Chapter 37 #2
She licks her lips and, with the stylus in her sleeve, taps the iris cap of her opal eye.
Tilting her head back, she blinks a few times to adjust. The lines of force flare to life, pale silvery and wavering against the steel-gray clouds.
Iriset sees plenty of random eddies of flow and rising, can trace the threads to one of the needle towers on the edge of the Flower neighborhood—River ordered all such buildings in Rivermouth brought down, considering the delicate nature of their construction.
She sees elaborate tangles of what look like ribbon skiffs to her but are actually a technological predecessor used here in the Apostate Age to send messages, not skiffs.
And there, past it all, one of the new lines of the four forces, this one rising, arced all the way from the Moon-Eater’s fortress and the anomalous star crater out to the edges of the city where the cardinal rising steeple is being constructed.
Iriset closes her opal eye and waits. “This is dangerous,” Roc says beside her. She ignores him, and then senses the shift in the air and looks up at the mitigation dome again.
It shivers, and instantly after she sees it, she feels the subtle tremor in the street below her feet.
The tremor grows, vibrating with ecstatic and broken flow, in a ripple, then another, and another, each larger than the last. There should be eight, and Iriset counts them, as if standing at the edge of a pond that’s rippling against her ankles.
On the seventh, the mitigation dome breaks.
Iriset almost doesn’t notice, because it’s not over her that it happens: It’s northeast, the Rising Smoke fortress, where the small king has constantly resisted the efforts of Amado Chimera to bring Rising Smoke into the metadesign plans.
Later, Iriset will hear words like slippage and dilatancy, neglect and strain, because the small king had for years been secretly digging a honeycomb of passages in an attempt to tap into the Lapis River where it exits the crater far underground.
Water seeped into the soft rock and, nearer to the surface, into the layers of sand and dirt.
The honeycomb flooded in the past few days as it rained heavily, and while that alone might have caused no trouble, the design of the entire precinct was under strain due to the same small king’s refusal to work with the company of city planners and designers who set the anchors of the mitigation dome throughout the city.
The Rising Smoke anchors were as sparse as possible, and none of the Rising Smoke designers were allowed—or tried—to weave the admittedly harsh force-lines of the dome in with their generations of layered architecture.
The floodwaters receded, the earthquake rippled through, and the design supporting the secret, illegal tunnels collapsed, tearing the threads of the mitigation dome nearest to them apart.
Of course, everything above the tunnels collapsed, too.
(Another thing Iriset will hear later is that someone finally manages to assassinate the Rising Smoke small king during all the chaos.)
Iriset runs. Toward the problem.
It isn’t like her, she’s not by nature an emergency responder, but maybe it’s wearing Singix again, maybe it’s being able to see in real time as the forces of the crater city bend toward the collapse like it’s a funnel, and if she’s there maybe she can grab some of the dome or some of the foundational design and reduce the damage.
Maybe it’s knowing that even if she can’t completely blame herself for this, it started with her choices. Or ended with them.
She runs through people fleeing, summoned by the siren song of structural damage and a thrumming under her skin like constant ecstatic force.
The energy walls cutting Rising Smoke off from Rivermouth are down, crackling in places like lightning, easy to cross.
Cutting up from the central section of Rising Smoke precinct is a huge crevasse hundreds of paces long, wider than the river, and it’s full of rubble and bodies and the whine of metal, the shriek of pipes bursting, the hum-pop-roar of messy forces failing.
Iriset can’t fix it, but she can drag people away from the crumbling walls.
She helps a woman stumble out from under a doorway without a building behind it and carries a child who somehow only split their knee open.
She sits the kid down and rummages in the nearby wreckage for something the right size and shape, a thin piece of metal, and in a teeth-grinding moment of focus she transmutes it into unshapely quartz so she can sew the kid’s wound together with a thread of flow force.
This is what she can do. She looks for more injured because she knows how skin and bones work, and there’s plenty of blood that needs to be stanched and breaks that need to be fixed and abrasions that need a crawling repair design.
There’s a man with everything below the knee pulverized and someone is tying a tourniquet just above the knee, getting ready to cut the leg off, and Iriset crouches down, draws a fast diagram against his skin, and jabs her stylus at the eight anchors, and suddenly the man slumps in relief because she’s taken away his pain.
Iriset’s arm is grabbed and someone is begging her to do it again, and again, so she does, the numbing array built fast from the dregs of the array she’d invented to give the Moon-Eater pain.
Iriset loses track of what she’s doing. Twice in succession she heals a body part that’s not fully human, or at least it doesn’t appear that way: scales with a sheen like oil on water that Iriset pretends are just thicker pieces of skin; a man with something like horns running down his back.
Those horns aren’t what’s wrong with him, but his back itself is torn open, ribs and vertebrae cracked.
Iriset closes her eyes and gathers her power in her belly array.
This isn’t arousal, or not the sexual kind; it’s burning and desperate, but it works.
She makes it work. She saves lives. Not every life, but some.
She sunders, creates the fifth force in the palm of her hand, and uses it to alleviate pain, to reteach bodies to remember themselves.
She makes bones knit together again, makes veins repair themselves, reattaches a finger, an ear, and once, she puts her hands on a huge chunk of stone crushing a woman’s hips and leg and uses the fifth force to turn the stone into dust and air.
There’s a cry to her left, and she can’t see much because the sun has long set and her opal eye aches in her skull and her flesh eye is nearly seeing double, so Iriset reacts differently than she might have when she feels the whipping arc of rising force-threads suddenly unleashed from Silence knows what.
She reaches for the ends and grasps at them, catches them because she thinks she can, she knows it, and just as she does, the whole knot they’re part of snaps into pieces.
The blowback is immediate and it barrels through Iriset.
She bends it. She moves it through her bones and uses the burst of energy to suddenly close all the tiny cuts covering the body of the man at her feet. He groans, and Iriset stares down at him, her palm tingling and her heart racing.
The man sits up, wipes blood from his face, and peers back at her. All the signs of pain and injury are gone from his face and posture. He hops to his feet. Spry, energized.
And suddenly Iriset knows exactly how to disseminate and render safe the entire overwrought power of the metadesign blowback.
Calculations spool themselves out in her mind, all the elements of the growing design array puzzling together in a sequence of blinks.
Transmutation is the answer, and sixty-four nodal points where the blowback force can spin and burn without blowing up half the designers and all the Moon-Eater’s fortress.
Sixty-four people in sixty-four places, activating sixty-four echo coins that won’t be exactly echo coins but more like resonance chimes to link them and change them.
Sixty-four reborn mirané princes ready to make their new world.