Outho frowned and handed the stone back to Starr. “Your mother believed—believes—that as long as there are untested gems, then there’s a chance that there’s still a gem that can change our fate. That can put us back in the favour of the Gods, restore balance, and keep us from ruin. I believe that as well. If we stopped trying because we thought every valuable discovery had already been made, then society would stagnate, there’d be no more progression. We would no longer try to improve ourselves, our world, for the better. We would live our lives quickly, until the gems were all dust, and then we’d be dust, too. I choose to live with hope.”

  Starr bit her lip and nodded. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Outho laid a heavy hand on her shoulder. “Don’t be sorry for expressing your doubt. You have walked a hard road this past week. It’s only normal for you to have doubts. You just have to remember to fight through them.” Outho wrapped Starr into a hug, and she closed her eyes for a moment, trying to remember everything about him: the feel of his woollen shirt under her fingers, the way he smelled of spiced tisane even though they hadn’t drank any with supper. She tried to lock the details away in her mind, fearful that she would lose Outho like she had lost her mother, her father. Afraid that if she lost Outho, that she would forget him like she feared she was already forgetting her mom.

  Outho excused himself to go out to his garden, an outbuilding where he grew fresh food. Starr went into the sitting room, where she found Hinton curled up on the springy chair. “That’s my spot,” she said.

  Hinton’s eyes popped open and he jumped up.

  Starr laughed. “I’m just kidding. You can sit there.”

  “No, this is your home. I mean, I think this is your home?” He held out a long arm and indicated for her to take the seat. His sleeve was pushed up to his elbow, revealing his smooth skin.

  “Sometimes,” Starr replied, running a hand over the end table that held the amethyst geode. The amethysts inside the geode were too small to be much use as messenger stones, hence the reason it remained in Outho’s house as decoration. “But most of the time my home is the road.”

  “Mine too.” Hinton slipped over to the couch and stretched out, resting his feet at one end and his head at the other. “Sometimes I get home to my parents’ and I just don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know what to do when I’m not moving. Other times, it feels so good to stop.”

  Starr sat down in the springy chair and was joined a minute later by Drift, who jumped up onto her lap and curled up into a ball. “Usually it feels good to be here, but my heart is still racing. This gem—I’m worried that it’s nothing, that it will be useless. But then I worry that it’s something, and that those goons will catch us and take it. Take me—” She shook her head. “I won’t get the rest I usually do here.”

  Hinton’s look was one of understanding. She could see that he was on edge as well. He jumped when Outho thumped back into the house with his heavy leather pack laden with equipment. And jumped again when Starr shifted in the chair, causing it to squeak loudly. They spent the rest of the evening going through the supplies, checking ropes for wear, checking hammers for loose heads, checking poles for weak spots and netting for holes. Only at the end of the evening did Starr realize that Hinton didn’t have a piece of peridot.

  “How do you not have a peridot gem?” she said, her stomach in knots at the thought of Hinton already having gone so long near the crater without one.

  “I’ve never been this far east before,” he said, his face flush. He sat on the floor beside her, legs crossed, a small aluminum box between them. He looked worried, and Starr realized she was probably the one that was worrying him.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ve been far enough away from the crater. But tomorrow we’ll be right next to it. You’ll need the peridot. You should always have one, really.”

  Outho came out of his bedroom with a peridot pendant in his hands. The stone, still rough cut, had been wrapped in copper wire to hold it secure. He handed it over to Hinton, who attached the pendant to the chain he wore around his neck, plain now that he had sold the cart and the key along with it.

  “How much do I owe you?” he asked Outho.

  “Nothing,” Outho said. “We’re on the same side, you and I.” He gave Hinton a firm nod. Starr felt a flare of pride that Outho approved of Hinton, that after all that had happened she’d at least made the right choice in companion.

  So why was she still thinking about Flint, and everything he had done to warn them? Why was she wondering if Flint was on their side, and hoping that the answer was yes?

  They left when bloom hit the horizon. The morning light was a mix of the crater’s yellow glow and the orange-brown tinge of the sky. The black ground glittered, the sharp, glassy rocks reflecting the morning’s glow.

  They followed one another in a tight line as they angled through the spaces between the boulders. Occasionally they were forced to take off their backpacks in order to pass through a narrow opening. Hinton and Starr had both brought all of their belongings, though Starr had opted to leave Drift at the house, worried that the cat would try to walk on the crater.

  As they walked, Hinton clutched his peridot pendant. He’d never been to the crater, but he had heard about it all his life. It was said that the crater was both a blessing and a curse, but he believed it was only the latter. Without the meteor, the skies would still be blue and they would have no need of gems. Without the crater, he wouldn’t need the peridot to keep him alive.

  The peridot was hot in his hand. Hinton let it drop back to his chest and reached out instead to grasp the rocks surrounding him as he scrabbled up a small rise of broken stones. The sharp rocks poked at his flesh, but the gloves he’d borrowed from Outho kept his skin from being cut open.

  Outho had also lent him a pair of leather chaps that he’d tied over his light cotton pants. “You don’t want to cut your legs up,” Outho said. Now, as Hinton slipped through tight passages between the sharp, upthrust sections of earth that hid their path like a labyrinth, he understood why Starr’s work pants were so thick. Without the right clothing, he would arrive at the crater covered in blood.

  “Why are the rocks so sharp?” he asked Starr at the top of the rise. For a moment, he could see the landscape around them. It was just more sharp, uneven ground for miles and miles, except for the great bowl-like depression a short ways off.

  “It’s like this because of the heat and force of Impact,” she said. “If rock is exposed to enough heat and pressure, it changes, metamorphoses.”

  “Like smelting?”

  “More or less,” Starr said. “The meteor formed this rock when it made the crater. Everything in sight and even beyond was killed when the meteor struck. In a way, even the natural rock died and was reborn as something new.”

  “That’s one way to put it.” Hinton shifted the pack on his back, redistributing the weight. “How did you come by owning the land, Outho?”

  Outho, who led the way, glanced over his shoulder. His voice was deep and carried well as they climbed down and then up over another small incline. “This land has been in my family for a couple hundred years,” he replied. “My grandfather was away in Armason when Impact occurred. The sky lit up, the whole world shook. The first thing he did was ride for home. My family bred horses. This area was known as the Bread Plains. We had the finest horses around, or so the stories go. But when he arrived, there was nothing here. It was so hot he couldn’t even get to the land for weeks. He moved closer every day as the ground cooled. When he finally reached the house, all that was left was a slight depression in the ground, marking the foundation of the old house. He rebuilt his house on the same spot. Received a new deed for the land—an even larger property than he had held before because who would want to own this burnt, dead scrub of nothing? Four years later when gem charging was discovered, he found a new way of life, and my family has been working here ever since.”

  “He must have known many of those that perished.” Hinton thought of the tall, obelisk monuments in Armason that were inscribed with the names of all those that had died from the crater strike. The monuments were as tall as ten-story buildings; thirteen pillars set in front of Government House so no one ever forgot.

  There were no monuments for those that were lost after Impact, for those that died because the sun no longer shone, because the only rain that fell for years was dirty, because food shortages occurred in the first six months and hadn’t stopped since. There were no monuments for those who were still dying because of hunger.

  They reached the top of another incline and Outho stopped. He pulled a long metal rod from his belt and stretched it out, holding it to his eye. A sight-scope. Outho scanned their surroundings, all three-hundred-and-sixty degrees. Once he was satisfied with whatever it was he was looking for, he closed the sight-scope and reattached it to his belt. “Can’t be overly cautious,” he said. “There’s no one else in sight.” He nodded and they continued on.

  The weaving didn’t stop. Why Hinton had thought the pathway to the crater would be a straight shot, he wasn’t sure. The closer they got the more his feet ached, but the more his pulse pounded in anticipation. He was going to see something that many people only dreamed of. Already, he’d seen more of the world than his mother ever had. He couldn’t wait to tell her about this. The yellow glow on the horizon brightened, the air around them warmed. He had heard that the crater gave off its own heat. In the cold winter months in Caloon, people joked about moving to the crater, living on its hot surface, but they couldn’t because touching the surface of the crater itself lead to a quick death. That was why they had all the rods and all the netting. Because if they went on the crater themselves, even their charged peridot charms wouldn’t save them.

  They didn’t stop to eat breakfast, but had a handful of nuts and some dried fruit as they hiked. It was a three hour walk to the crater. Starr had estimated it would take an hour to charge the gem, but she wasn’t sure given that different gems charged at different rates and no one had ever charged taaffeite before.

  He had stayed up late with Starr, who’d told him about her mother’s drawings that hung on Outho’s walls. She still hadn’t shown him what was in the notebook she worked on so diligently when there was nothing else to do, but he knew it had something to do with gems and prospecting. He’d caught a glimpse of a few pages, and saw some maps as well as sketches of gems. There were all types of gemstones, minerals that could be cut and polished to a shine. Minerals that could be charged. They had different cleavage plains, different properties such as colour and strength, which Hinton wasn’t sure he understood. But that didn’t matter. He believed in Starr’s work, in what they were doing together—searching for gems that could help them survive this life, even make it better.

  But he’d never understood the mission so clearly as when he spoke with Outho the previous afternoon.

  He hadn’t known Outho was a member of the Balentica, but he had suspected.

  “I feel well balanced today,” Hinton said to Outho the minute Starr disappeared inside the house. He’d asked Outho to show him the grounds so that he would understand the lay of the land, but also to speak to Outho without Starr present.

  “I wondered why you came so far, gave up so much, to help her,” Outho said, tucking his hands into the pockets of his black woollen pants.

  “The Balentica isn’t the only reason. Though the Grand Master did assign me this mission. I’m really just a messenger. But the way things rolled out, I was the only one in Bazeen that could help Starr. And I knew Diamond, passed information for her before.”

  Outho watched him, weighed his words, then nodded. Outho told Hinton about his own work with the Balentica, which was much like his own role. Outho passed information from the scientists to the Balentica, keeping tabs on any new discoveries or experiments the government scientists were doing, which in the past ten years had been less and less.

  “I don’t know why Diamond never told Starr,” Hinton said. “But I had to tell Starr about Diamond to get her to trust me. I assume she doesn’t know you’re a member, which is why I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know if you wanted her to know.”

  Outho took a long look at his house and sighed. Then he waved for Hinton to follow as they walked over to a long, low-lying building that held nothing but beds for visiting scientists—though there were none present at the moment.

  Outho showed him around half-heartedly as they discussed the Balentica and what to tell Starr.

  “Diamond wanted her to decide when she was old enough. She didn’t want her to choose the Balentica because it was all she knew. After all, Diamond and I have spent many years working on the Balentica’s behalf, and we have little to show for it. No money, no gems that have saved us from this cursed fate. Food still grows scarcer. BGMC gains more power every passing year.”

  Hinton kicked at a dusty black rock as they exited the bunkhouse. “My parents felt the same way,” Hinton said. “When I was ten I became obsessed with the Gods, obsessed with wondering why this would happen to us. I know the Gods aren’t conscious beings, that this wasn’t done on purpose, but the system’s supposed to be in balance. Our world exists because of balance. So why has our world tipped toward destruction? You don’t want to know the depths I researched, reading book after book. Asking my aunt and uncle all sorts of questions until finally my parents returned home and I could ask them.” Hinton looked up at the orange sky, the thick cover of cloud, dust, and dirt that swirled in the light breeze. “I remember my father smiling. I remember the proud gleam in his eyes as he said, ‘Now I know you’re my son.’ He taught me all about the Balentica, all about his work to find a way to regain the balance. To find that missing ingredient. The anti-meteor.”

  Outho nodded. “Diamond believed that there must be an element out there that can counteract the meteor. Shut it off.”

  “Aluminum?”

  Outho shook his head. “Aluminum stops a charged gem from working, but if it’s placed on the crater it immediately turns to ash. The crater isn’t a charged gem, it’s something different. But that something still must have a weakness.”

  Hinton admitted to Outho another reason he had travelled so far with Starr: because he had never known anyone as smart as her, as knowledgeable as her, and as passionate as her when it came to rocks and gems—even Diamond. And he desperately wanted that knowledge, because it was possibly the only thing that could save them all.

  Outho had provided Hinton with a stone to contact the Grand Master.

  Bring the girl and the stone here. We will await you.

  That was the only message he’d received. No other offer of assistance. Though it was likely the Balentica wasn’t in the position to provide them with any assistance out in the middle of nowhere anyway. If they wanted help, they had to get to Armason and hope the Grand Master could get them a private audience with Government House.

  Now here he was, about to help charge a gem that had never been charged in the history of Yurdeh. It wouldn’t make him a geologist, but it would bring him at least one step closer.

  When they crested the final rise, Hinton’s breath stopped. He stood in awe at what felt like the edge of the world. In front of him was a yellowish-green glowing field. It was smoother—or maybe it was smooth, it was too bright to know for sure—than the surrounding rock. It was round, more or less, and bordered by rigid black rock. The border was jagged, raised, the meteor sunk deep into the earth. It was easy to see that most of its mass must be hidden beneath the surface.

  Most of the land around the crater was much higher than the glowing yellow surface. There were many sharp cliffs, and only a few softer-looking inclines. He understood now why so many people thought the world was ending when Impact happened. Why so many still thought the world was ending. Even he had a hard time believing that there could be anything out there in the natural world that could defeat such a behemoth.

  “Welcome to Death Point,” Starr said, her lips twisted into a teasing smirk.

  “Wait, what? Did you say Death Point?” Hinton chased after Starr as she pushed ahead, heading down the final incline to the rim of the crater. The path here was narrow and had steep sections that required jumping down from one ledge to another, but the way was still passable, more so because rocks on either side of the path formed walls he could brace himself against.

  “That’s right,” Starr said. “Welcome to the resting place of the sad souls who died when they tried to charge hematite.”

  “Against my grandfather’s advice I might add!” Outho shouted from further ahead, where he was passing a row of small white rocks.

  Hinton stepped closer and realized that they weren’t rocks at all, but skulls.

  He thought for a moment that he might be sick, or that he might faint, which would be most unbecoming. Fainting or being sick were the two last things he ever wanted to do in front of Starr.

  He clenched his fists to his sides and forced himself to look at the skulls. They were dry, pure bone, no trace of flesh left.

  “Did the poison strip them so clean?” he asked, his eyes curious now that he had forced them to look. Even though they were all skulls, each one was different somehow, unique. One had a large gap where the nose would be, one had a large jaw, a narrower forehead.

  “Yes, so don’t ever play around with hematite. Unless you’re looking to lose a lot of weight really fast, I suppose. Or you want to join these fellows in their eternal rest.”

  Starr turned around and waggled her fingers at Hinton as she gave him a sly smile. He laughed, glad she was there to make light of the situation. If she wasn’t afraid to charge the new gem, then he wouldn’t be either. Starr knew what she was doing. He just had to trust her. Even though they had no idea what they were in for with the taaffeite, at least they’d brought precautions.

  Unlike the poor souls who’d lost their lives when they charged hematite, they’d brought an aluminum box. The use of aluminum to block charged gems hadn’t been discovered until after those men were already dead. Now, knowing that aluminum could be used to block a charged gem’s powers, they knew to have it on hand for emergency use. Hinton told himself all of this as they reached the rim of the crater. But he still found his hand wandering to the pendant hanging around his neck. At least that would keep him from getting crater sickness. But all thoughts of sickness and pendants and aluminum went out of his mind as they reached their destination and the blinding glow of the meteor stunned him to momentary silence.

 

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