Page 72

It wasn’t a lie: Iriset is nauseated. Her insides feel like a cold marsh, and her head rings dully.

But she can’t afford to return to her bed and simply rest. These new potential complications are a problem for later.

Now there’s a silicate anchor in her pocket, ready to be pinned in place.

She estimates she needs six more days to get all her groundwork laid since she can’t exactly be overt about what she’s doing.

Iriset hasn’t visited the Color Can Be Loud Garden since the night she held that strange vigil with Lyric, before Singix died, before Iriset stole her face and gave up her own life. It feels odd to be here.

Shahd lets go of her hand and says she’ll fetch ginger tea for her stomach.

Iriset smiles wearily, glad for Shahd. When she returns, Shahd will make sure there aren’t others in the garden to witness Iriset’s actions.

Maybe Shahd knows more about signs of pregnancy than Iriset and they can talk about that, too.

The Seal guards fan out to tuck into the alcoves and balconies, to peer behind the large, waxy square leaves of ilyen trees, as Iriset chooses her bench. Then the guards disperse but for one, who turns his back to her as she’s requested lately.

It’s so rare for her to be alone that Iriset will take the illusion of solitude, glad she can sigh without expecting a response, glad she can peer at the invisible design threads tying up the roses, touch her fingertips to the little design panel hidden in the plinth of a marble statue.

Even taste the force eddies in the air without anyone to see her stick out her tongue.

It will be complicated to find the right fork in which to settle her anchor here, but of course not too complicated for her.

The lilies haven’t changed at all, their vibrant trumpets bending toward her extravagant design, aching for her craftmask.

Iriset brushes her hand against their tonguelike leaves, picking up traces of red pollen at the tips of her fingers.

The pollen jerks into ragged starbursts of ecstatic when the tiny powder touches her skin.

Iriset wipes her hands off on her skirts and sinks onto the bench.

It’s a cool garden, shaded with its glass lattice dome and lush trees.

Force-fans create a breeze, as they do everywhere in the palace complex.

The entire place is such an amazing, intricate design.

Designs upon designs, really. Like a living body.

That reminds her of the pulse she used to feel, when she was only Iriset, sleeping at night with her ear pressed to the thin pillows and her palms against the tiled floor.

The pulse, like breathing, that holds the palace’s design together somehow.

She’s never had a chance to investigate, and there’s no obvious cause for it in the security layers she’d been digging into.

Maybe she doesn’t notice the breathing as Singix because so much design constantly runs over her skin and weaves through her flesh.

She’s too loud.

With a little self-deprecating smile, she considers how much she gave up, how much she took, when she became Singix. And yet, even as her shoulders droop, she thinks of Lyric sitting here beside her that night, telling her about brutality. He said her name— Iriset —and she knew even then.

A different Seal guard appears and taps the one with her on the shoulder. They nod and trade places. Then the new guard approaches her, and Iriset glances over, irritated. He approaches with purpose, yet there’s no sign of Shahd or any other messenger. “Yes?”

He says nothing but keeps coming, and Iriset gets to her feet. “What? What are you…?” And then she laughs, for she spies a small force-wire in his hand, curling and snapping ecstatically like an eager snake. She laughs because it’s too ironic, the timing.

Her amusement gives him pause.

Just enough for her to decide: He’s too near for her to get the stylus in her hair, the one designed to kill, before he gets her.

And if she runs, he’ll whip the wire over her head and the touch of it will either kill her or ruin her craftmask, or both.

So, recklessly, Iriset screams and runs at him, arms up around her head to ram his stomach with her right shoulder and all her weight. Like her father taught her.

The assassin does not see it coming and grunts, though he’s in lacquered armor.

He stumbles and drops his wire. Iriset nearly falls, but grits her teeth and stomps down on his foot.

Heat slices her shoulder and arm as she jerks away, then she rears back to bring up her other leg and smash her slippered foot against his groin.

It doesn’t hurt him. Iriset barely shoves his balance off.

But that’s all the time it takes for the other guards to fling themselves around her and use their force-blades to cast arcs of bright design around her in a shield, and their robes harden with charges of raw power.

Sinking to her knees, Iriset shakes and gasps for breath. She lets her inner design rage. Lyric will feel the violence of this, no matter where he is.

Panting, she stares through the legs of her loyal guards as another Seal guard kicks her attacker back into the lilies, and she whimpers in regret over the poor flowers.

But she’s glad she didn’t have to kill him herself.

She’d grown complacent, worried only about discovery and destruction, not Singix’s unknown enemy.

Iriset clutches the bleeding wound the assassin gave her, distantly, numbly relieved it’d been a regular knife and not something with applied force: Only her flesh is wounded, not her crawling net, nor any of her design.

If she were herself and human architecture weren’t ridiculously banned, she could grit her teeth and knit flowing force through the skin with her stylus until her crawling net taught her own body to heal fast enough that there wouldn’t even be a scar by morning.

A distant voice calls her guards and two jog away, and Iriset gets up to follow.

There’s a body sprawled on the grass, tucked half under a sculptured juniper with blush-pink berries.

The guards are holding the space while one kneels, pushes thick black hair out of the body’s face. It’s sticky with blood, dragging across Shahd’s slack mouth.

Iriset stops.

She hears the explanation through ringing in her ears: They think the assassin caught the girl returning with tea and slit her throat.

The Seal guard who says it isn’t even telling Iriset, but reporting to the other guard.

Iriset hears it, hears it like it shouldn’t matter to her.

She sinks to her knees and bends over her lap, lets blood and rising force rush up into her face as she presses it to her knees.

Shahd shouldn’t have been here. She should have been with Amaranth’s handmaidens, or with her family. Not here. She was only sixteen.

Someone says, “The assassin is dead, too. Blood in his eyes, probably force-popped.”

She believed in Iriset.

Lyric arrives breathless. “Singix, are you well?” He lifts her up.

“Of course not,” she snaps, smearing her blood onto his bare shoulder as she shoves him.

She blinks, staring at the color of it, brighter red and bluer in undertone than the rich mirané brown of his skin.

Why is blood colored as it is, she wonders, falling into a daze of fast thought, a spiral pulling her down into her own mind.

She kneels beside Shahd’s body, ruining her gown in the blood. Shahd’s eyes are oddly half open, her gaping neck drenched in blood that still seems to ooze, but that’s just the light and the breeze. Iriset tastes blood in the back of her throat.

She’s the one who said discovery was the greatest threat, not the murderer. She let her guard down, she’s the one. It’s her fault.

In a daze, Iriset stumbles back to her feet and before Lyric can catch her, she marches back to the dead assassin.

Force-popped is slang for too much ecstatic force in the brain.

A common accident in elder designers. She crouches and slaps him, even though he’s dead.

She slaps him again and again, each time driving her own ecstatic into his face and body, there has to be something she can trace: And there it is, a signature, a—

Lyric and Sidoné both grasp at her, pulling her away from the body. Her palm tingles with force and Lyric hugs her, begging her softly to stop.

But she has it. She closes her eyes, lets him drag her away, and imprints the signature, the feel and shape of it, into her memory.

The palace doctor smears her wound with stinging antiseptic and a bandage to hold the edges together until it heals of its own slow accord.

Lyric wraps a fresh robe over her bloodied gown, to show anyone who sees them pass that Singix is well.

He tucks her hand against his arm and walks her slowly to their tower.

She’s thinking furiously, because all her anchors could be used to trace this thing she found, whatever it is—a weapon, or a tangled force-loop that could be a pain device, something to shock him if he didn’t obey.

It can be traced, palace architects won’t think so, but she can repurpose her anchors to do it—

—but then she can’t use them for her graffiti.

She’d have to start all over again, but she doesn’t have time and it’s very likely the blown anchors would be discovered by the investigator-designers or Seal guard.

They might figure out someone is surgically altering the security groundwork, and if they put Raia or someone as talented on it, it could even be traced back to Iriset.

Raia might recognize her work. Silk’s work.

Iriset should do it for Shahd anyway. She should. Justice for Shahd—and Singix herself—should be more important than whatever legacy she thinks she’s leaving behind. She’s no good at this! People keep dying around her but she keeps trying. What hubris! Who will die for her next?

Suddenly Lyric picks her up.