Elayne’s predawn world was the color of an Iskari corpse: gray hotel room, gray curtains, gray skyline broken by the Sansilva pyramids. From dragonback the city fit a single grand design, but her fourth-floor window was not high enough to make that order clear.
She stretched, and took inventory of her body. Were her fingers less sensitive to pressure, her joints more stiff, than the day before? The Craft eroded flesh. Forty years ago, at the height of the Wars, her body and soul had been one instrument carrying out the demands of a single will. Even ten years back she hadn’t felt so clear a split between mind and form. Some mornings recently she woke and moved her limbs like a puppeteer, triggering muscles one by one to rise mechanical from her sheets. Those days, these days, she waited for the twinge of betrayal in the chest or the small vessels of the brain that would signal the start of her next phase of life. Or if not life, then at least existence.
The betrayal hadn’t come yet.
But no matter how carefully she kept herself, someday she would take that final stepwise jump, shed muscle and organ, and survive as—what, exactly? A skeleton, on the most prosaic level, but more. None of her friends who’d gone before her could explain the change to her satisfaction. They offered comparisons, many and myriad and no more consonant than those of blind men feeling up an elephant. How was it to see in cold heartless relief, to abandon the soft colors filtered through—created by?—jelly globe eyes for pure harsh wavelengths, to throw wide and close perception’s doors at once? She could imagine such an experience, her imagination was strong, but she had no way of knowing whether her imaginings were correct.
She suspected not.
Still, the face reflected in the hotel window hid her skull well enough. Except for her teeth, which pierced white through the illusion.
The Monicola Hotel had a pool on the top floor, and a gym. Laps sounded pleasant, but Elayne had long since stopped swimming for exercise. Bone density mattered more for a Craftswoman than for other humans, since bones would stay even once she shed her meat. Not that she could afford to neglect her muscles—the chirurgeons were clear on that point. Elayne knew one scholar who still complained of heart trouble and shortness of breath fifteen years after going full skeleton.
“But you don’t need to breathe,” Elayne had said, “and you have no heart.”
“Just because one does not need to breathe,” the woman replied, “does not mean one cannot feel short of breath. And the lack of a heart does not save us from heart trouble.”
So: bodyweight exercises. A little work on the bench. No cardio. Air filters be damned: in Dresediel Lex, to run was to invite the city into your lungs, and the city was a drunken guest who liked to trash the place. Elayne did medicine ball slams, lifting the heavy sphere overhead and throwing it as hard as she could into the mat, a wood-chopping motion remembered from childhood.
Mirror selves watched her.
The judge. Tan Batac. Kopil, self-styled King in Red, the sorcerer turned revolutionary turned backroom ruler of fourteen million souls. Temoc, who almost died trying to stop that transformation. Who would have died, had she not intervened for reasons she doubted to this day were sound. Sympathy for a boy caught on the wrong side of a war. A faint touch of attraction—to his will to fight for a lost cause, if nothing else—and a naive sense that such passion was worth saving for its own sake.
More mirrors. Elayne was older now, wiser perhaps, colder for certain, and used to power and its ways. She thought of Mina, Temoc’s wife. Caleb, his son. Chel. A web spun around them all.
They were not her clients. They were not her problem. She had been hired to mediate between the King in Red and Tan Batac, not to bring protesters to the bargaining table. But she had burned Dresediel Lex once, and she would not do so again.
She threw the medicine ball harder and harder still, until gym mirrors buzzed in their brackets. Her arms sang with the effort, ignorant of the skeletal fate that awaited them. Though in the end, perhaps her body was no worse off than her mind. Bones would endure, at least. No way to tell how much of her self would make the jump.
She returned the medicine ball to its stand, toweled off, and walked downstairs to shower and dress for work.