Page 16 of The Shape of Monsters
When Iriset wakes up in a strange old world, she’s glad Lyric is with her. It’s too loud here, the forces unbalanced and tangled, but Lyric she knows, Lyric she can focus on despite the constant buzz of force-reaction burning under her skin and her eyes trying to tear up, and what he says about the moon and the Moon-Eater and time is so outlandish but also easy to believe because Iriset wants it to be true.
Except then Lyric leaves her so fast he might as well never have been there.
“Are those quartz claws?” she demands of the woman—probably—Lyric left behind. (Left her!)
The feminine-forward person looks underfed and delicate, her skin too tight to her very fine bones, and shadows under her big gray eyes. She’s got straight hair so red it’s black, cut blunt across her forehead and at her chin, and Iriset really can’t read her features to guess her ancestry, though her skin is the same color as Iriset’s, so maybe Osahar, too. Most Osahar have thicker, lighter hair, though. But then again! This is the Apostate Age, isn’t it? Iriset is lightheaded, and possibly just a bit hysterical at having traveled through time and survived a dart to the chest, and before anything else, Iriset sways on her feet.
The woman steps forward and says, “Sit. Eliri will get help.”
It’s Old Sarenpet, and Iriset grasps Eliri’s wrist before she can go. Her teeth are crystal, too.
“Do not go,” she says carefully in the same, old words layered in sorrow. She and her father used Old Sarenpet as a private code, but she shouldn’t think of him now, not when there’s all this force-noise to ignore and this stranger staring at her like a fragile bird except built of quartz bone. “Do not go,” Iriset says again. Pleading a little, but that’s just the way it’s going today: overwhelming emotions and now her stomach is rolling slowly up up up her throat.
Eliri doesn’t pull away, so to focus herself Iriset turns Eliri’s hand over, tracing with her fingertips down Eliri’s palm and along her fingers, which are more finely made and longer than Iriset’s. She glances for permission and Eliri is only staring back at her but doesn’t free herself, so Iriset pinches Eliri’s forefinger and watches as the short, slightly curved claw lengthens. Iriset puffs out a breath of awe, then grins up at Eliri. “Gorgeous. Can you do that to me?”
She forgot again to speak Old Sarenpet, and repeats herself. “Eliri?” She taps Eliri’s wrist, and the woman says, “Eliri the Adept Hand.”
“Oh, I like it,” Iriset says, using the mirané personal pronoun surrounded by Old Sarenpet. “Adept Hand. I”—she taps her own chest—“myname is Iriset mé Isidor.”
“Iriset Sunderer,” Eliri says quietly. The same word the numen used. Iriset will have to ask about the numen, and if it came back, too. But Eliri continues, “Does mé Isidor mean sunderer?”
“No, it’s a descent indicator, for my father. Iriset the daughter of Isidor. Father had an epithet, though, the Little Cat.”
“Does that make Iriset a kitten?”
Kittenechoes through Iriset’s thoughts, tingling under her skin, and she thinks how funny the world and time can be, as she laughsa little. “Eliri is the one with claws,” she says, curving her fingers and baring her teeth because she feels silly and strange.
Eliri smiles. It is reserved, but with a narrow edge of mutual understanding.
Iriset says, in Old Sarenpet but for mirané pronouns and a technical design term here and there, “I made a glove out of force-charged silk, to directly manipulate threads of force. That must be the purpose of the claws. Can you do that to my hands? They must be better than a glove because nobody can take them away.”
Eliri glances down, but Iriset catches a pang of something she understands: quickly masked devastation. Iriset’s expression falls, and her prodigious mind spins fast, thinking of all the terrible things that could be done to a person to strip their bones of force-sensitivity—and then to survive it. Iriset swallows her next words, realizing she needs to be more considerate (probably it was pretending to be Singix Es Sun for so many quads that even taught her the notion of consideration).
“Your?” Eliri says. “Me?”
“You,youris other self.” Iriset touches Eliri again. Then she touches her own sternum as she says, “I,meis self.”
“I, me.” Eliri nods as she speaks. “I can attempt to give Iriset—”
“You.”
“—you claws, quartz-cast bones, but outside of fetal mesh it is painful and expensive, with a forty percent success rate.”
“Wow.” Iriset grins again. There is a roaring in her skull. She snaps her fingers next to her ear four quick times, letting the ecstatic find her inner design, and she pops her lips to meet it.
Eliri watches, then reaches with her claws and taps Iriset’s forehead in the center, a tiny painful prick, before Eliri pinches something and draws it away. Iriset can’t see force with her naked eyes, but for a moment the noise quiets. “Thanks given,” she says softly.
“Iriset’s design is frayed from blowback of great power,” Eliriexplains. “And Iriset’s inner design is unused to the crater city’s force patterns. The surgeon placed a stasis mesh at the location of the injury, but perhaps a broader-form quad-net could create an interference field.”
Iriset places her hand over the little cap covering her injury. She understood most of what Eliri said, though the design-specific terminology is more of a guess based on context. She has so many questions. About the surgery, about this room, the moon, sundering, Eliri the Adept Hand, the Moon-Eater, where Lyric went and where the numen might be, and they’re clogging her throat. She needs to prioritize. And she needs to pee.
“Or anchors in each quarter of the room,” Iriset says, which is not a question, but maybe a temporary solution.
“Anchors for individual forces?” Eliri asks. “Stabilize the room, not Iriset’s design?”
“Balance it.” Blinking slowly, Iriset is suddenly very aware of those fraying edges. Her skin aches, and she might have a fever. Something is swimming like a little eel in her guts. And Lyricleft her. “Food?” she says. “Then design.”
Eliri says, “Eliri’s lab has a diagnostic mesh, to check Iriset’s health. And Iriset will teach more of the fairy language.”
