10 Uniquely positioned #2
There’s a pause, even her hands still, and she says, “Right. Well, go ahead and rinse.”
Lyric dunks himself, rubbing fingers through his hair, helping the water do its work.
It fills his ears, and he can hear his pulse like a dull roar.
Lyric lets his arms drift and sinks down to sit at the bottom of the bath.
The heat presses his eyelids, and he opens his mouth to let water in, just enough to sit hot on his tongue.
Unable to breathe, he listens, refuses to fight the buoyancy lifting him off the tiles.
Before he chokes, he expels the water and stands. Water streams down his head and face, his shoulders. The bathwater ripples and splashes his belly.
Iriset watches him, submerged herself now. He wants to grab her and smoosh her against him, squeeze too tight. He wants to get back underwater and maybe stay there even when he needs air. He wants none of this to have happened.
“It’s almost the end,” he manages. “Of the Apostate Age.”
“Oh?” Iriset lifts both brows and nails him with a look he’s rarely seen on her: weariness bordering on displeasure.
He’s used to her passion, her reserve, her intelligence and humor, her wit, that spark of excitement when she got to argue even as Singix.
He’s used to intensity. But not this. He wonders if this is Silk, if this is the apostate, if this is how she always wanted to look at him.
Stupid, foolish Lyric, easily tricked, easily led.
“You’re staring,” Iriset says, displeasure melting into something sadder.
“You are, too.”
“You’re the second-most beautiful person I’ve known,” she says flippantly, but as she glances immediately away, Lyric hears the pain hiding in it, and he suddenly understands who the first was.
He remembers Iriset telling him that symmetry makes design easier, when she said his freckles were a gift from Aharté.
He wonders if making a mask of Singix’s face was easier.
With a sigh, Lyric moves through the water to sit on the bench a few lengths from Iriset. “Amado the Reconciler was one of Maimeri Sarenpet’s allies during the transition, it’s been assumed, and definitely in the immediate years following the establishment of the Vertex Seal. I met him today.”
Iriset grimaces. And Lyric presses, “But he didn’t know Maimeri. And he isn’t mirané. He’s written about as if he’s one of the first sixty-four mirané princes, though it’s never explicitly stated.”
Combing her fingers through her hair, Iriset shrugs. “Maybe it’s a different Amado.”
“But called the Reconciler, too? That’s too much coincidence. I know of Irsu River as well, one of the small kings before the transition, and not after.”
“Eliri?”
“The records of the Silent Chapel and mirané wouldn’t include a chimera or an apostate,” he says, though he has always believed it to be an oversight because one cannot learn from erased history.
“Her name is in one of the books in your forbidden library,” Iriset says.
“Also.” Lyric leans forward, pushing ripples toward her.
“You know the stories of how the Holy Syr arrived? I know you do because of that graffiti your lover painted. The Holy Syr arrives like a star in the sky, and with her is an alliraptor. You were”—he shies away from dead—“unconscious, so you didn’t see it, but a chimera alliraptor helped me.
Us. In the little crater. Who can do what the Holy Syr did?
Unravel the Moon-Eater and set up the first array of the Holy Design of Moonshadow City? Stop the moon in its orbit?”
Lyric knows he’s too impassioned, his words spitting out faster and faster. “Silk is Syr,” he whispers, reaching out underwater to grasp her wrist.
Iriset twists her arm to wrench away. “No,” she says firmly. “I can’t—I can’t catch the fucking moon, Lyric, and even if I could I won’t. I don’t want to. I said that already.”
“You said you don’t want to go home. But if there’s no Holy Syr, no unraveling, no Seal array, there wouldn’t be a home to go to anyway.”
“If it’s going to happen, it will happen. It happened already,” she says nonchalantly. But there’s an underlying tension. Lyric recognizes it. He knows her, even when he thinks he couldn’t possibly.
“Will it? It hasn’t already happened now.” Lyric tries to back down, to sound calm, too. “What if we interrupted it? We can’t make changes so big, Iriset. We can’t make too much of an impression on history.”
Iriset laughs once. “Can’t make a big impression? Do you remember who I am?”
Lyric snaps his mouth shut.
She snorts in less pretty amusement, “Changing history is fine with me. I don’t like your empire, Lyric. And I want to know more about apostasy, about the Moon-Eater! I want to know what sundering really is and why I can do it, apparently, and I want to learn how.”
“That’s your plan?”
Iriset looks him right in the eye again, and says meanly, “Planning has never been my job.”
Lyric stares back until Iriset fidgets, her expressions changing fluidly between stubborn to irritated, sad maybe, and back to frustration.
He wonders how she ever lied so well for so long.
He doesn’t ask. He suspects it has to do with sex.
Most of their conversations ended that way, as if to distract.
He understands why: Distraction sounds nice right now.
Her sandglass eyes flick from him to the water and back, to the wardrobe, to him, to the faucets, and they stick there for a moment.
Her jaw is square, balanced beautifully by lips fuller than Singix’s.
There’s a dusky peach blush across her warm Osahar cheeks, probably from the heat.
Water slides down her neck and collects in the dip between her clavicles, and the tops of her breasts shift slightly, weightless.
Lyric realizes that though he’s seen her body so much, touched it, made love with it, it was never exactly this, despite knowing that she didn’t change very much aside from skin and texture.
This is not his wife’s body, the body of that impossible hybrid Singix Es Sun and Silk the Apostate. This is just Iriset.
She leans back and looks at him again, catching his stare. “I suppose my plan will start with this damn marriage knot.”
He looks down at his hands, their edges wavering underwater. “You don’t think your Moon-Eater could undo it with a snap of his fingers?”
“I said I would do it myself,” she says tightly. “You sure have recovered your ability to verbalize.”
Lyric ignores the fact that she could read his earlier discomfort so precisely. “I’m going to find Maimeri Sarenpet, because the future cannot happen without him. And the alliraptor chimera. And some mirané people. They have to exist somewhere.”
Iriset leans back until her lips are at the surface of the water. She blows a few splashy bubbles. Through the wavering water, it looks like she’s hugging her middle.
“Is your wound still hurting?” Lyric asks.
She shakes her head. “Have you considered that you’re Maimeri? He’s the one who leads the terrible new world. He’s the father of the first Vertex Seal. Maybe it’s your place in the Holy Design never to go home, but to stay here and have babies. Make the miran yourself, Lyric Aharté.”
“With my wife, the Holy Syr?” he murmurs. Longing, and angry.
For that, Iriset splashes him.
Surprise makes him take it full in the face, sputtering.
By the time he wipes water from his stinging eyes, Iriset is glancing away—but not fast enough to hide the pressed little smile.
He gets out and goes to the dressing table to pick up the thin echo coin. “This was in your clothes.”
She looks back, and something precious slides across her expression before she shutters it. “Thank you.”
Lyric nods, replaces it on the table, and goes.