The numen told her that sundering is design at the level of thought and feeling. It is triggeringrivation, and from that creating force she can manipulate with a nudge of will or a word. It’s using her instinct and her inner forces to shift the smallest threads of force, the tiny particles that make force in the first place. Rivation is like using magnetics and ecstatic charge to separate hematite from ochre, only she’s the magnet and the charge.
Iriset works fast.
First, some tools: There’s more fine wire from the necklace, and she twists it into something like two short styli, then binds them into forceps. She shatters the smaller remaining side of the pendant, getting flakes of the clay. They easily charge into ecstatic buttons. She needs a sharp knife, but looking around is a mistake. There’s rubble and bodies, smoke in too many colors, ash falling like rain. Fire everywhere. No time to worry if any of it’s roaring closer.
With sharp clay Iriset scrawls the beginnings of a crawling design along Lyric’s scalp, sending it down his body to knit skin together. Instead of changing skin color or texture, it’s just repair. Easy. Easy. Then she takes the last of the wire and builds a tiny frame to teach threads of force what she needs, before inserting it into the stasis frame so Lyric’s bones get to work remaking themselves.Just like you were before, she murmurs to him, to the bones. It isn’t hard, this is nothing new, not a redesign: It’s only got to remake what his body remembers.
Without design vellum, Iriset cuts the next design into her ownface, eyes closed and working by memory to get the correct force-sigils in the correct places, mirror images, and she doesn’t hesitate to activate it. Heat suffuses the left side of her face, a flash of fire she grits her teeth against before it settles into a constant tingling warmth. She touches her eyebrow and doesn’t feel much. Hopefully blocking enough sensory information that the pain won’t debilitate her, but not so much she can’t feel what she’s doing.
Iriset opens her eyes as wide as they go, imagining that this will be smooth, precise, and it won’t kill her, either. With the clay ecstatic buttons, she sticks her left eyelids open.
It’s strange to watch it happen. To see the forceps. To hold her breath so she isn’t shaking even though she knows it’s best if she breathes carefully to smooth her motions. The truth is she’s too afraid to breathe.
But the clarity she feels is like a pristine spotlight shining on her in the midst of this carnage and chaos. That helps her dissociate just enough.
It hurts.
But not as badly as it should. Enough to remind her about this impossible thing she’s doing: cutting her own eyeball out, quickly, efficiently, with only two wire styli and her ferocious will, and centering all her considerable focus on the invisibly tiny details, the things she can’t know about how the eye connects to the brain, to its seat in her socket: She can’t know, but she can feel. She can sense. Sunder.
Pull gently apart, detach, unmake, she thinks, imagining it happens in a miniature shock wave, an orgasm, the threads of force and particles of her body behaving exactly, precisely the way she demands. Rivation, she thinks but doesn’t say: She can’t let herself move.
The pain cuts through the throb of her pulse, the ringing of screams in her ears. It’s so clarifying, Iriset wonders if this is what pain is truly for. It makes her hands steady again, shows her where to focus.
Then Iriset is holding her own eye in her hand, balanced in a tripod of two fingers and thumb, and she thinks,Oh, add another finger. Nothing made of three is stable.
Blood seeps down her cheek, but it isn’t flowing, isn’t spilling all her life down onto the broken cobbles of the crater city.
Iriset sways, lightheaded.
“No,” she commands herself.
Her eye looks back at her, almost alive in the flickering firelight. Before it totally dies—the tissues, the strings dangling off it (veins, she thinks), and smaller, more important threads of life and sensation (she doesn’t know what time she has)—Iriset leans over Lyric and thumbs open the tatter of his left eyelid. She plops her eye in, andthatshe hears: a squelch, a slick sound of wet flesh, pulpy chewy tongue spit-swallowing sound, and oh boy is that going to haunt her later.
Iriset sucks in a breath, her pulse throbbing in her raw, empty eye socket. Blood drips from her onto Lyric, blood becoming blood becoming blood, a smear within an ocean of blood on his cheek. The framework has his bones where they belong, snapped into place, but they’re still fractured, little pieces missing, and Iriset can’t wait, even though the skin isn’t quite right along the lower rim of the socket.
She holds the tip of clay over her eye in his skull and sends pings of ecstatic down through the orb, followed by humming flow, and in her mind’s eye, it merges with him, it knows what to do, the nerves and connections, warm and soothing as lips on a neck, fingers brushing a spine, there there, be yourself, be good, and Iriset hates how imprecise it feels, the metaphor, the imagining of it, but that’s what the numen said again and again: A sunderer has an instinct, and Iriset knows how it all works. She gets design on a fundamental level, and always has. Just keep practicing, the numen said. Let it all come apart and put it back together.
Like the unraveling and redesign every morning in the Moon-Eater’s Temple, that fifth force, Iriset knows it, she trusts it—she must.
This is faith in herself, in her instinctual knowledge and her education brought together. She puts a hand on his forehead, because it helps her not only feel, butknowshe’s working. It’s working. Iriset pricks tiny instructions into his hot skin, flow here, falling there, make connections, bring it all together, stitch, stitch, ecstatic, and keep breathing that rising force, Lyric, keep breathing.
She is so hot, her face aflame, still throbbing, weird, raw, and the world is flatter in her single eye.
But her eye is inside him. Part of Iriset mé Isidor inside him, like her fingers in his mouth, like the design seed that blossomed into a marriage knot—Lyric’s inner design wants hers, knows hers, and love is design, love is the sundering force.
Iriset plucks her own hair, and with the tip of the clay shard and quick, charging ecstatic pants, she begins to sew.
By the time she’s found, Iriset has gently wrapped Lyric’s face with strips of cloth from her outer robe. Not too much pressure, while his bones knit and heal, but only to protect. She’s done all she can, and maybe he’ll see through her eye one day soon.
He might not want it.
She’ll have to make sure she’s not around when he finds out.
After releasing the buttons holding her lashes open, she reverses one to gently stick her eyelid closed. It feels odd. She wishes she had a patch, and supposes she’ll be able to find one or make one with relative ease. Iriset leans back against half a wall, pulls Lyric’s head into her lap, and cups his face. She breathes in an eight-count, slow andsteady. Her own face hurts, an ache that fluctuates between acute and tender.
“What have you done?”
Iriset looks up, then winces instantly because it hurts to move her wound, but all the muscles still obey and try to move with her working right eye. Clapping a hand over the itchy, bloody mess, she peers up at the numen.
