Page 138 of The Shape of Monsters
Lyric takes a deep breath. The water is cool, and everywhere she touches him scorches. “To me, the difference in what parts are good is selfishness or selflessness. What is good are selfish things. My sister, my friends, having enough to eat and beautiful gardens, knowledge at my fingertips. But outside of myself, my immediate needs, things were bad. Not for everyone, but for enough.”
“Yes!” Water jostles loudly as she turns in his arms and climbs to perch on one of his thighs. “You do understand. It’s so complicated. How do you think about it from outside yourself? How do you act against your own interests? My interest is design, is, is being alive and happy, and that means you alive, too, and making a future where the people I care about were alive even if they did die. But it’s also such a bad idea. Making the mirané people, tearing this place into pieces so it can be remade in perfect balance? It’s so good for design, but not for everyone.”
Iriset’s gaze is afire, too close for Lyric to fully focus on.
“I’ve done too many terrible things in my life,” she says frantically. “I want to do this, because it’s wild and incredible, but maybe that’s a reason not to do it! Because it’s reestablishing something flawed. Why not reach for something better, even if it changes everything? If I have the power to do it, how can I be selfish and make it for me, instead of for people?”
Lyric doesn’t really know how to answer, especially because Iriset’s words are ever so slightly slurred. She’s too drunk for this. “What people?” he asks.
She laughs. Touches her forehead to his, but it’s too hard and their skulls clunk together. She groans, rubs his forehead instead of her own. “Let’s not do it.”
“All right,” Lyric says easily. “Let’s go back to the Hehet valley and live as long as we can. Let them figure themselves out. History will take its own course.”
Shock drives Iriset back, and she stares at him with round eyes, her hands gripping his shoulders like she’ll disappear otherwise. “Lyric! We can’t! History taking its course will shake the whole crater apart! Because of the array spike we brought here, everyone in the city could die! Tens of thousands of people!”
Lyric shrugs, his hands finding her waist. “Is that more people than the empire kills in the next four hundred years?”
Iriset gapes at him.
Lyric waits. She closes her mouth, opens it, several times. “I…” she begins. Then she frowns very deeply. “Well, I didn’t do that. So that’s not me, but if I, if I don’t complete the array, thatisme. More directly. So…”
“So you’d rather I’m the one responsible,” he offers softly.
Iriset grabs his face. “I’m tired of making choices. Choosing to act or not, or being made to make choices, to do things I don’t want to do, or things I really want to do but shouldn’t. I’m tired of the future on my shoulders, having responsibility.” Her breath is hot on his neck. “I just want to work in a giant library with all the supplies I’ve ever needed and make designs and invent what I want. Others can make decisions. Be leaders.”
Lyric holds her, gathers her hair into a thick wet tail, and holds it in his hand. “All right. If we make it through this, I’ll tell you what to do for the rest of your life.”
Iriset laughs against him, her whole body trembling. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” he whispers, unsure she can even hear him. “It’s what I was taught to do. Weigh options, make decisions for others. I didn’t ask for that, but I would do it for you.”
Her arms tighten around his neck. Water laps against their ribs. She says, “Don’t you just do what Aharté wills? What you think she’d will? Follow the Holy Design into eternity?”
There’s no bitterness in her voice, thanks no doubt to drunkenness,though Lyric can imagine it. “I did,” he admits slowly. “But I understand that Holy Design is a—a template. It’s a design. I don’t think it can be perfect, or without nuance. Especially when it is us making it, or any person or people. In the absence of Aharté, we have to decide for ourselves what is holy, what the future should be.”
“I corrupted you,” she whispers. “That’s great.”
Lyric laughs, breathlessly. But it fades into sorrow as he thinks of Setka. “I believe in it, still. As an ideal. The Holy Design isn’t perfect, but it is meaningful. It should… guide, not condemn.”
“I really hope I remember this in the morning,” Iriset laments.
Smiling, Lyric lifts her half off him, turning to where Saff enters with a tray of food and tea. “It will help if you feed yourself,” he tells Iriset. “Then you can sleep, and wake up to do what you do best.”
“Fuck everything up?” she says as she drags herself over the rim of the tub, water splashing everywhere.
“Design,” he answers simply, and Iriset darts her mismatched glance at him in surprise. Then she slowly smiles.
TRAITOR
Sidoné Rask, small king of Sharp-Shin precinct, is late to the Hall of Princes because for quads someone has been, at best, neglecting to inform her of meetings, or at worst, actively stopping messages from reaching her.
As the only second-generation small king, Sidoné has plenty of enemies not of her own making, and thanks to her blunt—honest, she’d claim—nature, a few she made all on her own. Sidoné is not opposed to conflict, though at least one of her enemies, Beremé mé Adora, would claim that a thirst for violence is bred into Sidoné’s Bow blood. But the truth is Sidoné was raised to believe one ought to fight for what is right, and though her fights have not always ended in success, Sidoné has never regretted jumping into a fray if it is on behalf of her values or, to be as blunt as she’s accused of being, on behalf of the woman she’s been in love with all her life: Amaranth mé Esmail, the Moon-Eater’s Mistress.
The current problem is that Her Glory reigns at the very pinnacle of Sidoné’s list of suspects. It is perfectly within Amaranth’s abilities and likely agendas to keep Sidoné far away from whatever mess she and her brother have gotten into. The Moon-Eater’s Mistress hascertainly stymied Sidoné’s every attempt at engaging in mirané politics ever since they were thirteen and Sidoné forced from her side. As if once Sidoné could no longer be Ama’s everything, she was no longer allowed to be anything.
But in the year since that Silk rebellion and the impressive spider array, Amaranth has been different, and the Vertex Seal, too. Nothing Sidoné has argued has penetrated Garnet’s thick skull, and he used to be the most sympathetic. Twice Sidoné has managed to needle information out of Anis mé Ario, the no-longer-new-in-reality-but-always-new-in-Sidoné’s-heart body-twin. The two truths Sidoné has gathered are first, that the Vertex Seal’s emergency commands issued only days after the rebellion must be followed for the very survival of the people of Moonshadow City, and second, that whatever Lyric’s inner circle originally awaited that would have fundamentally changed the Holy Design itself is late, or possibly never coming.
The circumstances are so mysterious, and this secret event so late, it has undercut the trust most small kings of Sidoné’s coalition and the mirané princes themselves were willing to put in Lyric. Sidoné wants to believe in Amaranth and her brother, but they need more information. They needrealinformation. Amaranth won’t even see Sidoné anymore. They used to sometimes have drinks after a garden party in some small king’s manor, or Sidoné might join Amaranth’s blanket for iced fruit while everyone enjoyed a production of old Sarenpet plays, and Ama allowed Sidoné to sit a bit too close.
