“Word’s spreading. A couple of the biggest gossips in the comm were with Ykka when she met you, and apparently you confirmed what a lot of the roggas have been whispering among themselves.” You almost flinch at his use of rogga. He was such a polite boy once. “Topside, you said this Season won’t end for thousands of years. Was that an exaggeration, or the truth?”
You sigh and rub a hand over your hair. It’s a thick, curly mess at the roots. You need to retwist your locks, but you haven’t because you haven’t had time and because it feels like there’s no point.
“Seasons always end,” you say. “Father Earth keeps his own equilibrium. It’s just a question of how long it will take.”
“How long?” It’s barely a question. His tone is flat, resigned. He suspects the answer already.
And he deserves your honest, best guess. “Ten thousand years?” For the Yumenes Rifting to stop venting and the skies to clear. Not long at all by the usual scale of tectonics, but the real danger lies in what the ash might set off. Enough ash covering the warm surface of the sea, and the ice might grow at the poles. That means saltier seas. Drier climates. Permafrost. Glaciers marching, spreading. And the most habitable part of the world should that happen, the Equatorials, will still be hot and toxic.
It’s the winter that really kills, during Seasons. Starvation. Exposure. Even after the skies clear, though, the Rift could cause an age of winter that lasts millions of years. None of which matters, because humanity will have gone extinct long before. It’ll be just the obelisks floating over plains of endless white, with no one left to wonder at or ignore them.
His eyelids flicker. “Hnh.” To your surprise, he turns to face you. Even more surprising is that his anger seems to be gone, though it has been replaced by a kind of bleakness that feels familiar. It’s his question, though, that floors you:
“So what are you planning to do about it?”
Your mouth actually falls open. After a moment you manage to reply, “I wasn’t aware there was anything I could do about it.” Just like you hadn’t thought there was anything you could do about the boilbugs. Alabaster is the genius. You’re the grunt.
“What are you and Alabaster doing with the obelisks?”
“What is Alabaster doing,” you correct. “He just asked me to summon one. Probably because—” It hurts to say. “He can’t do that kind of orogeny anymore.”
“Alabaster made the Rift, didn’t he?”
You close your mouth fast enough that your teeth clack. You’ve just said Alabaster can’t do orogeny anymore. Enough Castrimans hear that they’re living in an underground rock garden because of him, and they’ll find a way to kill him, stone eater or not.
Lerna smiles lopsidedly. “It’s not hard to put together, Essun. His wounds are from steam, particulate abrasion, and corrosive gas, not fire—characteristic of being in close proximity to an erupting burn. I don’t know how he survived, but it’s left its mark on him.” He shrugged. “And I’ve seen you destroy a town in five minutes without breaking a sweat, so I’ve got an inkling of what a ten-ringer might be capable of. What are the obelisks for?”
You set your jaw. “You can ask me six different ways, Lerna, and I’ll give you six different versions of ‘I don’t know,’ because I don’t.”
“I think you at least have an idea. But lie to me if you want.” He shakes his head. “This is your comm now.”
He falls silent after that, as if expecting a response from you. You’re too busy vehemently rejecting the idea to respond. But he knows you too well; he knows you don’t want to hear it. That’s why he says it again. “Essun Rogga Castrima. That’s who you are now.”
“No.”
“Leave, then. Everyone knows Ykka can’t really hold you if you put your mind to leaving. I know you’ll kill us all if you feel the need. So, go.”
You sit there, looking at your hands, which dangle between your knees. Your thoughts are empty.
Lerna inclines his head. “You aren’t leaving because you aren’t stupid. Maybe you can survive out there, but not as anything Nassun would ever want to see again. And if nothing else, you want to live so that you can eventually find her again… however unlikely that is.”
Your hands twitch once. Then they resume dangling limply.
“When this Season doesn’t end,” Lerna continues, and it is so much worse that he does it in that same weary monotone which asked how long the Season would last, like he is speaking utter truth and knows it and hates it, “we’ll run out of food. Cannibalism will help, but it’s not sustainable. At that point the comm will either turn raider or simply dissolve into roving bands of commless. But even that won’t save us, long term. Eventually the remnants of Castrima will just starve. Father Earth wins at last.”
It’s the truth, whether you want to face it or not. And it’s further proof that whatever happened to Lerna during his brief commless career changed him. Not really for the worse. It’s just made him the kind of healer who knows that sometimes one must inflict terrible agony—rebreak a bone, carve off a limb, kill the weak—in order to make the whole stronger.
“Nassun’s strong like you,” he continues, softly and brutally. “Say she survives Jija. Say you find her, bring her here or any other place that seems safe. She’ll starve with the rest when the storecaches empty, but with her orogeny, she could probably force others to give her their food. Maybe even kill them and have the remaining stores for herself. Eventually the stores will run out, though. She’ll have to leave the comm, scrape by on whatever forage she can find under the ash, hopefully while not running afoul of the wildlife or other hazards. She’ll be one of the last to die: alone, hungry, cold, hating herself. Hating you. Or maybe she’ll have shut down by then. Maybe she’ll just be an animal, driven only by the instinct to survive and failing even at that. Maybe she’ll eat herself in the end, the way any beast might—”
“Stop,” you say. It’s a whisper. Mercifully, he does. He turns away again instead, taking another long drag of his half-forgotten mellow.
“Have you talked to anyone since you got here?” he asks finally. It’s not really a change of subject. You don’t relax. He nods toward the infirmary. “Anyone but Alabaster and that menagerie you’ve been traveling with? More than a meeting; talked.”
Not enough to count. You shake your head.
“The rumor’s spreading, Essun. And now everyone’s thinking about how slowly their children will die.” He finally flicks away the mellow. It’s still burning. “Thinking about how they can’t do anything about it.”
But you can, he doesn’t need to say.
Can you?
Lerna walks away so abruptly that you’re surprised. You hadn’t realized he was done. It’s an ingrained flinch at the idea of waste that makes you go pick up his discarded cigarette. Takes you a moment to figure out how to inhale without choking; you’ve never tried before. Orogenes aren’t supposed to ingest narcotics.
But orogenes aren’t supposed to live, either, during a Season. The Fulcrum had no storecaches. No one ever mentioned it, but you’re pretty sure that if a Season ever hit Yumenes hard enough, the Guardians would have swept the place and slaughtered every one of you. Your kind is useful in preventing Seasons, but if the Fulcrum ever so failed in its duty, if ever the worthies of the Black Star or the Emperor had felt a whiff of a thought of a tremor, you and your fellow Imperial Orogenes would not have been rewarded with survival.
And why should you have been? What survival skills does any rogga offer? You can keep people from dying in a shake, yay. Fat lot of good that does when there’s no food.
“Enough!” You hear Ykka’s voice from a short distance away, though you can’t see her around the ground-level crystals. She’s shouting. “It’s done! You want to be there for it or stay here wasting breath on me?”
You get up, your knees aching. Head in that direction.