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“What?” Diaa’s eyes widen. Her hand lowers. “You’re not… No, you’re lying to save yourself.”

“Do you know who I am? I made a craftmask under your daughter’s command. For quads I have lived as Singix, and you didn’t know. They might not suspect you, Diaa, but neither does your daughter trust you.”

“Iriset mé Isidor,” Diaa hisses.

Iriset shakes her head. It feels so good to speak.

She burns with eager forces, vivid and popping in her blood.

“I am Silk . I have invented new kinds of designs my entire life, given wings to flightless animals, sculpted bones, and healed apostatic cancer. There is a rebellion burning through Moonshadow City in my name. I can”—she touches the dual tines of her crystal comb to Diaa’s chest, just above the collar of her layered robe—“do anything.”

Iriset activates the design.

(When Iriset created her weapon, she was thinking of apostatical theory, thinking of games she played with herself and what it might take to stop a heart, harden blood, whether a crawling design could be used to destroy a face or musculature as well as it could be used to transform.

She was not thinking of Erxan. She was thinking she had to live.)

The comb shatters in the surge of forces it focuses: ecstatic arrows for Diaa’s heart, hooking the threads of her inner design; flow draws them in; rising and falling slam together like a pair of vicious scissors, and cuts them.

Diaa collapses.

Dead.

Just like that.

Satisfaction unfurls in Silk’s mind. And tiny pricks of surprise. It worked perfectly. Too well. It’s so much cleaner than the mess she made of Ambassador Erxan. Painless.

Silk stares. She almost kneels to check… something. To seek out the threads of force and taste their angles.

Then, suddenly, panic blossoms outward. Iriset’s skin feels aflame, she’s choking on what she’s done, ecstatic force sparking behind her eyes. We pay for what we do.

She can’t feel her hands. She steps back, away from the sprawl of Diaa’s voluminous robes.

The mother of the Vertex Seal is dead.

Amaranth’s mother is dead.

Iriset remembers to breathe, gasping hugely. She bends at the waist, one hand fisted against her heart, the other flat on her knee. Closing her eyes, she draws in eight breaths in an eight-count.

She didn’t want this kind of revenge, but it seems she’ll have it.

“Your Glory?” Huya calls from beyond the study door.

“I’m fine,” Iriset calls back. “Settling myself. I’ll be out to join you shortly.”

Slowly, Iriset calms down—to a level of numbness in which she can function, at least. Going to the secret drawer, she pulls out the strip of silk that is the craftmask she hasn’t let herself think about this whole time.

With it, her basic stylus, and the resonance pill, she returns to their bedroom.

The pill is a small, rounded opal nugget the size of her thumbnail. Quickly Iriset sketches a basic four-eight-sixteen-four hold design against the gem, activates it with an atonal quartet, then swallows it.

It’s large and difficult but that’s the point: Once it’s in her throat, Iriset removes her Ceres chest piece and parts her borrowed robe so that she can touch the tip of the stylus to her sternum.

She sparks it and drives it into her skin.

The blood-pain-gasp works with a low hum to match the hold design on the opal inside her, and it catches.

The forces meet under her breastbone, and Iriset’s whole body thrums.

As she breathes through what will hopefully slowly, methodically, break down the marriage knot, she lifts the stylus to her left temple. With another deep breath, Iriset tears the Singix craftmask seam.

It hurts.

Like stripping skin off her face. Flaying design from muscles.

The burn makes her catch her breath, but she doesn’t hesitate.

The craftmask peels away bit by bit, even and strong.

It tugs at her eyes and loosens a few lashes and fine nose hairs, and she whimpers as it detaches from her lips, the sensitive skin bruised and new.

Heat fills her skull as her muscles reclaim themselves, jaw squaring off, cheeks widening into a slight tilt, and her tendons, muscles, cartilage bending to fit where they belong.

She pricks her eyes gently with the stylus, releasing the tiny nets that changed the color of her irises.

Her vision blurs, as if her eyes are melting, but that, strangely, doesn’t hurt.

Once she holds the used craftmask limp in her hands, she tears it violently in two, whispering a goodbye to beloved Singix.

She sets the remnants beside the newly completed craftmask on the bed, then begins the process of retracting the crawling design that will cause her skin to burn and flake away, revealing her own flawed desert-peach.

She deactivates the secondary net so it will dissolve slowly over the next few hours, stripping the softness and black gleam from her hair.

There’s nothing she can do to make that happen faster.

Or, she can, but it would be debilitating.

Sweaty and shaking, Iriset takes off the rest of her clothes. Her skin feels tight, wrinkling in places it bends the most: knuckles, elbows, knees, groin, neck. Closing her eyes, she rubs at herself, moving the transformation along. Skin puckers and flakes away. It’s disgusting.

But Iriset is methodical about it, taking care with one arm, then the other, then her torso and what she can reach of her back. Her hips and legs are easier, having had more time, and the skin of one of her feet comes off almost like a glove. Iriset grimaces, equally disturbed and fascinated.

When she’s as finished as she can be, she puts the trousers and tunic and slippers back on, and does her best to sweep the skin into a pile. It’s translucent and clear and will continue to quickly deteriorate until it’s nothing but dust.

Her breastbone hums with a deep resonance.

Trembling and exhausted, Iriset stares at what she’s leaving behind.

A mask of her husband, the Vertex Seal, waiting here in the room above his mother’s body. Proof of who she is and always has been. Proof of what she’s done to him.

It will be a quieter devastation than her public display.

A private message for the Vertex Seal: She’s not a god. Just an apostate, and maybe a bit of a monster. Like him.

If she goes now, fast, she’ll have time to find Bittor and warn him.

Make sure he’s safe. And her grandparents.

Dalal and her son. The remnants of the Little Cat’s court who were her family long before she infiltrated this one.

Iriset will be safe, too, slipped away into the city to be Silk out there. To keep pushing her work. To live.

Only slightly shaky, Iriset returns to the study.

Diaa remains sprawled on the floor, those pink blossoms still beautiful against her skin.

Iriset drops a scarf over Diaa’s face, then gathers the rest of what she needs, including a long strip of orange silk to be a cloth mask for herself and her father’s echo coin.

Before she can change her mind, she leaves through the secret door.

Her only stop on her way out of the palace complex is the Color Can Be Loud Garden, where she kneels on the lawn beside the bed of force-hungry lilies.

Iriset plants the final anchor, the trigger, with a crudely designed delay.

She hooks its delay into the breathing foundation, that natural rhythm of the palace architecture.

She doesn’t have time to make it precise, and only knows that at this pace, the delay will deteriorate sometime in the next five hours.

At that point the anchors will connect and close their loops, and her massive design will activate.

Silk’s spiders will climb all over everything.

Once it’s done, she retucks her cloth mask and bows her head like a regular attendant, and Iriset mé Isidor leaves the palace of the Vertex Seal.