The Obelisk Gate (The Broken Earth, #2)

by N.K. Jemisin

Did she not know that Schaffa would love her son as he loved her? He would lay the boy down gently, so gently, in the wire chair.)

But it is one thing to resolve to die, quite another to actually carry out that resolve in the midst of dying.

(He loses so much else, though. Understand: The Schaffa that we have known thus far, the Schaffa whom Damaya learned to fear and Syenite learned to defy, is now dead. What remains is a man with a habit of smiling, a warped paternal instinct, and a rage that is not wholly his own driving everything he does from this point on.

It is a manipulation. 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.

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.

(It is surprising how refreshing this feels. Being judged by what you do, and not what you are.)

It’s ridiculous, mundane, incredibly tedious stuff, and… you love it. Why? Who knows. Perhaps because it’s similar to the sorts of discussions you had back during the two times you were part of a family?

The arguments that you have with the other advisors are more important: Your decisions affect more than a thousand people now. But they have the same silly, pedantic feel. Silly pedantry is a luxury that you’ve rarely been able to enjoy in your life.

This is something he actually remembers, and his expression is… guilty? Rueful. Sad. “It’s wrong to hurt someone you love, Nassun.”

There’s nothing Sanzed in him because the Sanzed did not exist as a people in his day.

There is a quicksilver lightning strike of pain along his spine, too fast for him to smile it away. Something disagrees with his resolve. Automatically his hand twitches toward the back of Nassun’s neck… and then he stops himself. No. She is more to him than just relief from pain. Use her, commands the voice. Break her. So willful, like her mother. Train this one to obey. No, Schaffa thinks back, and braces himself to bear the lash of retaliation. It is only pain. So Schaffa tucks Nassun in, and kisses her forehead, and puts out the light as he leaves.

Now she has the freedom to be fully who and what she is, and she no longer fears that self. Now she has someone who believes in her, trusts her, fights for her, as she is. So she will be what she is.

He merely watches her, smiling and twitching now and again as the silver sparks and tugs within him. That’s been happening to him a lot, lately. Nassun isn’t sure why.

Given a choice between death and the barest possibility of acceptance, they were desperate, and we used that. We made them desperate.”

“It was wrong to treat your kind so. You’re people. What we did, making tools of you, was wrong. It is allies that we need—more than ever now, in these darkening days.”

You should imagine me as what I truly am among my kind, then: old, and powerful, and greatly feared. A legend. A monster.

Now you know that miracles are a matter of just effort, just perception, and maybe just magic.

“Calling someone a rogga-lover is bad!” “I… didn’t say that.” But in a way, she did. If Jija misses Mama and Uche, then that means he loves them, and that makes him a rogga-lover. But. I’m a rogga. She knows better than to say this. But she wants to.

“Roggas,” he says, and the word sounds like filth in his mouth, “lie, sweetening. They threaten, and manipulate, and use. They’re evil, Nassun, as evil as Father Earth himself. You aren’t like that.” That’s a lie, too. Nassun has done what she had to do to survive, including lying and murder. She’s done some of these things in order to survive him. She hates that she’s had to, and is exasperated by the fact that he apparently never realized it. That she’s doing it now and he doesn’t see. Why do I even love him anymore? Nassun finds herself thinking as she stares at her father.

It does not comfort Nassun to know that there is a reason—a specific reason—for what her father has done. All she can think is, Uche never lost control like that; Mama wouldn’t have let him. It’s true. Mama had been able to sess, and still, Nassun’s orogeny from all the way across town sometimes. Which means Uche didn’t do anything to provoke Jija. 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.

Jija steps back, as if she has hit him. “That isn’t why I let you live up there.” He isn’t letting anything; Schaffa made him. He’s even lying to himself now. But it is the lies he’s telling her—as he has been, Nassun understands suddenly, her whole life—that really break her heart. He’s said that he loved her, after all, but that obviously isn’t true. He cannot love an orogene, and that is what she is. He cannot be an orogene’s father, and that is why he constantly demands she be something other than what she is.

“No vote,” you say. It’s so quiet that you can hear water trickling out of the pipes in the communal pool, hundreds of feet below. “Leave. Go join Rennanis if they’ll have you. But if you stay, no part of this comm gets to decide that any other part of this comm is expendable. No voting on who gets to be people.”

We are in Lerna’s apartment. I’ve put you in his bed. He will like that, I think. You will, too, once you want to feel human again. I do not begrudge you these connections. You need them. (I do not begrudge you these connections. You need them.)

Thus I wait. And hours or days later when Lerna returns to his apartment, stinking of other people’s blood and his own weariness, he stops short at the sight of me, standing watchman in his living room. He’s still for only a moment. “Where is she?” Yes. He’s worthy of you.

“How honorable of you,” he says, in a tone that he probably means as an insult. No more honorable than his decision not to eat your other arm. Some things are simple decency.

“Why?” It takes a year for me to realize he’s speaking to me and not himself. By the time I figure it out, however, he has finished the question. “Why do you stay with her? Are you just… hungry?” I resist the urge to crush his head. “I love her, of course.” There; I’ve managed a civil tone.

Sleep, my love. Heal. I’ll stand guard over you, and be at your side when you set forth again. Of course. Death is a choice. I will make certain of that, for you. (But not for you.)

“Father Earth fought back,” she says. “As one does, against those who seek to enslave. That’s understandable, isn’t it?”

The way of the world isn’t the strong devouring the weak, but the weak deceiving and poisoning and whispering in the ears of the strong until they become weak, too.

Suddenly it doesn’t matter. Nassun sighs and rubs her face with her hands, as weary as Father Earth must be after so many eternities of hate. Hate is tiring. Nihilism is easier, though she does not know the word and will not for a few years. It’s what she’s feeling, regardless: an overwhelming sense of the meaninglessness of it all.