There are scant traces of Razia in the dwelling she seems to have shared with her mother and younger sister—I recognize the little girl from the archival image at the shore.
We found only two skeletons—an adult and a small child, their arms intertwined, and a small metallic canister, a rubber seal around its lid, on the floor next to them. In it a faded photograph encased in a kind of resin with their names scratched on the back and two computing devices the size of my thumb that our data forensics team is attempting to decrypt and read.
There was also a key.
August 27, 2031
Ummi’s spirit died the same day as Zayna. It took two more days for her body to catch up. When she was finally gone, I laid her body down, wrapping her arms around Zayna as well as I could. There is no ground to cover them. No caskets to bury them in. No one left to mourn them but me. We bury our dead in unmarked graves, wrapped in simple shrouds. We came into this world with no earthly possessions, and we leave the same way, humbly, carried off in prayer.
I don’t see the others anymore. Some headed south. Trying to find the warmth of the old sun. Last night I watched from my twentieth-floor perch as a lone figure walked onto the ice, toward the horizon. I followed them a long time until they were a dot. Until my eyes blurred and I blinked and they were gone. Maybe they wanted to be alone when their time had come. Maybe they just wanted to be away from this place. Maybe they wanted to remember what it was like to stretch and use their muscles and breathe the frosty air, because that was the last way to know they were alive.
I found a book in Ummi’s belongings. One she’d safeguarded. One she didn’t burn for heat: Forty Rules of Love. There is no one left to read it. I ripped out page after page, twisting the centers into stems until they transformed into a shape that looked like a flower. I scattered the paper flowers over Ummi’s and Zayna’s bodies while whispering a prayer. It is not much. But they look peaceful together. Like an infinity poem that repeats itself forever. That is how I will remember them for whatever hours I have left.
I left a small vacuum-sealed capsule next to Ummi. I had almost nothing of ours to leave behind. A small photo that Papa-ji took of his three girls and encased in flexible acrylic, our names and the latitudes and longitudes of our birthplaces etched on the back. I left my Cold Spot data, my notes and models. I left my key. There is no reason to lock anything anymore.
I whispered goodbye when I left the old apartment. It is the last place for Ummi and Zayna to rest. Peace be with them.
Voice Log: Planet Mirzakhani, Diin 7 Saal 3027, Last Day
The key was to a dwelling on the twentieth floor. Her place. Perhaps a quiet room she could go to when the terrible silence and fear grew too loud.
There she was, body curled up in a corner, the golden R pendant dangling from her neck.
Words cover the walls. Her words. Every inch of free space. Math problems and diagrams. Two-dimensional maps of the Cold Spot. And a log. A diary of days. Of the horrors she faced. Of the wonders she saw. Of the curiosity she tried to follow.
I sat next to Razia Sultana, my namesake, for hours, through the entire night. Letting her know she was found and will not be lost. Thanking her for her courage, for her story. For this unexplainable moment that drew us together.
We study the ancient ones to learn about ourselves. They are not a monoculture, not a song with a single note. They are a collection of stories, an endless symphony, a galaxy of stars. Perhaps my people are too logical to believe in synchronicity; perhaps the notion is absent in our language. But on this planet it meant something. Improbably, Razia called to me, through the vast emptiness of space-time, and asked me to find her, to tell her story.
I honor that request.
September 1, 2031
I don’t think I’ll be able to write anymore. I think this is the end. The sun is rising over the lake, and I am thankful that for a moment it covers me in its golden light. So that I will be able to close my eyes and remember what it was like to be warm. To remember what it was like before we lost everything.
If you have found this, if you are reading this, tell our story. The terrible and the beautiful. The horror and the wonder.
Tell my story.
Say I lived.
I wondered.
I dreamed.
I loved.
I gazed into the stars, hoping to seek you out. And here you are. I looked to find answers because I refused to believe we were alone.
Strange, now as my light dims, I’ve found a flicker of hope again that you might find me. That you have heard my call and will answer.
I was here.
We were all here.
Remember us well.
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 gender 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, presently 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. Inhabitin
g 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 might 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 raised her hands to touch her eyelids 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 a twenty-minute 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 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 singing of skull sirens and the hum of 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—both 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 as they left for 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.
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