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 likeslippageanddilatancy,neglectandstrain, 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 RisingSmoke 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 onlysplit 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 togivethe 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.
A deadline in more ways than one
The math holds, to Iriset’s deep chagrin.
There are already sixteen places in the heart of the array she’s building that are intensely susceptible to the blowback. Because of the work the people stationed at each of those nodes will be doing to activate the array when Iriset unravels the Moon-Eater, it’s easy to express that sixteen into sixty-four. If they can find sixty-four people who are skilled enough at design to activate their node in exacting order and with exact timing, who are willing to transform into the ruling class of the future. Unless it all goes wrong and they’re shredded to tiny pieces.
It makes Iriset nauseated.
She supposes she could give the mirané princes puke-yellow skin instead of moon-red, or try to give them all a useless sixth finger or something to make herself feel a little better. But honestly this whole thing doesn’t just make her sick, it scares her. She hasn’t transformed a living creature. She can make bone into quartz, yes, rain into clouds, yes, but there’s sympathy between the minerals and nodanger of killing anything. She did some healing design in the Rising Smoke precinct disaster, yes, but it was individual and messy, and during the setting of the metadesign, Iriset will be extremely busy.
Besides that, can she really trust that she understands what the miran even are to make them correctly? They’re balanced, they never get sick, their bodies resist anything that isn’t part of the Holy Design. Iriset doesn’t know how orgasms work, which she’s spent a lot of time thinking about, much less why brains dream when they’re sleeping or how food turns into fuel and shit. Iriset cannot make intricate arrays for every different part of a mirané circulatory system or to understand why lungs are made of a different kind of material than stomachs. Where does the acid come from? Why do people even breathe at all?
She’s worked herself up into several panicky tizzies in the half-quad since she passed out after patching boo-boos in Rising Smoke. There are so many tomes and scrolls and diagrams the apostates these days have written and put together that detail plenty about human architecture. But Iriset is on the clock! There’s too much to know so she can’t know any of it. She has to use her instincts. She has to figure out how to find the faith in herself to justdo it. Want to believe.
And maybe find a fool to experiment on.
Iriset is thinking about all these things, lying in the sun in the garden just outside her little room near Eliri’s suite, when a scream startles her, and she sits up like an agitated cat. It sounded like a griffon. She’s not heard of any in the city these days. Could they have been recently designed? she wonders, getting up and jogging toward the front gates. Did the line of Vertex Seals know their royal pets were designed by apostates? Just like that little bobcat kitten her father gave her, and she designed it ill-fitting wings.
The thought brings a smile to her face, though the memory has never made her happy before.
As if part of her knew what to expect, Iriset is still smiling as she reaches the wide fortress gates, where Lyric speaks with Rivermouth guards, convincing them to allow in a small wagon carrying at least three griffons. One of them is a fully grown queen, the others younger, thinner, maybe adolescents. It’s the queen who screams.
