it as home.
Seek the orogene in its crib. Watch for the center of the circle. There you will find [obscured]
10
you’ve got a big job ahead of you
YOU’VE CALLED HIM CRAZY SO many times. Told yourself that you despised him even as you grew to love him. Why? Perhaps you understood early on that he was what you could become. More likely it is that you suspected long before you lost and found him again that he wasn’t crazy. “Crazy” is what everyone thinks all roggas are, after all—addled by the time they spend in stone, by their ostensible alliance with the Evil Earth, by not being human enough.
But.
“Crazy” is also what roggas who obey choose to call roggas that don’t. You obeyed, once, because you thought it would make you safe. He showed you—again and again, unrelentingly, he would not let you pretend otherwise—that if obedience did not make one safe from the Guardians or the nodes or the lynchings or the breeding or the disrespect, then what was the point? The game was too rigged to bother playing.
You pretended to hate him because you were a coward. But you eventually loved him, and he is part of you now, because you have since grown brave.
“I fought Antimony all the way down,” Alabaster says. “It was stupid. If she’d lost her grip on me, if her concentration had faltered for an instant, I would have become part of the stone. Not even crushed, just… mixed in.” He lifts a truncated arm, and you know him well enough to realize he would have waggled his fingers. If he still had fingers. He sighs, not even noticing. “We were probably into the mantle by the time Innon died.”