The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin Page B

we Guardians train,” he continues, perhaps not noticing that she has gone still. They are deep into the shatterland now; sheer, jagged rock faces, as high as the buildings in Brevard, frame the road on both sides for as far as the eye can see. Whoever built the road must have carved it, somehow, out of the earth itself. “We train,” he says again, “as Shemshena did. We learn how orogenic power works, and we find ways to use this knowledge against you. We watch for those among your kind who might become the next Misalems, and we eliminate them. The rest we take care of.” He leans over to smile at her again, but Damaya does not smile back this time. “I am your Guardian now, and it is my duty to make certain you remain helpful, never harmful.”
    When he straightens and falls silent, Damaya does not prompt him to tell another story, as she might have done. She doesn’t like the one he just told, not anymore. And she is somehow, suddenly certain: He did not intend for her to like it.
    The silence lingers as the shatterlands finally begin to subside, then become rolling green hillside. There’s nothing out here: no farms, no pastures, no forests, no towns. There are hints that people once lived here: She sees a crumbling, moss-overgrown hump of something in the distance that might have been a fallen-over silo, if silos were the size of mountains. And other structures, too regular and jagged to be natural, too decayed and strange for her to recognize. Ruins, she realizes, of some city that must have died many, many Seasons ago, for there to be so little of it left now. And beyond the ruins, hazyagainst the cloud-drifted horizon, an obelisk the color of a thundercloud flickers as it slowly turns.
    Sanze is the only nation that has ever survived a Fifth Season intact—not just once, but seven times. She learned this in creche. Seven ages in which the earth has broken somewhere and spewed ash or deadly gas into the sky, resulting in a lightless winter that lasted years or decades instead of months. Individual comms have often survived Seasons, if they were prepared. If they were lucky. Damaya knows the stonelore, which is taught to every child even in a little backwater like Palela. First guard the gates . Keep storecaches clean and dry. Obey the lore, make the hard choices, and maybe when the Season ends there will be people who remember how civilization should work.
    But only once in known history has a whole nation, many comms all working together, survived. Thrived, even, over and over again, growing stronger and larger with each cataclysm. Because the people of Sanze are stronger and smarter than everyone else.
    Gazing at that distant, winking obelisk, Damaya thinks, Smarter even than the people who built that?
    They must be. Sanze is still here, and the obelisk is just another deadciv leftover.
    “You’re quiet now,” says Schaffa after a while, patting her hands on the pommel to bring her out of her reverie. His hand is more than twice the size of hers, warm and comforting in its hugeness. “Still thinking about the story?”
    She has been trying not to, but of course, she has. “A little.”
    “You don’t like that Misalem is the villain of the tale. Thatyou are like Misalem: a potential threat, without a Shemshena to control you.” He says this matter-of-factly, not as a question.
    Damaya squirms. How does he always seem to know what she’s thinking? “I don’t want to be a threat,” she says in a small voice. Then, greatly daring, she adds, “But I don’t want to be… controlled… either. I want to be—” She gropes for the words, then remembers something her brother once told her about what it meant to grow up. “ Responsible . For myself.”
    “An admirable wish,” Schaffa says. “But the plain fact of the matter, Damaya, is that you cannot control yourself. It isn’t your nature. You are lightning, dangerous unless captured in wires. You’re fire—a warm light on a cold dark night to