An can hear Lyric swallow. Then he says, hollowly, “Not married anymore.”
“Because of this?” River asks, appalled.
“No, just before.”
“Why?” River upgrades ans feeling of being appalled to being scandalized.
“To go separate ways. Lyric must find the Moon-Eater’s child Rabbit, then bring Rabbit back to the crater city. Iriset will remain at the Moon-Eater’s side. Gods of apostasy together,” Lyric adds at the end, sounding wounded.
River remembers viscerally how an felt when those fucking college remnants took Eliri from an, when an had to choose between being a leader and being a spouse. Roc expected River to be torn, ans attendants and commanders and friends all expected it. But River was not torn. And River proved it by showing the ones who didn’t want to get her back exactly how ruthless an could be on Eliri’s behalf. River chose, Lyric is right about that.
And River remembers, too, Roc saying Lyric is a leader. Was one, at least, where he came from. He should understand choosing leadership or love. But maybe Lyric does not love Iriset like she is a piece of him, like without her there is no point in a better world.
River looks at the light eye in Lyric’s face and thinks that even if Lyric does not feel that way about Iriset, she certainly does about him. Eliri couldn’t have done this if she wanted to, she confessed. Lyric wouldn’t even try. But River would. River would dig out any part of an to keep Eliri alive. Even if she hated an for it.
“Well,” River says. “Will Lyric Aharté go with River to listen to Amado Chimera’s news about what caused the spider mine explosions? Chimera requested Lyric’s presence.”
Lyric frowns, though it’s more of a wince—either at the words or at his eye adjusting. “That must mean Iriset is involved,” he says with what River can only read as rather weary humor.
Standing out
Iriset settles on opal as the base for her new eye. She’d been leaning toward silicate, or a crystal structured similarly, because it could react easily to new design, maintain arrays well, and respond to resonance, but Eliri mentioned that they’ve had more luck with the fluid structure of opal when it comes to integrating its inner design with human design outside of rigid mineral compositions like bone in her case.
Besides, opal is colorful and sexy.
She and Eliri create a prototype prosthetic, designing multiple overlays and a quad-core of layered opal, quartzite, ferro-magnetized silicate to protect against interference and electromagnetic resonances, and pure force, then spend another day building it and prepping Iriset’s socket.
Eliri manipulates a detailed scaffolding to insert the prosthetic, and when she triggers the eye, it hurts. Just a sharp sting, and Iriset sucks air through her teeth. A headache radiates through her skull from the prosthetic. She closes both eyes and tears spill out, surprising, but then again there was little damage to her tear ducts or sinuses, and Iriset canfeelthe clinging ecstatic force, the heat of rising, thesinking, belonging of falling force searching for her mind, and the flowing blood and the hard, impossibly slow flow of the opal itself.
“Breathe, and when Iriset is ready, try to look,” Eliri says in her soft way.
Iriset gives herself only slightly less time than she thinks she should before peeling open both eyes. Her fleshy eye aches in what must be sympathetic brain disorientation. Iriset sees through a bright blur of tears. But she sees.
Despite Eliri’s protest that they move slowly, Iriset hops up from the chair and finds the hand mirror they’ve been using. The skin around her opal eye is reddened, slightly puffy, but nothing worrisome to Iriset. She blinks, cognizant of the different texture of the opal eye against her inner eyelid. It’s smooth, cooler, though slowly warming to her body temperature.
And the eye itself is gorgeous. Its milky-white surface shimmers with underlying chips of hot orange and strands of phosphorescent green, with hints of pink and gold. The pupil blooms like a black-hearted flower, its vibrant iris the blue-green of iridescent lichen, with facets of sunshine yellow. The iris could have been any color drawn out of the opal, but Iriset claims to like this bold choice because it’s different from mirané coloring, from earth and crater and bone. (Truthfully, they’re the colors of Singix’s best gowns, the teals and deep blue of tide pools and starfish, the elegant green of tropical waters, anemones—colors that hardly exist in the desert, but that Singix wore on her body. She brought the ocean with her.)
Eventually Iriset will be able to tap the eye with a stylus to shift several layers of design and allow it to draw in different visible spectrums—last night Eliri read to her from an actual dissertation on bird eyes compared to human eyes, because such investigation is legal here! The amorphous nature of opal will allow for greater numbers of complex arrays to simultaneously exist within.
Iriset’s face, though, is so strange now. Lyric is probably going through a very similar disorientation. She knows he’s healing well, according to Eliri, but Iriset hasn’t asked more.
She grins at herself in the mirror, shoving away unwanted distractions. Eliri watches calmly over her shoulder and Iriset says, “Thanks given, Eliri the Adept Hand.”
Eliri nods acceptance. Then they go to show off to the Moon-Eater.
The Moon-Eater isn’t lounging in his pit, and he wasn’t in the design tower, so Eliri asks a few passing attendants until one says they sent cinnamon coffee to the Moon-Eater’s library. Eliri cups Iriset’s elbow to lead her around a fountain in the center of the tower atrium that looks like an upside-down waterfall. “The library is not made of books, but is more art and armory. Gallery would be a better name, but perhaps when Shade named it the language was different.”
“Then what sort of art does the Moon-Eater like?”
Eliri shrugs. “Color, flowers, the ocean.”
Stopping, Iriset waits for Eliri to face her. The fountain rushes gently, and now that they’ve paused, it sounds decidedly musical. “Does Eliri not consider design to be art?”
“Science,” Eliri counters easily. “Question, hypothesis, experimentation, result.”
“That sounds lovely,” Iriset says. “To have the structure—the resources to treat design in such a way.”
“Iriset learned without resources?”
