33 The wood has a memory of being aflame #3
Iriset drapes herself across the rugs, gazing at the little sliver of moon and twinkling stars, passing the snake back and forth with Eliri.
In addition to the flavor—and effect—Iriset likes the process of this, too.
It’s sexy, isn’t it? Lips on the warmed metal, bringing smoke inside her and the little bubbling wet sounds of the water basin.
“What is it Eliri lets go of?” Iriset asks, watching her words turn to thin smoke.
“Eliri,” the chimera murmurs.
“Eliri?” For a moment Iriset doesn’t understand at all. Then she frowns. It feels like too much of a pout, bottom lip jutted. She sucks it back in, distracted by her teeth dragging over sensitive skin.
“Self,” Eliri whispers. “Let go of Eliri. Nice to diffuse like this smoke. Eliri would be the sweet peel in Irsu’s pink cigarettes. Inhaled, diffused, let go, all that’s left is Irsu’s dreams.”
Iriset puffs a laugh. She still doesn’t understand. Iriset would never let go of herself.
“What happens to chimeras like me in your future?” Eliri asks several minutes later, her voice rougher and languid, just how Iriset feels.
“Hmm, hmm,” Iriset hums, letting smoke out through her nose.
It burns a little. Wrinkling it, mind drifting, she says, “There are no chimeras like you. Just remnants. Eyes and feathers passed down down down from the stable, balanced chimeras that survive. We have rep-cats, rainbow bees, skull sirens. Um. My father said unicorns survived.”
Eliri is quiet for another while. Iriset, too. She likes how melty she feels, loose around her bones. Like her face might slide off, but in a good way. Then Eliri says, “The Holy Design won’t sustain unbalanced chimeras. Is Eliri balanced?”
Turning a little too fast, Iriset puts the snake down.
“I see that in the plans, too. But if a chimera leaves, if you leave, then return to the crater after the new arrays, after it’s all fixed to the steeples, you would be all right.
It’s the moment of transition that’s dangerous.
Almost like rivation, the metadesign”—Iriset really likes that word—“will pull everything apart and snap it back together in the new configuration. That’s when…
” Her mind catches up with Eliri’s actual question and Iriset pokes Eliri’s nose.
“Don’t you think Eliri is stable? The fetal mesh was used.
Your design is fully integrated, isn’t it? ”
Eliri wraps her fingers around Iriset’s pointing finger and holds it to her chest. “Yes. But fully integrated doesn’t mean stable or balanced by the requirements of Lyric Aharté’s Holy Design. It’s not natural what was done, these bones. They resonate differently, ache and pull differently.”
“The Holy Design isn’t natural—what does natural even mean?” Iriset demands.
“That’s what Irsu says,” Eliri murmurs. She still has Iriset’s finger, and squeezes tightly before releasing it to curl away from Iriset. “But the people who took this chimera away from Irsu said other things, and tried to prove it.”
Iriset rolls so she can shape her body around Eliri’s, though she doesn’t touch, unsure Eliri would accept any physical comfort. Iriset’s mind buzzes with thoughts, as usual, but they don’t feel overwhelming and instead drift one by one, out of order. “They hurt you?”
“Some people do not consider chimeras capable of pain, despite the—the evidence.”
“People are awful everywhere,” Iriset says. Iriset risks putting her hand on Eliri’s elbow.
“Some people are good. Iriset, and Lyric Aharté.”
“Good and bad is reductive,” Iriset says to avoid talking about Lyric. “Two is the worst number.”
“Better than one?” Eliri asks, and it almost sounds like she’s teasing.
Iriset smiles and tucks up against Eliri’s back, hugging her middle.
“I had a lover with eyes slit-pupiled like a cat’s.
Remnants from the Apostate Age. From now.
There are many design aesthetics that last, through generations all the way to my time.
People with feathers in their hair like Irsu River.
Scales. We have rep-cats and skull sirens.
I’m not sure if the lattice snakes are remnants of apostasy or not. Oh, and the royal griffons.”
“I wouldn’t mind,” Eliri says. “If all that lasts of me are remnants.”
“You’re in a book I read in a forbidden library,” Iriset whispers, like she’s confessing a secret. “Eliri Who Touched the Sun.”
Eliri’s hand creeps up and she hugs Iriset’s arm around her waist. “Nobody calls this chimera such a thing.”
“Not yet,” Iriset promises.
Eliri hums. She holds her left hand up against the sky.
In the low tower light, Iriset can just make out a scar along the bottom of Eliri’s littlest finger.
The one she cut off to escape her captors.
Except it’s fresh. Not a scar so much as a wound.
Days old, not years. Iriset’s tongue seems to curl unpleasantly at the back of her throat, almost like she’ll throw up.
Before she can ask, Eliri says, “Eliri Who Touched the Sun is a good way to be remembered in your future.”
The wistfulness in the chimera’s voice leads Iriset to decide to ask instead, “Why do you believe that we’re time travelers?”
“The math makes sense,” Eliri answers immediately. “No—the missing math. The dark space, the parts that can’t be observed. The missing math makes sense if what’s missing isn’t space or weight or force, but time.”
“Yeah,” Iriset whispers her agreement. The memory of the sun, she thinks, from that hot afternoon in the garden with Singix. Here courage is a daily practice, between the sun and the memory of the sun. And Eliri who can touch it.
“But I want to believe you,” Eliri says very quietly. “I want it to be true, the future Iriset speaks of. Sometimes all that matters for belief is wanting to have it.”
Iriset wrinkles her whole face, and it feels funny, so she does it harder. She must make a noise, as Eliri twists to look at her. “Iriset doesn’t want to make this array, doesn’t want to put the Holy Design in place, but is, to save lives here.”
“It will destroy them down the line, so that’s a wash when it comes to goodness,” Iriset argues listlessly.
“Reductive, too.”
Iriset snorts. Points to Eliri.
“Then why do it?” the chimera wonders.
“It’s hard to care more about the abstract someday people who establishing the Holy Design will kill than the people living right now who will die if I don’t and the array remains untethered.
” Iriset takes a deep breath. That’s only partly true.
“I’m still trying to figure out my obligation to the future.
The moon is stuck above the holy city then, so does that mean I must make it happen?
The Holy Design exists, and I understand how it works, so must I enact it?
Ugh.” Iriset takes her hand back and presses both heels of her palms into her eyes.
It hurts the left eye more. “Are the people the empire will kill already dead because I lived through it, lived after it? Or are they alive again because they haven’t been born?
Is changing anything even possible, or have I already changed everything?
Is it murder to prevent the miran from appearing?
They don’t exist yet, but if I actively try to keep them from being born, is that genocide?
They will commit various forms of genocide in the next four hundred years, so is erasing them stopping genocide? ”
“Eliri sees,” Eliri says, taking Iriset’s wrists and pulling them off her face. Iriset’s vision is blurry, and not only from pressure. “Sees Iriset welcome too much weight onto Iriset’s shoulders.”
“Eliri is the one who claims to be too heavy,” Iriset says.
Eliri lets go of Iriset. In the starlight, Eliri’s gray eyes are more washed than usual, her black hair tarnished rusty-red. The tips of her quartz teeth show when she smiles sadly. “Eliri would gladly put down this weight, if there were a way.”
There’s something so heavy, indeed, in Eliri’s voice that Iriset angles her gaze back to the sky. The night breeze is not as cold as it was a few days ago. Maybe spring is coming. The gauzy clouds keep crawling nearer to Aharté’s moon.
And then Iriset wonders if she’s ever even wanted to believe in anything at all.