The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

After all, a person is herself, and others. Relationships chisel the final shape of one’s being. I am me, and you. Damaya was herself and the family that rejected her and the people of the Fulcrum who chiseled her to a fine point. Syenite was Alabaster and Innon and the people of poor lost Allia and Meov. Now you are Tirimo and the ash-strewn road’s walkers and your dead children … and also the living one who remains. Whom you will get back.

You are Essun, after all. You know this already. Don’t you?

Life cannot exist without the Earth. Yet there is a not-insubstantial chance that life will win its war, and destroy the Earth. We’ve come close a few times. That can’t happen. We cannot be permitted to win.

I’ve betrayed you already and I will do it again. You haven’t even chosen a side yet, and already I fend off those who would recruit you to their cause. Already I plot your death. It’s necessary. But I can at least try my damnedest to give your life a meaning that will last till the world ends.

Mama has said occasionally that she loves Nassun, but Nassun has never seen any proof of it.

Something of her is warped out of true by this moment, and from now on all her acts of affection toward her father will be calculated, performative. Her childhood dies, for all intents and purposes. But that is better than all of her dying, she knows.

So she says softly, “Mama knows, Daddy.” Nassun’s not even sure what she means by this. Knows that Uche is dead? Knows who has beaten him to death? Would Mama even believe that Jija could do such a thing to his own child? Nassun can hardly believe it herself. But Jija flinches as if the words are an accusation.

(Later, lying in bed and considering the day’s errors, you will think belatedly, I am as crazy now as Alabaster was back then.)

“Wouldn’t it have been better,” you cannot help saying, “to just … live?” To have come back, you cannot say. To have made what little life he could with Syenite again, after Meov was gone but before she found Tirimo and Jija and tried to create a lesser version of the family she’d lost. Before she became you.

There is such a thing as too much loss. Too much has been taken from you both—taken and taken and taken, until there’s nothing left but hope, and you’ve given that up because it hurts too much. Until you would rather die, or kill, or avoid attachments altogether, than lose one more thing. You think of the feeling that was in your heart as you pressed a hand over Corundum’s nose and mouth. Not the thought. The thought was simple and predictable: Better to die than live a slave. But what you felt in that moment was a kind of cold, monstrous love. A determination to make sure your son’s life remained the beautiful, wholesome thing that it had been up to that day, even if it meant you had to end his life early.

The son he made with you is dead, the family you built together has been rendered forever incomplete, but if nothing else he’s still your mentor.

It’s a poor trade, really—Nassun for him, a mother’s purpose for an ex-lover’s, these ridiculous mysteries for the starker and more important why of Jija murdering his own son. But without Nassun to motivate you, you need something. Anything, to keep going.)

It’s a reminder that these are not the old days and you cannot react in the old ways. If Alabaster has not changed, then it’s up to you. Because you have.

You loved him once. You probably still do. With a sigh you get up and move to the wall. Gingerly, though his back is unburned, you prop yourself for comfort, then rest a hand against his back to hold him up, the way Antimony so often does. Alabaster’s silent for a moment, and then he says, “Thank you.” Then … he tells you everything.

“I cried for you and Innon and Coru for three days, there in that city of who we used to be.”

You’re not confused. You think you understand. You just don’t want to, so you decide that you must be confused.

“The Earth is alive.” His voice grows harsh, hoarse, faintly hysterical. “Some of the old stories are just stories, you’re right, but not that one. I understood then what the stone eaters had been trying to tell me. Why I had to use the obelisks to create the Rift. We’ve been at war with the world for so long that we’ve forgotten, Essun, but the world hasn’t. And we have to end it soon, or …”

You want to ask what will happen if a war so ancient doesn’t end soon. You want to ask what happened to him down there at the core of the Earth, what he saw or experienced that has so plainly shaken him. You don’t ask. You’re a brave woman, but you know what you can take, and what you can’t.

That’s the third faction, then: those who want a truce, people and Father Earth agreeing to tolerate one another, even if it means creating the Rift and killing millions in the process. Peaceful coexistence by any means necessary.

In love, then, we shall seek understanding.

“You serve a higher purpose, little one. Not any single man’s desire—not even mine. You were not made for such petty things.”

He is a beautiful failure. It happens so fast that he has no time for fear.

Just another comm, just another name, just another new start, or at least a partial one. It will probably end the way all the others have. But … it makes a difference that here, everyone knows what you are. That is the one good thing about the Fulcrum, about Meov, about being Syenite: You could be who you were. That’s a luxury you’re learning to savor anew.

“You never change. If I ask you for help, you tell me to flake off and die. If I don’t say a rusting word, you work miracles for me.” He sighs. “Evil Earth, how I’ve missed you.” This … hurts, unexpectedly. You realize why at once: because it’s been so long since anyone said anything like this to you. Jija could be affectionate, but he wasn’t much given to sentimentality. Innon used sex and jokes to show his tenderness. But Alabaster … this has always been his way. The surprise gesture, the backhanded compliment that you could choose to take for teasing or an insult. You’ve hardened so much without this. Without him.

You try to smile, and fail. He doesn’t try. You just look at each other. It’s nothing and everything at once.

“Tradition’s just going to rust everything up, in a situation like this. Better to have a headwoman who doesn’t know how things should be, only how she wants them to be. A headwoman who’ll kick all the asses necessary to make her vision happen.”

It does sound like the Castrimans you’ve gotten to know. It also sounds like the Tirimo-folk you’ve gotten to know, and the Meovites, and the Allians, and the Yumenescenes. No people in the Stillness would have survived to this point if they weren’t fearsomely tenacious.

But the answer’s obvious, isn’t it? Tonkee’s like Hjarka. Both were raised Leadership, raised to put the needs of others first, and both chose a more selfish path. It’s not even a question.

Oh no there is hate and we all do what we have to do there is anger and ah; hello, little enemy

You’re thinking of Tonkee as you do this. Wanting to save her life. But Tonkee is not Tonkee to you right now; she is a collection of particles and substances. You make the cut.

Ah, this ridiculous war of ours. We use your kind so easily. Even you, my Essun, my treasure, my pawn. One day, I hope, you will forgive me.

You’re the one who has to explain to Tonkee that Hjarka’s decided, through whatever convoluted set of values the big woman holds dear, that an ex-commless geomest with the social skills of a rock represents the pinnacle of desirability.

You hate him for no longer being invincible. And for not hating you.

You try not to think—how far of a leap is it from thrilling in such power to using it to destroy the world? (Did Alabaster feel this, when he …?)

I WANT TO KEEP TELLING THIS as I have: in your mind, in your voice, telling you what to think and know. Do you find this rude? It is, I admit. Selfish. When I speak as just myself, it’s difficult to feel like part of you. It is lonelier. Please; let me continue a bit longer.

If she hurts him because she loves him, is that still hurt? If she hurts him a lot now so that he will hurt less later, does that make her a terrible person?

For the first time, however, Nassun tries not to care about Schaffa’s feelings.

Thus it is with her mother on her mind that Nassun knocks on the door of her father’s house. (She has a room here, but it isn’t her house. This is why she knocks.)

Almost eleven and so beautiful, so strong. So much like—he falters. Nassun looks down at her plate because he’s almost said, so much like your mother. Is this not how love should work?

It is a terrible thing that Nassun is beautiful and strong like her mother, but love always comes bound in terrible things. “I miss her, too.” Because she does, in spite of everything.

In a sudden blur of understanding as powerful as magic, Nassun realizes Jija does not remember standing over Uche’s body, his shoulders and chest heaving, his teeth clenched around the words Are you one, too? Now he believes he has never threatened her. Never shoved her off a wagon seat and down a hill of sticks and stones. Something has rewritten the story of his orogene children in Jija’s head—a story that is as chiseled and unchangeable as stone in Nassun’s mind. It is perhaps the same thing that has rewritten Nassun for him as daughter and not rogga, as if the two can be fissioned from each other somehow.

Jija killed his own son for what a completely different person did, long before that son’s birth. This, more than anything, helps her finally understand that there is no reasoning with her father’s hatred.

No reasoning. But she tries, because once upon a time, this man was her whole world.

For how many centuries has the world killed rogga children so that everyone else’s children can sleep easy?

You are in the infirmary, looking down at an incongruously small, yet finely made, stone sculpture. No color to this one, no polish, just dull sandy brown all over. It is almost abstract, archetypal: Man in His Final Moment. Truncation of the Spirit. Neverperson, Unperson. Once Found but Now Lost. Or maybe you can just call it Alabaster.

“He left you a message,” she says. Her inflectionless voice is no different, and yet. Somehow. Is that pity? “ ‘The onyx is the key. First a network, then the Gate. Don’t rust it up, Essun. Innon and I didn’t love you for nothing.’

You sit where she’s left you, where he’s left you. There are no thoughts in your head. But when a hand touches your arm, and a voice says your name, and a connection that is not the obelisk presents itself, you turn toward it. You can’t help it. You need something, and if it is not to be family or death, then it must be something else. So you turn and grab and Lerna is there for you, his shoulder is warm and soft, and you need it. You need him. Just for now, please.

Six rings, polished and semiprecious, sit there. Not enough for you, a nine-ringer, but you don’t care about the first four, anyway. They clack and roll across the floor as you discard them. The last two, the ones he made for you, you put on the index finger of each hand.

She stops because she doesn’t know what it is. But you do. It’s a fucking coup. Doesn’t matter who’s in charge, but on this one issue, you’re going to be the dictator. You will not allow Alabaster to have died saving these people from you for nothing. “No vote,” you say again. Your voice is pitched to carry, as if they are twelve-year-olds in your old creche. “This is a community. You will be unified. You will fight for each other. Or I will rusting kill every last one of you.” True silence this time. They don’t move. Their eyes are white and so far beyond frightened that you know they believe you. Good. You turn and walk away.

You keep thinking about Alabaster, too, though. Is this grief? You hated him, loved him, missed him for years, made yourself forget him, found him again, loved him again, killed him. The grief does not feel like what you feel about Uche, or Corundum, or Innon; those are rents in your soul that still seep blood. The loss of Alabaster is simply … a thinning of who you are.