Just enough for her to decide: He’s too near for her to get the stylus in her hair, the one designed to kill, before he gets her. And if she runs, he’ll whip the wire over her head and the touch of it will either kill her or ruin her craftmask, or both. So, recklessly, Iriset screams and runsathim, arms up around her head to ram his stomach with her right shoulder and all her weight. Like her father taught her.
The assassin does not see it coming and grunts, though he’s in lacquered armor. He stumbles and drops his wire. Iriset nearly falls, but grits her teeth and stomps down on his foot. Heat slices her shoulder and arm as she jerks away, then she rears back to bring up her other leg and smash her slippered foot against his groin.
It doesn’t hurt him. Iriset barely shoves his balance off.
But that’s all the time it takes for the other guards to fling themselves around her and use their force-blades to cast arcs of bright design around her in a shield, and their robes harden with charges of raw power.
Sinking to her knees, Iriset shakes and gasps for breath. She lets her inner design rage. Lyric will feel the violence of this, no matter where he is.
Panting, she stares through the legs of her loyal guards as another Seal guard kicks her attacker back into the lilies, and she whimpers in regret over the poor flowers. But she’s glad she didn’t have to kill him herself. She’d grown complacent, worried only about discovery and destruction, not Singix’s unknown enemy.
Iriset clutches the bleeding wound the assassin gave her, distantly, numbly relieved it’d been a regular knife and not something with applied force: Only her flesh is wounded, not her crawling net, nor any of her design.
If she were herself and human architecture weren’t ridiculously banned, she could grit her teeth and knit flowing force through the skin with her stylus until her crawling net taught her own body to heal fast enough that there wouldn’t even be a scar by morning.
A distant voice calls her guards and two jog away, and Iriset gets up to follow.
There’s a body sprawled on the grass, tucked half under a sculptured juniper with blush-pink berries.
The guards are holding the space while one kneels, pushes thick black hair out of the body’s face. It’s sticky with blood, dragging across Shahd’s slack mouth.
Iriset stops.
She hears the explanation through ringing in her ears: They think the assassin caught the girl returning with tea and slit her throat.
The Seal guard who says it isn’t even telling Iriset, but reporting to the other guard. Iriset hears it, hears it like it shouldn’t matter to her. She sinks to her knees and bends over her lap, lets blood and rising force rush up into her face as she presses it to her knees. Shahd shouldn’t have been here. She should have been with Amaranth’s handmaidens, or with her family. Not here. She was only sixteen.
Someone says, “The assassin is dead, too. Blood in his eyes, probably force-popped.”
She believed in Iriset.
Lyric arrives breathless. “Singix, are you well?” He lifts her up.
“Of course not,” she snaps, smearing her blood onto his bareshoulder as she shoves him. She blinks, staring at the color of it, brighter red and bluer in undertone than the rich mirané brown of his skin. Why is blood colored as it is, she wonders, falling into a daze of fast thought, a spiral pulling her down into her own mind.
She kneels beside Shahd’s body, ruining her gown in the blood. Shahd’s eyes are oddly half open, her gaping neck drenched in blood that still seems to ooze, but that’s just the light and the breeze. Iriset tastes blood in the back of her throat.
She’s the one who said discovery was the greatest threat, not the murderer. She let her guard down, she’s the one. It’s her fault.
In a daze, Iriset stumbles back to her feet and before Lyric can catch her, she marches back to the dead assassin.Force-poppedis slang for too much ecstatic force in the brain. A common accident in elder designers. She crouches and slaps him, even though he’s dead. She slaps him again and again, each time driving her own ecstatic into his face and body, there has to be something she can trace: And there it is, a signature, a—
Lyric and Sidoné both grasp at her, pulling her away from the body. Her palm tingles with force and Lyric hugs her, begging her softly to stop.
But she has it. She closes her eyes, lets him drag her away, and imprints the signature, the feel and shape of it, into her memory.
The palace doctor smears her wound with stinging antiseptic and a bandage to hold the edges together until it heals of its own slow accord. Lyric wraps a fresh robe over her bloodiedgown, to show anyone who sees them pass that Singix is well. He tucks her hand against his arm and walks her slowly to their tower. She’s thinking furiously, because all her anchors could be used to trace this thing she found, whatever it is—a weapon, or a tangled force-loop that could be a pain device, something to shock him if he didn’t obey. It can be traced, palace architects won’t think so, but she can repurpose her anchors to do it—
—but then she can’t use them for her graffiti. She’d have to start all over again, but she doesn’t havetimeand it’s very likely the blown anchors would be discovered by the investigator-designers or Seal guard. They might figure out someone is surgically altering the security groundwork, and if they put Raia or someone as talented on it, it could even be traced back to Iriset. Raia might recognize her work. Silk’s work.
Iriset should do it for Shahd anyway. She should. Justice for Shahd—and Singix herself—should be more important than whatever legacy she thinks she’s leaving behind. She’s no good at this! People keep dying around her but she keeps trying. What hubris! Who will die for her next?
Suddenly Lyric picks her up.
Surprise has her throwing her arms around his neck, and her injured arm burns. But the Vertex Seal cradles her against his chest and pushes his face against her neck. They’ve just arrived in their private rooms; she didn’t even notice where they were. Lyric holds her, silently, and she grips him tightly enough to bruise, aware of the pounding of his heart mirroring hers.
When the last Vertex Seal finally speaks, his words are like a ferrous pin anchoring an elaborate design into a wasteland of silicate crystal and red-moon rock:
He says, “I love you,” and Iriset starts to cry.
