Your attention is recaptured by the man on the bed as some of the people around him step back. At first you can’t tell what the problem is, other than that his pants seem oddly wet in patches, caked with muddy ash. The wetness isn’t red, it’s not blood, but there’s a smell that you’re not sure how to describe. Meat in brine. Hot fat. His boots are off, baring feet which still spasmodically twitch a little, the splayed toes relaxing only reluctantly even in unconsciousness. Lerna is cutting open one pants leg with a pair of scissors. What you notice first, as he peels away the damp cloth, are the small round blue hemispheres that dot the man’s skin here and there, each perhaps two inches in diameter and an inch of rounded height, shiny and foreign to his flesh. There are ten or fifteen of them. Each sits at the center of a patch of bloated pink-brown flesh covering perhaps a handspan of the man’s legs. You think the lumps are jewels, at first. That’s kind of what they look like, metallic over the blue, and beautiful.
“Fuck,” says someone, voice soft with shock, and someone else says, “What the rust.” Someone else pushes into the infirmary behind you after a moment’s argument with the people who’ve blocked off the door. She comes to stand beside you and you look over at Ykka, whose eyes widen in confusion and revulsion for an instant before she schools her expression to blankness. Then she says, sharply enough to jerk people out of staring, “What happened?”
(You notice, belatedly or perhaps right in time, that another stone eater is in the room, not far beyond the tableau. She’s familiar—the red-haired one who greeted you along with Ykka when you first came to Castrima. She’s watching Ykka now, avidly, but her stone gaze occasionally drifts toward you, too. You suddenly become hyperaware that Hoa did not follow you from the apartment.)
“Outer perimeter patrol,” says another ash-covered Midlatter man, to Ykka. He doesn’t look like a Strongback, too small. Maybe he’s one of the new Hunters. He comes around the bedside group and fixes his gaze on Ykka as if she is all that prevents him from staring at the injured man until his mind breaks. “We were out by the s-salt quarry, thinking it might be a good place for hunting. There was some kind of sinkhole near a stream runnel. Beled—I don’t know. He’s gone. I heard them both scream at first, but I didn’t know why. I was upstream, looking at some animal tracks. By the time I got there it was just Terteis there, looking like he was trying to climb out of the ash. I helped him out, but they were on him already, and more were crawling up his shoes so I had to cut them off—”
A hiss jerks your eyes away from the speaking man. Lerna is shaking his hand, holding out the fingers stiffly as if they hurt. “Get me the rusting forceps!” he says to another man, who twitches and turns to do so. You’ve never heard Lerna curse before.
“Some kind of boil,” says the Sanzed woman who injected the man. She sounds disbelieving; she’s speaking to Lerna, as if trying to convince him rather than herself. (Lerna just keeps grimly probing the edges of the burns with his uninjured hand, ignoring her.) “Has to be. He fell into a steam vent, a geyser, an old rusted-out geo pipe.” Which would make the bugs just a coincidence.
“—or they would’ve gotten on me, too.” The other Hunter is still talking in his hollow voice. “I thought the sinkhole was just loose ash, but it was really… I don’t know. Like an anthill.” The Hunter swallows, sets his jaw. “I couldn’t get the rest off, so I brought him here.”
Ykka’s lips press together, but she rolls up her sleeves and goes over, pushing through the other shocked people nearby. She yells, “Back up! If you don’t mean to help with this, get out of the rusting way.” Some of the milling people start pulling others away. Someone else grabs for one of the jewel-objects and tries to pull it off, then jerks their hand away, yelping as Lerna did. The object changes, two pieces of the shiny blue surface flaking away and lifting before clapping back into place—and suddenly it shifts in your head. It’s not a jewel; it’s a bug. Some kind of beetle, and the iridescent shell is its carapace. In the moment that it lifted its wing covers, you saw that its round body was translucent, with something jumping and bubbling inside. You can sess the heat of it even from where you are, hot as a boil. The man’s flesh steams around it.
Someone gives Lerna the forceps and he tries to pull one of the beetles off. Its wing covers lift again, and a thin jet of something skeets across Lerna’s fingers. He yelps and drops the forceps, jerking back. “Acid!” someone says. Someone else grabs his hand and tries to quickly wipe off the stuff, but you know what it is even before Lerna gasps, “No! Just water. Scalding water.”
“Careful,” says the other Hunter, belatedly. One of his hands bears a line of blisters, you notice. You also notice that he doesn’t look back at the infirmary table or any of the people there.
This is too horrible to watch. The rusting bugs are boiling the man to death. But when you look away, you see that Alabaster is watching you again. Alabaster, who himself is covered in burns, but who should be dead. No one stands near the epicenter of a continent-spanning fissure vent and gets only patchy third-degree burns. He should’ve been ashes scattered over Yumenes’s melted streets.
You realize this as he gazes at you, though his expression is indifferent to another man’s trial by fire. It is a familiar sort of indifference—Fulcrum-familiar. It is the indifference that comes of too many betrayals, too many friends lost for no good reason, too many “too horrible to watch” atrocities seen.
And yet. The reverberation of Alabaster’s orogeny is carelessly powerful, diamond-precise, and so achingly familiar that you have to close your eyes and fight off memories of a heaving ship deck, a lonely highroad, a windy rock island. The torus that he spins is devastatingly small—barely an inch wide, so attenuated that you cannot find its hairpin fulcrum. He’s still better than you.
Then you hear a gasp. You open your eyes to see one of the bugs shiver, hiss like a living teakettle—and then freeze over. Its legs, which had been hooked into the boiled flesh around it, pop loose. It’s dead.
But then you hear a soft groan, and the orogeny dissipates. You look over to see that Alabaster has bowed his head and hunched over. His stone eater slow-grind crouches beside him, something in her posture indicating concern even if her face is as placid as ever. The red-haired stone eater—in internal exasperation you decide to call her Ruby Hair, for now—is gazing at him, too.
That’s it, then. You look back at the man—and your gaze catches on Lerna, who’s looking at the frozen bug in fascination. His eyes lift, sweep the room, stutter across yours, stop. You see the question there, and start to shake your head: No, you did not freeze the bug. But that isn’t the right question, and maybe isn’t even the question he’s asking. He doesn’t need to know if you did. He needs to know if you can.
Lerna, Hoa, Alabaster; today you are driven by silent, meaningful gazes, it seems.
The hot points of the insects sess like geothermal vents as you step forward and focus your sessapinae. Lots of controlled pressure in their tiny bodies; that’s how they make the water boil. You lift a hand toward the man out of habit so everyone will know you’re doing something, and you hear a curse, a hiss, a scramble of feet and jostling bodies as people move back from you, away from any torus you might manifest. Fools. Don’t they know you only need a torus when you have to pull from the ambient? The bugs have plenty of what you need. The difficulty will lie in confining your draw just to them and not the man’s overheated flesh underneath.
Ykka’s stone eater takes a slow step closer. You sess her movement, rather than seeing it; it’s like a mountain shifting toward you. Then Ruby Hair stops as suddenly there is another mountain in its way: Hoa, stock-still and quietly cold. Where did he come from? You cannot spare another thought for these creatures right now.
You begin slowly, using your eyes as well as your sessapinae to determine exactly where to stop… but Alabaster has shown you the way of it. You spin the torus from their hot little bodies as he did, one by one. As you do this, some of them crack open with a loud and violent hiss, and one of them even pops off, flying off toward the side of the room. (People move out of its way even faster than they moved out of yours.) Then it is done.