The first strike was silent — a razor thread, gleaming like moonlight, slicing through the air between Sloane and Cassien.
Cassien reacted fast, weaving a deflect pattern with the cuff of his suit. The sleeve unraveled, exploding in a flare of kinetic thread that absorbed the impact. The razor strand dissolved, sizzling into smoke.
Venna Krell grinned.
"Still using kinetic thread? How charmingly retro, Cassien."
Sloane stepped forward, pulse pounding. "You stole my code. You murdered Lady Juna."
Venna tilted her head. "Stole? Darling, I perfected it."
She raised a hand. Her dress shimmered, pixelating into a liquid mirror that refracted Sloane's silhouette a thousand times — each image blinking, shifting, showing her twisted, fractured, and dying in a hundred ways.
Sloane didn't flinch.
Venna's voice purred. "You wear your mother's defiance well. But let's not pretend this is about Juna. This is about you. You're the perfect fall girl. A rogue with motive, a dead noble, a dirty signature... even your little love affair."
Cassien bristled beside her. "We're not—"
"—together?" Venna said sweetly. "Oh, but you will be. They always fall for the myth. The noble and the rebel. It's fashion's oldest seduction."
Then she snapped her fingers.
The room exploded into threadlight.
---
Mirror threads unraveled from Venna's dress, curling through the air like silver snakes. Each one encoded with distortions — reversals, illusions, mimics. They didn't attack directly. They copied.
Sloane's pulse surged.
"They're learning your movements," Ari warned in her earpiece. "Every move you make, they duplicate and counter."
Sloane dropped low, spun a decoy weave from her bodice hem — Ghost Drape. The shimmered fabric left false after-images behind her as she moved. Three fake Sloanes darted left, right, forward.
The mirror threads hesitated.
Cassien seized the opening, unspooling a Myrrh cloak sigil — Nocturne Weave — and threw it across the room. The entire chamber darkened, threads blinking out in a hush of shadow.
They ran.
---
In the corridor, Cassien hissed, "We need to sever her access to your design vault. She's not just using your patterns — she's upgrading them in real-time."
"She has my mother's core code," Sloane said, breathless. "That's how she's doing it."
"She has more than that," he said. "Venna was banished for trying to weaponize the Loom Protocol. The original algorithm that gave power to fashion in the first place. If she's cracked it—"
"She's trying to destabilize the empire."
Cassien nodded grimly.
They stopped in front of a sealed door.
"This is the only way out," he said. "But it's guarded."
"By what?"
He looked at her. "By your mother's last design."
Sloane stared. "That dress was never finished."
"It was," he said. "We just buried it."
He placed his palm to the scanner.
The door hissed open.
Inside stood a mannequin dressed in a garment unlike anything Sloane had ever seen.
It was stitched in blood-red and bone-white threads. The fabric moved like it breathed. It pulsed with raw, dormant energy. Her mother's signature flared at its hem — Liora Calyx, the Ghost Stitcher. Fashion revolutionary. Vanished in disgrace.
"This," Cassien said, "is Silhouette."
---
Sloane approached it slowly.
It wasn't just beautiful. It was alive.
It wasn't made to be worn. It was made to change the one who wore it.
"It's unfinished," she whispered. "It doesn't have a power thread."
"It doesn't need one," Cassien said. "It is pure algorithm. Raw Loom code. The first dress built to rewrite the rules of the Threadsphere itself."
Sloane stepped closer. "This was the design that got her exiled."
"She didn't want it used for war," Cassien said. "But Venna did. That's where the schism began."
He reached out to touch the edge of the sleeve.
The room shook.
"No!" Sloane shouted.
Too late.
Silhouette activated.
Threads unspooled from the dress, dancing into the air, reaching toward Sloane's skin. They scanned her — her heartbeat, her breath, her memories.
Then they pulled back.
Rejected.
"It knows I'm not her," Sloane said.
Cassien nodded. "But you have her blood. You can unlock it. You're the only one left."
"I don't know how."
Cassien stepped behind her. "Let me help."
He placed his hands lightly on her shoulders. "You can't force this dress. You have to let it choose you."
The fabric pulsed.
Sloane exhaled.
She closed her eyes... and let go.
---
What happened next felt like falling into a memory.
She was a child again, in a rain-drenched alley. Her mother knelt in front of her, wrapping her in scraps of thread. Humming.
"You don't fight fashion, baby. You listen to it. You dance with it."
Sloane reached out now, in the vault, and touched the hem of Silhouette.
The threads wound around her fingers.
Accepted.
The mannequin collapsed.
The dress leapt into her arms.
It wasn't heavy.
It was perfect.
As the fabric wrapped around her body, Sloane gasped. A thousand strands whispered into her mind. Techniques she'd never learned. Patterns she'd never seen. Movements that bent light, warped matter, disrupted energy.
The Threadsphere bent around her.
Cassien stared at her like she was no longer human.
"You look like your mother," he whispered.
"No," Sloane said.
"I look like vengeance."
---
The Vault alarms screamed.
Venna was back.
This time, she didn't come alone.
Two Spectra — mirror-cloaked agents wielding glitch-threads — stepped into the hall, flanking her like shadows.
But Sloane didn't run.
She stepped forward, Silhouette pulsing around her like a second skin.
Venna smiled, mocking.
"So you finally put on mommy's favorite."
Sloane raised a hand.
The air shattered.
A ripple of threadlight surged from her palm — slicing through the floor, unraveling the mirror fabric on the Spectra like peeling skin.
They screamed and vanished.
Venna hissed.
"Impressive. But you can't kill me with a dress."
"No," Sloane said. "But I can strip you of yours."
She snapped her fingers.
Silhouette's hem danced.
Venna's mirrored gown imploded — threads snapping back into nothing, leaving her naked, exposed, and furious.
Cassien stepped beside Sloane.
Venna stared at the two of them. For the first time, her arrogance cracked.
"You're making a mistake," she spat. "The Houses are already falling. I'm not the enemy. I'm the future."
"No," Sloane said. "You're a thief in a broken mirror."
She turned.
Cassien followed.
Venna's scream echoed through the vault as the doors sealed behind them.
---
Outside, the sky was turning violet.
Emergency broadcasts flared across the Threadsphere: "House Ignis destabilized." "Council motion suspended." "Fashionline breaches in six cities."
The world was unraveling.
Sloane walked into the storm wearing the most dangerous dress in existence, and a prince by her side.
Cassien looked at her. "What now?"
"We find the rest of her network. Burn it out."
"And after that?"
Sloane paused.
"Then we talk about why you really remembered me."
Cassien's silence was telling.
Romance wasn't fashion. It couldn't be stitched, sculpted, or coded.
But it could be cut.
And Sloane had just picked up her shears.