that, salt lavender and walnut. Beyond that, wild seaflowers, which were plucked and sold in nearby villages. Beyond that, the sea.
Then, if you followed the rise and crash of waves down to the south, if you sailed along miles of cragged and rocky shoreline, there was Varn. The queendom ruled by Queen Junn. The only place Crier’s father could not touch. There were more rumors about the queen than about Kinok and the Watchers of the Heart put together. Whispers at every gathering: that Queen Junn was mad. That Varn was rife with infighting due to her progressive policies. That she was arming Varn against the rest of Zulla. That she was ruthless.
But Crier had always thought that the stories of Junn spoke of power and strength, of a girl ascending to the throne at just sixteen after her father, the king, was killed.
She readjusted the strip of red cloth tied around her upper arm, the mark of one betrothed, and continued to move through the gardens.
Everywhere the gardeners did their work—feeding and watering and trimming and arranging, cutting off the dead flowers when they curled into themselves and went brown. Unlike most other humans, the gardeners did not shy away when Crier came near. They had grown accustomed to her presence.
Crier had always been fascinated by humans: by their hot dark eyes and the strange songs they sang at night, in the gardens and the fields and the black shores where they dived for oysters; how sometimes they moved like there was something else inside them, something too big and tooth-gnashing for the soft human skin to hold inside. Once, and only once, she had mentioned this fascination to her father. She told him all about the songs, and how they sounded either like whale songs or like wobbly speaking, and how the humans sang frequently of love and hate and loss.
Her father said he did not completely understand all the different forms of human love, but that he had thought carefully about it and that perhaps, beyond his fascination with their history, their little cultures, he did love humans. In his own way.
Like how they loved dogs, he said, enough to feed them scraps of meat.
Crier continued to walk until she found a deserted corner of the gardens, a tangle of tall rosebushes with thorns the size of her fingernails. Here, hidden from sight, she finally untied the string and unfurled the thick bundle of pages. Her hands were not shaking, but it felt like her heart was, or her teeth, or her inner workings. She could not remember ever experiencing this much dread. It will be fine, she told herself, eyes adjusting to the tiny, cramped writing on the first page. Everything will be normal. Who would dare to sabotage a Design from the sovereign?
Makerwork Design by Commission, Ideation Final, Year 30 AE:
Crier of Family Hesod, Model 9648880130
She read the pages quickly, her nerves subsiding. Nothing out of the ordinary. There was a letter from her father, faded and yellowed after seventeen years, in which he formally stated his desire to create a child, as his forebear, Sovereign Tayol, the first sovereign, had done before him.
There were a series of blueprints he and Midwife Torras had Designed together—the first, third, eighth drafts of Crier’s form. They balanced her four pillars based on Hesod’s requirements for a potential heir. They Designed her inner workings and her outer appearance, the color of her skin and hair and eyes, the measurements of her body, putting meticulous consideration into everything from the shape of her nose to the exact length of her fingers. As she read, hardly noticing the night falling down around her, Crier could not help but compare the documents to her actual physical body. She touched her nose, her throat; she wiggled her long fingers and studied the faint lines on her palms.
The last page was the final draft of her Design, the one that the Makers would have used to actually create her. Unlike the previous drafts, this one had only Torras’s neat, blocky handwriting—none of her father’s scrawl. But that made sense. Torras was the Midwife, not her father. Crier gave a quick once-over to the ink drawings of her body, the cross section of her inner workings. She was more than ready to return these documents to Kinok and forget all about her ridiculous paranoia.
But there was something off about this page.
Crier held it up to the moonlight, frowning. The proportions of her body were