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The bluish light reflects in Lyric’s eyes as he looks at her, then he releases her wrist suddenly with a suck of breath, as if she’s poison.

Yelling from outside jolts them back into action.

Lyric lurches to the locker beside the door and, with a grunt, shoves it over to collapse with a screech across the broken door.

For whatever reason, he’s keeping her from the army, and Iriset doesn’t want to be trapped in here alone with him, but she can deal. She’s had worse!

Iriset almost laughs in gasping hysteria. She’s so cold! She wraps her arms around herself, rubbing her hands on her bare arms. She has nothing but the clothes on her body—Lyric’s clothes! And her father’s echo coin.

No, shock. This is shock. She isn’t cold.

Outside, another explosion hits, near enough its concussion wake causes a zing of ecstatic force through the lines underground.

The mechanics room fills with tiny flashes of pink lightning.

For a second Lyric’s face is clear: drawn in harsh, raw lines as if she’s not the only one who ripped a mask off today.

She doesn’t want to see it.

What the fuck is she going to do? She has no idea where to begin. All her good intentions, dead with Bittor. Even if she gets away from Lyric, survives the night, then what? She’s no leader. She didn’t even find out where he hid her grandparents.

Red god, Bittor is dead .

The pink concussion lightning vanishes again.

Their only light now is the force-blade.

They should turn it off if they don’t want to draw attention.

She can’t bring herself to say it. Maybe they should get caught.

Maybe it would be better to look General Bey in the face and sneer and tell him how right he was all along.

She could kill Lyric.

The thought makes her chest ache, in the hollow spaces where that marriage-killing resonance was.

That would break the knot. Consent or death.

He can fight her, but she can stop his heart.

That would certainly change things. They’d say Silk unraveled the Vertex Seal the way the Holy Syr unraveled the Moon-Eater. She should.

“Iriset,” Lyric says, barely any intonation. Just a word. The settling of a question.

She shudders, glancing down at the floor she can barely see.

She can’t bring herself to look up at him so she looks around.

The small room has exposed design nets and crystalline pegs, for easy access to the bridge’s architecture.

In the center, a small square worktable sits empty, and little storage drawers line its legs.

Iriset wonders if she can find a spare stylus somewhere.

“Iriset.”

She’s wanted him to say her name for so very long.

And he just killed Bittor. With his own hand.

After she killed his mother, with hers.

Yelling swells outside, then passes, as if a mob or fast battle swarms by, and neither speaks until they’re alone again. Tension spits and tickles up her arms, and Iriset asks, still not looking, “Why did you bring me here?”

He takes a step closer to her. From the corner of her eye, she can tell he won’t stop staring. “I have questions.”

“Questions?” It’s almost a shriek. Nausea twines up from her stomach, wetting her mouth, and she presses her tongue to her teeth and clenches her jaw, breathing harshly through her nose until it passes.

“I need you to answer them, before I decide what to do.”

Iriset goggles at him. He wants to think about things .

The army is outside raiding houses and shops to find a rebel who is already dead and Singix is dead, too, and obviously Iriset took her place and is his wife, what else could he possibly think happened?

He fought his own army to get her away, and—

“Amaranth knew,” Lyric says, still in that nothing-tone. He sets his force-blade naked onto a high shelf in order that it might continue to cast its spare light.

Iriset doesn’t even consider protecting Her Glory. She cuts her eyes up to Lyric’s and says meanly, “It was Amaranth’s idea.”

“That is… easy to believe,” he whispers, and puts his hand out toward the wall as if he needs support.

Holy moon , Bittor had cursed softly. Oh holy moon.

She still can’t believe all that’s happened.

Last night she had days to stick to her plan, last night her husband made her holy inside his arms. Today she stripped off quads of work and Lyric hunted her down and killed Bittor without even knowing what he did.

Making Bittor a casualty. Collateral damage!

Where were all Lyric’s philosophy and inner turmoil and questions before he stabbed Bittor through the chest, hmm?

Anger has a nice rising force, heating Iriset up from her shock.

“We mourned together.” Lyric says it so softly, with such gentle sorrow, that Iriset falters.

Her anger defuses but she doesn’t want it to.

She tries to seethe it back while Lyric knocks his forehead against the stucco.

“We—Singix, you, you and I mourned her—you!—together. But Singix died that night in her rooms. She’s been dead for quads. I married a—”

He stops.

Iriset pushes herself up onto the worktable and perches there, shoulders locked and her hands tight on the edge.

If she doesn’t sit here and hold on, she’ll hit him, or worse.

She’ll tear at his hair and claw at his freckles and shove a blast of ecstatic energy into him and then he’ll never have to angst about the right things to do ever again!

She clenches her eyes shut, trying desperately not to think about anything.

Survive. Survive. Blood roars in her ears and she counts her breaths in eight beats: in-one-two, hold-three-four, out-five-six, hold-seven-eight; in-one-two, hold-three-four, out-five-six, hold-seven-eight.

Gradually she realizes Lyric is doing it, too. The space between them is enormous, despite how she could cross it in two long strides.

Iriset stutters her breath on purpose.

Lyric looks at her, and she feels it blaze so strongly upon her that she finally looks, too. In the darkness and thin blue light, his eyes are black, and the curve of his cheek a strange, uncomfortable purple. He still hasn’t asked any real questions.

Fine.

“Why did you come after me?” she demands.

Incredulous, he says, “You’re my wife. I’ll always come after you.”

It sounds more dire than it would’ve two days before.

“I thought you were in danger,” he adds with a hollow laugh. “I thought you needed me.”

She understands what that means and it hurts: He rushed to rescue his sweet Singix and found an old argumentative apostate instead.

Iriset brought Lyric directly to Bittor.

She didn’t think it through. She thought she had, but the resonance pill wasn’t fast enough, or strong enough; it couldn’t shake the connection from his side. It’s her fault Bittor is dead.

“Iriset—”

Like a tension-release valve, Iriset says, “I killed your mother.”

“No.” Lyric shakes his head once, harshly.

“Diaa was going to kill me,” Iriset goes on.

“She did kill Singix, and when we made her think she killed the wrong person, she tried again. It was always your mother trying to assassinate your wife. Diaa of Moonshadow did not want her grandchildren tainted with non-mirané blood.” Iriset allows the bitterness she feels to flood her tone. “So I killed her.”

“I killed your father.” He says it like it’s a reason for something.

And Bittor , she thinks but doesn’t say. And Bittor. She can’t say his name or she’ll scream.

They stare at each other, each unable to break the contact, as if between them this intense balance of horror and revelation is all that keeps them upright. Iriset feels his upset as sure as her own, and she wants to hurt him, and also to hug him. Hold him so tight he suffocates, or she does.

Lyric sighs jaggedly. “Amaranth knew. And so Sidoné must. Who else?”

“Shahd,” she says, because that hurts, too. “And Erxan realized.”

He sucks in a furious breath and holds his hand in front of his eyes to shield himself from her. “Why?”

“Why did he know?”

“Why did you do it—why did Amaranth do it?”

Iriset makes herself shrug. She won’t think of those intense, terrifying hours when Amaranth commanded her to become Singix, after she’d tasted the woman’s skin and pleasure, for fuck’s sake.

The terror and the thrill of it. The best and worst thing Iriset has ever done.

(Yet.) “She said it was to catch the murderer and maintain her reputation because she brought Singix here. She did not want to let the world see that an assassin could murder the wife of the Vertex Seal in his own house. I think she wanted your wife to be someone she could control.”

“And the price was to allow an apostate to run rampant! Holding court in the heart of Silence! You—you are a human architect, and you defeated every defense in the palace. We didn’t even suspect.

” Lyric makes a frustrated sound, a growl and a whimper.

“How could Amaranth not see how much worse this is?”

“She made a choice and it was done,” Iriset says. “She is not so narrow-minded about the tools she uses for her brutality.”

Lyric’s lips part, and Iriset thinks he might curse, but instead he remains quiet.

His mouth droops, not into a frown but into a soft sorrow that breaks Iriset’s thin control.

Exactly that quiet devastation she expected.

She turns away, too, sinking off the worktable to kneel on the floor.

Her fingers tighten on the table’s edge, keeping her from melting entirely.

In the dark egg of the mechanics room, their hard breaths slowly align again. There’s nothing either can do about it.

When Iriset is able, she pushes again to her feet. “Go put a stop to this destruction,” she says, her back to him. “Bittor is dead already. The wholesale ruin of the Saltbath will not do more good than that.”

“Dead? What happened?”