Chapter 18
An idea so good it’s bad
It hurts. There’s screaming in her ears. Something outside of her throbs, the air itself squeezing, expanding, squeezing, expanding. There’s weight on top of her, pressing her chest down, and beneath her the ground is cold and hard, also wet.
Iriset smells blood. Her face is sticky with it, and she can’t move one of her arms. She opens her eyes to blurry darkness. Bubbles of color pop at the edges of her vision.
Gasping a breath, she tastes ash and iron.
Suddenly the strangeness bursts and the whole world rushes in: An explosion, the building beside them is half blown apart, that is screaming, people screaming and crying for help, and an alarm shrieks through the neighborhood.
Angry pops like fireworks, sudden hard rain—something is still exploding—
Iriset pushes at the weight on her chest. It’s—
“Lyric,” she says, but can’t hear her own voice even in her own skull, there’s too much screaming, a ringing through her bones. With extreme effort she manages to roll enough that he falls away from her and she sits. She pushes him over. He’s covered in blood—
The left side of his face is half gone.
He isn’t breathing.
Iriset kneels over him, the ground swaying under her, and reaches for the marriage knot.
No—it’s gone, too, there’s nothing between them.
She unraveled it when they fucked, pulled it apart in a long trembling orgasm.
The heart force to undo a heart. She flattens her hands on Lyric’s chest and sucks in quick, shallow breaths, seeking ecstatic force.
Without thinking, she drags ecstatic from every part of her own body, scours herself, and in a bright burst shoves every shred through her arms and into her palms and rocks him with it.
“Lyric!” she yells, then again, and she can almost hear herself.
She slaps her hand on his chest, using the kinetic power to charge ecstatic again and again, and suddenly Lyric’s mouth falls open and he takes a ragged breath. His breath is shallow, slow; he is not going to survive this if she doesn’t fix it fast.
Iriset grabs his face. Blood trickles away from his ruined cheek, and her fingers find viscous material—not skin or muscles, no, it’s his eye, and bits of bone poke out around the socket.
A sharp shock of ecstatic cuts at her chest, and Iriset cries out at the pain; she clasps a hand around the weird pendant on the wire necklace he gave her—that last moment flashes back.
Lyric heard, or felt, or knew the explosion was coming, and he activated the defense necklace that was meant for him, that he put on her, can you defend yourself, and Iriset is fine!
Fine, shaken, aching like her whole body got punched through a wall, but the force-net protected her like some kind of shield bubble. And Lyric wasn’t inside.
Her hands shake as she tears the necklace away and unwinds the wires, takes the clay pendant and snaps it with a surge of energy. It’s small but sharp and pointed on one side now, good enough.
Shucking off her outer robe, Iriset starts tearing at it.
With a strip she wipes blood and worse away from Lyric’s face, careful around the delicate broken bones of his cheek and eye socket.
Focused, she scoops out what’s ruined and flicks it away, carefully unthinking.
Lyric shifts under her hand, but she still can’t hear if he’s whimpering, pained.
Just keep breathing, Lyric, she says, but cannot hear.
Using the fine wires of the necklace, Iriset quickly twists together a rudimentary quad frame; she’d give anything for a proper stylus right now.
Good thing Iriset is a genius and can snap ecstatic into one line, and sing force-notes to imbue the others with flow, falling, and rising, trusting herself even if she can’t hear the tones.
Then she uses the sharp clay pendant to cut the frame into Lyric’s skin.
It fits over his ruined eye socket, and when she puts a hand to either temple she lights him up with all four forces so the net flares to life and then falls into stasis.
She’s no surgeon, apostatical or otherwise, but she understands the basics of blood flow and bone structure and pulmonary rhythm and kinetic charge, the aspects of the body that correspond to each force on a basic level.
Iriset squeezes her eyes closed and settles her hands against his chest again. Lyric is breathing.
For a moment her throat closes.
The blood loss is probably already substantial, and only a constant trickle now, but the injuries to his eye socket, cheek, probably tiny abrasions throughout, and whatever damage there is to the sensory…
whatevers! Nerves? Tendons? She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t have to know, you don’t have to know, she reminds herself.
All she has to do is keep him alive. The best way is to restructure the bone here, now, and close up the wound so that it’s more structurally sound for movement.
Before ash gets in or more dirt or anything to increase the likelihood of infection. The eye—
Later, a design surgeon can help, a real healer.
Iriset has never tried to make anything like this.
A missing piece. She does transformation, masks, reworking, redesigning.
Not something brand-new. She doesn’t know how to make a new eye, but she could make something out of glass or opal or better yet a resin, something that might even eventually work to connect with his brain in some way, if she’s good enough, or if she could find a proper replacement, which of course Lyric would never accept—
The idea occurs to her so completely, she’s halfway started before it hits her just how terrible it is.
The numen told her that sundering is design at the level of thought and feeling.
It is triggering rivation, and from that creating force she can manipulate with a nudge of will or a word.
It’s using her instinct and her inner forces to shift the smallest threads of force, the tiny particles that make force in the first place.
Rivation is like using magnetics and ecstatic charge to separate hematite from ochre, only she’s the magnet and the charge.
Iriset works fast.
First, some tools: There’s more fine wire from the necklace, and she twists it into something like two short styli, then binds them into forceps.
She shatters the smaller remaining side of the pendant, getting flakes of the clay.
They easily charge into ecstatic buttons.
She needs a sharp knife, but looking around is a mistake.
There’s rubble and bodies, smoke in too many colors, ash falling like rain.
Fire everywhere. No time to worry if any of it’s roaring closer.
With sharp clay Iriset scrawls the beginnings of a crawling design along Lyric’s scalp, sending it down his body to knit skin together.
Instead of changing skin color or texture, it’s just repair.
Easy. Easy. Then she takes the last of the wire and builds a tiny frame to teach threads of force what she needs, before inserting it into the stasis frame so Lyric’s bones get to work remaking themselves.
Just like you were before, she murmurs to him, to the bones.
It isn’t hard, this is nothing new, not a redesign: It’s only got to remake what his body remembers.
Without design vellum, Iriset cuts the next design into her own face, eyes closed and working by memory to get the correct force-sigils in the correct places, mirror images, and she doesn’t hesitate to activate it.
Heat suffuses the left side of her face, a flash of fire she grits her teeth against before it settles into a constant tingling warmth.
She touches her eyebrow and doesn’t feel much.
Hopefully blocking enough sensory information that the pain won’t debilitate her, but not so much she can’t feel what she’s doing.
Iriset opens her eyes as wide as they go, imagining that this will be smooth, precise, and it won’t kill her, either. With the clay ecstatic buttons, she sticks her left eyelids open.
It’s strange to watch it happen. To see the forceps. To hold her breath so she isn’t shaking even though she knows it’s best if she breathes carefully to smooth her motions. The truth is she’s too afraid to breathe.
But the clarity she feels is like a pristine spotlight shining on her in the midst of this carnage and chaos. That helps her dissociate just enough.
It hurts.
But not as badly as it should. Enough to remind her about this impossible thing she’s doing: cutting her own eyeball out, quickly, efficiently, with only two wire styli and her ferocious will, and centering all her considerable focus on the invisibly tiny details, the things she can’t know about how the eye connects to the brain, to its seat in her socket: She can’t know, but she can feel. She can sense. Sunder.
Pull gently apart, detach, unmake, she thinks, imagining it happens in a miniature shock wave, an orgasm, the threads of force and particles of her body behaving exactly, precisely the way she demands. Rivation, she thinks but doesn’t say: She can’t let herself move.
The pain cuts through the throb of her pulse, the ringing of screams in her ears. It’s so clarifying, Iriset wonders if this is what pain is truly for. It makes her hands steady again, shows her where to focus.
Then Iriset is holding her own eye in her hand, balanced in a tripod of two fingers and thumb, and she thinks, Oh, add another finger. Nothing made of three is stable.
Blood seeps down her cheek, but it isn’t flowing, isn’t spilling all her life down onto the broken cobbles of the crater city.
Iriset sways, lightheaded.
“No,” she commands herself.