Tessa Gratton
“The Beginning of Monsters”
a Moon Heresies short story
The College of Dedicated Renovation had agreed to make Lady Insarra a new body because she was tired of being a woman.
Insarra was one of eleven small kings of the nameless crater city: rich, powerful, and spoiled enough that boredom was all it had taken for her to commission this expensive redesign. Most people who wanted a new body but not chimerical accentuations or augmentations did so because of their identities, and of those, most couldn’t afford this level of work. But Insarra could’ve afforded wings if she’d had a sudden hankering to fly.
Elir was the designer assigned by the college. She was a sixteen-year-old prodigy born with crystal bones and retractable crystal claws that allowed her to lift and knot pure threads of power with her bare hands. A stylus was often necessary for heavier work, but not that day.
In the initial design phase, Elir spent hours alone with Insarra, a magnifying circle, pencil, and paper, drawing every tiny detail of the small king’s current body.
Insarra reclined, naked, on a low sofa, currently on her side and smoking a long red cigarette. She was careful not to blow the smoke toward Elir, as she must have known its effects would limit the girl’s capacity for detailed drawing, but otherwise Insarra ignored her. Elir knelt on a thin pillow, a sketching frame set over her knees to support the sheaf of papers upon which she drew the dips, shadows, jutting lines, and folds of the small king’s right hip. This phase was for overall design: color, freckles, blemishes, and hair texture would come later, once Elir’d finished the structural design mesh. Though it was possible Insarra would request a new skin color or hair texture, Insarra was Osahan dynasty, with the rosy-tan skin and wavy thick hair of her people, and for pride would very likely keep it.
Such concerns were for another day. Elir licked her bottom lip to make it more sensitive to the eddies of force-threads as they curled against Insarra’s hip and belly. She made a note in the corner of her paper: Insarra was heavy with flow force, which affected the other three forces—falling, rising, and ecstatic—in difficult-to-predict ways. Some said impossible-to-predict, but those people didn’t understand the math as well as Elir.
The chamber in which Insarra posed for Elir was octagonal, with eight pillars holding up a mosaicked ceiling, and the walls were latticework quartz, thin enough that sunlight penetrated not only the cutouts, but the pale-pink stone itself. It made this room ideal for sketching at all hours of the day: the pinkish glow softened the harsh desert sunlight.
“Irsu,” Lady Insarra drawled, arching her neck to glance toward the eastern archway.
Elir paused, not because Insarra moved, but because the small king’s only child had entered. Irsu walked on bare feet, which slapped gently against the marble floor, ans chin lifted arrogantly. An wore a loose white robe and pantaloons tied at the knee, and ans hair fell in sleek black lines around ans face and neck. An was so much more beautiful than ans mother.
“I came to tell you, Mother, I am not attending dinner tonight. I’m tired of the games you play with Far Dalir.” Irsu drooped one shoulder in a lazy, disinterested affectation that Elir wanted badly to draw. An was the sort of person inherently talented at using ans body to the fullest. Inhabiting it completely in a way even Elir, who understood the very design of her own, could not quite manage. And an was only eighteen, barely older than she was. By the time Irsu was thirty, imagine the devastation an might cause, or the emotion an might encapsulate with the slightest gesture. Elir wanted to imagine it. She wanted to imagine Irsu doing a great many things.
Lady Insarra groaned and flicked cigarette ash toward her heir. “You would be dour company. I give you permission.”
Irsu stiffened so slightly Elir might not have noticed if she hadn’t been staring at the play of musculature on ans face. But an loosened the tension instantly. “My thanks, Mother.” An turned to go, glancing at Elir.
The designer lowered her gaze to her work. Irsu paused, studying her, Elir was sure. Then an strode out.
“I am exhausted, Eliri,” Insarra said. She stretched her back with a pretty sigh, then reached for her long silk robe.
“I have enough for today,” Elir said, remaining on her knees.
“Good.” Insarra stood and snapped the corner of her robe as she wrapped herself, in a slight display of irritation. Unlike Irsu, she swept out of the chamber loudly.
Elir gathered her things and retreated to the workshop.
***
The workshop was deep in the heart of Insarra’s fortress, where no light penetrated that Elir did not invite, and no breeze or errant force-thread was allowed. Cubbies were built into the floor for storage, and sections of it lifted to become worktables of various heights. Everything an architect could need, Elir could find right here.
She pinned her day’s drawings to the south wall, made of smooth stucco to discourage sticking forces. It had been built to her specifications when Elir’s college accepted the commission to redesign Insarra’s body for her, and Elir was satisfied with it. She sealed the door behind her and opened the long box containing the delicate wire mesh into which she was building the structural design. She rotated it so that the right hip was level with her chest and flexed the forefinger and middle finger of both hands so that her crystal claws slid out.
Slightly curved, the claws acted as precise styli and Elir plucked a humming thread of flow force that had entwined itself around one of the wires of the design mesh. She pulled it in two places to readjust, and with it the thread drew the mesh into a more accurate peak of hip bone. For several minutes Elir worked by memory and instinct, before turning to the sketches to refresh her familiarity with Insarra’s physical design. Elir needed to understand the design intimately; not only to successfully convince everyone the redesign would work, but so that she could sabotage it when the time came.
A chime shivered around the seam of the workshop door: Elir had a visitor.
She took a moment to fix the mesh in place before answering. She tapped her key into the small panel with her claws before retracting them. The door unmade itself, flowing smoothly into the design of the walls, as if it had never been.
Irsu stood there. An leaned ans bare shoulder against the entrance frame and said, “I’d like to see it.”
Silently, Elir backed away, allowing Irsu entrance. An walked to the mesh, where it hovered over its box on a cushion of rising and flow forces. In ans wake, eddies of rising force lifted, tingling the hairs along the back of Elir’s neck.
“You never speak to me,” Irsu said, examining the wire mesh vaguely shaped like ans mother.
“I was not hired for conversations.”
Irsu glanced over ans shoulder at Elir. Wryly, an said, “Do I need to compensate you for this then?”
Though she might’ve earned a tip for herself that she wouldn’t need to report to the college, Elir tilted her head no. The excuse to study Irsu’s face and the lilt of ans voice would be compensation enough. An stood still, staring at what would eventually be fit over ans mother and irrevocably alter her design. An said, “How are you so good at this, and so young?”
“I have trained for it my entire life. How many languages do you speak?”
“Six.”
“I only speak this.”
Irsu fell silent, staring at the complex wires of the mesh. Maybe an could see or sense the force-threads, too.
“Why are you here?” Elir asked carefully.
“I’d like to ruin it.”
Elir’s eyes widened. An could so easily touch the wrong thing and undo days of work.
Irsu turned to her, smiling. “But I won’t,” an assured her.
“That was unkind,” she said, unable to stop her gaze from darting along every line of ans face. Irsu was slightly taller than she was, more slender, and graceful. Ans mouth looked too thin to be soft, and a slight rose-gold darkness bruised the skin under ans honey-colored eyes. Copper studs pierced both ans ears, curling up around the cartilage. As Elir stared, she realized that hidden among the sleek black hairs on ans head were long, narrow feathers. Her lips parted.
Irsu sucked in a quick breath, surprising Elir out of her trance. She lowered her eyes in brief apology and murmured, “I look with a designer’s gaze.”
“And?” Irsu asked just as quietly.
“I wouldn’t change a thing,” Elir answered immediately. She felt rising force climb her neck to flush her face with heat, and wondered if Irsu was studying her intently enough to notice the dusky tinge it would give her light-bronze cheeks.
“Neither would I,” Irsu said, glancing back at the design mesh that would change everything about ans mother’s physical body. “My grandfather had the eyesight of an eagle, and a related chimerical redesign aesthetic.”
The sudden change of subject startled Elir until she realized it was no change at all. If Irsu had been born with feathers two generations after ans grandfather’s redesign, that was amazing! “That is indicative of a stunning level of design,” she said breathlessly.
Irsu shot her a look just as wry as ans earlier comment.
Elir raised her right hand and flexed the appropriate muscles to slowly display her crystalline claws. “My mother used a fetal mesh to redesign the development of my bones. My body is a perfect machine for architecture.”
Irsu’s gaze swept down her body, and when an lifted ans eyes, they held on hers. An touched the pad of a forefinger to the tip of her claw.
“Be careful,” she whispered.
“I think everyone should be careful around you.”
Elir stopped herself from asking what Irsu saw when an studied her. How did an suspect her when nobody else did? Or was it something else an meant with those words?
She wanted to find out.
***
The crater city did not have a name because for over a hundred years everyone had been arguing about what it should be. Small kings, cult leaders, the commander-philosophers of every design college, boss artists, and crime lords, all had their own names for the city, and nobody could earn a majority preference or the favor of the god whose fall had caused the crater itself. He lived in the center of his city, sometimes benevolent, sometimes razing an entire precinct with his temper.
Every neighborhood had a name to make up for it, and Lady Insarra’s fortress rose in a spiral of elegant towers at the center of the Rivermouth precinct. Stone designers had carved tunnels through the side of the crater to draw the clean water of the Lapis River into the city, where it bubbled up in private springs and carefully monetized pools. It was this water that made Insarra rich.
Elir lived an hour’s walk away, in the Chimera precinct, where several design colleges made their homes. There the buildings burst with strange angles and open rooftops lined with toothy force-hooks, swaying towers, and cloud bridges connecting floating apartments, each style a secret of its birth college.
Some days Elir was allowed to walk alone through the twisting, layered streets of the crater city on her own, with nothing but a linen cloak designed to bend threads of ecstatic force to make her slightly hard to spot. She didn’t like wearing the hood, as it muffled the hum of design graffiti and street advertisements. Elir was not worried about thieves or assaults, for her crystal bones were strong, and her claws viciously sharp.
It was on the days when her neighborhood and the Rivermouth were under small-king alerts or the god’s interdiction warning, of sky-whales roosting nearby or diamond rain and other remnants of recent wars between city factions, that Elir took extra protection with her: a contingent of mercenary combat-designers trained to turn air into ice or pull blood out through an enemy’s pores. Paid for by Lady Insarra, of course. Those days, Elir was bundled into a force-suit woven with ecstatic wires, which she could activate with a sharp cry. Even a sky-whale would hesitate to chomp on such a spiky treat.
Elir arrived at Insarra’s fortress exhausted those mornings, needing to rehydrate herself from the effort it took to move under the weight of the suit. She stripped it off piece by piece in the sunny courtyard just beyond the fortress’s third-tier gates. The mercenaries teased her, easily moving in their own armor, and left for the refreshments awaiting them in Insarra’s private barracks. Usually a kitchen servant awaited Elir with a flask of water and cup of mint tea, as well as a small basket of sweet cheese and olives to take with her to the workshop.
Today it was Irsu holding a juniper-wood tray inlaid with gold sigils spelling out a poem Elir could not read. She took the water flask and sipped from it, then dribbled some into her palm to splash her hot forehead. All the while, she kept her eyes on Irsu’s, trying to exude confidence.
But ans nearness shook her. Especially when one half of ans mouth lifted in that wry smile as she pressed some water up into her scalp, hoping to stick her baby hairs where they belonged.
“Don’t you have a design comb for that?” Irsu asked.
“Not with me. Can I borrow yours?”
An shook ans head, and that sleek, straight hair brushed along the embroidered silk of ans sleeveless robe. “I don’t need one.”
Elir licked her bottom lip to feel the threads of force dancing around Irsu, and when ans gaze flicked down to watch, she realized a non-designer might think it was a different sort of habit. But when Irsu kept ans gaze on her mouth, she also realized she didn’t care why an thought she’d done it, because it was clear an liked it.
She took a deep breath. “I need that tea, please.” She plucked a small square of cheese off the tray. The sweetness was complicated by essence of roses. A good restorative.
“What is the alert for?” Irsu asked.
“An old spider mine was tripped last night, arming a whole web of them between Chimera and Ribbonwork. Everything around is on the god’s interdiction.”
Disgust crawled over Irsu’s beautiful features. “It is these wars that make the small kings small.”
“When you are the small king of Rivermouth, will you stop them?”
“If I survive to ascend.”
An would, Elir thought, because ans mother was not long for life.
***
They walked in the labyrinthine pearl garden in the residential section of the fortress. Near the center, four towers were connected with flaring balconies like petals spiraling up the stem of a vibrant suncup. The pearl garden wove around the bottom levels, looping over itself in puzzled layers, tucking under to make surprise rooms or corners that flared with shade bushes. The paths were laid with crushed marble, gleaming white and iridescent blue purple, which is what gave the garden its name. Irsu led Elir to a tear-shaped grotto with a thin lattice roof laced with blossoming drop vines—the flowers hung in near-perfect spheres of white and deep pink. They bobbed happily in the artificial breeze of force-fans.
“I can relax here,” Irsu said, sinking onto the gleaming granite edge of a crescent-shaped pool. Fish with fins like a peacock’s tail swam lazily in the clear water, blowing bubbles that lifted above the surface before popping to release a sweet smell. Decorative chimerical design could be the most fun, but it wasn’t intense enough to hold Elir’s interests.
She perched beside Irsu, watching the way sunlight filtered through the vines to mottle ans black hair. She could see the slight waver in the light-prints indicating that a force-roof covered this entire garden.
“Do you think you’re making my mother better?” Irsu asked, tilting ans head back to look at the nearest bobbing drop flower.
“Is something wrong with her?” Elir asked, sliding her gaze along the lines of Irsu’s throat. Her pulse popped with little bursts of ecstatic force.
Irsu laughed and jerked ans chin down to grin at her. “So many things. But nothing a redesign of her body will improve.”
“Oh.” Elir missed the visual access to ans neck, and traced the lines of ans bare shoulder with her gaze instead. “But what will a redesign hurt? And if it improves her state of mind, surely it helps.”
“Her state of mind is boredom, so I suppose . . . But your skills are wasted giving her a new aesthetic she doesn’t need.”
“It’s never a waste!” Elir was startled out of her obsession with Irsu’s features. “At the very least I am practicing, and together, your mother and I create art.”
“But you could be practicing your art by making the world better.”
Elir narrowed her eyes. She knew this philosophy. “You’re a cultist.”
Irsu glanced away and rubbed ans thigh nervously. Then an curled ans hand into a fist and looked back at her, hard. “So? Cultists have good ideas. There is even a cult approved by the fallen god.”
“My parents were both architects in my college,” Elir said.
“The College of Dedicated Renovation.”
“It sounds cold, and we have many necessary regulations that help us direct our designs so we don’t end up hurting anyone. My ama taught me to work architecture without doing harm.” She put her hand over Irsu’s and wondered if her ama would approve of this sabotage assignment. It was a small harm to prevent a greater one. Like cutting into a body to revive their heart, the commander-philosopher of her college had said.
An loosened ans fist and nodded. “Good.”
“Good?”
Turning ans hand beneath hers, Irsu laced their fingers together. “I wouldn’t like to want to kiss someone who believed in weaponizing architecture or death-design.”
Elir’s breath caught in her throat, and instead of replying, she leaned up and put her mouth against Irsu’s. Ans lips were dry, and softer than she’d expected, and an pressed gently. Her eyelids fluttered, and she thought of the contours of ans thin lips even as she touched them with her own, even as rising force teased up her spine, tingling with ecstatic, and flow pounded through her veins with every beat of her heart. Falling force dripped through her stomach like the hundred tiny feet of a tunnel snake.
Irsu tasted her, and Elir gasped into ans mouth at the touch of ans tongue, leaning away.
It was lovely and strange to feel the eddies of design dancing in the air because someone else had licked her bottom lip.
***
Irsu kissed her almost every day.
In one of the pockets of the pearl garden, or in her workshop, or quickly in a turn of the corridor, just a breath or lick of her lips. It added such a tension to her days that Elir relished nearly as well as the kisses themselves. Frequently, Irsu came to observe during Lady Insarra’s posing sessions, leaning over Elir’s shoulder to watch the sweep of her pencil. She’d moved on from the contours to the details, and marked extremely precise maps of Insarra’s body. The lady wanted as little change as possible, except what was required to forward a male aesthetic. Irsu rarely spoke to Elir during the sessions; an wasn’t cold exactly, but seemed indifferent. When Elir asked why, Irsu said ans mother would lose respect for Elir if Insarra realized she was carrying on with an. “I’m lazy and unambitious,” an said, drawing the words out like ans mother.
Insarra did wish to retain her perfectly shaded Osahan skin, but said she’d take a darkening of her hair with undertones of auburn, as such was the perfectly realized beauty of her ancestors. Elir nodded her agreement, but she was disappointed.
Irsu noticed, and inquired why when they were alone.
“Beauty should be surprising,” Elir said. “She could have blood-red hair, or iridescent scales spilling down her scalp, for the price she’s paying. I could fit her irises with ecstatic shifting flecks! And she merely wants the physical appearance of a man’s aesthetic. How is that better? For her or anyone? It is merely different.”
The heir to Rivermouth smiled in such a haughty manner Elir snapped her mouth shut. But an said, “You’re frustrated with the art.”
Elir reminded herself that the ultimate point of this redesign was assassination. She could not meet Irsu’s gaze that afternoon, and put off ans kisses. An teased her for being a grumpy artist.
***
Elir carefully controlled the release of her breath to keep her claws from trembling as she linked six separate threads of force over the mouthpiece of her design mesh. They latched as they should, shaping a perfectly specific lip-corner. Insarra had approved the final design two days prior and so Elir had begun the real construction. This part was even more delicate than the initial phases, especially because it would be examined closely by security designers and the small king’s mercenaries, for weaponry or false-design. Elir had to get it right, and still leave a ripple in which to pinch the sabotage at the very last moment.
Every stroke and pull of her claws could unravel it.
When the alarm ripped through the walls of the workshop, Elir gasped and instantly splayed her hands away from the mesh. Then her mind caught up, and she realized what the alarm meant: the fortress was under attack.
She carefully opened the long box and settled the mesh inside it, sealing the box with null spikes to keep every possible combination of forces out. The workshop was a good place to hole up, as it was suited to defense here in the depths of the fortress.
But Elir didn’t stay there: she clawed the door open and dashed out, heading up the spiral stairs. Irsu spent ans afternoons in the tiny fortress library, practicing rhetoric with a tutor or listing Sarenpet declensions, and occasionally writing poetry an refused to share.
It was stupid to leave the workshop sanctuary, but Elir wasn’t thinking. She pushed past a quad of Insarra’s personal soldiers and avoided people rushing to one of the underground shelters by darting through the gardens. The air was tinged dark, despite the daytime hour, and rang with the alarm. Just as Elir reached the side arch leading into the minaret with the library and a honeycomb of guest rooms, she slammed into Irsu.
An caught her shoulders, but was given no moment to speak, for the soldiers swept them both along to the private shelter, disregarding that Elir was not allowed, because Irsu refused to release her.
Once they were buried under not only the red rock of the crater floor but layers of defense-design, a combat-designer in Insarra’s employ lit force-lights in a web against the cave ceiling. The shelter was small but luxurious, and Insarra herself was standing with a flask of some fuming liquor in hand.
When she saw Elir, the small king tapped her foot angrily. “What is she doing here?” she asked, not exactly hostile, but annoyed.
“She was with me,” Irsu said. “And so I brought her. She’s too expensive to risk losing to your enemies.”
“Our enemies,” Insarra said sourly. She drank from her flask and stalked to her combat-designer, dismissing Elir.
Elir hugged herself. Irsu touched her shoulder. Ans hand was a weight grounding her, and she wanted to lean into an, but she settled for closing her eyes and licking her bottom lip. The forces in this shelter were perfectly aligned and in order.
She felt a hum in the soles of her feet. Then the vibration traveled up her crystal bones in uncomfortable dissonance to her ears, becoming a sound she doubted anybody else could hear. “Null the gates,” she said. Then louder, glaring at the combat-designer. “Null the gates! Can you do it from here?”
“Kid, I don’t know what you—”
Elir unsheathed her claws, gripped the lines of force tightly woven across the arch, and bent them, slipping out enough to see the air of the tunnel turning hard yellow in billowing clouds. A gaseous design, and it was strong enough to turn on elements too tiny for her to see—that was the only way through the defenses they’d passed. The elements of the air screamed as they were violently redesigned, and she could feel it in her bones.
She reached out and dug her crystal claws into the stone wall, hunting for the right threads: they were so thickly woven here she had to strip some apart to find what she wanted. Knots that could be undone and redone into null knots. She gripped a thread of rising in her teeth—Old Fairy bless the crystal in her bones—and worked fast. Behind her the combat-designer grunted and grabbed another thread with the tip of his stylus. He twisted it and held it at the angle she needed, then Elir flipped the final thread, hissed to speed the ecstatic force, and the null knots imploded.
As Elir fell back, Irsu caught her, dragging her inside while the combat-designer sealed the arch again.
Irsu lowered Elir to the cold floor of the shelter and stroked her braids.
“What was she doing with you?” she heard Irsu’s mother demand, though Elir was slowly drifting into force-loss sleep.
“Drawing my picture,” Irsu said tenderly.
Elir’s last thought was that her quick actions had saved Lady Insarra’s life.
***
Four silver-moon months ago Sahdia had interrupted Elir’s practicum for her final project and dragged her into the commander-philosopher’s office. The view from the spire opened in three directions: east, south, and west, leaving the ecstatic north closed off with black-fired tiles. The commander’s crescent desk curved against the wall, and she stood behind it, flanked by trees of pale-yellow force-fire.
The commander beckoned Elir close with her milk-pale hands. Her vertical inner eyelids blinked one at a time so she never took her gaze away. Though not truly a parent to Elir, hers had been the father-seed Elir’s ama used to grow her in az womb. When az died of a miscalculated force-feedback, Elir had been thirteen, and the commander had told her they both had been proud of her and that she could serve that familial pride by climbing the ranks at the college fast and well.
Elir had: she was only sixteen and already prepping her final project.
“I have a new final for you,” the commander said, Sahdia thrumming with restrained ecstatic charges at Elir’s side. “I’ve received a commission for a redesign of the small king of Rivermouth. She requests a body with a male forward aesthetic.”
“That’s all?” Elir wrinkled her nose.
The commander grinned to show her crocodile teeth. “That’s not all, girl. The small king of Rivermouth, we’ve learned, supports the heresies of the hope cult with quite a bit of money, and you will use your access to design a poison to kill her when she undergoes the aesthetic surgery.”
Murder! Elir could not hold back a gasp of ecstatic surprise.
Sahdia touched the nape of Elir’s neck. “Use your imagination, sky-heart. Impress us.”
Elir thought of her ama excoriating the Cult of Hopeful Design for its philosophies, for the scandal five years before that revealed how many children were buried in their catacombs with ruined bones and crushed skulls.
Lazy architecture, her ama had exclaimed. The worst crime. A careful moderation is necessary for the long-term benefit of humanity’s design! Fetal mesh is not meant to change human children into chimeras—merely for slight changes like your perfect bones. I drew out the crystal already written into your design, nudged you better. Aren’t you better, baby?
Yes, ama.
That’s right. No lazy designs to glorify the possibilities of human design!
Then most colleges had banded together for once to demand that the hope cult be stopped—the cultists were too wild, too bizarre! Of course, the fallen god of the red moon had dismissed the complaints of the city colleges, saying there should be no limit to the possible achievements of human architecture. The fallen god rarely took sides, preferring, some said, chaos.
Elir understood, though, that her family and college believed the design of the world would be better if the hope cult fell. It made sense. The cult took too many wild risks. They were not regulated.
And so she had walked to the inner curve of the commander’s crescent desk and, with her crystal claws, touched the skin over her heart. “I accept,” she’d said, meeting the dangerous gaze of the commander-philosopher.
***
Elir woke to the touch of light silk sheets and a warm breeze fluttering her lashes.
She opened her eyes and saw first a vaulted ceiling set with tiny shards of blue and green chipped tiles, in a mosaic like the waves of the sea.
“Elir,” said Irsu, coming to kneel at her bedside. “You’ve slept more than a day, and I brought you to this room, a guest room. It’s yours until you’ve recovered, but I’m afraid you’ll have to remain while the fortress is interdicted.” An spoke more quickly than usual.
Elir blinked slowly, thinking of the commander’s vertical inner lids. A shiver dragged down through her bones, and Irsu kissed her forehead.
“Are you ill?” An said. “Curro thought it was force-loss faint, and that you’d recover quickly.”
“Yes,” she whispered. “Water?”
Irsu left, but Elir heard an moving and the trickling sound of water being poured. An set a shallow cup down on the rug and scooped an arm around her to help her sit up. Then an brought the cup to her lips, and she drank.
“You’ll have to draw me now,” an said. “I told my mother that you’d offered a portrait.”
“No extra charge?” Elir whispered, managing a little smile.
Irsu laughed and kissed her cheek, then pressed ans forehead to hers.
***
Elir remained at the fortress for six days while the small king’s combat-designers cleansed the air. They were wonderful days, because Irsu spent them with her and allowed her to draw an.
Elir went carefully, first focused on ans eyes, then jaw, then mouth, before letting her gaze travel down ans throat to the bend of ans collarbone.
“Shall I remove my robe?” an offered quietly.
Elir’s heart popped with ecstatic hope, and falling knots twisted in her belly. She parted her lips to answer but could not.
Irsu took the paper and the pencil from her numb fingers, set them aside, and tugged at the small hooks holding her robe closed below her breasts. She allowed it, barely breathing, and took ans face in her hands, fingers flicking over the copper studs in ans ears, and kissed an without a thought to eddies of force. Elir wore a sleeveless linen shift under her robe, and Irsu kissed down her sternum, teasing her with warm breath that easily drifted through the linen. When an kissed one of her breasts, Elir flexed her claws. They sliced through the silk of ans robe, snagging a line of embroidered succulents. Elir gasped, and Irsu laughed. “See,” an said, “I should just take it off.”
Nudging Elir away, Irsu stood and easily untied ans robe, letting it slip off one shoulder. An lifted the shoulder and turned to gaze flirtatiously over it at her. Where the robe slunk low on ans chest, the hem of pretty purple binder showed.
“What do you want me to draw?” Elir asked, staring at Irsu’s languid beauty.
“You’re thinking about drawing right now?” an murmured.
“I can’t stop thinking about the lines of your body, the tucks and shadows, the curves and planes,” Elir whispered, slowly standing. “I’ll draw it however you like, you know, however you want it.”
Irsu put a hand out to stop her approach. “I like it as it is, Eliri. I told you that.”
“Then that’s how I’ll draw it. Though I think you’d look magnificent with wide drooping wings to match. . . .” She caressed one of Irsu’s head feathers.
An kissed her again, hands on her hips, and she tasted the threads of ans design on her tongue!
***
“Why are you a cultist? What is your cult?” she asked Irsu, draped against an later, half-dressed but lazy with kissing and touching and sharing knots of force between them. She knew an would say the hope cult that Insarra supported, but she longed for an to say something else. Give her a reason to argue.
“Roc Aliel is the leader. Have you read any of his philosophy?”
“No,” she said, though she knew the name: he was the founder of the hope cult.
“He writes about possibilities. About being better than our design, pushing past what we know and believe, into a realm of infinity.”
“What does that mean?” Elir asked, trying not to sound intrigued.
“Well.” Irsu kissed her shoulder. “For example, he thinks we should have names for more than four genders.”
Elir snorted softly. “More between? Or beyond?”
“Either. Both. I know you are stuck at four in the same way most are, especially because you are an architect. Four-way thinking is the foundation of our entire society. Four genders, four directions, four forces! But there are more ways to walk to the horizon than east or west or north or south, and there are more possibilities between bodies and what different designs—physical and inner—signify.”
Elir hummed, staring at the tiny whorls of hair on Irsu’s forearms.
“Isn’t it more wonderful to imagine more than to limit your thinking?” an said.
That made her sit up. She stared down at an, stunned.
She’d had the same thought about architecture. About life itself.
“See?” Irsu grinned. “You’re imagining possibilities.”
But this was the thinking that had led to catacombs of dead babies and rampant sky-whales. Imagination and power running wild together. It sounded exhilarating—and dangerous.
Irsu said, “Soon, Roc and I will crash over the city, and everyone will change in our wake.”
“You and Roc? The leader of the hope cult.”
“I’ll take you to meet him.” An lifted her hand to kiss the pads of her fingers, trailing them against ans lips. “I’ve been going to meetings and funneling cash. Mother has no idea. Rivermouth will be the stronghold of hope.”
Elir’s pulse pounded in her fingers. Irsu was the one supporting the cult, not ans mother. Irsu was the one her college should have her kill.
She could never do that. She loved an. She agreed with an. Elir wanted to imagine more.
Irsu sat up, holding her close. “Eliri, stay with me. You were made for infinite design! Born for this—for me. It is a fight worth fighting. Limitless potential! Hope!”
She pushed away, climbed to her feet. She had to think. “The fallen god will not let you amass against him.”
“He likes ambition!”
“I should design you those wings,” Elir said, picking her robe up off the floor. “You would fly all the way to the sun.”
Irsu laughed, and an was so beautiful it took her breath away. “I’ll let you, if you design a matching pair for yourself. I’m a little in love with you.”
“A little?” she laughed, giddy and horrified—she’d not realized before they were so much the same feeling.
“With all the possibilities ahead of us for more!” Irsu said, finally rising to ans feet, too. “A little love is only the beginning. This is the beginning.”
Elir stared at an a long moment, at the curve of ans thin lips, the brightness of ans eyes, and the perfect haughty lines of ans bearing.
She fled.
***
Her personal room in the college complex was tucked among those of other final-year students, in a honeycomb tower grown from the red rock of the crater. Elir hid herself within, curled on her pallet with her knees drawn up. She stared at the wall, papered with chimerical diagrams she’d drawn as a child: a griffon, its bones, muscles, connective tissues, feathers, and wings all on separate tracing papers; a thorn tree with bisected branches to show rings and veins; a rainbow bee, stingers drawn in large scale to show their mechanism; pear blossoms randomly sketched in corners, and lips, and her own name repeated over itself, again and again, to form a complex heart-design that might suit a massive monster like a sky-whale. From the ceiling hung the real wing of a tree dragon, furry chimeras made of lizards and rain-forest megabats. The wing’s long bones splayed like an open hand, with white-gold membrane stretched between, and the longest bone arced down, glinting pearlescent in the small bobbing force-lights.
She thought of Irsu with such wings, though an probably would prefer graceful feathers, the black-and-white patterns of an oasis vulture.
Elir thought of many things that long week she confined herself, sketching wings for both of them, various models and skins. Avian, draconic, mammalian, insectile. She thought of the first lessons of architecture, that there were only four forces; of the special blaze she felt when ecstatic pops fizzled into something more like flow; of what made the fallen god a god—his ability to change his design at will, without architecture, without external design; of her parents, especially her ama, who had so strongly proselytized moderation yet had worked design on az own womb to give Elir this crystal gift. Az had certainly imagined possibilities. Maybe the difference between college and cult was merely education and skill. Or only regulation. Maybe the cult needed someone to describe the distinction between true possibility and doom.
Maybe Elir was arrogant to think she could make any kind of choice like that.
She was only sixteen.
But maybe only somebody at the beginning of their life could change the course of the future.
A little love is only the beginning, Irsu had said. Maybe a little arrogance was only the beginning, too.
***
The song of the riot did not vibrate through the intricate security of the college, but Elir heard the noise. She was already on her feet when Sahdia came to drag Elir out of her reclusion, rolling her sharp eyes. “While you pouted, never finished your work, the hope cult has risen, Eliri! The commander will see you now, and you need a good explanation for your failure.” She pulled Elir into the corridor.
Elir grabbed Sahdia’s wrist, jerking free. “What do you mean it has risen?”
“That leader, Roc, has taken over Rivermouth, and you are the only one who can stop him”
“Why?”
“Because Insarra wants her new body, and she trusts you. Her household knows you.”
“No, Sahdia, why must the cult be stopped?”
“Ah! Eliri! If they have their way, someday there will be no humans left.”
Elir flexed her hands, unsheathing all ten of her claws. “What is human?”
“Has Insarra been preaching? She is corrupt. Remember your ama, and listen now to your commander.”
“I never spoke to Insarra about hope.” Elir smiled before she could stop herself, recalling the passion in Irsu’s voice. She’d made her choice days ago. “Sahdi, I forgot something in my room. Go, and I will come after to the commander-philosopher’s office.”
Sahdia frowned. She’d assisted the commander for years and knew well how to look for subterfuge in students. “You promise?”
“I promise,” Elir lied.
But the woman left her, and Elir hurriedly packed a small bag with only her favorite slippers, a set of styli, and the tracing-paper griffon diagram. She did not need any of the winged designed. After putting on her best robe she went out of the honeycomb student rooms and across the eight-star courtyard. The sky blazed red with bright lily-bombs, and intricate spirals of purple smoke rose. There came a roar in the seven-note chord of a raging sky-whale.
Instead of turning into the command tower, Elir walked for the massive gates of the college.
They spread like wings, cut of mountain crystals, with veins of red crater rock. Fuchsia blossoms trailed over them, from vines rooted in place, for the gates of the college rarely opened. Instead, a tiny arch cut into the granite wall beside them served as an entrance—and an exit.
Elir drew a deep breath and unsheathed her crystal claws. She dug them into the gate, and baring her glittering crystal teeth, she tore through a knot of falling force. It snapped free, and she hooked a pop of ecstatic force, redirected it with two claws to disrupt the flow force binding the gates together.
They groaned; the fuchsia blossoms shivered and began to fall around her like vivid rain.
Then the gates of the college opened, scraping the street in a raw cry that would call the sky-whale here to distract the commander-philosopher.
Elir walked through it, and there was Irsu with a streak of dark blood on ans cheek.
Her lips parted in surprise and eddies of chaotic forces tickled her tongue as she stared. The crater city lifted around them in gleaming towers and arched bridges, floating apartments and rising ribbons of force, all a-shudder with the peal of alarum bells and the chanting cultists, with booming explosions and something like distant laughter.
“I came to see you,” Irsu said. An wore a dark-blue robe, sleeveless and tight to ans chest and waist. It flared around ans hips like a skirt, and for the first time Elir had seen, an wore shoes, to protect ans feet against the dusty flagstones. She lifted her eyes from the soft brown boots, dragging her gaze up and up to ans face again, and the straight lines of ans hair as it gleamed in the hot morning violence. An added, “I came to implore you.”
“I hoped you would,” she announced, letting her bag slide off her shoulder.
Irsu stepped closer and took it, smiling ans wry smile. An offered ans free hand.
Elir scraped her claws gently against Irsu’s sensitive palm. She said, “This is only the beginning.”