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“He was killed by the Vertex Seal himself, with a force-blade to the chest—quite the victory, don’t you think?

” When she hears no immediate reaction, she adds with exceeding bitterness, “Anyone who says Lyric méra Esmail His Glory lets others dirty their hands for him will have to shut up for a while.”

“You were with him. You left the palace and went right to him,” Lyric says slowly. “Because you know him… Sweet Silence, you begged mercy for him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything, did I?”

There’s not much she can say to that. Quiet falls again, and Iriset stares at the wall while she tries not to care about Lyric’s feelings.

She always knew this would be terrible, even if she did it on purpose.

Out of habit, and also to make herself feel better, a little, she allows herself to wonder what Singix would do.

Apologize, explain herself, take care of him. Because she loves him.

The best Iriset can do is to say, “Garnet is probably desperate to find you.”

Lyric grunts agreement.

Deciding not to beg him to spare her, knowing full well how Lyric considers mercy, she simply ignores the possibility that he’s planning how to best incapacitate her and drag her back to the palace to stand for her apostasy.

She puts on a strong expression, glad she has her back to him.

“You should go. Your wife doesn’t need to be rescued.

Bittor is dead and the Silk rebellion won’t last without him.

I certainly am not capable or interested in leading revolution no matter how much you all deserve it.

I think I’ve done enough damage already.

” She adds the last with appropriate relish.

She knows the stories of today will ripple in every direction.

Everyone in the empire will hear about Silk alive in the home of the Vertex Seal.

No matter what they say or do, it cannot be erased.

It will be a rallying cry. A loose knot.

Iriset can tug on it later, at her leisure.

He doesn’t speak.

Iriset makes her way carefully through the darkness to the narrow ladder that leads up into the bridge’s inner workings.

She grips the bars and climbs, blindly, past two hubs and into a curving petal where there’s a knot of rising and flow for whatever reason—Iriset knows next to nothing about bridge stabilization.

But she presses her palms to the wall and finds a hatch.

It pops open with a tug of ecstatic, and she climbs out onto the petal’s curl.

This isn’t meant as a balcony, but it suits her as a place to sit and attempt not to shake apart.

From her perch upon that small petal (positioned both to collect errant threads of flow in the air and to encourage said flow in the necessary direction for the tower’s integrity), Iriset can see across the dark, sparking Saltbath.

Fires flicker, and alert-sparks burst in the sky, drifting on thin wings for a while before sputtering out and disintegrating as they crash.

In several spots the army’s light arrays still glow, shifting slowly as the soldiers move.

The wavering quality of the firelight and the explosive ecstatic charges put the night into a dream-space.

Or nightmare-space, rather. Darkness, bursts of strange lights, yelling, and the occasional arc of force-weaponry jutting up from an alley.

There’s a bonfire in a square four streets away, and tall plants crowning some lofted apartments burn.

Thin towers are nothing more than shadows, and the winding streets shimmer, shadows on shadows punctuated by the occasional streak of fire.

Iriset has no idea what she should do next. She’s so tired.

But flee, she supposes. Collect her stash and her grandparents and leave Moonshadow, go north toward the Cloud Kings. At least for now. Hunker down, collect herself. She needs space to remember who she is, especially after she’s been someone else for so long.

There are stars in the sky, scattered silver, except directly above where the gibbous moon blots them out, its dark side a ghostly black-gray shadow she can hardly see.

She curls her hands around each other and presses them between her breasts.

The wind blows, smelling of smoke and force-echo, ringing with alarum and tears.

Later, Iriset is numb, hungry, and too tired to even close her eyes. It’s still dark, still nighttime, but the noises have died down, the force-bursts becoming more rare. She suspects maybe an hour remains before the morning will slick light across the sky.

And that’s when Lyric climbs out of the hatch to join her.

She holds herself motionless, not looking.

He settles beside her on the small petal balcony, unarmed, and without the layer of lacquered armor. The pale linen of his shirt nearly glows in the cool darkness. He sits with his knees drawn up, leaning back. There’s very little space for them both, but they’re careful not to touch.

“It was always you,” he says quietly.

“Always me,” she whispers like an echo. “But I did change. I took her potential and made it a part of mine, and so I became something new. Someone new.”

“But who.” It’s not quite a question.

“There were so many times I wanted to argue with you.”

“But… she… would not have.”

“Eventually, in a few years, maybe. I…” Iriset doesn’t finish.

Lyric takes a deep breath and lets it hiss out slowly. He leans away, looking up at the stars. She can see his profile in her peripheral vision. Oh holy moon she wants to touch those freckles; she knows where they are exactly, even in this spare nighttime.

Iriset keeps her eyes on the cityscape before her, on the hazy layers of shadows.

He says, “I fell in love with you the night in the garden.”

Her lips part in barely a gasp.

“Then you died,” Lyric continues. “I was… aghast at how I felt. Ruined, shocked, changed by things I had no right to feel for Iriset mé Isidor, especially when I was mourning hand in hand with my wife. I wasn’t supposed to feel changed by one night in a garden.”

She wants to beg him to stop. She doesn’t even want to breathe. Have mercy on me, Lyric méra Esmail.

“And slowly, or not so slowly, I suppose,” he murmurs, “I fell in love with you again. Do you think it means bodies don’t matter? That we fall in love with spirit and inner design?”

The pause lasts just long enough Iriset realizes he expects an answer. Ever the priest, questioning the world. She breaks up her pain by analyzing the architecture around her; he turns to philosophy. Iriset’s chest hurts. She’s quiet.

He continues, “I thought, and was relieved actually, that perhaps I hadn’t known what being in love was, I’d only felt a strong connection to Iriset, but it wasn’t love.

This was love, this new relationship. It had always been my wife changing me, our inner designs forging a new bond together.

” Lyric laughs then, small and sad. “I was such a fool.”

“You’re not a fool,” Iriset whispers, her voice feeling like tiny claws in her throat. She clutches at her own legs, digging fingers into her trousers. His trousers.

“It was always you,” he concludes.

She almost—almost—looks at him. “That night in the garden I knew you were no fool. I wanted to kiss you even when your mouth was shaping my father’s death.”

“Imagine if you had.”

“Maybe everything would be worse.”

They breathe in unison together, thinking and staring out at the city.

Lyric says, “That night, I decided to be ambitious.”

“I know. I saw it on your…” She stops.

But he remembers. “There is a new cast to every conversation.”

Iriset winces.

“You have to go back with me,” he says firmly.

“I don’t think so. I won’t go to prison, or to my execution. And you can’t explain my presence, Singix’s absence, without admitting the graffiti was right. Silk was in your bed all along, and now she’s resurrected. If that’s really what you want, then—”

“We have to be divorced.”

It hurts.

And he says it like a plain fact. “The ritual requires a few hours, and both of us,” he continues. “And so you must go back with me.”

“Or you could push me off this balcony,” Iriset says viciously.

“Don’t think I haven’t considered it,” he answers in the same.

They both catch their breath then, and go quiet.

A sliver of hope crystallizes through her heart, like a hardening vein, that Lyric doesn’t want to kill her. He might wish any number of things upon her, hate her, cast her out, but he doesn’t want her dead.

Maybe such knowledge will be enough, and she can survive this.

She says, “I will find a way to unbind us. I am the greatest human architect in a hundred years.”

“That is not something I would brag about right now, were I you.”

“I have done surgery upon myself before, changed and unchanged my body—both inside and, as you have witnessed, my face and skin and hair. Can you even imagine that I cannot invent a way to unwind the threads of our inner designs on my own?” Iriset strives to push arrogance into her voice, whatever it takes to convince him and turn him away.

“I will not give you permission to perform apostasy,” he answers with matching scorn.

“I don’t need your permission! One day you will simply feel it, know it’s done.”

Lyric turns to her. “One day! No. I need this finished now. No lingering effects, nothing to cling to.”

“Don’t worry, Your Glory, soon you’ll be free of me.”

“Free of you?” He laughs an empty laugh. “Impossible.”

Iriset wants to skim her fingers against the skin on the back of his hand. Just a brief touch, anything: Iriset touching her husband while they both know her name.

“Go back to the palace with me,” he says quietly. “Go with me, submit to the unbinding ritual, swear you will not perform apostasy, and I… will let you go. So long as it is out of Moonshadow City, never to be seen again, I will let you go.”

Pulling her hand back into her own lap, Iriset murmurs, “You cannot think I will give up my work. Not after knowing me as you do.”

“Not even if I beg you?” he whispers.

Iriset hisses air in through her teeth, utterly surprised.

Lyric presses his advantage. “It is wrong, can’t you see? Unbalanced. The science of it pushes humans past our limits, into the territory of gods. You can’t control yourself if you go down that path.”

“I certainly can—I control myself better the more I learn of design, Lyric, even human design.”

“Look what you were willing to do! The arrogance of apostasy doesn’t allow you to stop or mediate between pride and necessity.”

“If more of us practiced, we could mitigate one another—just as with any architecture or technology. And it does so much good in the world.” Iriset knocks her skull back against the tower.

“You stole a woman’s life, and you lied, you killed and manipulated and—and when I think about what else you might’ve done with the access you had, it takes my breath away.

I know you are not evil, Iriset, or you could have done immeasurable harm while you were—while I was—” He shakes his head.

“Human architecture is not worth what it makes you.”

Iriset sighs. “You’ll never convince me of that. I’ve seen what it can do, how it can save.”

“But the consequences! This city was brought to its knees when apostasy held sway, thousands died, and people still die of apostatical cancers today because of what those apostates did hundreds of years ago. Didn’t… didn’t your own mother die of it?”

“I saved her,” Iriset whispers breathlessly. She’s never, not once, spoken it aloud before.

“What?”

She leans closer to him, glaring into his mirané eyes. “You will never convince me that human architecture is wrong or not worth it, because yes, yes , my mother was dying of apostatical cancer, but I saved her .”

His lips part; he doesn’t look away.

“I was only ten years old, but I saved her.” Now, hours after this nightmare began, tears finally arrive to soothe Iriset’s eyes. “Nothing you argue will change my mind, because my mother would have died, but because of human architecture, instead she is alive.”

In the taut silence that follows, Iriset hears her pulse thrumming, a rhythm in her skull again, and recognizes it this time: It’s Lyric’s heartbeat joining hers, through the weave of their inner designs.

“She had to leave,” Iriset says, shaking a little with the urgency of explanation.

“Because of your laws. I saved her, and lost her anyway, or she and I and who knows how many others I barely touched would’ve been taken and unraveled without a thought of mercy .

But my mother is out there in the world, alive, and that is better than the alternative.

My world is better because of apostasy. And I will never forswear it; otherwise it would be like forswearing her. ”

“Iriset,” Lyric whispers, and something in his expression shifts, from anger to—to wonder, perhaps. Or it might be fear. They’re so close, wonder and terror.

Behind him a line of silver light fattens on the horizon, displaying the sharp edge of the crater. The dawn puts an aura of holiness around him, glinting against his black curls, and Iriset thinks she’ll remember him exactly so for the rest of her life.

She says, “Maybe Aharté is wrong. Maybe she doesn’t even exist.”

Then the Vertex Seal takes her hands, gently tugging her around to face him.

Their crossed legs touch at the knees and he begins the balancing meditation they’d mastered together.

Ecstatic, flow, falling, rising, curling through them via the circle of their hands, arms, and hearts.

The light strengthens and so she can see his freckles, the pinch of weariness at the corners of his upturned eyes, and the glint of bright red among all the mirané-brown flecks in his irises.

Like an array of rose petals in the Garden for Four Winds where first they met.

Lyric lets go her right hand and touches her cheek, then her mouth, his gaze tracing the path of his fingers.

Iriset can’t help comparing her own face to the perfect, symmetrical beauty of Singix Es Sun.

Her jaw tightens and she looks down, but Lyric puts two fingers under her chin and lifts it again.

“I am married to an unapologetic apostate.”

“And I to an ardent priest,” she says, trying to find any shred of humor.

“Mercy,” he whispers, and it sounds like a curse.