“Which was the lie?” you ask. It is the only thing you can think to ask.
“The lie?” The voice is a man’s now. The same voice, but in the tenor range. Coming from his chest somewhere.
You step into the room. It’s still unpleasantly hot, though cooling off quickly. You’re sweating anyway. “Your human shape, or this?”
“Both have been true at different times.”
“Ah, yes. Alabaster said all of you were human. Once, anyway.”
There is a moment of silence. “Are you human?”
At this, you cannot help but laugh once. “Officially? No.”
“Never mind what others think. What do you feel yourself to be?”
“Human.”
“Then so am I.”
He stands steaming between the halves of a giant rock from which he just hatched. “Uh, not anymore.”
“Should I take your word for that? Or listen to what I feel myself to be?”
You shake your head, walking as far as you can around the geode. Inside it there is nothing; it’s a thin stone shell bare of crystals or the usual precipitant lining. Probably doesn’t qualify as a geode, then. “How’d you end up in an obelisk?”
“Pissed off the wrong rogga.”
This surprises you into a laugh, which makes you stop and stare at him. It’s an uncomfortable laugh. He’s watching you the way he always used to, all eyes and hope. Should it really matter that the eyes are so strange now?
“I didn’t know that could be done,” you say. “Trapping a stone eater, I mean.”
“You could do it. It’s one of the only ways to stop one of us.”
“Not kill you, obviously.”
“No. There’s only one way to do that.”
“Which is?”
He flicks to face you. This seems instantaneous; suddenly the statue’s pose is completely different, serene and upright, with one hand raised in… invitation? Appeal? “Are you planning to kill me, Essun?”
You sigh and shake your head and extend a hand to touch one of the stone halves, out of curiosity.
“Don’t. It’s still too hot for your flesh.” He pauses. “This is how I get clean, without soap.”
A day along the side of the road, south of Tirimo. A boy who stared at a bar of soap in confusion, then delight. It’s still him. You can’t shake it off. So you sigh and also let go of the part of yourself that wants to treat him as something else, something frightening, something other. He’s Hoa. He wants to eat you, and he tried to help you find your daughter even though he failed. There’s an intimacy in these facts, however strange they are, that means something to you.
You fold your arms and pace slowly around the geode, and him. His eyes follow. “So who kicked your ass?” He has regenerated the eyes that were missing, and the lower jaw. The limbs that had been torn off are part of him again. There’s still blood in the living room, but whatever there had been in your bedroom is now gone, along with a layer of the floor and walls. Stone eaters are said to have control over the very smallest particles of matter. Simple enough to reappropriate one’s own detached substance, repurpose unused surplus material. You guess.
“A dozen or so of my kind. Then one in particular.”
“That many?”
“They were children to me. How many children would it take to overwhelm you?”
“You were a child.”
“I looked like a child.” His voice softens. “I only did that for you.”
There is a greater difference between this Hoa and that Hoa than their states of being. When adult Hoa says things like this, the words have an entirely different texture from when child Hoa said them. You’re not certain you like that texture.
“So you’ve been off getting into fights all this time,” you say, adjusting the subject back toward comfort. “There was a stone eater at the Flat Top. A gray—”
“Yes.” You didn’t think it was possible for a stone eater to look disgruntled, but Hoa does. “That one isn’t a child. He was the one who defeated me, finally, though I managed to escape without too much damage.” You marvel for a moment that he thinks having all his limbs and jaw torn off is not much damage. But you’re a little glad, too. The gray stone eater hurt Hoa, and you hurt him back. Ephemeral revenge, maybe, but it makes you feel like you look out for your own.
Hoa still sounds defensive. “It was also… unwise for me to face him while clothed in human flesh.”
It’s too damned hot in the room. Mopping sweat from your face, you move into the living room, push aside and tie off the main-door curtain so cooler air will circulate in more easily, and sit down at the table. By the time you turn back, Hoa is in the door of your bedroom, framed beautifully by the arch of it: study of a youth in wary contemplation.
“Is that why you changed back? To face him?” You didn’t see the bit of rag that contained his rocks while you were in the bedroom. Maybe it caught fire and is just charred cloth amid the rest, purpose served.
“I changed back because it was time.” There’s that tone of resignation again. He sounded that way when you first realized what he was. Like he knows he’s lost something in your eyes, and he can’t get it back, and he has no choice but to accept that—but he doesn’t have to like it. “I could have kept that shape only for a limited time. I made a choice to decrease the time, and increase the chance you will survive.”
“Oh?”
Beyond him, in your room, you suddenly notice that the leftover shell of his, er, egg, is melting. Sort of. It is dissolving and lightening in color and merging back into the clear material of the crystal, parting around the detritus of your belongings as it rejoins its former substance and solidifies again. You stare at that instead of him for a moment, fascinated.
Until he says, “They want you dead, Essun.”
“They—” You blink. “Who?”
“Some of my kind. Some merely want to use you. I won’t let them.”
You frown. “Which? You won’t let them kill me, or you won’t let them use me?”
“Either.” The echoing voice grows sharp suddenly. You remember him crouching, baring his teeth like some feral beast. It occurs to you, with the suddenness of an epiphany, that you haven’t seen as many stone eaters around lately. Ruby Hair, Butter Marble, Ugly Dress, Toothshine, all the regulars; not a glimpse in months. Ykka even remarked on the sudden absence of “hers.”
“You ate her,” you blurt.
There is a pause. “I’ve eaten many,” Hoa says. It is inflectionless.
You remember him giggling and calling you weird. Curling against you to sleep. Earthfires, you can’t deal with this.
“Why me, Hoa?” You spread your hands. They are ordinary, middle-aged woman hands. A bit dry. You helped with the leather-tanning crew a few days ago, and the solution made your skin crack and peel. You’ve been rubbing them with some of the nuts you got in the previous week’s comm share, even though fat is precious and you should be eating it rather than using it for your vanity. In your right palm there is a small, white, thumbnail-shaped crescent. On cold days that hand’s bones ache. Ordinary woman hands.
“There’s nothing special about me,” you say. “There must be other orogenes with the potential to access the obelisks. Earthfires, Nassun—” No. “Why are you here?” You mean, why has he attached himself to you.
He is silent for a moment. Then: “You asked if I was all right.”
This makes no sense for a moment, and then it does. Allia. A beautiful sunny day, a looming disaster. As you hovered in agony amid the cracked, dissonant core of the garnet obelisk, you saw him for the first time. How long had he been in that thing? Long enough for it to be buried beneath Seasons’ worth of sediment and coral growth. Long enough to be forgotten, like all the dead civilizations of the world. And then you came along and asked how he was doing. Evil Earth, you thought you hallucinated that.