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The woman lifts her eyebrow and Iriset picks out a thread from the hem of Lyric’s very fine tunic.

It isn’t silk, but should work as easily to knit flesh.

She loops some between her fingers in an infinite knot, then presses it to the woman’s warm brown skin.

With the stylus she pricks the points of a simple star polygon pattern, and then draws on the woman’s inner forces of flow and falling to fuel the design.

The woman hisses in surprise, and possibly some pain, though it’s more hot than sharp.

As Iriset works, the silk thread sinks in, tightening the skin, and in a brief echo of sympathetic magic, it basically teaches the flesh to sew itself back together.

“Human architecture,” the daughter says quietly, either in awe or in fear.

“Fast, too,” her mother says, pressing at her healing wound. She jerks her chin and the daughter dashes out of the shop. “I’m Pel,” the mother says to Iriset. “Drink?”

“Thank you.”

“There’s a stool if you’d like to come into the back.”

Iriset accepts the hospitality and the cup of rose wine. It’s cloudy, cut with rice liquor, and it sits hard on her tongue but slips down like a trickle of smooth fire. She touches her eyelids with thumb and forefinger in appreciation.

Pel sips at her own cup and studies Iriset. “You’re probably better for him dead.”

“Not personally,” Iriset answers, taking no offense. “And not if I miraculously revive. But you should go visit friends in another precinct.”

“You bringing the army behind you after all?”

“No, Bittor’s done that himself, with the assassination of Sian méra Sayar last night. I’m here to warn him. To help.”

The old woman’s crooked front teeth gleam when she grimaces, and Iriset thinks, as she often has, that there’s no need for anyone to have crooked anything.

Superstition and stubbornness hold human architecture as apostasy.

But this time, she thinks of Lyric, too, and his belief in Aharté’s Holy Design.

His insistence that humans are already designed as intended, even when born with disabilities that apostasy could mend.

There are things Iriset knows she can’t fix, but perhaps only because she’s never given it great study.

(She’s never given much study to any kind of healing or developmental design beyond traumatic injury or apostatical cancers, and doesn’t realize that in three hundred years of the Apostate Age, the question of what human design could and couldn’t, or should and shouldn’t, attempt was varied, passionate, and rife with not only conflict but disaster.

There are no easy answers, only individual circumstances and a whole lot of arrogance.)

Thinking of Lyric even fleetingly makes the opal pill in Iriset’s chest ache and the resonance hiccup.

She has to swallow carefully and breathe obviously deep.

The disintegration of the marriage knot has to be working, but she can’t focus on it too clearly or it will solidify again.

Maybe. Her whole body feels like it’s recovering from sunburn.

“I don’t think Bittor killed him, hiha,” Pel says.

The endearment clenches a fist around Iriset’s throat, and all she can say is “Huh?”

Pel looks darkly amused. “The small king. I am not aware of any plans to kill him, especially since he was in the neighboring precinct. But I don’t know all that Bittor plans.”

Iriset finishes the wine in her cup in one long go. It parts strangely around the opal she swallowed. She briefly meets Pel’s gaze before politely settling her eyes on the older woman’s lips. “The Vertex Seal thinks he did.”

“Then he might as well have.”

Before Iriset can respond to that brittle pessimism, Pel continues, “You’re Isidor’s daughter, aren’t you?”

Iriset nods.

“I remember you on the street with your grandfather. You never came into my shop, though, not a good little girl like you.” Pel snorts. “Except you’re also Silk. That was well done.”

“The Little Cat was good at keeping his life compartmentalized,” she says lightly. Iriset learned the same trick from him very well.

“I was with Bittor when we heard that Iriset mé Isidor died.”

“So?” Iriset feels her cheeks flush. She’s disliking the sense of interrogation.

“So nothing in particular.”

“Will he come fast?”

“Probably.”

Iriset clenches her jaw. Her scalp itches and she wants to scratch away any of the last of Singix’s skin.

Tentatively she touches her hair. The crawling design is working hard, but it’s a weird, tangled mix of sleek and rougher brown.

She drops her hand into her lap and glances down.

Peach-brown, maybe a little paler than usual, with rougher knuckles but her fingertips as smooth as ever.

“He’s consolidated what’s left of the Little Cat’s people as best he can, using the graffiti as a rallying cry. But not for much besides chaos.” Pel sounds frustrated.

Iriset doesn’t know how to explain that this chaos is meaning.

The protest art, the protest itself, has meaning.

Disruption is all that matters when ruining a design.

The design breaks whether that disruption comes from a well-thought-out plan or the wrong person sneezed and spilled a bit too much ecstatic into the threads.

Someone bursts into the front of the shop, and Pel heads out to take care of it, Iriset just behind.

A man with hair tied in the Sarian way gestures wildly, saying, “A spider! Right over the ribbon hub. It’s huge graffiti, and it’s weaving something!”

The man waves and runs off, and the few customers and a pale-faced server from the patio go after. Pel glances over her shoulder at Iriset. “You?”

“Me.” Grim satisfaction presses Iriset’s mouth into a smile. “If it’s there, that means the palace array is live, too. Graffiti the likes of which you’ve never seen, a beautiful big spider right over the Silent Chapel. Silk lives.”

“Just to match what Bittor and Dalal have been making?”

“Partly, but also to prove Silk does live, and not out here. If the army wants to root out apostasy, they have to do it to the palace of the Vertex Seal, too.”

“They’ll never.”

“Which will only prove their hypocrisy, prove Aharté’s Silence isn’t perfect, isn’t even sustainable. It’s so easy to disrupt, and the longer we can disrupt it, the more people will see.”

“Maybe even miran,” Pel says thoughtfully.

“Lyric méra Esmail certainly. I was supposed to be there for the array, to show myself to all of them, but I had to come here. This way at least Lyric will know there is no Silence in his life that cannot be undone because of how deeply I disrupted every aspect of it already. Fuck Aharté—Silk is the one who can redesign the whole empire.”

Someone behind them claps slowly. Iriset and Pel both spin.

“Silk is Syr,” Bittor says, standing backlit in the glow from the shop door.

“Bittor.” Iriset’s Bittor, alive and whole, those stocky shoulders corded with muscle, his forearms wrapped with knife-cuffs, his hair a mess around his square face, his scarred nose, and his mouth opening to shape her name.

“Iriset,” he says, so rough with emotion it seems to shake the room.

His robe is worn green linen and hangs heavy like it’s paneled with armor on the underside.

Bittor tears his cloth mask away from his face, tugging it off-kilter so the whole twisted cloth slides off his brown hair and slumps onto his shoulder.

He doesn’t seem to notice, for he stares at Iriset with his glinting cat-eyes, pupils long and wide.

His hands twitch against his thighs, and Iriset flings herself into his arms.

Bittor catches her, stepping back from the strength of the embrace, and lifts her off her toes.

Iriset breathes so deeply, as if she can erase her memories of the past season with his smell alone.

She buries her face under his ear while Bittor’s arms tighten beyond the strength of her oversensitive body, and she’s stuck, unbreathing, for a moment.

A tremor passes from him to her—ecstatic force popping between them, dominant in him just as in her.

She digs her fingers into his hair. Just like hers.

Thick, rough, strong enough for knotting.

“Holy moon,” he says, voice shaking, and releases her enough she slides down to her feet again.

He grabs her head, cupping it, and smooths his thumbs along her cheeks.

It aches, for her facial skin is the most tender.

But she doesn’t stop him. His eyes flicker over her face, fast and desperate, and the smile slowly spreading across his mouth is like wildflowers blossoming across the desert.

For the first time in so long, Iriset feels joy—a fleeting dart of it, childlike and familiar and uplifting. “I knew it,” he adds.

“How?” she whispers. “How did you know?”

“All the things,” he says with that soft smile. “But mostly, Singix of the Beautiful Twilight said my name, and the most incredible, the most insane reason why that could be so was because it wasn’t Singix, it was you .”

Iriset involuntarily laughs like a sob, feeling warm rain falling force ground her in this, in her oldest friend, in being known.

Bittor knows her so well that he knows exactly what audacious, wild genius she is capable of, and not just as an if, a possibility, but he believes in it.

In her. Even if she’s pretty sure he just called her crazy, too.

Then he kisses her, and she’s kissing him back, his taste hitting her like a rising-falling back draft.

(She won’t think about how she doesn’t know Bittor nearly as well, not his heart; she spent all her time with him on his body and reactions, on what he was in relation to her.

She never thought about who he was when she wasn’t around.

Does she think of anyone outside of her own personal design?