The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin Read Free Book Online Page B

walk, people you’ve seen before at the market or via Jija’s business. You catch a few glances from them, too, but these are fleeting. They know your face enough that you are Not Stranger. For now, they’re too busy to remember that you may also be rogga’s mother .
    Or to wonder from which parent your dead rogga child might have inherited his curse.
    In the town center there are more people about. Here you blend in, walking at the same pace as everyone else, nodding if nodded to, trying to think about nothing so that your face falls into bored, disengaged lines. It’s busy around the headman’s office, block captains and caste spokespeople coming in to report what lockdown duties have been completed before heading back out to organize more. Others mill about, clearly hoping for word on what’s happened in Sume and elsewhere—but even here, no one cares about you. And why should they? The air stinks of broken earth and everything past a twenty-mile radius has been shattered by a shake greater than any living person has ever known. People have more important matters to concern them.
    That can change quickly, though. You don’t relax.
    Rask’s office is actually a small house nestled between the stilted grain-caches and the carriageworks. As you stand on tiptoe to see above the crowd, you’re unsurprised to see Oyamar, Rask’s second, standing on its porch and talking with two men and a woman who are wearing more mortar and mud than clothing. Shoring up the well, probably; that’s one of the things stonelore advises in the event of a shake, and which Imperiallockdown procedure encourages, too. If Oyamar is here, then Rask is elsewhere either working or—knowing Rask—sleeping, after having worn himself out in the three days since the event. He won’t be at home because people can find him too easily there. But because Lerna talks too much, you know where Rask hides when he doesn’t want to be disturbed.
    Tirimo’s library is an embarrassment. The only reason they have one is that some previous headwoman’s husband’s grandfather raised a stink and wrote letters to the quartent governor until finally the governor funded a library to shut him up. Few people have used it since the old man died, but although there are always motions to shut it down at the all-comm meetings, those motions never get quite enough votes to proceed. So it lingers: a ratty old shack not much bigger than the den of your house, packed nearly full with shelves of books and scrolls. A thin child could walk between the shelves without contorting; you’re neither thin nor a child, so you have to slip in sideways and sort of crabwalk. Bringing the crate is out of the question: You set it down just inside the door. But that doesn’t matter, because there’s no one here to peek inside it—except Rask, who’s curled up on a tiny pallet at the back of the shack, where the shortest shelf leaves a space just wide enough for his body.
    As you finally manage to push your way between the stacks, Rask starts out of a snore and blinks up at you, already beginning to scowl at whoever has disturbed him. Then he thinks, because he’s a levelheaded fellow and that’s why Tirimo elected him, and you see in his face the moment when you go from being Jija’s wife to Uche’s mother to rogga ’s mother to, oh Earth, rogga, too.
    That’s good. Makes things easier.
    “I’m not going to hurt anyone,” you say quickly, before he can recoil or scream or whatever he has tensed to do. And to your own surprise, at these words Rask blinks and thinks again, and the panic recedes from his face. He sits up, leaning his back against a wooden wall, and regards you for a long, thoughtful moment.
    “You didn’t come here just to tell me that, I assume,” he says.
    You lick your lips and try to hunker down in a crouch. It’s awkward because there’s not much room. You have to brace your butt against a shelf, and your knees encroach more than you like on