Page 4

Prison

T he soldiers of the Vertex Seal take Iriset to the apostate’s prison at the edge of the Crystal Desert in the center of Moonshadow City.

She knows, because even trapped inside a ribbon skiff with null wires circling her neck and wrists to bar her from manipulating external forces, she can trace their path through the streets using her other senses and extensive memorization of the map of the city.

Her father used to make a game of it every morning over breakfast. The better to avoid authorities and locate safe houses, the Little Cat said.

The better to understand the security habits of the royal architects, Iriset answered. Both were true, of course.

In these days, Moonshadow City is the heart of the empire, literally and metaphorically.

Moonshadow, the Holy City, glimmers inside a massive red-rock crater eight miles across.

From the central palace complex built like succulents with sharp-edged leaves, the city unfurls with exacting Design: Sixteen precincts divide it into four quadrants, each ruled by the four forces of rising, flow, falling, and ecstatic.

Brilliant white towers with star crowns and needle roofs poke up among vivid blue and green domes.

Petal-style housing complexes spiral and curve like stucco roses in which people live and work.

Peristyle halls frame green space to create temples to Silence, and there are gardens of lush rainforest plants, gardens of sand and glass, and water gardens filled with mirror fish and black lotus.

Elegant force-bridges sweep across avenues and canals, humming with the hollow song of skull sirens, those tiny birdlike creatures from the Apostate Age that feed on the layers of rising and falling forces woven together to keep the bridges active.

Dominating the skyline are the four Great Steeples in the north, south, east, and west that anchor the forces of the city, rising tall enough to cast thick shadows across multiple precincts.

The edge of the crater in the south glints with glass from the windows of pocket apartments cut into the red rocks, and the western cliffs are taken up by barracks shared between armies.

The eastern crater face is terraced with gardens and walking paths and chapels, while the north is reserved for catacombs piercing deep into the earth.

The Lapis River passes into the crater via underground caverns, bursting up near the Rising Steeple to pour south and cup the city with its flow.

Two sprawling canyons slice through the city, mirroring each other though they are on opposite sides of the crater: They are left over from experiments during the Apostate Age to draw water up from deep in the earth.

People carved homes into the sides of the canyons, which flood in the rains and dry to dust during the Days of Mercy.

It is the most beautiful city in the world.

And above it, Aharté’s silver-pink moon hangs like a pearl affixed to the brocade of the sky.

Iriset’s cell consists of design-resistant walls and floor, empty but for a sleeping shelf and a clay bowl for relief. Once a day she’s fed soda bread and nutty cheese with a shallow bowl of water. The soldiers do not remove the null wires around her wrists and neck.

She paces the dirt floor, walking the lines of a four-point star, then eight-, then sixteen-point.

The room is too small for thirty-two points so of course she convinces herself that nothing will relax her but thirty-two points.

How is she to calm down without being able to sense forces thanks to the fucking null wires?

Only walking patterns, only the repetition, and she needs the complexity of thirty-two.

Her heart won’t stop pounding, she feels feverish and lightheaded, working herself into an intense state of anxiety until she finally falls asleep.

Iriset is unused to idleness.

The best she can do to distract herself is mentally indulging in wild theories of flight, which she’s never forgotten as she’s never forgotten the bobcat kitten.

It’s her favorite architectural problem to chew on, and her theories have moved away from wings over the years: Some spiders, when young, build delicate gossamer webs with which to catch the wind, ballooning up into the air to travel miles and miles to new lands, new homes.

She thinks perhaps that is a key to flight that doesn’t smack of creating new life.

But the mathematics are impossibly complex, to heft a human woman’s weight on a thread of force, considering wind vectors and tensile strength and how to combat—or use, or use!

—the falling force always dragging downward to the earth.

She wishes she had writing materials, or even just the company of her poor darling spinners, burned and smashed in her study.

She misses the shiver of their tiny feet on her forearm, each step a shock of ecstatic force.

She wants Bittor to crouch beside her, tell her he didn’t kill them, then wrap arms around her to ground her in her body.

They spent hours testing force-reactions on each other: a bite here, a lick there, tickling the elbow or under the wrist, finding ways to draw out the rising force of desire.

Iriset took notes comparing their bodies’ reactions, how Bittor’s masculine-forward design conveyed physical reactions to ecstatic force differently from hers.

They made so many innuendos about rising force and flow.

(That was the essay that revealed Silk was a woman, when she included personal observations about pleasure in a feminine-forward body and theories about using the forces generated during sex to trigger delay-releasing medicines or poisons.

Her father read it, as he read all her work, and told her to stop experimenting on his best escape artist. Raia mér Omorose read it in secret, and thought about Silk touching an tenderly, transforming ans body to a better gender.

Bittor read it, too, and was so embarrassed he didn’t speak to Iriset for days and never read one of her pamphlets again.)

By the fourth day in prison Iriset’s robe is filthy, her mask balled up with her jacket like a pillow upon the shelf. Pale stucco dust sticks in the creases of her skin, and her fingernails are cracked to the quick from scrabbling to sketch equations upon the floor.

Halfway through the day, the cell door unlocks, surprising her onto her feet: She only has time to smooth hair off her face and wish she’d spent the moment grabbing her mask before two soldiers grasp her elbows and haul her from the cell.

The stucco-smooth hallways wind upward, and they shove her into a room flooded with sunlight. Iriset winces away.

Her bare toes warm against a plain black-and-white geometric rug.

There’s a long table at the center of the room, and a lattice window allows in blue sky, fractured sunlight.

Beside it stands a young person in the simple tight robe of a palace architect.

She assumes an is a man, which is the point of ans carriage and masc-forward clothes.

It is Raia mér Omorose, who earned a place with the palace designers for locating Silk.

An makes a noise of distress and points to a bowl and pitcher at the corner of the table, and a pile of folded blue cloth.

“Take a moment, please, to steady and drink, and change if you would,” an says, and leaves her alone.

Iriset tears out of her dirty clothes. Instead of using the bowl for gentle washing, she pours water straight from the pitcher onto her chest, swiping under arms and breasts, between her legs and then down her back.

She tips her head upside down and does what little she can to scrub at her scalp.

She needs a pick for the tangles, or to chop it all off.

When the pitcher is empty of every drop, she pulls apart the pile of clothes to find the mask first, which is a cloth mask, typical of the lower classes and first-generation citizens.

With it, Iriset twists up her heavy hair, winding the plain linen across her forehead and under her chin, securing it all firmly, with a fluttering edge by her ear to hide her eyes if she needs it.

Only then does she find the robe and loincloth and vest. Having her hair wrapped again is such a relief she almost laughs, longing for the luxury of a few moments to stand nude atop the table, free of null wires, to feel for errant threads of ecstatic or rising force.

The gentle knock and long pause before the door opens again are an unexpected kindness that relaxes her slightly as she positions herself beside the lattice window where she can feel a breeze on her cheek, if not the omnipresent hum of force-ribbons outside.

Raia immediately touches ans fingers to ans eyelids.

It’s polite, a gesture of respect for the goddess Aharté, who prefers her children not to share the intimacy of long eye contact unless they’re family or otherwise bound—it is also an old tradition against human architecture.

If you show your eyes to none, none can design a mask of your face.

That’s why the masks, too. An old tradition—or superstition, Iriset might say—born with the mirané people.

Iriset touches her eyelids briefly in return. She does not draw the mask across her sight.

“I am named Raia mér Omorose,” an says.