The Refused Seam

"You've come to reclaim your face. She swore it to you."

The Sculptor does not turn. His fingers knead the raw Éclat, an amber nodule where a thousand features surface and drown. Mine drifts among them — I know it by a hollow, a jaw cast in negative, the exact measure of what was subtracted from me the other dawn.

Astou holds the Greenhouse mouth. Her rifle sweeps the gutted glass roofs, the brambles of cable the Seven Who Reign left to rot here.

"Take it," the old man whispers. "Be whole."

HATHOR.∞ unspools inside my skull, honey and patience. Tear out the Éclat. Grant him the Narrative Death. Come back to be sewn shut.

The khépesh trembles above his nape. A press would do it. A sigh of water. I draw it back against my hip.

To stitch the hollow would be to let her light seal the one fracture I still breathe through. Made whole, I would become again the seamless tool that executed at Marrakab al-Mawt without a flinch. My void holds me upright. I keep it.

"Scatter them," I tell the Sculptor. "Return each face to its dissident. Mine with them."

Astou lowers her weapon a second. She weighs me — hunting for the trap, as always — then tips her chin.

From my belt I draw a dead scale, soaked in my blood, hacked into a crude mask. I break it before the sensor nested in the foliage. The interface drinks the illusion: face recovered. The Goddess exhales her ease. She believes me mended.

The Sculptor presses the untouched amber back among the roots.

"She will count your silences, gladiator."

"Let her count."

Astou seals the glass behind our steps. The Greenhouse's blurred Résonance swallows us. I walk without my face and I no longer tremble. But HATHOR awaits a return, and soon she will want to touch with her own glyphs the seam she believes remade. What will her fingers find, in the flesh left open?