Chapter 26
Keep me from doing it
When Iriset returns to her suite, the numen is sprawled on her bed. It actually seems to be floating several fingers above the blanket. She shakes her head with a smile. So strange, and yet so understandable. If Iriset were a numen, she’d do things like that all the time, too.
“Never,” she says, wondering where it’s been.
It grunts. Its eyes are shut, its silvery hair wavers like long strips of grass in a slow wind.
Iriset gently rubs at the skin around the opal eye, walking toward the design counter beside her bed.
She kneels and picks up the stylus she keeps in a nook of the stand and taps a few points around her eye socket.
Ecstatic flows reverse in a well design she learned from Eliri to momentarily numb the pain.
She uses the stylus to nudge the opal, and the tiny frame she’s improving every day pushes it out with a surprisingly dry pop.
There’s a softer prosthetic Eliri suggested that promotes healing while everything is still tender.
Eventually Iriset won’t need it, but stress isn’t helping the intricate process of integration.
“Why are you sad?” the numen asks.
“Lyric is leaving.”
“Good.”
With a sigh, Iriset stretches to her feet, thinks of Lyric stretching, thinks of him walking through the crater tunnel south along the banks of the Lapis River, where it widens into a delta.
She sits on the bed and pokes the numen in the ribs.
It doesn’t even flinch. Disappointing. “Are you ever ticklish?”
It rolls black-diamond eyes. “Why should I be?”
“It’s fun.”
“Shade is the one who wants to be human.”
“Ah, yes, you are wind,” she says, glancing at the moving hair. She tangles fingers in the ends and tugs a bit.
Its eyes bore into her, glowing for sure, in tiny firework bursts of pink. “Why were you so concerned about the eclipse?”
“It’s when the mirané people were made, during an eclipse. Lyric wants me to do it. He’s setting up all the pieces so it will be easier for me to simply give in and knock them down.”
“Could you? Make the miran?”
Iriset grimaces. “Maybe. If I tried, maybe.”
“It isn’t only an aesthetic,” the numen says, then wrinkles its nose. “Shade says Lyric Aharté is perfectly designed.”
Turning away, Iriset hangs her feet off the bed.
“The miran are designed in accordance with the Holy Design. They are only perfect if the Holy Design is perfect. Where it exists, their design is fundamentally ideal. Where it doesn’t, they aren’t.
Maybe they’re still balanced. This place feels like chaos to Lyric.
He’s making anchors to hold balanced space for himself. ”
“So you could make them, you could redesign someone in accordance with Holy Design.”
“Ugh, yes. Especially if I could study someone—like Lyric. Without him here, I can pretend I don’t know how.” Why is Never of all beings interrogating her about this?
“And you don’t want the miran to exist.”
“Of course not. I certainly don’t want to be responsible for creating them.
They aren’t necessary for completing the anchor, and you know what they’re like!
But Lyric will fight for them—he already is.
I’m worried time and that untethered array are already on his side.
Not knowing how is the only guarantee that will keep me from doing it. ”
Cool arms come around her, and the numen says, “Iriset, you’ve never done anything you didn’t want to do.”
“I didn’t want to take Singix’s life!” She jerks, trying to free herself, but the numen holds tight. It hums soothingly.
“You did. Once it was too late for her to live, you wanted it. To prove you could. I know you.”
Iriset slumps into its embrace. “Yes,” she whispers. “That’s why I don’t want to know how to make the miran, because what if I figure it out and just have to see it through? It would be the most ambitious project I’ve ever conceived of,” she tries to joke.
The numen holds her, and Iriset lets her mind fall into it, into its complexity, the jagged, chaotic design of forces at play along its boundaries.
“And if you’re nothing else, you’re ambitious to a fault,” it murmurs, almost sounding amused.
And that’s true, but also exactly how she phrased it when she told the Moon-Eater the entire saga of how she came to be Singix and marry Lyric and meet the numen.
Iriset keeps leaning, keeps breathing, but nudges further through the numen’s boundaries, into fireworks and power, and she holds on to its forearms where they wrap around her.
It feels exactly like the Moon-Eater, and maybe that’s normal, maybe numena all feel the same, but that’s so difficult to believe when one has played at godhood for centuries and the other is from the future, four hundred years older.
She knows.
This is the Moon-Eater, pretending to be the numen.
Chilled to the core, she wonders, when was the last time she saw the real numen?
Lyric just warned her to be careful, and here she is, heart pulsing, terror zinging through her with an excess of ecstatic, impossible that the Moon-Eater won’t feel it, and she has to laugh to hide. She laughs, breathless with it, and holds the Moon-Eater closer.