“Make your plans then,” I said, turning back to the desk. “We can discuss later tonight.”

He hesitated at the door, Lozhi on his heels. “I am sorry about Jovis,” he said. “I know how hard it is to realize that you can no longer trust someone. Life in the monastery… it was not as easy as people think it is. I had to learn that no one would help me. I had to help myself.”

Something in his tone made me turn back around, only to find the door clicking shut. I frowned. I’d have to ask him more about that later. If there was a later. I put my pen to paper.

One shard for obedience to me. Another three for basic combat skills. He’d have to be more sophisticated than her constructs in case he got caught. Twelve left. I wished I’d had the fortitude to examine Bayan’s shards before I’d burned his body. I could have picked out the ones that gave him the ability to create his own constructs. But I hadn’t thought I’d need those skills again.

Any commands I verbally issued could not be too complicated and would only hold for so long, so I had to rely on commands written into shards.

I could start with a command to rewrite any construct this one encountered, and from there add reference shards. But adding too many reference shards beneath a command often destabilized it, especially if the reference shards contained further commands.

Bayan had been written with the ability to learn. I couldn’t do that with only twelve shards.

That left me with step-by-step directions. If I combined that with some reference shards, I might be able to make this work.

I pulled out some of the books I’d brought with me, scouring the pages for sophisticated commands – words that had the most meaning contained in the least amount of space. My head ached and I’d only just begun. If only I’d had more time and the full use of my father’s library! Was there a word that described the calm state of mind one had to enter before reaching into a construct? Did a construct even need to have a calm state of mind if they didn’t have much of a mind?

These sixteen people, including Urame, were bargaining away pieces of their life in the hopes I could save them.

I wrote down a few combinations.

If you see another construct and no other constructs are watching, reach into that construct. Too wordy – it would barely fit. When you are two paces away from another construct, check if you are watched. If you are not watched, reach into the construct. That would take two shards, but it didn’t mention any state of mind. I could hope it wasn’t necessary. And then there was the matter of the modification.