Chapter 7 #2
In the center is a long table at waist height, and Eliri pats it before kneeling to press something in the wall.
A panel opens to reveal multiple drawers, and Iriset stares as Eliri withdraws a stylus and vellum and a contraption that looks like a rose cactus made of glass. “Up,” Eliri says, and Iriset obeys.
“Clothes on?” she asks, and Eliri nods.
Iriset lays herself out on her back, and Eliri taps her claws to the corner of the table.
Threads of force shoot up, and the Adept Hand uses her crystal claws to pinch and move them into arches across Iriset’s body.
Once four force-arches cover her, at face, chest, hips, and ankles, Eliri efficiently draws multiple lines of force between each in an octagonal nautilus pattern using the stylus, then activates it.
Forces zap themselves into place, glimmering golden against the air, and Iriset can taste the flavor of them when she laughs. Ecstatic and flow dominate, but falling and rising have their places, too. Iriset desperately wants to learn to use the table.
“How am I, Adept Hand?” she asks.
Eliri ignores the question as she pulls the diagnostic mesh tighter and tighter against Iriset’s body, poking at it until she creates a swirl like an eye just where the dart bit hard into Iriset’s ribs.
Then she links the diagnostic mesh to the glass cactus and manipulates several of its petals.
A map of Iriset’s body appears in the air above the rose, as if threads were sketched on an invisible surface.
Iriset holds back a squeal by literally biting her lips together.
This would have made curing her mother’s apostatical cancer so much simpler.
“No sign of deterioration, no sign of infection,” Eliri says. “The surgeon is good. This Hand will encourage a sweep for the mesh to detect anything unusual, though it might malfunction because of the excessive fraying.”
“What does that mean?” Iriset cranes her neck to look down her body at the shimmer of the mesh.
“The evaporation of inner design. Does Iriset know it?”
“No,” Iriset says, horrified at both the thought and her own ignorance.
“A natural occurrence,” Eliri says, focus on the mesh as she tugs at a few thin lines with her claws, holding steady as she loops another thread with the stylus. “Energy transforms—like life and death, but more mundane usually—between states like water and ice, or between rising and falling.”
Iriset nods, though Eliri doesn’t seem to notice.
“Evaporation is also the name for the energy unused during a body’s natural transformations.
Food to fuel, for example. It is body heat, it is excess breath, gas, a byproduct of internal design work.
It should be smooth, if a design functions as intended.
Iriset’s evaporation has frayed ends, jagged tendrils in and out, where the excess does not know what to be. ”
“Can it be healed?”
“It will heal itself. No excess work, no more blowback, and Iriset will be…”
Eliri trails off and Iriset waits, but the designer is picking apart threads of the mesh over Iriset’s lower abdomen. “…fine,” she finally finishes. “Iriset, rest. The sweep may take time. Need anything?”
“No,” Iriset murmurs, closing her eyes. Rest sounds very good, even without a pillow. The tingle of the diagnostic mesh seems to embrace her, and Iriset likes it. She drifts to sleep thinking she should be more interrogatory about this whole time-travel thing.
When Iriset wakes again, she aches with a weariness of long hard work, and there’s a persistent gloop of nausea in her stomach that might be starvation again. She’s been working too hard for her body to keep up. Maybe she can get Shahd to—
Wait. Iriset’s eyes fling open as she recalls the reason she’s reclined on a hard table and tingling from the effects of a force-array blanket wrapped over her.
She sits up, ruining the array—no, it’s a diagnostic mesh. She swipes at the threads of force. They stick weirdly to her fingers before dissipating.
“Sunderer,” says the numen, suddenly at her side. A cold arm around her shoulders helps prop her up. The mesh fully disintegrates.
“Numen,” she answers, looking at its too-close eyes, the shards of black-diamond iris around ruby-pink pupil, its silvery-white skin smooth and youthful even though it’s frowning slightly.
Its pink-silver hair is bound up into a luscious bun with two hair sticks dangling golden chains and tiny glass bumblebees. She blinks hard. It’s so whimsical.
The numen touches her lips, then skims cold, too-long fingers against her cheek. “You will be fine,” it says.
Carefully, Iriset pulls away from the numen.
It stands beside the diagnostic table watching her.
Beyond it, Eliri waits with her hands folded and her eyes down.
Iriset draws her legs up and crosses them, resettling a little in her body.
Whether it’s the diagnostic mesh or the lab’s normal status, Iriset doesn’t feel quite as tingly as before.
There’s no need to breathe an eight-count or balance her inner design.
“We’re at the end of the Apostate Age?” she asks in mirané. “Do you know exactly when?”
It shrugs.
“And the Moon-Eater?”
“Here, alive.”
“And you?”
“Me?” It frowns.
“Are you… well? Time travel didn’t scramble anything? And you’ve spoken with your… friend?”
The numen snorts. “No time scramble. The Moon-Eater is the Moon-Eater.”
Iriset studies it as best she can, unable to read any nuance in the shift of muscles beneath its milky skin. It could hide anything from her, probably. “Did I do this?”
It hops onto the diagnostic table and sits, mirroring her pose.
It even shortens its spine and limbs so that it is exactly her height.
An old god tilting its head as she does, blinking when she blinks, and smiling when she smiles wryly.
“If you’re trying to cheer me up, numen, it’s not necessary. I’m not upset.”
“You did this,” it says. “Sunderer.”
“I want to know what that means.”
“I showed you rivation already, how to pull apart threads of force so tiny they are invisible, and how in that deconstruction, power is created. The process was called rivation, and the result sundering by the first sunderer I met.”
“It shouldn’t work, though,” Iriset argues, having believed for her entire life that forces couldn’t be created or destroyed. Only changed.
The numen raises a brow, and in an instant Singix Es Sun sits before Iriset, perfect in every way.
She closes her eyes. “Stop.” But she understands its double-edged point: Based on Iriset’s understanding of design and the material world, the numen should be impossible.
And based on what everyone in the Holy Empire believed, what Iriset did, impersonating Singix, marrying the Vertex Seal, living hidden for quads, and building her massive spider array: All of it should have been impossible, too.
A featherlight touch to her cheek has her opening her eyes. Singix’s wet-earth-black gaze meets hers, and Iriset feels the deep ache of loss all over again, the loss she didn’t have time to feel before because Amaranth didn’t give her the chance.
Though she has so many questions—Who was the first sunderer? How old is the numen? How does it know the Moon-Eater?—Iriset changes the subject again. “I want to meet the Moon-Eater.”
Singix melts back into the numen, who scowls. “Will you like him better than me?”
“Ha!” Iriset laughs right in its face. “Are you so certain I like you at all?”
The numen grins with all its crowded layers of shark teeth.
Iriset mimics the expression, wondering how to pull the world apart, until the tiniest elements of forces split into power.
If she can learn sundering, then with it she can rebuild, change, remake anything.
Supposedly. The numen says, “Shade went to find Lyric méra Esmail,” it says with distaste.
“We are to share a meal, with Eliri and her spouse, too. Shade wants to show off.”
“Shade,” Iriset murmurs.
“The name I gave it long ago.”
“Did Shade give you a name, as well?” Iriset asks.
The numen narrows those black-diamond eyes. “Never.”
Iriset opens her mouth to protest its refusal, but catches on at the last moment. She makes a noise of disbelief but says, “Never.”
The numen slides off the table. “Are you ready?”
Looking past it to Eliri, who waits with the patience of a tree, Iriset says she is.