Page 127 of The Mercy Makers
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 myown?” 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, butI 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 pulsethrumming, 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 ofmercy. But my mother is out there in the world, alive, and that is better than the alternative. My world isbetterbecause of apostasy. And I will never forswear it; otherwise it would be like forswearing her.”
