The Fifth Season

Essun and Hoa settle down to sleep outside a roadhouse, and then wake at dawn to the sound of screams. Essun grabs Hoa and runs but realizes when they stop to rest that she’ll need to return to fetch more water. Hoa suggests going back to the creek, but Essun doesn’t want to lose a day’s travel; she assures Hoa that even if a gang has seized the roadhouse, she can overpower them with orogeny.

However, the only person in the roadhouse is a woman who appears commless: “Her skin isn’t just covered in dirt; the dirt is ground in, a permanent fixture” (178). The woman was filling canteens but moves aside to give Essun access to the pump. She then begins to chat with Essun, describing a test she’s devised to see whether the shake contaminated the local aquifers. Essun guesses that the woman is a geomest, but she denies this.

Essun asks about the screams she heard earlier, and the woman says she thinks it was an animal attack. This proves to be true: The woman tries to leave, only to stop short at the sight of a kirkhusa (an otter-like creature that becomes carnivorous during Seasons).

Ignoring Essun’s warnings, Hoa approaches the kirkhusa, which grabs his arm in its mouth. Before Essun can react, she realizes that the kirkhusa is turning into stone, glass, and crystal; Hoa, ashamed, says he “hadn’t meant for [Essun] to see this, yet” (188). He then moves his arm, shattering the kirkhusa and freeing himself. Though still shaken, Essun takes Hoa’s hand and leads him away, the woman following behind.

Damaya settles into the routine of Fulcrum life, where there are strict rules regarding cleanliness, lectures featuring impromptu oral exams, and rumors that grits (students) who fail “Applied Orogeny” get frozen to death. Nevertheless, she’s largely content: She does well in her classes, and she admires the ringed orogenes, who seem to “know what they are, and [to] have accepted all that means, and [to] fear nothing” (196).

Damaya keeps to herself for the first six months, in part because most of her fellow grits grew up in the Fulcrum (or at least in the wealthy Equatorial regions). When an older boy named Maxixe strikes up a conversation with her, Damaya is mistrustful. Her suspicions prove warranted the following day: Someone steals her shoes, causing her to fail an inspection, then slips alcohol into her drink at dinner.

Realizing the Fulcrum could decide to “ice” her if this continues, Damaya seeks out a girl named Crack to help her. Crack’s lack of control has made her an outcast, and she agrees to help Damaya find the perpetrators. They plant Damaya’s shoes in Maxixe’s chest, and Damaya notifies an instructor of the “theft.” When the shoes are discovered, Maxixe turns to a boy named Jasper and accuses him of stealing the shoes the first time. Jasper begins to cry, revealing that Crack was in on the plot as well: She traded the shoes to a Fulcrum cleaner for alcohol. Crack retorts that Jasper traded sexual favors to the cleaner in exchange for a letter to his mother.

As Damaya watches in horror, the instructor takes Maxixe, Crack, and Jasper away. Before leaving, Crack tells Damaya she was simply trying to deflect attention from herself: “One more slip-up and I’m done for, but you, you’re Little Citizen Perfect” (209). In the aftermath of the incident, Jasper is sent to a satellite Fulcrum in the Arctic and Crack disappears. Damaya concludes it’s not safe to make friends and sticks to herself, but her fellow students no longer bully her.   

Syenite returns to the governor’s mansion alone the following day. She tells Asael—whom she suspects might have poisoned Alabaster—that she’s capable of clearing the harbor herself. The women argue, and Syen threatens to leave after Asael calls her a “rogga,” forcing Asael to finally fetch the lieutenant governor—a woman named Heresmith, who apologizes for Asael’s behavior and accompanies Syen to the harbor.

Once there, Syen realizes there’s something besides coral impeding traffic. The coral is growing on top of something large that Syen, to her frustration, can’t identify:

She can’t feel it. She should be able to, if it’s pushing up the seafloor like this. She can feel the weight of the water atop it, and the rock deformed by its weight and pressure underneath, and the strata around it, but not he actual obstruction itself. There might as well be a big empty hole on the bottom of the harbor (220).

Syen explains the situation to Heresmith and Asael: She can clear the coral away, but it will eventually grow back on top of the unknown object. Heresmith worries that Allia won’t be able to afford either the additional orogeny, or a geomest study on the obstruction, and Syen agrees to do what she initially warned was too dangerous: Use orogeny to move the object. She reaches out, only to once again find something pulling her against her will and filling her with its power, which she uses to free the object.

As Syenite comes back to herself, she sees an obelisk emerging from the water:

But something’s wrong with it, which becomes clear as it rises. At the midpoint of the shaft, the clear, crystalline beauty of the thing gives way to cracks. Massive ones, ugly and black-tinged, as if some contaminant from the ocean floor has seeped in during all the centuries that the thing must have lain down there (230).

She then notices the body of a dead stone eater at the center of the cracks and realizes that it’s somehow responsible for the obelisk’s condition.

The commless woman—Tonkee—takes Essun and Hoa to spend the night in her cave, which is “full of contraptions, books, and junk she’s scavenged” (233). Tonkee hopes to study Hoa, but whenever Essun tries to question him about who he is or what he did to the kirkhusa, he becomes upset.

The next day, the three resume traveling south. Conditions steadily worsen as ash begins to fall, and they run into fewer and fewer fellow travelers. Essun speaks to one group of Equatorials about what happened, and they tell her they saw a “red light flare up at one point [on the horizon], then it spread off to the east and west” (237); an ash cloud then engulfed them, and they fled.

As they travel, Essun sometimes stops to buy food or supplies; most people haven’t yet realized the severity of the Season, so she’s able to purchase these relatively cheaply. Hoa continues to guide the group’s movements, but after a few weeks, he starts to have trouble; he tells Essun that he senses a large group of orogenes nearby, which interferes with his ability to specifically track Nassun. Essun doesn’t understand why or how orogenes would gather in one place, but since Hoa believes Nassun passed close to that location, she decides to seek it out.