Page 112 of The Only Way Out Is Up

“Some lizards can purge their own tails,” Ky explains. “Like Star can do with his legs when they get damaged. So when something catches them by the tail, it falls off and they get away.”

“Wait, really? Lizards can do that?”

“That’s what I read, anyway,” Ky says a little defensively. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a real lizard.”

“You see them at the edges of the Heap sometimes. I caught one once.” I smile at the memory; I’d been no more than six. “Tasted like pork, but less fatty.”

Ky laughs out loud. “Sometimes I forget I’m dealing with a barbarian.”

“Excuse me for being hungry!” But I’m laughing, too. It’s easy to laugh with her.

“Anyway. What if Star had outer plates that he could purge when Bitey gets ahold? Then he could get away.”

“That… might work. But only once. Then we’d just be back where we started.” I shake my head. “What we really need is the opposite of BIND. A REPEL, something that pushes things away.”

“But?”

“But there’s no such thing. At least, I’ve never seen it.”

“So make one.”

I laugh. “That’s not how it works.”

“Why not? You made the sigil for BLAST, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but that was just a modification of EXPLODE. A little tweak.”

“This wouldn’t be all that different. Here.” She vaults to her feet, sending her chair sailing backward, and bends over the worktable beside me. “The BIND sigil looks like this, right?”

She draws the character on the paper. I nod.

“It looks pretty close to the way we still write bind, right?” She jots down the common version of the word. The characters used in sigils are supposed to be from an older form of writing, more intricate and decorative but still often recognizable as precursors of the way we write today.

“So?” Stray hairs from her ponytail are tickling my neck, and when she leans forward her breast presses against my shoulder. I’m trying very hard not to be distracted.

“So we write repel like this, don’t we?” She scribbles it. “Same lower part, but the top is reversed. In that case, wouldn’t REPEL look like this?”

She writes another decorative character, BIND with the top half flipped horizontally. It certainly looks like the kind of thing you’d see on a sigil, and if I didn’t know what it meant I might even assume it was REPEL. But…

“I’m telling you, that’s not how it works. You can’t just guess the character. It has to be right.”

“How much do you know about making sigils?”

“Almost nothing!”

“Me neither,” she says, like it proves her point.

“And?”

“Nobody knows anything about it,” she says. “Down on Malkuth the workhouses crank out thousands of copies of a few basic characters”—she speaks hurriedly, eager to skip over that subject—“and otherwise we only use parts shipped down from Above.”

I frown. “I always assumed there was someone on Hod who knew how it all worked.”

Ky shakes her head. “We have sigworkers, obviously, but they just wire things together the same as you do. So who says this isn’t how it works? Maybe it’s just that nobody has tried it.”

“That seems unlikely. Anyone with a knife and a sigil blank can try—”

“Try, then,” she says. “We’ve got plenty of sigil blanks. What harm can it do?”