CW: religion, criminal justice, corporal punishment, capital punishment, skin horror, bones

"I love my city. Its trellis curve and rising voice. My photograph and gambol that jump it awake, and out: think less of it. Emelry - let this soil clog not our hard heart. Now we are in the hands and parting storm I, what is this land to me? My city can vacuum up, break shell and murder bore free. My and your motion affords no fear. Water cold. Gasp! And preen and panic! But here is motion."

Vacation. Invisible festival and we ate like kings on the Quarry fare: Looy had lied that eir love was of rations. The food here was electric: milled and processed, every ingredient pulverized and desiccated into a powder before being reconstituted into mortar bricks of a pure spice spectrum. A purity of nutrition that became fragrant, aromatic, nutmegs and red cinnamons, and the most luxurious vanillas that are so strong they turn bitter and sickly. Blocks of pounded sand, and slabs of fat - butter, coconut, aloe - that melted their counterparts into fireworks. I was developing a taste. My body ached and it sang.

In this level of weight - Lunic, or near it - even Kali would manage bursts of gliding. From here, eventually, we would fly straight when the sun arrived, like an arrow to the same height at opposite end. Already, distantly, morbidly, I dreamt of turning the quarter into a bastion manse and make it rain confetti for returning hero Rain.

Kali perched nestled in my arms like an infant, a housecat viciousness sheathed in eir claws. Eir little heart, and lungs maybe the size of mine, shivering like a wristwatch. This close, each of eir breaths was a sigh, a small satisfied rattle. I stroked eir wingblades, firm and careful, applying henna from a golden vessel smelted from torn wiring: Quarry-quarried, and set with ruby shards. They were drawn from a skeleton that had fallen and shattered in the fire of Kali’s youth, and the memory was mine.)

"My voyage companion, my field of flowers," I murmured to em. "Motion. Give me a title."

"No."

Alas! I grinned, outraged: "Yes. Look at my service, wonderful! I am the king’s Porter, I am porting you this moment. Sign me."

"No, a work is for life. It should. A tengmunnin is a task, how can that translate?"

"A friend cannot be within the retinue? I will not be only a companion. Make it undoubtable where I stand, take me into the fold – rank me under Harka, ka!"

I was lighter. I was regaining my strength at the top of the world. Its middle wind rolled hard and slow. My muscles had scarred and were reforming, geologic. Less weight and always the rising wind, lilting, as if I could push off into it.

"No," Kali said, and the tension was gone. E gently shook my fingers from eir wings, and I began cleaning the dye from as deep in myself as I could reach. We watched the view.

I traced a point in the sky, imagining I was flying. I knew enough of wings, now, to feel them. I held my hands back, the angle at the ball of the wrist, the blade where thumb meets arm and folds into foil. There was the rise, there was the curl, the stairway to slice into, stirred along the small hairs of my arm. The hair of my head, my eyelashes, all of it like antennas to the open sky.

I was stronger and still locked. Harka's claw could ring my wrist; it would not have three months ago. As I was before Savannah, in that body - that mind? - could I have sat here and raised my arm without it shivering, without its puppet strings straining? I felt like dark meat, fuzzy and dry. Like mackerel flesh. Even at these heights they had adorned me with, this perspective and gentleness, even with my blood twisting to bring me back to baseline - even now I was weak, and straining upwards, and falling down.

Nothing was beyond belief. I had read nothing since coming down besides what was in the library Quay, I was fattened on those leaves and starved the dense grain-meal of records and rote. If I dug, if it had not been burned or buried, maybe I could find it - some experimental log of the initial generations, the layout of the tally-rooms of the spine, an easy diary left for me by some partisan - by a young Razina, even, brave and fresh. But I did not need to read that to know it.

A red bird in the sky. Red with tracking-dye worked into the root of the feathers, red with heartsblood, life and fire and voice. Flying, a comet down the spine - mythic will and syllabic strength, poetic license and coilmuscle. Everything had happened, made wild in youth! Carrying a giraffe by the neck in my fist.

"I will forgive you anything," I said –

"Kakaka! And what such fail!"

"My lion-voiced one, calling canine. I tell you I appreciate the metaphor, truly, but I have been playing that letter in my head since the news. It is too low for you – a hunter on the trajectory of pet. I understand the poetry of it! It is strong, yes, sky-wolf, alien. But still sour with me."

"But catface is in the primal terror. There is an enemy – a hunter. Canine means peer, feline means challenge. In the size."

"No, I’m sure it happened. Somewhere – the savannahs before the walls rose, the pre-Edenic hunt. Somewhere in those long years, even if just a generation, even if only one and one, it must have happened between a pride and a band. A pinnacle. It was there, a spearman languid lying on the red clay, backed by his lioness, a cub and a child playfighting with sheathed teeth. More peerage in that. Peers of luxury, not necessity, a bond of fat. I can see it, even if it never lasted."

E scrabbled up, and turned to face me. "Think back further. The human inherits the mantle of the hunter. Cat and dog, old masters of the niche, contested by the new human victorious. But further, think of panic over pride. The hunt before it was vanquished. Guillotine, tiger! The tiger death is kind. Go tide to neck, crack once. Now come old wolf, ardent pack's arrowhead, barking orders to tear you apart. The wolf death tugs and pulls ragged – latches on, drags down. Cut, tiger! No. Fellowship up above – but below, if I were to fail, if my love was shattered, and if the world changed... Had I a host, riding, the wolf war would be mine. Mine that, always, dogged, and tugging."

E was aglow. Honey-drunk, and changed. Eir downcast focus, that picky intensity, was replaced by a new slowness. Always looking up, light soft in eir eyes. One week since the letter, one week since the spine had gone out in a thunderclap echo. It was a moment of night in midday, saved only by our position among the lights and lanterns of Quarry, and even then we were still blind, restricted to the fishbowl bubble glow it left us with. Five minutes of darkness. Five minutes of vomit and suicide.

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Strait: a maelstrom. Bitter, ripping sea wind. Mammoth musk. Ribbons of land across the grey shallows, that would have been swamp if not for the cold, and linking their twists the grand bridges fording the window-bottomed deeper waters. Strait: a story. Pre-Edenic. Humankind before the walls rose and acclaimed the union of language. It was raw, it was dangerous, and it was the edge of permission; a leftover from a more radical regime's era that could now not be interfered with. The mandala was permanence itself.

Ironies:

First, if the true and credible dissent that Kuryo so yearned for were to form, it would happen at the breast of the sun, within the mandala. It would occur at that center, the place whose each seated habitat was ordained as a baseline tremor of the species. All little worlds that grew there, in their chorus, when winning its place was named inarguably a pure expression of the human current. What can be done with the light of the sun, its potential of power that seems so infinite to our perspective? Industry enough to create not only places that are hypothetically possible, but moreso the places that must always exist, for their existences come not from history but from the bubbles beneath our souls' surface. All the logics of life that could not be extricated from us, nor invented anew. Somewhere in all of us, whether neotene or changeling, was a brace against the rocky earth of Strait's ice age. Somehow, all our feet knew that they must be ready to touch it. Likewise the soft mossy vineyards of Chaff, likewise the marble plazas of Honey. A series of homes, that were built by and for these rights of remembrance. There would be a proper nursery for specific ideologies, specific bents of perspective, thoughts that are so native to the human condition that they are independent from the state of the world.

Second, the mandala long predated Triactis, which acclaims itself as the great game. Grand laboratory of form and flesh and feeling clinging to a single tenuous theological underpinning. The line that had won it everything was its place of absolute honor concerning the soul: every faltering flame in the ribs of the world is precious and irreplaceable, moreso unique, and even moreso uniquely elucidating. Souls are kaleidoscopes, lone networks of connection. To do justice to God and the creation one must dramatize these differences, these specializations, in a process of one becoming more and more themselves. But what accomplishments had this system had that yet equaled the social interplay of the mandala? It vanished in the mist, created an atmosphere of extreme differentiation but no juxtaposition. One could go straight to the mandala and argue that Srait's culture of anonymity achieves the same thing; people's actions speaking for them, the removal os a strong system of social pre-parsing.

I was thinking too fast about nothing, and trying to pin down a shadow. Fight to fawn, for my thoughts were of drowning in sunlight as compensation for those minutes of dark. Before the letter: a thunderclap had fallen like a thousand hammers striking at once. A bolt, a bolt, the crushing noise of a factory in a single moment.

Utter night. An intolerable echo, feedback whine, slamming back and forth between the opposite ends of the distant landscape. For a while it seemed to only get louder. The lights where we sat turned bright, the ones far beneath in the surface industrial zones hurriedly clicked on. But it was over too fast even for panic. Clack – clack – clack – one by one, starting from our end, the segments of the spine flared on again, and the missive arrived to where we crowded around, alarms still singing.

Here is its course, the longed-for remittance to the decades of Quay's love: three solar omen in hard white shieldjacket drapes, inner-court garb. The eyes of the marginal two sparkled with the information on their screens; the middle was stony and wide-eyed. Fury, fear, what? I still can't parse it when I remember. "Unprecedented," they said. "What choice can we have but emergency? We throw up our hands – immediately, sunbeam support must be suspended. The overture is appreciated, but there is just no authority yet that may speak to yours. It is our regret that –"

And it would have droned on into darkness, setting the countdown clock for Savannah running out of backup power - which at its scale would come quick down its inhabitants' necks. But in a hammer strike no less loud than the spine breaking, the pearl door was banged in behind them. Muffle, furious, laughing argument - a pleading second voice, and the radiant remonstrations of the child of light: "I will beat you all! I will put your teeth into the air!"

The three former speakers recoiled, mortified - one tried to dodge and was caught in the temple with a grain-scepter, one fell on their knees, and all three were forced out by Shirazavid Inanari Sanchez in full albeit half-dressed ceremonial robes. "Out, out, out out out! Out!"

"Please! Your Parent has –!" and the attendant who followed Them indeed lost a tooth, whimpering in betrayed petulance. The infanta spread Their arms in a splay of gold and color, the four bruised solars cowered at the door and called for help as Their forehead hit the ground.

"O friend and lover, o fenghuang, o brilliant crystal spear," They cried, voice echoing against the tile, "you have exploded Our heart and hurricaned the limits of Our esteem wider than the wheel. May all creation embrace you! May the circuit complete in your gem! By the world's ring, be Ours forever! O red lake, precious spring, take Us into the awful upwelling of your bounty, and know that this fortress world is Our home. You have made it glass, shimmering, its walls and ceilings! I will shatter a path, I'll tear apart anyone who stops this now, I will extinguish every bridge-burning torch, I will find you. I come now. My will is yours!"

All who are welcomed as an heir of the sun are singular. The See's royal family is a long project of production and perfection. Of the doubtlessly countless children of the monarch which are scattered to the mandala, only those that unaware of their heritage make an impact on their little worlds become legitimized and welcomed into the highest light. Seeds of the sun, signs of the system, and of the fifteen heirs of this generation Shirazavid was one of the most recognizable. A harsh, narrow face in a permanent grin, immersed in a fiery personality that since Their first press meets was apparent to the world. They were insatiable, ceaseless, pure motion, never stopped talking. Strait was transformed, its curated sphere of nomadic land dependency coopted by Shirazavid's time on it in a way that still felt true to its goals. Where once there was hardscrabble self-sufficiency and a brutal winter want only overcome by sheer hunter-gatherer ingenuity, Shirazavid alongside their tribal mentors had spent Their youth in borderline evangelistic travelling - and wherever They went shelters rose, earthen bunkers and iceway irrigation that at each turn of the migration cycles refined themselves, became polished.

It was a small thing. Cities did not rise. There was no grand revolution, only the patience and incisive sense of small improvements that had come to define Their public image. Shirazavid, insatiable, could never let Their mind sit still on one thing. Their sun-drenched heart had to eat, had to amoeba itself around things, jumping from idea to idea, structure to structure, searching for flaws and jagged edges and absorbing it. This royal restlessness was now striding towards the door of Savannah, unprimed to catch it.

The power of the sun is boundless, indescribable. One cannot understand the pure bounty of it, the world-creator, abstracted crown of life itself. Even in the ancestral condition, looking up from the hardscrabble soils of Heath at only a sliver of a sliver of a fraction of its output. Cradle engine, downpour, sail-filler, long umbilical – center of every highest tale, the door by which God and sight and sense step into the world. The jewel of Adonai – at just a glimpse! A single-point needle exposure to it! When our species moved beyond that point, and began to multiply the points of contact with those beams – as the founding crews of first Solars forded headfirst into that fire, that wind, skin-stripping proximity,

The nature of a king is love and hate. It is the ends of the spectrum. One person able to cohere extremes, and perform the long figure of society in one vessel. A king is a conduit, helpless and knowledgeable. I see this in you, fellow scion of a wavering line.

--------------------------------------------------

"Ludicrous," I said. Rain and Looy laughed together, forcedly - both of them in a cold sweat and beaming.

"I only emulate you," Rain Flower turned and mock-whispered to me.

"Oh. We are ludicrous then. I’m unsurprised."

Quarry had developed an arsenal.

Our chatter pinged across the hangar walls and made the assemblybirds glance – but we were left unmolested, they turned back to their welding and hauling. The entire level of Quarry’s tree had been turned to a battery of constructions: the first five prototype janitors sat in front of us where more skilled artisans were fitting the pieces together: behind them, material enough for many tens of new units was being loaded in from the manufactories.

Looy had invited us, gloating, and all around there was a voyeuristic rush. Rain and I, deep taboo, thrown to the winds, proprietary secrets tossed out like candy. Giddy, nervous, complacent, defeated, sprinting. Long had he been paralyzed by the line-crossing, but now I saw the freedom of falling in him that I had felt. Why not push it all the way, why not cry out to die for something. Faced with the weight of Savannah there was nothing to do but to become a tool, and drown in the river. Thrust both hands in. No fear, no responsibility except to sunlight. It was a comedy sketch, leering Looy and ribald Rain musing about literally moving mountains, carving out lakes in the landscape. With such a fleetsuddenly presented why not kick out to sea? Why not slice the rest of the way, complete Quarry’s long quarry in a week.

My arrival had been late, but now the assemblybirds carted over a turtleshell-sized slab of ceramic for Rain's inspection: a smooth chevron that he passed into my hands. Deathly and paper-light.

"We're getting close, Emelry. Beautiful work. This is - this is one of the valve connectors for the waterblade, they just spit this out. Real complex. This is supposed to be impossible - impossible - to make outside of Diadem and Near Victory, the precision it required... I have no idea how it will hold up to the pressure." He hefted it again in his hands, watching how it moved. I saw him consider dashing it against the floor. "The glass is good, but the ceramic is brittle. These will be fragile models. I don't see a way around it. The shape is perfect but they might be single-users."

Looy perched on my litter's railing, pretending to be distracted by the showcase beyond us in the wide, white, empty hangar. Far back were the calibration test stations, further back still a few half-assembled skeletons and the intake elevators, pumping materials and parts up from the lower-branched kilning and manufacture zones. Here was our showcase floor, our puzzle room. Looy looked back, half-ready to bark orders, but e wanted to be by us.

Rain's own janitor was back in his possession - they had analyzed every centimeter of it, and Rain had given them all the extra context needed. Now Quarry was well on its way to performing the task it was best at: rebuilding, reconfiguring. Now new janitors perched, poised, as if they would preen their antennae if you looked away. Chassis and shielding complete, their segments open and unsealed, spiracles. The guns were the last step, for their supply of water and glue was the finest and most delicate touch.

"A high, high red gift," Looy said. "The plans we access have been insensible. Scrap, borrowed or borrowed and not given. My greed and gratitude overflow in this arsenal. Quarriers are my fearful people, you understand this?"

"Palpably." Kali feared a lack of flower, a limit to what would overgrow. The sense of fear along the trunk and traipses of Quarry was a dread of a material loss. Death was no limit, many more here were cheerful and adapted - even Ynewey's inherited Diamond was a sort of ritual rather than remembrance. Boiled together and made solid, made enduring.

"How do I say it to a priest without rawness? It is a romance. Soon these will be ours, first generation strict and second more carved. The gift came here, for sheer capability?"

"Units will go to Quay," I said, "obviously. Network with me, make it fifty fifty, for we are of equal parts. Our brain, your brawn, an adorable reversal. But why has the secret escaped you so long? The Quarry which reads everything. You'll excuse me, but the capture feels total already, you are beyond this in many crafts. Savannah is yours - does it seem to be wrong? At every step we have found you bitten into the wiring, having uncovered everything before we thought to look. Is it that the full industrial capacity is only now ramped?"

"At audience you will have to speak on this thing I hate: the open door. Gifts and gifts and gifts and a bare neck, and we must take what is given. We cannot flinch at an open door. We have to run, you know this, more than you know whence go. 'Why the speed', you will ask us: it is your own speed. Abandoned, favored. Ynewy is like you, same impulse, same dare. It's rushwork, no? It's risk. Eat a poison berry."

The hour mounted, and Rain and I found our own corner as Looy went back to calibrations. We wedged in by the wall, him leaning into my litter. From a distance still the models were beautiful. Spiders of burnished steel shells to make up for the less than perfect ceramic. "I know janitors can fly rough when in atmosphere too long. And these are yet more fragile. How bad will it be without hull-capacity kilns? These feel made of rock to me."

"No, that's not true, that's for cases of years, years of interior stationing. I allowed it, I - look, it's not. God! The air runs cold here when I'm not collaborating. They stare at me, no one stares at me so patiently. What could I even say? I'm a thief of a thief. This had me so defensive at first, like watching myself trip in slow motion. I don't care now that I think about it. I will make a big show of saying it was a gift. Yes it was me."

"An arsenal! A handsome gift for any occasion! Let no one say we cannot choose well."

"Oh, say we, say we, you utterly cruel little – ! La, la, Emelry, never forget what you owe me. Never forget what you have done to me!"

"Don't be trite."

"I'll say it again! You don't know - they will bury me ten miles under Diadem, I will never see the sun again. You're making me forget how to talk, I go brittle around you. Let me have a little outlet. You owe me riches and riches and riches for this, make that the deal when you remember me! Rot me with sugar and gold and vistas!"

"You will have honey-drunk villas and harems of brave captains. You'll have ten million ears hungry for you, and ten million portraits of your heroic trailblazer's visage. You will have storms of nectar and bouquets of silk. When our part is over we will eat forever."

"Emelry can you teach me to pray?"

"Trite."

"Oh, I was joking." He giggled, rushed and nervous. "Please! Let me fan my face in peace. Let me lie down. Nah, nah, I'm dead serious after all. All my art is slipping from me and into the current - the under-running and utter thing that escapes words and hands - that is the breath of God, or history at least, as I understand it. We've chosen a stance without my ignorance in it."

I tiptoed my littler closer, and took Rain's hands. "Repeat after me."

"Oh this is painfully embarrassing."

"A good prayer already, but repeat after me:"

We spoke together. "I am a prisoner of the living God. I am grass in the shallow current, moved by His water and wind. See, I sway! I am free and unforgivable.

"O Lord of Lullabies, whose lyrics are organized as the celestial bodies: star painter, by this cry I claim a wish. My God, who swore to me the kilning of my sun and the kindling of my flesh, make that heat of desirous love overtake me. That pure blend of molten clarity that transmutes mineral to all the fruits of Haven: Lord of Goods! Weaver of vessels, lodestone, golden locus of nectar, let your palms encase mine, my empress of milk and honey. Let your left be my armor and your right my shield, and your enflocked lantern dream parallel behind my eyes. With you I am barefoot in the night, and all weapons break against my hands."

And I lone: O waiting God of Justice, it is you alone that I call upon, by your name I sing this spell. Swift spade, clenched talon, garden’s price: linger on me, spotlight, long enough to blind. Let every cubic meter of air in this world Savannah pass through my skull: let me hear the chant rising from the hated soil of my king, O One, O Love, O joy of motion. Plowsmith, quarryknapper – O nightmare, be with me in your feather cloak, place it upon my shoulders, and let none take it from me. Tsabarch, hieronym, capacoça – principal official, full court, keep me and be my bone, and be the jewel asleep in my head; my fossil, my pride and my terror.

--

Deeper into the strange society of Quarry: hurried and arbitrary. Looy took great but stifled offense to Kali's handful of cheerful questions about the floor, when e was brought to meet us, but spoke casually to Rain and I as if we were fellow workers frankly on a break. Groups were tight-knit and broke easily. Conversations were murmured, huddled like secrets, but where then openly announced. Time for neither pretense nor affect, but plenty for maneuvering. Every statement was a request, every request a statement, a mutual testing of boundaries and etiquette of yielding.

Tall and shallow.

Kali, reunited with my litter, biscuited my cushions. "Piece taker," e called me.

'Too far?"

"Heavy, but not too. A good gift - you have heard this? A good gesture, and in our spirit. Ynewy is capricious, and Quarry eager for caprice. It makes a laugh. Quarry I would hate to be at had it not that laugh, and that delirium. Sleepwalkers, that my line flinches for and loses such a floor."

He led us in a long pace down the length. Rain glanced over at us, unsure whether he was welcome - poor thing, who had less the privilege of solitude we sometimes won back for ourselves.

"Will you caprice with me? Ynewy has a great jarring game."

"E called this a lunch. I know it is a negotiation already."

"And you will speak mine."

"And how could I? This is too tense. You have felt that tension as I have, the letter's weight and its banished night filling this place like smoke. It has been an honor to glimpse the thing, but it could not be me to speak on it."

"It must be. If you are mine, take an order."

My breath caught. I fixed my posture, and said nothing on the long walk to Ynewy's inmost sanctum, on the levels that loomed above the dwelling place of the Diamond.

A cathedral arch. A tall, long canal - an audience-room perhaps patterned from the manifold branches of the grave tree. Repurposed from an old industrial project that still had its leftovers scattered around the room - demolition cranes with shrunken handmade cockpits leaning like tall branches along the walls, unsealed gouges in the cliffs of former dredging. Even now the work continued, a small group in the corner clustered around a sort of mineshaft of an exposed ferry pipe, ignored.

Ynewy sat, backed by a silver burnished mirror, high in the eaves of the walls that stretched up what must have been blocks, and halfway between em and the floor we remained on perched our fellow runaways.

Anahit was translucently pale, and her eyes unfocused. She was huddled in a borrowed cloak of muddy red and saffron yellow. I must have gawked, I must have swallowed my throat when I saw her, and her eyes caught my glassy ones. She smoothly looked away, sinking back into the shadow of Kuryo Redname who stood, ragged and proud, in her borrowed pulpit.

"Nighttime. Here we are aday, mounting," Ynewy said - speaking as if to a smaller room, a close audience. The room felt like it was stirring with so many wings, all the little alcoves occupied by audience. But it was only us. Ynewy, the king, Anahit, Kuryo, and I. "Now the phase is over. Over. Soon I'll fly. Tell me, as I gather my train, what you would: my allies, my friends."

I looked to Kali - e looked back at me, steady. A soft gleam in eir eye, a silent one. I panicked - but I understood. Looking up, I raised my voice to make a greeting, "Arbiter of Quarry -"

"We aren't doing this. Why is the girl here? Why is she speaking? You won't allow this."

"Oh," Ynewy said, "my graces are endless, and all my friends supplicants. Ply and plead me, gifters, and pave my stride. My ears open wide, yes, so much to listen to. Your priorities are clear: I am second, but whose is the better second?."

I and the apostate watched each other until she spoke. "Do you know what happens in a week with no light? A long slow shutdown of every life process. A self-sustaining hurricane growling longer. Unregulated, spinwards, it rips the land of its grasses and shoves the rivers out of their beds. The land scours down to its foundation. Annihilation - washing machine! Then the ice. Why are we in this discussion? Explain it as if I am the idiot you imagine me to be. This girl has perpetrated a crime there is no recovery from."

"That letter was Quay's, and is a pillar of Quay. Nothing could have stopped its bolt. This has always been the position of Quay," I said, and ignored my voice breaking. "Now it is a matter of delegation, and the palace spearship comes. The time is now, Kuryo. The cities prepare their orchestra, where is yours?"

"Oh, Emelry, didn't you call my hatred delusional? And just like that aftershock: you, Sainshand, are a dancing ray of sunshine. A shattering final autumn Pure, bladelike, unbound, carcinogenic. You cook me like a slug on stone. If I see more of you I'll go blind. I wish I could tell you what you are, how you were made, what a horrific jewel you are. It's not happening, and the gall it takes to stand here - ha."

I turned to the highest seated one; "Ynewy - you've put me in a court now. I will happily argue or prove, but I must know what is expected here."

E twined eir claws, considering. "I am a lover: pursued and jealous. And now there is a beautiful rhyme gift. Two appropriate humans enmeshed in landing strip. I have nothing to say."

Kuryo was only more upset "Listen! We are going to talk about the cutoff first. No plans before we sort this. Two options: one that it was incompetency, looseness of bureaucracy, the malleability of it at the highest levels. The See is erratic and ruthless. Otherwise, an intentional warning shot we were lied to of. Oh, that wild savior princess, the timing of it! How can I talk to you, Sainshand? You are like - not a child - no gulf can describe it. A veiled dagger and a cruel smirk and you fall in love like a slave. Claws in the soil - bone breaking..."

"I'm fearless. If it was a warning, let it be. I call it a reminder, not hostility - a warning is kind. And if incompetency, I say humor it, allow the gears to turn, the inertia to pivot. Then we are the alarm. Nothing alike has ever happened - and nothing can hurt us. With Rain I have confirmed the backup power availability; he is working with Looy to bring it under our access. And when tides the dark in those same winds will turn luminous, the cities will launch, and that may be the closest path to your dream of escape."

The birds only watched us, quiet.

"I want you with us, Redname. The See will not accept a single party, it must be a delegation. Who am I to find here with an equal perspective to yours? The doctor and her henchmen. Face your fear, Redname, stand up against it and see it stand with you."

"Never happening."

"What then was your hope?"

"I wanted more time. I still beg Ynewy to leave. Get out, forever, follow through. Five years and we could gather all who would come - but I've made my case."

"Five years?" I asked.

"Five years quiet, lifeboat it. I will tell you again and again to leave and take the soil, to respect what has been built here, Ynewy Flechetteir. Both the cities are addicted to each others' haste because both of you want to prove more than to do. The girl will now bark at you on how to stay, that Quay's lineage is built as service, that it is succeeding. Why are they here? Because Marilore was going to leave the way that you now have to leave. Here because they failed, because they couldn't swing the hookshot. With a single smokescreen you can. Bide the time - take the jade - what's in the tree and what I have will add up to enough. You can do it, and must do it now. And what's Quarry worth if you can't! Leave, hide in the shadow of Jove, and nothing can touch you. Curve out, and no one can follow you. Leave like a ghost, and let the river people cover for you. Forget them, forget everything, get out of this prison. Away from the enemy, and find yourself."

"As if we've such simplicity. Kuryo, you have betrayed yourself."

"No," she snorted, standing. "This is the core of my belief."

"How many should die fast? Five years' worth? All, forever, black wing in the dark with no sheen, no coat? You told me this - you did! That the goal is to stop the deaths. What are you saying, five years?"

"Dilettante. Stop talking."

Once again my voice slipped from my control: "Aye, when you stop loving my enemy! When you cease the wreaking of Coteshinoeleon's progression, and the withering of my king's kind."

"Ynewy Flechetteir, you cannot take her as any kind of envoy," Kuryo said, turning from me with a sweep of her cloak. "She came here as a smokescreen, this little-merited child, with no foresight and no goals. This is a vapid passion you hear from her. This is the petty fervor of a petty crew - I will not allow you to place that above my own efforts. Quarry owes me years, don't forget it and don't mistake it."

"The crew you cling to – you will call my enemy wise, and now call my friend petty too? Exploiter, abdicator, unemployed! It is you, Kuryo. It is your own pride, your own fear, your own esteem of the man who has ensured that we find ourselves in a cruel situation rather than a complex one. You will say you’ve no love – despite any deep-seated loyalty for taking you in as a stray kitten, and keeping you that way. Cote hands out titles and he hands out plans. You are not angry – it suits you! – his goals are not abhorrent to you, who will abandon the sun one day, in grand crime now or else on the last day when you walk away from the feast. Why does Quarry exist, why is it here? Because the door has been left open by that man. Because all these advancements have been fed."

"Do you think I don't know Cote? I know his decades. You are so hateful." Unmoved. "Poetry is good enough for the poet king, and you’ve slid by on it. Savannah is spite, and a tight ship, a locked box of venom for his masters and his world. It is a jealousy I can respect, but he yearns to return. I am not like him. He is like you. Dreaming of dancing in the sun, young and celebrated by the places I abhor. Our spites are antithetical."

The lines of Quay, Kali had shown me, were meticulously drawn up out of the earth – great pains going to a not slow but methodical and lifelike growth. A raising, a teaching, a foundation, steady and earnest. Quarry was ravenous, a wildfire, clicking into their role and pursuing its end. The process was irrelevant.

Was it truly an oversight? Each departmental faction among the staff assuming that some other neighbor had eyes on the ravens, and what could possibly happen in such a closed box? Was it a diverting of attention, or merely a lack of it, an unwillingness to look too hard at what they had all wrought.

So careless. so callous. Where was the opposition? Where were the janitors screaming through the sky for my confinement? Fear, negligence, no. A seam had been left. Ynewy likely knew this – that Cote had given them a path. There is an outrage that the proud savor when faced with low charity, when thrown table scraps, when a wrestler takes a slow step. This must be the cut in eir eye, and the furious pace of Quarry: "You have shown me your neck as a play, you have flashed your submission out of the spite of my inability: now I will at your throat. Now I will wolf you. Now I will take what you have, and no play."

"Not so. Your two spites are aimed at the same place. He does not seek redemption but ruin, a poison pill of resentment against humanity in whole. Savannah is a trap, a magnifying glass, a bomb of revolt, designed to drip feed all this access to its prisoners so they have the means to resent the world as he does. But it is his goal, not the sun's. It is his designed flaw - his

"Well guessed, lieutenant, but a miscalculation of scale. Unassailable arrogance. Cote is an old mover - I don't worry. Old and blind, and dead soon."

"It was me," Kuryo said gently, "the door opener. I give good gifts. Call me Quarry's patron; I just don't demand to be a part of it. You'll never get it. It'll never click with you."

I was so sick of embarrassment. I could not allow it to continue touching me, shaking me. I could not allow it into the archetype of who I was: the brave are never embarrassed. The youth arrives to the castle and makes an error - the treasure is lost - there is shame, but not embarrassment, and it passes. It vanishes along the path of the striver - it is learned, forever, and transformed. Humble yourself! It was in fact blind to demand the selfishness from Redname, to assume her concern before a complete picture was presented. But nothing was wrong. I had been right in my offers and assumptions. My playbook was strong. This was good news. I had asked delegation from her, and now my partner was brighter than before. Now I saw the magnanimity in her, the power to advance on multiple fronts. Yes! I was synthesizing. I could take her as an equal. this had been unknown even to Kali, I could feel it, and both e and I were now a step behind. I looked up, ready to respond, but it was then that Anahit stopped shrinking like a child behind their mother's back.

"Do you live in the world you want to live in?" she said in her clear voice.

"The institution of the audit ensures those places of living remain what we would hope for. Curating and cauterizing, that is the task we share. I know we are off script, and each in our own directions, but you must see that we remain in the work, and that the work is that want you speak of."

Anahit ingored me, "I've thought of little lately but my ideal world, if every piece fell into place. What I hoped for, and how I want to live along this history wheel, this wide and enriched garden. I once thought of this Ecumene that each of its spokes was mine to love, and that I could find that love in my own power. Like how a muscle tears and strengthens."

"What do you hope for, then? What have you found that you hadn't the access to? Where did the girl I knew go, her curiosity and reverence, her faith? I cannot see the objection."

"It looks different," she said, thoughtfully and poised. "It just looks different.

"There is a struggle and a grain to the world. Crime and calumny and all the petty things, humanity is jagged. People weigh on each other in their mass and force, the ice breaks and cuts - but you know this. Our education is of these things, the brutal and the vast. Why is it now that you scream at the pain of growing?"

"Oh, it’s not the pain," Anahit said dismissively, still watching the walls airily, oriented away from my gaze. "That’s not the question. ‘Growing’... I am suffocating, mummified. My god is a pale feather, a laughing and leaping thing. I think – is God play to you, Emelry?"

"In part."

"The whole for me. God of the rainbow, of chemistry. An electric God, who takes two things in his hands and sparkles them together. God is eternal – the Ecumene is old – the wiring is fading."

"The Ecumene is the joining of hands. I am in disbelief. That connection, the kinship between the distant worlds it encompasses and the varied beings it directs - that is what allows your spark to exist. Without the Ecumene – without us, you understand – the trend will be towards death or reinvention. Void, snow, static, the suffocating loss that comes with that kind of unformed noise.

"Suffocating, yes. I am so soft. I am so soft and shocked. My skin – my skin seethes with its own softness. Old, old, old, and cut. When I think of the fire of heaven, the cutting sensation, that is what I mean by suffocation. The ceiling to the garden, the wall, the bars I see the play behind."

"Impatience for Heaven, then. You give me nothing."

"I think the dam just needs to break. You can hold it in the spirit of execution – Redname is right, that is how you move – tight, like reins. You pull and pull and make a noose –"

"You object to the idea of justice. You object to the practice you are sworn to. That you joyfully chose, picking through these wide boughs that have space for us all. The font of peace and plenty is not enough, you need to bruise your knees in a drift! You still give me nothing, no decision, for you cannot give me a decision! Here are mine: every motion of our industry! The pacts of trade and aid that spread and synthesize the long light of the sun! The ability for the old – you say old! – oh, that old and stuffy backwards empire of Lune, oh, how pale, how stony! Cradle of art and song – not enough! The workers and officials who tie the knot from there to the Triactians, that give a cancas for land and life – that our people, our line have entwined, have awakened! What possibly play could be higher than that of a haruspex! To select and tie the most elecrtifying parts of two worlds into each other, into union! What is grey in that?"

"Unify them and kill them."

"You sell away the glory of the world in hope of invisible things. No. My Anahit has always known this – my Anahit sang to me of this. She showed it to me. I respect nothing that you say now, for you give me no road you took to come here. You give me nothing. You have never completed an audit – I too threw my chance for a proper one away. We can still find it, we can still make the tie! We have not worked through it, and she has never seen the world as it is. She lived in a false world, lost it, and now lives in a new one – all outside the true one. Oh, she will drown you in perspective, she is fascinating and a voice like no other – Speaker! And so I say stay with me. Anahit, back with me. Kuryo, along with us. Do you see where we are? Look – look through that window, at that span. We are both here at the terminus. Stop walking away. I will show you it is possible, I will show you the play and the justice both. We will win – I will give you everything you ask, and show you it is sunlit. All good things! Say, say it, that you will call and stay!"

I saw Anahit in her eyes. Sparkle! That light cloudy lavender, so much lighter than mine, as if she was half-blind. Eyes on Heaven – poor love.

It was a shallow argument, and accomplished nothing Ynewy listened, still with that slightly amused ruffle - e heard our tempers out, and Kali and I climbed back to where our room waited. Little to be said. The world was so big and I could not see past my palms. Kali consoled me - as the spine shut down softly e spoke of our course back. I was hungry for a detour. A new-model Quarry janitor, sleek and gliding, was the signal we would take to depart. Once supplied with a small fleet of treasures we would return to the city and spend as wisely we could the nine months remaining until the See's presence was upon us. I saw little value in human politics now. I would not be able to stomach the scrape and bow of it, and neither the theater. I wanted sand and salt. I wanted shadows under trees.

That night, alone, I wondered again of final practicals.

"Now you know it was a lie. Why were you convinced?" His gentle, cold voice was so quiet in the closed room but it filled every inch of air.

"I didn’t get anything from him. He gave me a pile of things I had already verified, and his delivery was the same on the lies."

"Wrong. That’s excuses, Sainshand. I don’t like the body language schools. Tell me why he convinced you – he would not have convinced John, nor Pacelem. He did not make a mistake, he marked you. Why did it work?"

"Because

"Wrong. You are doing it again. You are deferring to me because I am piercing you, because I am pushing you. You are ceding ground, and betraying yourself. Why?"

"How long will you only answer my questions? I am asking you to tell me, not answer me. Do you feel it? You are not getting angry – that's John’s problem and its why she has failed already – but rather afraid. This is a worse condition but a more salvageable one. Either explain to me or stand up to me. Only be deferential in earnest or in deceit, never on reflex. If you learn one thing today have it be that."

"I am still convinced, then! I still don’t see it – even with the facts on the table now, it would stretch imagination! It is soap opera – it is contrived – it feels like script, and it is script. I do not like easy answers – lover’s quarrel impacting the entire dock infrastructure? It begs for incredulity. Maybe I did not want to think something so trite was used in a benchmark!"

"Afraid of seeming a coward, then. Ha," Mon said in the first hint of a smile. Tell me, when you broke into the era archives two years ago, you did not read the Good Shine dossier?"

"No. Please, that’s been long settled –"

"Oh, I don’t disapprove. There for the taking. If I believe in anything to fight for it is libraries. It only would have helped me explain: it is the case this exercise was based on. Emelry – if anywhere in the world is soap-opera, if anywhere will stretch your tolerance of trust, it will be the places where auditing is necessary. It will be the folly of collapse. You must not expect these grand plans. Conspiracy grows from dissatisfaction and mistakes more than it does from the drive of deviance. These will be people running in the shadows – embarrassed, defensive, shame chasing them even further than you will. Now think over the problem again. But do not give him the credit of his stature, think of him not in the role of side-commission. Imagine him as a fool, a fool beyond belief, who could never have stumbled into that job if it was thrust on him."

Everything clicked.