The rest of the arm, from which someone has stripped your shirt and jacket sleeves in order to bare it, has changed nearly past recognition. It’s your arm, you’re pretty sure. Beyond the fact that it’s still attached to your body, it’s got the shape you know like your own—well. Not as graceful and tapered as it used to be when you were young. You were heavyset for a while, and that still shows along the plush-looking forearm and slight sag under your upper arm. The bicep is more defined than it used to be; two years of surviving. The hand is clamped into a fist, the whole arm slightly cocked at the elbow. You always did tend to make fists while you were wrestling with a particularly difficult bit of orogeny.
But the mole, which once sat in the middle of your forearm like a tiny black target, is gone. You can’t turn the arm over for a look at your elbow, so you touch it. The keloid scar from where you once fell is impossible to feel anymore, though it should be slightly raised compared to the skin around it. That level of fine definition has vanished into a texture that is gritty and dense, like unpolished sandstone. Perhaps self-destructively you rub it, but no particles break off beneath your fingertips; it’s more solid than it looks. The color is an even, allover grayish tan that looks nothing like your skin.
“It was like this when Hoa brought you back.” Lerna, who has been silent throughout your examination. His voice is neutral. “He says he needs your permission to, ah …”
You stop trying to rub your stone skin off. Maybe it’s shock, maybe fear has robbed you of shock, maybe you’re really not feeling anything.
“So tell me,” you say to Lerna. The effort of sitting up, and seeing your arm, have restored your wits a little. “In your, uh, professional opinion, what should I do about this?”
“I think you should either let Hoa eat it off, or let one of us take a sledgehammer to it.”
You wince. “That’s a little dramatic, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think anything lighter would put a dent in it. You forget I had plenty of chances to examine Alabaster when this was happening to him.”
Out of nowhere, you think of Alabaster having to be reminded to eat because he no longer felt hunger. It’s not relevant, but the thought just pops in there. “He let you?”
“I didn’t give him a choice. I needed to know if it was contagious, since it seemed to be spreading on him. I took a sample once, and he joked that Antimony—the stone eater—would want it back.”
It wouldn’t have been a joke. Alabaster always smiled when he spoke the rawest truths. “And did you give it back?”
“You better believe I did.” Lerna runs a hand over his hair, displacing a small pile of ash. “Listen, we have to wrap the arm at night so that the chill of it doesn’t depress your body temperature. You’ve got stretch marks on the shoulder where it pulls your skin. I suspect it’s deforming the bones and straining the tendons; the joint isn’t built to carry this kind of weight.” He hesitates. “We can take it off now and give it to Hoa later, if you like. I don’t see any reason why you have to … to do it his way.”
You think Hoa is probably somewhere below your feet at this very moment, listening. But Lerna is being oddly squeamish about this. Why? You take a guess. “I don’t mind if Hoa eats it,” you say. You aren’t saying it just for Hoa. You really mean it. “If it will do him good, and get the thing off me in the process, why not?”
Something flickers in Lerna’s expression. His emotionless mask slips, and you see all of a sudden that he’s revolted by the idea of Hoa chewing the arm off your body. Well, put like that, the concept is inherently revolting. It’s too utilitarian a way of thinking about it, though. Too atavistic. You know intimately, from hours spent delving between the cells and particles of Alabaster’s transforming body, what’s happening in your arm. Looking at it, you can all but see the silvery lines of magic realigning infinitesimal particles and energies of your substance, moving this bit so that it’s oriented along the same path as that bit, carefully tightening into a lattice that binds the whole together. Whatever this process is, it’s simply too precise, too powerful, to be chance—or for Hoa’s ingestion of it to be the grotesquerie that Lerna plainly sees. But you don’t know how to explain that to him, and you wouldn’t have the energy to try even if you did.
“Help me up,” you say.
Tonkee gingerly takes hold of the stone arm, helping to support it so it doesn’t shift or flop and wrench your shoulder. She throws a glare at Lerna until he finally gets over himself and slides an arm under you again. Between the two of them, you manage to gain your feet, but it’s hard going. You’re panting by the end, and your knees are distinctly wobbly. The blood in your body is less committed to the cause, and momentarily you sway, dizzy and light-headed. Lerna immediately says, “All right, let’s get her back down.” Abruptly you’re sitting down again, out of breath this time, the arm awkwardly jacking up your shoulder until Tonkee adjusts it. The thing really is heavy.
(Your arm. Not “the thing.” It’s your right arm. You’ve lost your right arm. You’re aware of that, and soon you’ll mourn it, but for now it’s easier to think of it as a thing separate from yourself. An especially useless prosthesis. A benign tumor that needs to be removed. These things are all true. It’s also your rusting arm.)
You’re sitting there, panting and willing the world to stop spinning, when you hear someone else approach. This one’s speaking loudly, calling for everyone to pack up, break’s over, they need to do another five miles before dark. Ykka. You lift your head as she gets close enough, and it’s in this moment that you realize you think of her as a friend. You realize it because it feels good to hear her voice, and to see her resolve out of the swirling ash. Last time you saw her, she was in serious danger of being murdered by hostile stone eaters attacking Castrima-under. That’s one of the reasons you fought back, using the crystals of Castrima-under to ensnare the attackers; you wanted her, and all the other orogenes of Castrima, and by extension all the people of Castrima who depended on those orogenes, to live.
So you smile. It’s weak. You’re weak. Which is why it actually hurts when Ykka turns to you and her lips tighten in what is unmistakably disgust.
She’s pulled the cloth wrapping off the lower half of her face. Beyond her gray-and-kohl eye makeup, which not even the end of the world will stop her from wearing, you can’t make out her eyes behind her makeshift goggles—a pair of spectacles that she’s wrapped rags around to keep ash out. “Shit,” she says to Hjarka. “You’re never going to let me hear the end of it, are you?”
Hjarka shrugs. “Not till you pay up, no.”
You’re staring at Ykka, the tentative little smile freezing off your face.
“She’ll probably make a full recovery,” Lerna says. His voice is neutral in a way that you immediately sense is careful. Walking-over-a-lava-tube careful. “It’ll be a few days before she can keep up on foot, though.”
Ykka sighs, putting a hand on her hip and very obviously rifling through a series of things to say. What she finally settles on is neutral, too. “Fine. I’ll extend the rotation of people carrying the stretcher. Get her walking as soon as possible, though. Everyone carries their own weight in this comm, or gets left behind.” She turns and heads off.