Edger is the first of them to address her directly. “Pardon me, Slider, but might I ask you to elaborate?”

“That’s how the Spectrum was built,” she says. “Or… formed… would be the right word. Water.”

Now several of the planners actually turn to whisper to one another heatedly. Some of them seem excited to Dyeawan, while others seem suspicious, even hostile.

It is, as always, impossible to read Edger, though as in the bay when she emerged from the test in the drowned room, Dyeawan can’t help but picture him smiling.

“How did water form the Spectrum?” he asks.

Her slight shoulders shrug. “The same way water shapes all stone, I imagine.”

Dyeawan takes out the flattened rock from the stone bank upon which the God Rung sits. She gently wings it across the nearest curve of their snakelike table. It skips several inches before rattling to a halt like a flipped coin.

“Time,” she says.

This statement elicits murmurs among the planners, to which Edger raises his arms, signaling for their silence.

“If you’re asking me how the builders created such specific forms, I don’t know,” Dyeawan explains. “I don’t think you do, either. If you did, you would be using the process to create more palaces and keeps in the Spectrum’s likeness. I think you know how they did it, but you also do not know how they did it.”

Edger takes up a jovial, smiling mask and holds it over his expressionless face. He turns his head to regard each fellow planner with the painted expression.

“I believe, comrades, this demonstrates with finality that my faith in our little Slider here was not misplaced,” he says.

“She’s magnificent,” one of the other planners says.

She’s a young woman who can’t be much older than Riko. She also has more purple in her eyes than anyone Dyeawan has ever met.

“She is… undeniably adequate,” another among them says, begrudgingly, and Dyeawan is not at all surprised to see it’s a much older man.

In fact, their opinion of her, read on their faces, seems to be divided strictly by age. The younger planners are all smiling at her, while their elders either appear dubious or scowl outright at her.

No one else speaks. The majority opinions on Dyeawan seem to have been expressed.

“What happens now?” she asks them. “Do you vote?”

“I don’t believe that’s necessary, no,” Edger says, raising his arm and motioning behind her.

Dyeawan turns her head and peers over her shoulder. She did not notice Quan standing there before, waiting attentively just inside the chamber doors. He strides forward, smiling and cradling a length of cloth in his long arms.

It’s a gray tunic, like the rest of them wear. Dyeawan can see the concentric circle pendant already pinned to the garment.

Quan kneels beside her and bows his head, presenting the tunic ceremonially.