Chapter 7
Recalibration
When Iriset wakes up in a strange old world, she’s glad Lyric is with her.
It’s too loud here, the forces unbalanced and tangled, but Lyric she knows, Lyric she can focus on despite the constant buzz of force-reaction burning under her skin and her eyes trying to tear up, and what he says about the moon and the Moon-Eater and time is so outlandish but also easy to believe because Iriset wants it to be true.
Except then Lyric leaves her so fast he might as well never have been there.
“Are those quartz claws?” she demands of the woman—probably—Lyric left behind. (Left her!)
The feminine-forward person looks underfed and delicate, her skin too tight to her very fine bones, and shadows under her big gray eyes.
She’s got straight hair so red it’s black, cut blunt across her forehead and at her chin, and Iriset really can’t read her features to guess her ancestry, though her skin is the same color as Iriset’s, so maybe Osahar, too.
Most Osahar have thicker, lighter hair, though.
But then again! This is the Apostate Age, isn’t it?
Iriset is lightheaded, and possibly just a bit hysterical at having traveled through time and survived a dart to the chest, and before anything else, Iriset sways on her feet.
The woman steps forward and says, “Sit. Eliri will get help.”
It’s Old Sarenpet, and Iriset grasps Eliri’s wrist before she can go. Her teeth are crystal, too.
“Do not go,” she says carefully in the same, old words layered in sorrow.
She and her father used Old Sarenpet as a private code, but she shouldn’t think of him now, not when there’s all this force-noise to ignore and this stranger staring at her like a fragile bird except built of quartz bone.
“Do not go,” Iriset says again. Pleading a little, but that’s just the way it’s going today: overwhelming emotions and now her stomach is rolling slowly up up up her throat.
Eliri doesn’t pull away, so to focus herself Iriset turns Eliri’s hand over, tracing with her fingertips down Eliri’s palm and along her fingers, which are more finely made and longer than Iriset’s.
She glances for permission and Eliri is only staring back at her but doesn’t free herself, so Iriset pinches Eliri’s forefinger and watches as the short, slightly curved claw lengthens.
Iriset puffs out a breath of awe, then grins up at Eliri. “Gorgeous. Can you do that to me?”
She forgot again to speak Old Sarenpet, and repeats herself. “Eliri?” She taps Eliri’s wrist, and the woman says, “Eliri the Adept Hand.”
“Oh, I like it,” Iriset says, using the mirané personal pronoun surrounded by Old Sarenpet. “Adept Hand. I”—she taps her own chest—“my name is Iriset mé Isidor.”
“Iriset Sunderer,” Eliri says quietly. The same word the numen used. Iriset will have to ask about the numen, and if it came back, too. But Eliri continues, “Does mé Isidor mean sunderer?”
“No, it’s a descent indicator, for my father. Iriset the daughter of Isidor. Father had an epithet, though, the Little Cat.”
“Does that make Iriset a kitten?”
Kitten echoes through Iriset’s thoughts, tingling under her skin, and she thinks how funny the world and time can be, as she laughs a little. “Eliri is the one with claws,” she says, curving her fingers and baring her teeth because she feels silly and strange.
Eliri smiles. It is reserved, but with a narrow edge of mutual understanding.
Iriset says, in Old Sarenpet but for mirané pronouns and a technical design term here and there, “I made a glove out of force-charged silk, to directly manipulate threads of force. That must be the purpose of the claws. Can you do that to my hands? They must be better than a glove because nobody can take them away.”
Eliri glances down, but Iriset catches a pang of something she understands: quickly masked devastation.
Iriset’s expression falls, and her prodigious mind spins fast, thinking of all the terrible things that could be done to a person to strip their bones of force-sensitivity—and then to survive it.
Iriset swallows her next words, realizing she needs to be more considerate (probably it was pretending to be Singix Es Sun for so many quads that even taught her the notion of consideration).
“Your?” Eliri says. “Me?”
“You, your is other self.” Iriset touches Eliri again. Then she touches her own sternum as she says, “I, me is self.”
“I, me.” Eliri nods as she speaks. “I can attempt to give Iriset—”
“You.”
“—you claws, quartz-cast bones, but outside of fetal mesh it is painful and expensive, with a forty percent success rate.”
“Wow.” Iriset grins again. There is a roaring in her skull. She snaps her fingers next to her ear four quick times, letting the ecstatic find her inner design, and she pops her lips to meet it.
Eliri watches, then reaches with her claws and taps Iriset’s forehead in the center, a tiny painful prick, before Eliri pinches something and draws it away. Iriset can’t see force with her naked eyes, but for a moment the noise quiets. “Thanks given,” she says softly.
“Iriset’s design is frayed from blowback of great power,” Eliri explains. “And Iriset’s inner design is unused to the crater city’s force patterns. The surgeon placed a stasis mesh at the location of the injury, but perhaps a broader-form quad-net could create an interference field.”
Iriset places her hand over the little cap covering her injury.
She understood most of what Eliri said, though the design-specific terminology is more of a guess based on context.
She has so many questions. About the surgery, about this room, the moon, sundering, Eliri the Adept Hand, the Moon-Eater, where Lyric went and where the numen might be, and they’re clogging her throat.
She needs to prioritize. And she needs to pee.
“Or anchors in each quarter of the room,” Iriset says, which is not a question, but maybe a temporary solution.
“Anchors for individual forces?” Eliri asks. “Stabilize the room, not Iriset’s design?”
“Balance it.” Blinking slowly, Iriset is suddenly very aware of those fraying edges. Her skin aches, and she might have a fever. Something is swimming like a little eel in her guts. And Lyric left her. “Food?” she says. “Then design.”
Eliri says, “Eliri’s lab has a diagnostic mesh, to check Iriset’s health. And Iriset will teach more of the fairy language.”
“I will teach you to speak mirané, not a fairy language.”
“The Moon-Eater speaks it, and the Moon-Eater’s friend, and Lyric Aharté, who looks like the Moon-Eater.”
Iriset’s lips fall open. Mirané brown, crater red. They always said the miran were created in Aharté’s image, but she supposes it makes sense if the Moon-Eater is the same. Huh.
Eliri escorts Iriset to the bathing room, but Iriset only relieves herself, feeling surprisingly clean. An attendant in violet skirt and tunic with cute little fans tucked into her braids says, “Lyric Aharté bathed, fed, held, stayed with wife for two days.”
Iriset is so surprised she forgets to ask about this “Lyric Aharté” business.
But Eliri sends the attendant with a message for the Moon-Eater and his friend god that Iriset is awake and will be with Eliri.
There is food waiting when they return to the bedroom, light soup and gentle bread and some flaky fish.
Despite her impatience, Iriset eats carefully, offering the designer bread and fish, too.
They share the sweet coffee-like drink made with chicory root and honey.
It takes forever to get to Eliri’s lab not only because Iriset feels like her bones turned into rubber and since she’s eaten she’s tired again, but because Iriset keeps stopping to touch things and ask questions about the design work.
Eliri tells her some shallow theoretical answers, but admits she specializes in human design not construction design—which of course Iriset is delighted to hear.
They trade Old Sarenpet and mirané words, which works well to distract Iriset from the buzz of tangled forces setting her teeth on edge.
(She will not let herself remember trading language with Singix, who is dead, or Ambassador Erxan, whom she killed.) Eliri explains that she is from Rivermouth fortress but has worked for the Moon-Eater here nearly six years.
The Moon-Eater loves design and allows Eliri almost free rein.
“We call them numena,” Iriset says, wondering if it’s true that the Moon-Eater was never a god at all, but just like her numen.
Eliri’s lab is three stories at the top of a thin tower, and they get to it via a mechanism that lifts them up through the central pillar!
Iriset can feel the pull of the rising force stripping away the tangled force-noise as the platform moves upward in a slow spiral—tracks with wheels, Eliri explains, activated by a constructive design to negate falling and promote rising with something she calls a perpendicular force array.
If Iriset weren’t so curious about what’s going on in her own body and partial to apostasy, she might’ve insisted on pulling apart the array right there until she understood how it was done.
(Negating falling force is something she’s wondered about for years, hoping it was part of a key to recreating the tensile web flight of little spiders.)
The diagnostic table in Eliri’s lab is on the lowest of her levels, a disappointingly plain room built of solid wood with a thick but soft resin covering that she can see the remnants of design carved into—a genius idea for a workroom—and two beams crossing wall-to-wall about an arm-span from the ceiling.
Bolts that appear to be silver or steel punctuate the resin walls in even lines, and Iriset has no clue as to their purpose but could come up with some things!