CHAPTER THIRTEEN SORROW
The thing about smuggling is that it teaches you how to read rooms.
Not literally—though I've done that too, broken into plenty of spaces to take inventory of what could be moved and what couldn't. I mean the other kind of reading. The way tension gathers in certain places. The way information flows through networks, pooling in some spots and draining from others. The way you can walk into a bar and know within thirty seconds whether it's safe to do business or time to find the back door.
The Hinge was tense.
I'd felt it building for days, ever since word of Cael's escape spread through the Threshold. The bounty hunters were bad enough—mercenary types who'd sell their own mothers for that kind of money—but they were predictable. You knew what they wanted. You knew how to avoid them.
The true believers were worse.
They were everywhere now. Pilgrims who'd heard about the heretic and come to witness divine justice. Faithful who wanted to be part of something righteous. People who genuinely believed that killing Cael Morrow was a sacred duty.
You can't bribe true believers. Can't threaten them. Can't appeal to their self-interest, because their self-interest is wrapped up in being virtuous. They'll die for their cause and smile while they do it.
I watched three of them come through the door and knew immediately: trouble.
They were young. Bleach-born, by the look of them—the white-desert Reach, where the sun never stopped shining and shadows were considered morally suspicious. Bright-eyed and certain, the way only people who've never had to question anything can be.
"We're looking for the heretic," the leader said. He couldn't have been more than twenty. Probably thought he was on a sacred quest. Probably imagined himself as the hero of a story where he brings the blasphemer to justice and receives the gods' personal blessing.
I've seen what happens to heroes. It's rarely pleasant.
"Lot of heretics in the Threshold," I said. "Going to have to be more specific."
"Cael Morrow. The one who claims the Thrones are parasites." He said it like the words themselves were filth. "We know he's in the area. We know you people"—the contempt in 'you people' was almost impressive—"move things. Move people. Someone here knows where he is."
The bar had gone quiet. Not the dramatic silence of a standoff—the careful silence of professionals calculating whether intervention was worth the cost.
It wasn't. Not yet.
"Never heard of him," I said.
"You're lying."
"Probably." I took a sip of my drink. Let the moment stretch. "But even if I wasn't, why would I tell you? What's in it for me?"
"The satisfaction of serving divine justice."
I laughed. Couldn't help it. The kid was so earnest, so certain, so absolutely convinced that everyone shared his values if they would just stop being wicked for five minutes.
"Divine justice doesn't pay my rent. Try again."
His face did something complicated. I could see him struggling to process a worldview that didn't include automatic deference to divine authority. In the Bleach, that kind of defiance probably got you burned for heresy. Here, it was just Tuesday.
"The bounty, then. Three thousand marks. Enough to set you up for years."
"Assuming I collected it. Assuming the Thrones paid. Assuming I didn't end up dead in an alley because everyone in the Threshold knows I sold out a man who was asking inconvenient questions." I shrugged. "The math doesn't work."
"Then we'll find him ourselves."
"Good luck with that."
They left. Not satisfied, but not stupid enough to start a fight in a bar full of smugglers. I waited until the door closed behind them before letting out a breath.
"That's going to be a problem," Vex said from beside me. I hadn't noticed them approach—Vex moved like smoke when they wanted to.
"They're kids. They'll get lost in the Threshold's topology and wander out somewhere embarrassing."
"It's not them I'm worried about." Vex nodded toward the corner booth, where a woman I didn't recognize had been watching the whole exchange. "She's been here since yesterday. Doesn't drink. Doesn't talk. Just watches."
I looked at the woman. Middle-aged. Unremarkable. The kind of face that disappeared in crowds.
The kind of face that professionals cultivated.
"Throne-agent?"
"Or something worse." Vex's voice dropped. "There's been chatter. Old networks waking up. People who haven't been active in decades suddenly asking questions. Something's moving in the background, Sorrow. Something bigger than bounty hunters and true believers."
I thought about Thessaly. The woman who'd found Cael in the first place. Three hundred years old, if the rumors were true. A survivor who'd learned to work within the system.
What would someone like that do, when the system started to crack?
"Keep watching her," I said. "And double the security on Cael's location. If whoever she is wants to make a move, I want to see it coming."
"And if we don't?"
I smiled. It wasn't a nice smile.
"Then we improvise. It's what we're good at."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN ALDRIC
I found the next piece of the puzzle in an abandoned temple.
Not one of the official ones—those were too well-guarded, too thoroughly controlled by clergy who would have noticed a third-rank inquisitor poking around in records he wasn't supposed to access. This one was older. Pre-Ascendancy, or close to it. A shrine to something the current theology had decided wasn't worth remembering.
The building had been repurposed a dozen times over the centuries. Archive, then warehouse, then meeting hall, then nothing at all. Now it squatted at the edge of a Churn settlement, slowly sinking into the volcanic soil, forgotten by everyone except a few local scholars who used its basement to store texts too heretical for public display but too valuable to destroy.
I'd heard about places like this during my training. "Pockets of resistance," they called them. "Lingering infection." The kind of language that made destroying knowledge sound like surgery.
I found the pocket. I found the infection. And I found something I hadn't expected.
The text was old. Older than the Ascendancy. Written in a form of the common tongue that I could barely parse, full of vocabulary that hadn't survived into the modern era.
But the math was clear.
Someone—many someones, over many centuries—had been tracking the same thing Morrow tracked. Quintessence flow rates. Soul return percentages. The slow, systematic diminishment of what came back from death compared to what went in.
And they'd been recording their findings. Hiding them. Passing them down through generations of questioners who saw the same truth and knew they couldn't speak it openly.
There were notes in the margins. Different handwriting, different eras. A conversation across centuries.
The harvest accelerates in times of war. More death means more consumption.
I've confirmed the correlation. The Blaze's influence over mortal conflict is not coincidental.
Grandmother's records match mine. The diminishment is real and ongoing.
We are being eaten. The only question is what to do about it.
And then, in handwriting that was almost modern, almost legible, a final note:
Thessaly found this record fifty years ago. She said nothing. She took nothing. She put it back exactly as she found it and walked away.
I think she wants someone else to finish what she started.
Thessaly.
The name kept appearing. In Morrow's notes, in the hidden records, in the whispered histories of resistance that had been buried beneath eight thousand years of official theology.
She was the one who'd found Morrow in the first place. The seminary acquisitor who'd recognized something in a six-year-old street rat and pulled him into the system.
Had she been cultivating him? Preparing him for this moment? Playing a game so long that even she might have forgotten when it started?
I should report what I'd found. Go back to my superiors, explain about the records, about the patterns, about the conspiracy of silence that had kept this truth hidden for millennia.
But I remembered the angel's words. The theology is not your concern.
If I reported this, it would disappear. Like all the other records had disappeared. Like all the other questioners had disappeared. I would be praised for my diligence, promoted for my loyalty, and the truth would be buried again beneath another layer of institutional forgetting.
Or I would disappear too.
I took the text. Copied what I could, photographed what I couldn't. Left the original where I'd found it, because whoever came next deserved the same chance I'd been given.
Then I started walking.
Not toward my superiors. Not toward the hunt. Toward the one place I might actually find answers.
Toward Cael Morrow.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN VERAINE
The first time I mended something truly broken, I was nine years old.
It was a mirror—one of the sacred objects my family used for divination. My cousin had dropped it during a ceremony, and the glass had shattered into a dozen pieces. Not just physical damage—the enchantments had fractured too. The spiritual resonance that made it useful for seeing beyond was scattered and dying.
Everyone said it was ruined. Irreparable. They were already talking about the ritual required to dispose of sacred objects properly, the prayers and offerings necessary to release the power that had been bound into the glass.
I looked at the pieces and saw something different.
The fractures weren't random. They followed lines—stress patterns, weaknesses in the original construction. The mirror hadn't just broken; it had broken along paths that were already there, waiting. And those paths connected.
I could see how to put it back together.
Not just the physical pieces—any child could have done that with glue and patience. The spiritual fractures. The severed connections. The places where intention had been shattered along with glass.
I spent three days in my room. No food. Barely any sleep. My mother thought I was sick. My grandmother thought I was touched by the ancestors. Nobody understood what I was actually doing.
When I came out, the mirror was whole. Not repaired—whole. As if it had never been broken at all.
The family treated me differently after that. Not with the reverence I'd wanted—the acknowledgment of a gift that might make up for not inheriting the sight they expected me to have. With fear. The kind of fear you reserve for things that shouldn't be possible.
People who can break anything are useful. People who can mend anything are dangerous.
I've spent my entire adult life proving them right.
The thread between Cael and me wasn't supposed to exist.
When I pulled him back from death at twelve years old, I wasn't trying to create anything permanent. I was just trying to keep him from leaving. From dying in a burning building while I screamed on the other side of a wall of flame.
But intention matters. Desperation matters more. And in that moment of absolute refusal—the moment when I said no to death itself, when I reached across the boundary and grabbed onto the piece of him that was already slipping away—I created something.
A fracture in the order of things. A repair to something that was supposed to be broken. A connection that shouldn't exist but does, binding us across distance and death and the careful rules that govern how souls interact with the cycle.
For twelve years after, I didn't know what I'd done. I thought the connection was love—the ordinary kind, the kind that made me seek him out again after the seminary split us apart. The kind that made me stay when everything in him pushed me away.
It wasn't until he died in the gutter, falling from a window with an angel behind him, that I understood.
The thread I'd created was still there. It had never broken. And when death tried to take him, the thread pulled him back automatically—not because I consciously chose it, but because the mending I'd done at twelve was still holding.
I'd made him unkillable.
I'd made him mine, in a way that neither of us had consented to.
"You're thinking too loud," Cael said.
We were in the Socket's back room, surrounded by maps and plans and the detritus of revolution. Sorrow's networks were mobilizing. The information was starting to spread. Soon, there would be no going back.
"I'm thinking at exactly the right volume."
"That's my line."
"I'm borrowing it." I looked at him. Really looked, with both my ordinary sight and the gift that saw fractures. "We need to talk about the thread."
He went still. The kind of stillness that meant he'd already been thinking about it, already run the patterns, already calculated the implications.
"What about it?"
"I didn't know what I was doing when I created it. I didn't ask your permission. I just... refused to let you die, and my refusal took physical form." I took a breath. "That means I bound you without consent. Made decisions about your soul without asking if you wanted them. Whatever the thread is, whatever it does—you didn't choose it."
"Neither did you."
"That doesn't make it okay."
He was quiet for a moment. I could see him processing, the way he always processed—pattern after pattern, implication after implication, building toward some conclusion I couldn't see yet.
"When I was four," he said finally, "I died. You know that story. The fever. The non-Euclidean nightmare. The math that showed me what I really was." He moved closer. Took my hands. "I came back from that changed. Something in me that had been whole was broken afterward. I've spent thirty years trying to figure out how to live with it."
"Cael—"
"Let me finish." His grip tightened. "The point is: I never chose to be what I am. The sight. The patterns. The way my brain works, the things I see that other people don't. I didn't consent to any of it. The fever happened, and I became this, and I had to figure out how to live with it."
"That's different."
"Is it? You made a choice in a moment of crisis—pulled me back because you couldn't stand to lose me. I could resent that. Could spend our whole lives being angry that you tied us together without asking. Or—" He lifted my hands to his lips. Kissed my knuckles. "Or I could decide that being tied to you is better than being free and alone. That whatever you did, whoever you made me—I choose to be that person. I choose you. Even the parts I didn't choose."
I felt tears on my face. When had I started crying?
"What if the thread is wrong? What if it's interfering with the cycle, disrupting the natural order?"
"The natural order is rigged. The cycle is compromised. The gods are eating us." He smiled—that brilliant, broken, infuriating smile. "Why would I want to be part of a system like that? Let the thread keep me outside it. Let your mending be my rebellion. I'd rather be a mistake in their mathematics than a meal."
I kissed him. It seemed like the only appropriate response.
When we finally pulled apart, he was still smiling.
"Besides," he said. "If you really could break anything—if your gift works the way I think it works—then eventually you'll be able to break the thread too. If you want to."
"Would you want me to?"
"Ask me after we've broken the gods. I might feel differently once we've won."
CHAPTER SIXTEEN THESSALY
The woman in the Hinge was one of mine.
I'd planted her there three days ago, when the reports started coming in about Morrow's location. She wasn't there to capture him—not yet. She was there to watch. To learn. To report back on who was seeking him and why.
What she reported made me uneasy.
An inquisitor named Aldric had stopped checking in with his superiors. Was moving independently, following leads that should have led him away from Morrow but instead seemed to be leading him toward something worse. The pre-Ascendancy records. The hidden histories. The truth I'd spent three centuries being afraid to speak.
And the Ember was moving too. Not in the physical sense—gods don't move physically, not anymore—but in the political. The divine councils were meeting. Arguments were happening. The careful balance of power that had kept the Ascendancy stable for eight millennia was starting to wobble.
All because one feral scholar had looked at a tax ledger and refused to look away.
I found him in a dream.
Not his dream—the space between dreams. The place where gods go to negotiate, where mortal minds sometimes wander when their consciousness slips its moorings. I'd learned to navigate it centuries ago, one of the skills the Sun had taught me as part of our arrangement.
Cael was already there. Waiting for me.
"You're the one from the seminary," he said. Not surprised—resigned. The way you'd talk to an inevitability. "Thessaly."
"You remember."
"I remember everything. Pattern-sight doesn't come with a forgetting function." He studied me. In the dream-space, my appearance was mutable—I could have looked like anything—but I'd chosen to look like myself. Like the old woman I actually was.
"You found the ledger," he said. "Three hundred years ago. Found the same truth I found."
"Yes."
"And you made a deal. Worked for them. Delivered heretics like me to be silenced."
"Yes."
"And now?"
The question hung in the not-air between us. Now. What now? What did I want from the boy I'd pulled from the gutter and groomed for exactly this moment?
"I want to know what you're planning," I said. "Not to stop it. Not to help it. Just to know. So I can decide what to do."
"You've had three hundred years to decide."
"Three hundred years of survival. Of working within a system I knew was wrong because the alternative was dying and accomplishing nothing." I moved closer. In dreams, distance is negotiable. "I told myself I was waiting for the right moment. The right person. Someone who could do what I couldn't."
"And now I'm here."
"Now you're here. Doing exactly what I imagined and also nothing like what I imagined." I laughed—the sound felt strange in my throat. "You're not a revolutionary. Not a prophet. You're just a broken scholar who saw something true and couldn't stop picking at it. That's not heroic. That's obsessive."
"I know." He wasn't offended. If anything, he seemed amused. "The neurotypical version of me would have found the ledger and published it through proper channels. Written a treatise. Submitted it to peer review. Trusted the system to correct itself when presented with evidence." He shook his head. "That version of me doesn't exist. I'm the one whose brain wouldn't let it go, who had to keep digging, who couldn't accept 'that's just how things are' as an answer. My pattern-sight isn't a gift. It's a defect that happens to be useful."
"Useful for whom?"
"For everyone who wants the truth. And I think, Thessaly—I think you're one of those people. I think you've wanted this for three centuries and never let yourself admit it."
I could have killed him there. In the dream-space, where gods negotiate and mortals are vulnerable, I could have done damage that his body would never recover from. The thread his wife had made would pull him back from physical death, but spiritual damage was different. Subtler. The kind of thing that left someone alive but empty.
The Sun would have rewarded me. The other Thrones would have been grateful. I could have ended this before it began, contained the damage, preserved three hundred years of compromise and survival.
I thought about Cassia. My mentor. The woman who'd looked at me with grief when I showed her the truth, because she'd known what was coming. She'd died in the purge that followed my capture. One of hundreds who'd known too much and paid the price.
I thought about the children I'd delivered to the Thrones over the centuries. The questioners. The pattern-seers. The feral geniuses who'd glimpsed the truth and needed to be silenced before they spread it. How many Caels had I handed over? How many revolutions had I strangled in the cradle?
I thought about the girl I'd been. Twenty-three and terrified and absolutely certain that knowing the truth meant something.
"I'm not going to stop you," I said.
He nodded. Not surprised.
"But I'm not going to help you either. Not yet. The Sun made me what I am, and that debt isn't paid just because I want it to be." I stepped back. Started to dissolve into the dream-stuff. "When it matters—when you face the Thrones directly—I'll be there. What I do then... I haven't decided."
"Fair enough."
"One more thing." I paused at the edge of departure. "The inquisitor. Aldric. He's turning. Moving toward you, not away. If you reach him before he breaks completely..."
"He might be useful."
"He might be something else entirely. A true believer who loses faith doesn't become an atheist. They become a zealot looking for a new god." I smiled. "Make sure that god isn't you."
Then I was gone. Back to the waking world. Back to three centuries of compromise and the terrible suspicion that it might finally be time to stop.
End of Chapters 13-16