Chapter 21
Cascading effect
Iriset is terrible at recovery.
She’s supposed to just rest? Alone? She can’t even read because for the first twenty-four hours, the Moon-Eater’s physician packed her eye socket with absorbent cloth and medicine, and for the second twenty-four they changed it out for a small temporary design-grade film along most of the inner curve of the socket to protect the nerve endings and prevent infection.
It needs a prosthetic as soon as possible, the physician insisted, or a replacement eye.
Obviously, Iriset said. But she can’t design a prosthetic until she can read and research for more than sixteen minutes without a migraine. So they told her to get a temporary prosthetic and have it replaced when she was ready.
But Iriset wants it now. And Eliri hasn’t returned to the fortress yet.
Iriset feels petulant and cranky. Everything is terrible, and Iriset can’t absorb herself with invention about it or draw her stupid ex-husband’s face again and again about it, and she can’t read any of the no-doubt-incredible books in the Moon-Eater’s library or fuck a stranger about it.
She can’t even fuck herself! Moving too much, especially with ecstatic force involved, hurts her socket!
The whole area is sensitive, not so much like a wound, though, more like the soft palate of her mouth or the inner walls of her vaginal canal.
She can feel it, sometimes excruciatingly so depending on the circumstances, but she can ignore it, too.
Except ignoring it sends her thoughts spiraling along reckless paths, both familiar—flight, interlocking security design—and new—the faces of people she’s murdered or directly caused to die, and there are so many of them.
It’s been a traumatizing few quads. She doesn’t want to think about that, so Iriset thinks about Lyric.
Since they met she’s never gone longer than a day without seeing him.
Without being near him—sometimes a little too near.
He wants to go home, but can’t without her.
She doesn’t know how to send him, and the ramifications of either going or staying are astronomically complicated.
Iriset’s eye socket throbs and she trembles from the effort not to tear the bandage off and dig her fingers in and scratch it or something.
That eye, the organ, the substance, the organic structure that took light or shapes or something and translated them to her brain isn’t gone gone. It’s in Lyric’s head.
In retrospect, she should have made him a prosthetic. Then when he wakes up and rejects it, she’d still have her eye.
As it is, Lyric will keep it, but also reject it, and hate her.
(“If I hated you, I might be able to do it,” he said.)
Six days after the explosion, Iriset wakes up with the numen perched cross-legged at the foot of her bed, staring with hostility. “You’ve been summoned outside,” it says.
“Oh thank fuck!” Iriset sits up, rubbing at her eyes before she remembers.
The pressure sends a sharp throb through the left socket.
She rolls off the bed anyway and stands up.
Slowly she evens her breathing, summoning her inner design with a few halfhearted snaps of her fingers.
Ecstatic pops, and she aligns it with the rest: falling, flow, rising.
She truly needs to imbue some anchors and just balance the whole room.
When she’s less dizzy, she turns and finds her nose so close to the numen’s chin she can feel it breathing against her forehead.
Iriset startles: It was soundless as it moved.
She puts her hands on its chest and pushes gently.
Instead of stepping back, the numen melts apart.
Her hands sink into its flesh and softening bone, disorienting her, but it ends abruptly, the numen holding both her wrists as it stands to her left. Her blind spot.
With a huff, she twists her wrists. “You’re ornery today.”
It hums.
“Do you know why I’m summoned?”
“There’s a problem at the crater where you landed,” it says, and her smile wipes itself away.
Then the numen flings open the door to command her attendants to lead Iriset to the crater when she’s ready, and it slinks off on too-long legs with extra joints that even Iriset finds disconcerting.
Very ornery.
She eats quickly what the attendants bring her, picking as she dresses and rebandages her eye with the older attendant’s help.
(Iriset needs the help, too. Someone to babysit her.
Alone, Iriset touches the socket too much.
Experiments with sensation to the point that even she knows it’s risky.
Iriset wants to make an incredible new eye, and she doesn’t want to ruin the chances of it connecting.
But left to her own devices, she can’t be trusted with herself.)
When Iriset is ready, it’s the younger attendant who gestures ahead for Iriset, and they fall into step together.
Down a winding stair, crossing one of the mid-levels to different stairs, and farther down.
This tower is like a muskrat den, with rooms piled on top of one another, and stairways leading from suite to suite or public foyer to suite to bathroom, and Iriset wonders if it’s part of how architecture works best to be stable in this time when there’s no inherent Holy Design requiring multiples of four and specific sequences of space and math.
“Iriset Sunderer?”
The attendant has paused, and Iriset turns, tapping her toes impatiently.
But Peace—who must be eighteen or so, close to Shahd’s age, and that means she better not get too familiar with Iriset or she’ll end up dead—clears her throat and looks directly at Iriset.
Even knowing it’s common here, the eye contact makes her feel too exposed. It’s probably easier for Peace, though, only having one eye to focus on.
“Is Lyric Aharté well?” Peace asks softly.
Grimacing exactly as she wishes to, Iriset says, “The last I—the last Iriset saw Lyric, Lyric was recovering.”
“Is it true Iriset’s injury is because Iriset tore out an eye for husband? To keep Lyric alive?” And oh, how eager Peace sounds. Like she’s experiencing a head rush at the very idea.
“It wasn’t that romantic,” Iriset mutters. She tries to keep walking, but Peace grabs her sleeve, curling her fingers in the fabric almost desperately.
“Oh for—” Iriset pries Peace’s fingers away. “Gossip moves fast in the Moon-Eater’s city,” she says, disgruntled. The last thing she wants is the city turning this into a beloved story. “Show me to the crater.”
Peace tucks a smile away in the corner of her mouth and complies.
The sun makes Iriset’s remaining eye water, and she wishes for a sheer cloth mask to tug across her forehead and block the harshest rays.
They walk slightly slower until she adjusts, though once they reach the rock garden where the crater is, there’s not even shade and Iriset gives in to shielding her eye with her hand.
There is a disconcerting amount of activity around the crater.
The last time Iriset saw it, there was only a hole in the ground and a small gate shrine with a handful of glass baubles hanging in it.
Now there’s probably a quad of people gathered under a cloth awning that arches up across a small slice of the crater, angled perfectly to shade the crowd from the sun.
Someone grabs her. “There you are,” the Moon-Eater says as she stumbles into his side. He’s looking perfectly mirané today, except for the streaks of pink and white in his wavy black hair. “Here is the expert.”
Iriset frowns. Compared to everyone in the Apostate Age, Iriset knows nothing.
She turns her frown to the crowd, doing her best to ignore all the eye contact.
Sure, she likes to see the design structure of other people’s features, but she doesn’t need them to see hers.
Ugh. The only person other than the Moon-Eater Iriset recognizes is Amado, the small king of Chimera fortress, whom she met at the mask-making party for the Night of Chimeras.
She doesn’t smile at the small king. “What’s wrong? ” she asks.
Most people in the crowd look at either the Moon-Eater or a fem-forward person with strange white skin and hair only slightly less starkly white.
Her skin has a sheen to it in the sunlight that Iriset can’t quite parse, but her hair is clearly not hair.
To a connoisseur, the luster and way it falls makes it obvious, and Iriset says, “That’s silk,” because while yes, being blunt has bitten her in the ass before, it never makes people doubt her expertise.
“Yes,” the woman says as if that’s not the point.
Amado Chimera smiles like someone who knows everything. “Helica Silkhair is among the crater city’s most renowned geo-designers. That is—”
“Oh!” Iriset can’t help interrupting in her delight.
Geo-design. The design of mountains, volcanoes, earthquakes, maybe even waterworks and trees.
It’s history in the Age of Aharté. “Does Helica Silkhair terraform?” she asks, but it’s not an Old Sarenpet word, so Iriset waves her hands in front of her to erase the question.
“Understand relationship between natural, ah, earthworks architecture and human architecture? Groundwater prediction and, um, erosion patterns?”
The Moon-Eater laughs. “This red god said Iriset is special.”
Someone snorts, and Helica Silkhair eyes Iriset like she’s an interesting insect, but an insect nonetheless.
Iriset fights the urge to hide behind Shade. Not because she isn’t special, obviously she knows that. But because she’s not used to being so much in the light. Relied upon. They have a problem and they think she knows the answer.