The Moon-Eater looks first at Eliri, then twists his head unnaturally around to give Iriset the same look. He drops Setka and returns to his usual youthful form, handsome, mirané brown, with a high, long ponytail and flowing skirts. “Sunderer, take care of yourself.”
“Moon-Eater?” Iriset asks, too breathless. She hates sounding weak even when she is.
The Moon-Eater stands before her, reaches out to pinch her earlobe like an affectionate cat. She asks, “Will you take me back to the tower for rest? And give me a new room? Near the design tower.”
“I will.”
Iriset accepts the Moon-Eater’s hand and leaves without glancing back. A clean break. She’s good at that. She’ll make herself good at that.
Cascading effect
Iriset is terrible at recovery.
She’s supposed to justrest? 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 wholearea 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 areso 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’tgonegone. 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 fartherdown. 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.
