Page 49 of The Shape of Monsters
Lyric accepted, and though nothing in the intervening hours has made him feel in danger of violence, he can see and in some casesfeel the tension between precincts that doesn’t exist in his time: Some have checkpoints and energy walls like the one surrounding the Moon-Eater’s fortress. Others are patrolled by patchwork-looking soldiers he realizes belong to various mercenary schools, and their patchwork armor is actually patterned in archaic force motifs. It makes Lyric glad to be wearing the horrible skull siren mask—it’s no stranger than several other costumes he’s passed and allows him an anonymity that his god-red skin would not.
Once the bonfires are lit and the sky grows starry, strings of tiny blue candle flames flare across streets, and the banners and streamers spark to light. The quality of the light is eerie and a mess of competing colors and strobe effect. Disorienting at least, especially when the near-quarter moon vanishes below the crowded city horizon and Lyric doesn’t even have such a misplaced beacon for comfort.
Now that the sky is devoid of Aharté’s smiling eye, it is nearly four hours to midnight, when the sacrifices will be made. Thrown into bonfires in every yard and market square in the city. Lyric prays Irsu River kept his word and spirited Setka away. Unbalanced, Lyric continues moving slowly. He takes moments to connect all four forces within him, and lets his pace grow into a meditation: The entire crater city is his labyrinth tonight.
The meditation makes his fingers feel better.
He’s offered a tiny cup of liquor from someone in a grinning lion mask. “Terrifying mask, chimera,” the person says before joining a group of others in predatory animal masks—two of whom have design masks like Lyric’s that appear to grow out of their faces.
Lyric downs the liquor. It’s a lot like honeybite: bland and sharp. His pulse races.
The worst thing he sees is a competition between children in chimera costumes, clamoring to be the most ugly, the least useful, the strangest with wooden arms and plaster and painted horns, withcolored paste hardened on their faces into extra mouths, and there’s one kid with a whole second head. The children are laughing and shoving one another.I want to be in the fire! I’m the messiest, I’m the best, let me burn!The competition is judged by the crowd, but a trio of adults leads them, one a masculine-forward person with no human legs past his upper thighs, but moving fast and gracefully with eight glinting, polished carapace legs like a spider, and Lyric doesn’t understand because if legs like that can be designed, why not real human legs, why this? (Ah, but perhaps there are redesigned human legs, or reattached limbs, or flesh prosthetics that are so natural looking, so human, that Lyric hasn’t even noticed, and couldn’t possibly if his life depended on it! Some people want to be remade into what they were before accident or impairment. Some people want to be spiders. Some people don’t want to be redesigned at all. That is the glory of the monster city.)
A boom startles Lyric and everyone around him, and he reaches for the defense necklace as brilliant light flares just above: fireworks exploding much too close. Laughter and yells of shock and surprise surround him, and another firework explodes. It’s merely a quad of paces in the air. He can feel the heat of it, see sparks raining down like hot waterfalls. He backs away, pushing through the crowd to one of the corners of the market where the celebration trickles off toward new places. Lyric reaches the road, half attached to a party of youths with pink and yellow and violet hair that ripples and shines like streamers.
He breaks away, heading for a quieter crossroads, and realizes his heart isn’t racing, urging him on. It’s the marriage seed.
Lyric stops again, a hand over his sternum. It feels urgent, but not afraid or excited, no hint of what she’s experiencing exceptI’m looking for you.
There’s no point in hiding.
He doesn’t even want to.
Turning, he closes his eyes, ignoring the people around him, the crowd and noise and lights. He steps in one direction, then another, gauging the sense of the seed, the hook of its pull. Then he chooses a way and starts walking.
He excuses himself as he ducks through a tight crowd of drinkers, heading toward the Moon-Eater’s fortress, then darts down a stone staircase into a tunnel dripping with vivid iridescent blue stalactites and echoing with laughter and song. He tracks after a couple of adolescents holding wands with sparkling fireworks on the end, and they lead him unknowingly through the underground neighborhood, past dark shops and candlelit cafés, past cozy-looking houses tucked in for the night, tucked under, under in the warm caves. Iriset is here, right here, he feels it, the same sensation as when he tracked her through his city, looking for Singix.
Lyric stops, but she’s moving away, past him, and he spins around, grabs a woman in a slick bird mask whose eyes behind the scaled feathers are too dark, and lets her go. Iriset is moving away, and Lyric looks up at the blue glow of the cavern roof. She’s above, on the city streets.
By the time Lyric ascends, he has to double back more than a block.
He runs.
In the middle of a long rock garden where people sit on spread blankets to watch a trio of trees full of tiny glass birds perform, Lyric sees her.
He knows Iriset instantly: her stance, the long red-and-teal robes, her thick hair fallen from the buns he put them in, redone into her knots so the ends hang around her shoulders and back, reddish in the firelight. Her mouth parted in nothing like a smile, but expectant. There’s a horrifying mask on her upper face: Long, thin teethgrow out of her cheeks, arcing up toward her hairline to form a cage through which her sandglass eyes flash.
Iriset meets him halfway and they stop before each other close enough to touch. It’s a relief as the marriage knot calms. He glances at her eyes through the cage as best he can, then takes in the whole mask: From this close it’s a truly compelling illusion of teeth piercing up out of her flesh, and the curved tips glint sharply.
“You’re wearing it,” she says, almost too soft for him to hear amid the festivities.
Lyric finds no reason to answer her obvious statement, unsure what she wants. His shoulders rise and fall with breath; her sparks of ecstatic force are so strong he can’t believe everyone in her radius doesn’t lean away. Finally, he says, “Iriset.”
“Lyric.” She steps in. Tilts her face to hold his gaze. It’s disconcerting, especially through the teeth. She places her hand on his chest, and his entire awareness focuses on that warmth, the touch, as if a tiny sun emerges from the palm of her hand.
Her gaze darts to his mouth; he realizes he made a sound. She leans up on her toes and kisses him.
Or she tries to—the cage of teeth she wears clicks against his skull siren mask, and Iriset laughs, pushing away. Lyric forgot he was wearing such a thing.
“Come with me,” Iriset says, grasping his hand. She turns and pulls him away from the tiny glass birds and rock garden, past a bonfire and into a street lined with pink lanterns, under a bridge made of glass filled with living fish he cranes his neck to keep looking at. Up two stories they go, past windows and a balcony, and Iriset climbs over onto a wide stone wall dividing the building from a broad, lively garden. She skips along the wall fearlessly and Lyric goes after, remembering she’s a child of thieves. Iriset takes him to a strange shelf rather like half of an oyster that juts out over the garden. It’s broad enoughfor them to stretch out on their backs to look at the fireworks still sparkling and dripping light overhead. They don’t, though. Iriset sits with her legs crossed and tugs him down. She takes off her mask and he follows, touching the lines the skull siren mask impressed across his cheeks as if he’s never felt the shape of his own face.
“What do you want?” he asks because earlier she was so disgusted that he didn’t try harder to save Setka. He can’t be the one she wants to spend this festival with. She hates him a little bit, after all.
With a little hum, Iriset reaches into her robe and removes a small cloth pouch. She unties it and tips it into her palm. Two oblong pills, like large grains of grass. “One is for you.”
His mouth dries with understanding. The pulse of the marriage knot seems to twist painfully in his chest.
“I tried to do it myself, you know. By myself, the day I left.” Iriset nudges her hand closer. “With resonance designed into a chunk of polished opal, and it was working. But not fast enough to stay away from you. It would have been better if you’d had one, too. Taken them together, like we took the seeds together.”
