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She tries to explain this to Singix, who listens, and doesn’t grow suspicious that Iriset thinks of design with such subtle philosophy. Why should the princess be suspicious of the handmaiden? Even if she knew of Iriset’s history, how likely that she cares about the murdered Silk?

If only Iriset could remain by Singix’s side, lazily discussing poetry and design.

If only she could be herself, dig into the design of the palace and invent again.

Show the Vertex Seal what architecture is truly capable of.

Singix wouldn’t mind, Iriset knows it. Singix likes her, and she likes the princess.

Her heart beats hard as she longs for everything: power, friendship, family, safety, and the truth of her real name.

Apostasy. Impossible.

Someday, Iriset promises herself, this will be nothing but the memory of a hot afternoon with a beautiful princess. She’ll think of it when she thinks of the sun.

Iriset hurries to the rising side of the palace complex, where the delivery docks spread in the shade of the quarter tower.

Skiffs and small caravans line up to off-load the goods they’ve brought across the quartz yards, and an intricate system of pulleys and ribbons lets items be dispersed quickly by the dockworkers.

She feels like a kite floating over her body: She’s never done this sort of thing before.

The con-work of her father’s undermarket had been for the cousins, not Silk.

She hovers near the timetable, cloth mask drawn and her arms crossed over her chest to display the jade cuff. Everyone in the palace knows it means she belongs to Amaranth, and nobody bothers her.

The resin merchant arrives with three helpers, carrying a permit for delivery as she walks along the thin ribbon dragging her skiff. The skiff is egg-shaped and decorated with rows of unpolished amber and red sacra and smells like maple syrup.

Iriset studies the three helpers as they unload trays of examples, opening the lids to display a variety of resins, in low bowls or hardened enough to be chunks like the sacra and pine copal.

She could identify most on sight, but knows little else, for most resins don’t hold design well and thus she has no reason to have studied them.

Shifting nearer to the table, Iriset doesn’t have to feign interest.

One of the helpers says, “Interested, honorie?” Their voice is soft and high, perhaps a woman’s and certainly not Bittor.

Iriset says, “My lady is.” A safe enough answer.

“This is unusual,” says the servant minding the timetable to a young miran who had just arrived in servant’s robe with hems indicating a better rank.

“We don’t mind showing our wares to a pretty lady,” says another of the merchant’s helpers.

Bittor.

Thankfully, Iriset’s cloth mask hides any expression that might’ve crossed her face at the strong jab of recognition in her chest. She tried to prepare herself to remain calm, but the shock of his voice—his actual voice—triggers a flood of rising force inside her.

“Thank you,” she says lightly. “My lady likes to burn resin for her… devotions.” She says the Ceres word.

Iriset steps away, and Bittor follows. His cloth mask is white, as with most of the merchants and workers who braved the quartz yards in the summer. Iriset finds a spot of shade amid the bustle of the docks, then kneels.

Bittor crouches, unrolling a canvas purse with tiny pockets for various resins. He puts it between them on the dusty ground. “Touch whatever you like, and if one appeals, rub it to your wrist. Your body will unlock more of the particular scent.”

Iriset can’t speak. Her throat is too tight as she struggles to control herself. She wishes she could be a kite above her body again, instead of trapped by her very physical responses to him. Oh, how she missed him, lover and friend and ally. She wants to be touched by someone who knows her.

“Take your time,” he says gently, and reaches up to tuck his cloth mask off his eyes.

She’s going to grab him and ruin everything.

Iriset stares at his ruddy peach-brown cheeks, the curve of them as his mouth pulls into a smile for her.

She knows it’ll crinkle his eyes, and finally looks to them.

The pupils are narrow spikes in this hot light, and the green-gold glint of irises leave no white at all.

The most gorgeous thing she’s ever seen. “Bittor,” she mouths.

“Iriset,” he whispers.

A jagged breath whooshes out of her. She tucks up her own cloth mask so he can see her eyes, too. They can’t share too much intimacy while surrounded; eye contact like this will give them away. But Iriset needs it.

“Touch the resin,” Bittor says, and she obeys, holding his gaze. The muscles around his eyes, especially his brow, shiver and she sees he shares her need, and the effort to conceal it.

“How is the undermarket?” she asks, looking down at what her hand is doing.

“Dispersed and buttoned down tight. Everyone is in deep hiding, or with distant family. Your grandparents offered to relay messages between families, in return for news of you. I didn’t have it and said no anyway.”

“Thank you. Dalal?”

“With me. Her son is safe. You know about—”

“Yes,” Iriset cuts him off. She glances up. “I saw him. He is in the apostate tower, and I tried to break him out, but he refused to endanger me.”

“Hardly surprising.”

Iriset huffs. “I have been learning the security of the yards, of the palace itself, and will be able to get you a force-map so you can plan a rescue for the day of his execution. They won’t bring him out until then. But you have to get word that he’s not to be touched before then.”

“That won’t come from us, if it happens, but from the army. I’ve tried getting to them, but the general put people in charge we can’t find ways to blackmail.”

Iriset nods, thinking of General Bey and his uncompromising honesty. Of course he knows which of his men should surround the Little Cat. She pushes her frown back into pleasant interest as she removes a milky-white chunk of resin and smells it. Sharp, spicy, an undertone of wet earth.

“Can you get out?” Bittor asks.

“Yes. But not until after he is. I have to be here, to keep tracking the security threads, and so that if I must, I can beg for mercy.”

“You’re making friends?”

“As many as I can.”

Bittor lets his fingertips, soft because he keeps them oiled for greater sensitivity, brush her knuckles.

Glancing toward the timetable where everyone busily ignores them, Iriset turns her hand over and clasps his.

Her fingers slide between his fingers, turning their hands together, and she shivers as their palms connect with a tingle of ecstatic followed by the rush of rising that comes with relief and hope.

“Bittor,” she says, and this time lets it be more than silent breath.

She wants to ask him what he’s been doing, how he got in with these merchants.

She wants to kiss him, to bite his lip too hard, so that he feels her for days and she can carry the taste of his blood on her tongue.

Iriset presses her tongue to her own teeth instead.

“The Day of Final Mercy,” Bittor says, bringing her back. “Can you create a distraction?”

“What kind?”

“As big as you can make it. Safely.”

Images and ideas flash through her thoughts instantly—most of them related to the very intricate details she’s recently gleaned about the palace security webs already in place. “Oh yes,” she murmurs with quite a bit of relish.

“Good.” Bittor grins.

“What’s the best way for me to send you a map?”

Bittor removes his hand from hers and plucks a chunk of sea glass from the pocket of his linen jacket. The hem of it brushes the dust around him. He puts the greenish glass into her hand. It’s sun-warmed and glows.

Iriset hides it between both her hands. Sea glass is perfect.

She can reorder the internal structure to hide a design map.

They’d hypothesized about such spy-craft two winters ago, tossing the idea back and forth, and Iriset designed a web to impress into the foundational design of the glass.

Any amorphous stone like this would, theoretically, work, but she thought natural glass best, and Bittor had remembered.

She looks up at him. His pupils have widened as the sun dips behind a cloud.

She knows he’s thinking she shouldn’t be here, shouldn’t be the one in the field. Silk is meant for the laboratory.

“I don’t want to be doing this, either,” she says. “But I must.”

“I know. I miss you at my back.”

“I miss you,” Iriset says, then tilts her smile wickedly. “Under me.”

It startles him into a bark of laughter. Bittor glares but for a moment, happily. Then he starts to roll up the resin. “I have to go. Make your map and send that through Shahd mé Sahar.”

“Don’t hurt her family unless you must.” Iriset tucks the sea glass into the bodice of her sleeveless vest. She draws her mask across her eyes, sending the world back into a glaze of orange.

Bittor nods. “I want your escape as part of the plan for your father. I’m getting both of you out that day.”

“Yes. I’ll be ready.”

“Here.” He stands with his rolled pack of resin and offers his hand to assist her. Iriset takes it, and he squeezes, putting something into her palm. He withdraws, and Iriset opens her mouth to speak, to call him back, but doesn’t.

She watches him return to the others, ignoring her. She doesn’t look at what he gave her.

Longing paints streaks down her skin, cold and hot and cold.

Iriset counts to eight with her breath. In-one-two, hold-three-four, out-five-six, hold-seven-eight.

In-one-two, hold-three-four, out-five-six, hold-seven-eight.

She’s so torn today, isn’t she? Longing to run back into her shadow home; longing to remain with Singix in the sun.

Before the resin merchants pack up, Iriset leaves, walking slow to counter the urge to run.

Late that night, after fucking herself as best she can, followed by hours of careful notations on the security and force-threads she’s encountered, Iriset sets down her stylus and vellum, the sea glass and scrap of silk that is the craftmask of her own face.

Bittor had put three tiny crystal shards into her palm, coated in resin that can be easily removed with the proper vibration.

They’re from her prototype glove, and part of the fabric that made it useful for manipulating force.

With them, she can make another silk glove with which to dig her way through gates and security, or tear down craft and force art.

She can’t stop thinking of another use, though.

It’s past the nadir hour when she slips out of her room, disengaging the field of the jade cuff with her tourmaline cap. She hurries silently through the curving corridors of the palace, toward the mirané hall.

Under the stark black-and-white domes, the throne of the Vertex Seal gleams solemnly and alone, lit only by low force-lights, and beneath it is the chunk of red moon rock like dried old blood.

She slips through the vast room, too quiet for any echoes, then behind the throne, and finds the ring of iron through which the numen’s chain would be bound.

If she leaves the shards here, tucked against the iron base, the numen will find them. Or perhaps somebody else will, servant, attendant, designer. But will they extrapolate the purpose?

It isn’t enough to leave crumbs for the numen. Iriset has to do something more. She can’t explain it, and is grateful nobody is asking her to. But its imprisonment makes her so uncomfortable. For herself, for her father. For it, though she understands nothing about it or why it had come.

Keeping the shards in her hand, she goes to the wall and touches it. She closes her eyes and parts her lips to sense and taste the argument of forces filling the mirané hall. There’s so much empty space that the Hall of Princes roars with tension.

Iriset follows the most basic threads woven into the walls.

Ties and anchors for security and decoration, for amplifying and dousing sound, knots for occasionally charging a cool breeze, and nets of rising force for something she can’t identify.

Toward the back of the hall, she finds an archway almost invisible for the clever way it was built—without design, but only basic building techniques.

It opens into a shadowed corridor she suspects will take her to the Vertex Seal’s private office.

Across the hall from that archway is another. Iriset dashes to it on silk slippers and follows the shallow steps down and down to a dead end.

There’s a hidden door. This one disguised by design to appear like nothing more than wall, but covered with alarum-net.

She leans close and breathes on the filaments of force without quite touching.

They tremble, and Iriset freezes. If she fiddles with it in the slightest, the alarm will sound. She can’t afford that, yet.

It must be where the numen is kept.

The wall is seamless. It looks like a mistake, not a prison or false door.

As Iriset climbs back up to the Hall of Princes and makes her way back to her room, she wonders how many hidden doorways are scattered around the palace.