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His hands are warm, cupped around hers. He does nothing, though, simply breathes with their hands joined.

Iriset follows his lead with long breaths and eventually a very slight smile.

She opens her eyes to find him watching her lips.

“May I have mine?” she asks, thinking again of Singix.

She needs to banish the thought. This is her own design egg. Hers.

Lyric blinks and then quickly removes her sandglass box from the necklace he wears. They trade. Iriset grips hers in one palm while Lyric flicks open his box and withdraws the tiny egg.

Carefully, he raises it and parts his lips. He extends his tongue a little bit, just enough to touch the egg to the tip. Wordlessly, he lifts his brow and leans up toward her.

Iriset reaches for his shoulder with her empty hand, to steady him when he kisses with warm, soft lips.

Then they open their mouths at the same moment, and Lyric turns his head to touch his tongue to her upper lip, then slides it deliberately into her mouth.

Iriset sucks the egg into herself, swallowing.

She leans her forehead against the corner of his mouth, pulse racing, and opens her sandglass box to press her finger against her egg.

It sticks there and she brings her hand up between them.

Dropping her box onto the bed, she takes his jaw gently in her two hands.

She meets his gaze again, and when he opens his mouth for her, she puts her finger inside, placing the egg against his tongue.

As she withdraws her finger, Lyric closes his lips around her and sucks softly.

The pad of her finger skims his bottom teeth and Iriset moans.

Her skin prickles with desire, needles of force dancing out of her blood, clapping a beat in her skull, and all of it drains in a swirl to her hips and thighs and belly.

Lyric doesn’t move until Iriset tugs him onto the bed beside her and leans in to kiss him.

He holds her face, sliding fingers into her hair and opening his mouth.

Iriset hugs his head and neck, kissing hard enough to lift herself over onto his lap.

She slides across his thighs, and his erection is so extremely satisfying Iriset rubs her bottom against it before remembering in a burst of pleasure that Singix had been anxious to the point of fear, and this is not the right behavior—but she also doesn’t really give a shit anymore, being entirely hot and wet herself, and nothing between them but thin linen.

What’s he going to complain about, anyway?

Their kiss breaks off in a heady smear, and Lyric kisses her jaw, her cheek, sighing into her hair, until Iriset puts their mouths together again and—

The eggs, traded and burrowing into each respective design, suddenly unleash their power.

Iriset’s back arches and her eyes fly wide open: She stares at the red-wound ceiling glass, that mirané gash, as tendrils of forces drive through her, gathering every part of her up and twisting it, reaching out of her body—and it’s like light, filling her up, shining from her, except invisible.

And Lyric’s design reaches back for her.

They become cries of light, a moan of Silence, when their designs bind together, transforming into one whole.

Sweating, panting, they might stop there—the ritual is finished with this kiss.

Lyric holds her tight against him; Iriset melts into his chest, her eyes pressed under his ear. “Water?” he whispers raggedly.

But Iriset is not satisfied, and perhaps Singix wouldn’t have recognized the ache for exactly what it is, but she does, and she recognizes the evidence of Lyric’s desire, too.

So she shakes her head and pushes him back against the bed, rolling off him.

She grabs at his shift, dragging it up with desperate hands.

Her fingers scour his thighs and she looks frantically at his face; he’s so sweetly intent, and Iriset suddenly stops, panting slightly.

“Singix,” he says, gratifyingly shaky, “we can—slow, we can do what we like, now, or later.”

“No,” she whispers, “I want this, I want you.”

“I want you, too,” he answers.

Iriset can see it, can see the shivering flow tightening his belly, the rise and ecstatic of his erection.

The answering sparks and heat in her make her feel like a center of falling force, everything spilling, pooling in the mouth of her hips, the small of her back.

She taps at his sternum, and Lyric sits in one graceful motion.

He throws off the shift and is as naked as her.

He cups her shoulder, rubs a thumb into the thin skin at the join of collarbone and muscle.

Then Lyric leans in and kisses her again, open-mouthed.

Iriset lets him in. She wraps her hand around his cock and his body spasms. The noise he makes against her tongue tastes like that fifth force she nearly felt in the Moon-Eater’s Temple.

(It feels like when she stopped Erxan’s heart.)

Clamoring into his lap, Iriset kisses and bites at his lips.

Lyric grabs her by the bottom, strong hands steadying her though Lyric is anything but steady himself.

She reaches behind herself and nudges one of his hands so that his fingers find the wet edges of her labia.

Iriset arches her back to welcome the touch, leaning down, and when Lyric slides his fingers deeper, she winds her arms around his neck, pulling her face to his in a tight embrace, and whispers, “Yes, yes, yes.”

“Yes,” he says back, completing the quartet, dipping fingers inside her.

Iriset decides to take her time later, lick every inch of his skin, explore the joints and tendons, the flavor of his elbows and throat-knot and inner thighs, but right now she wiggles and finds his cock again with her hand. She lifts up and does her best with the angle. “Lyric,” she says.

His eyes fly open and lock onto hers.

Finally he helps, taking himself to her entrance.

He trembles everywhere, returns his hands to her thighs, offering to hold her weight.

Iriset presses down, and fights against the instinct to let her head fall back, her eyes close.

Instead she stares at him. She puts her hand to his jaw, his mouth, and when he opens up, Iriset slides two fingers into his mouth.

His tongue is just as hot and wet as her.

This is something Singix would never think to do. An act singular to Iriset, making a circuit of penetration between their bodies.

Lyric’s lashes flutter as they both push in as far as they can go.

His mirané-brown eyes blur in her gaze, too close, too close, becoming red sparks of ecstatic force as the flow between them rises and falls and Iriset smiles, laughs.

Lyric sucks at her fingers and she pulses her hips, and it is perfect.

Iriset mé Isidor lies in the darkness, one hand trailing off the bed to brush against the carved scales of the alliraptor’s back.

Her other is pinned beneath her husband’s limp body.

Though he sleeps, she can’t even close her eyes.

A thick, warm breeze slithers through the lattice walls, finding her eyelashes, her toes, every exposed hair on her body.

It’s too much.

Standing carefully, Iriset leaves Lyric to pad quietly down the twist of stairs into the greeting room, and from there goes down again into their bathing room.

A panel beside the entrance activates light with a touch, and the ecstatic chandelier drips in eight simple lines, filling the room with a pale glow.

Iriset washes her face, then runs a warm bath in the pool sunk into the floor.

It’s many hours until dawn, and she slips in without oil or perfume or bubbles, only herself and the water, cradled in the belly of the pool. The moment the water laps at her chin, her breath shudders.

She did it. She is here. She is the best.

So what?

Singix, whom she loved , is dead and unremembered. Iriset killed a friend with raw design.

Iriset has never bothered to pretend her work primarily served good—she knows what her father has been, knows her ambitions were for herself, not the progress of justice.

Silk might chase flight and tensile strength and healing—all manner of things that could improve lives, but that wasn’t why she did it.

Alone in an echoing bathroom, Iriset can’t help thinking Singix would be so disappointed in her.

Iriset is no better than the Vertex Seal, struggling to maintain a brutal system with equal brutality.

Using her genius for this kind of design proves nothing but that she is just as willing to harm a few in order for her legacy to stand.

Iriset grips her fists around each other, pressing them to her sternum beneath the water, where the marriage knot coils. She has to keep it together. Keep herself—everything—together.

She breathes. She trembles. Her distress (and the pulse of her pain through their marriage knot) draws Lyric to her.

He kneels beside the pool in a thin robe and brushes damp hair back from her face and touches her mouth, and when she brings up her arms he drags her out onto the floor, both of them soaked.

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and he hugs her tightly.

“What for?” he asks, stunned. He strokes her hair.

Iriset shakes her head and realizes his presence alone has drawn her ecstatic sobs into a gentler rhythm.

The Vertex Seal stands and lifts her into his arms. He carries her up and up the twisting corridor and back to their bed, where he kisses her cheeks and palms, where he caresses her thighs and belly, until she begs in short, hot whispering cries for his fingers to reach inside her and his tongue to press at the hollow of her throat.