The maintenance tunnel stretched ahead like a throat waiting to swallow them whole. Kael's boots splashed through puddles of stagnant water, each step echoing off the curved walls with metallic persistence. Behind him, Mira's breathing came in sharp, controlled bursts—the kind that suggested someone fighting very hard not to hyperventilate.
'Can't blame her for that.'
The image of those black threads writhing through flesh refused to leave his mind. The way they'd *moved* beneath the skin, alive and purposeful, turning human beings into something else entirely. Something that still wore a familiar face while everything underneath had been rewoven into...
"That wasn't healing."
Mira's voice cut through the tunnel's oppressive silence like a blade through silk. Kael glanced back to find her pale features twisted with disgust and disbelief.
"No," he agreed quietly. "It wasn't."
She stumbled slightly, catching herself against the tunnel wall with one trembling hand. "The way those things moved... God, Kael, they were still *conscious*. I could see it in their eyes."
The golden threads connecting them pulsed brighter, responding to her distress. Kael found himself slowing his pace without conscious thought, drawn by an instinct he didn't fully understand. The connection between them had grown stronger since entering the cathedral—more visible, more *present*.
'What the hell is happening to us?'
"We need to keep moving," he said instead of voicing that particular concern. "Dawn's coming, and I'd rather not explain to the district guards why we're crawling out of their tunnels."
Mira pushed herself off the wall and continued forward, but her expression remained haunted. "Do you think... do you think it actually works? The Weaver's cure?"
Kael considered the question as they navigated around a cluster of corroded pipes. "Define 'works.'"
"You know what I mean."
"Those people aren't dead," he said carefully. "But they're not exactly alive either, are they?"
The silence that followed carried weight. When Mira spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper.
"I almost went to him. Before I met you." She laughed, but there was no humor in it. "I was desperate enough to consider trading Sera's humanity for her life. How fucked up is that?"
'More understandable than you realize.'
The golden threads between them flared briefly, and Kael felt an echo of her guilt like a physical ache in his chest. "Desperation makes monsters of us all," he said quietly. "The question is whether we choose to stay that way."
Light began filtering down from ahead—real sunlight, not the sickly glow of the cathedral's corruption. The Lower Market's morning bustle reached them as distant sounds of commerce and conversation.
They'd made it out.
But as they approached the tunnel's end, Kael couldn't shake the feeling that their real problems were just beginning. The Weaver knew about them now. And those black threads...
Those threads had looked *hungry*.
The building Mira led him to wasn't much better than his own—cracked walls, peeling paint, the perpetual smell of rust and desperation—but it had something his didn't: functioning windows. Actual glass instead of scavenged metal sheeting.
'Small mercies.'
"Third floor," Mira said, taking the stairs two at a time despite the exhaustion that clung to her like a second skin. Her movements carried a familiar urgency, the kind that came from racing against time you couldn't see.
Kael followed, noting the way she avoided the seventh step—rotted through, probably—and how she automatically ducked beneath the low-hanging beam on the second landing. Practiced movements. She'd been making this climb for years.
The door she stopped at was painted blue once upon a time. Now it was mostly gray, with flecks of color clinging stubbornly to the edges like hope refusing to die.
"Ava?" Mira knocked softly. "It's me. I brought someone."
A voice answered from within, thin but clear. "The mysterious partner in crime?"
Mira's smile was genuine for the first time since they'd left the cathedral tunnels. "That's the one."
The girl who opened the door looked like Mira might have, once. Before the weight of keeping someone alive had carved lines around her eyes. Ava was maybe sixteen, with the same dark hair and sharp features, but where Mira moved with coiled tension, Ava carried herself like spun glass.
The red threads were there, wrapped around her chest and arms like bloody bandages. But they were... different. Frayed at the edges, some of them flickering in and out of existence as if they couldn't decide whether to hold on or let go.
'She's further along than Lyra. Much further.'
"So you're the one who's been keeping my sister out all night," Ava said, studying Kael with eyes that held too much knowledge for someone her age. "I was starting to think she'd finally done something stupidly heroic and gotten herself killed."
"The night's still young," Mira replied dryly, but her hand found Ava's shoulder in a gesture that spoke of years of careful touches, of learning exactly how much pressure was too much.
Ava laughed, a sound like breaking bells. "Come in before Mrs. Chen across the hall decides to lecture you about proper visiting hours again."
The apartment was small but clean, with mismatched furniture that had been arranged to maximize both space and comfort. Medical supplies lined one wall—not the expensive kind from the Upper Ring, but the generic alternatives that did the job if you were careful with dosages.
'Just like home. Except someone here actually knows what they're doing.'
"Tea?" Ava asked, already moving toward a small kitchen area. "Fair warning, it's not actually tea. More like... optimistic leaf water."
Kael watched her move, cataloging the careful way she balanced herself, the slight tremor in her hands. The red threads pulsed with each heartbeat, but some of them were... dissolving. Literally coming apart at the molecular level.
"How long?" he asked quietly.
Ava paused in her tea preparations. When she turned back, her smile was sharp as a blade.
"Direct. I like that." She glanced at Mira, who had gone very still. "Two months. Maybe three if I'm feeling particularly stubborn."
The words hung in the air like a death sentence.
Because that's exactly what they were.
The apartment felt like a furnace when they returned.
Kael pushed through the door first, his enhanced vision immediately cataloging the wrongness that permeated the small space. The air itself seemed to shimmer with heat distortion, and the metallic tang of fever-sweat hit his nostrils like a physical blow.
Lyra lay on the makeshift bed where they'd left her, but she was barely recognizable. Her skin had taken on a waxy, translucent quality, and sweat poured from her in sheets despite the violent shivering that wracked her small frame. When Kael knelt beside her, he could see the red threads writhing beneath her skin like living parasites.
'Worse. So much worse.'
"Jesus," Mira breathed, dropping to her knees on the other side of the bed. "How did she get this bad so fast?"
Kael's hands hovered over his sister's burning forehead, afraid to touch. The fever was so intense he could feel the heat radiating from her skin. "I don't know."
"We need to cool her down. Now." Mira was already moving, gathering the medical supplies they'd scavenged. "Find me anything cold. Ice, frozen food, whatever you've got."
They worked in desperate silence. Mira applied cooling packs while Kael tried to get water past Lyra's cracked lips. For a few precious minutes, it seemed like they might be making progress. Her breathing evened out slightly, and the violent shaking subsided to occasional tremors.
Then Lyra's eyes rolled back, and her entire body went rigid.
The convulsion hit like a lightning strike. Her back arched impossibly high off the bed, tendons standing out like cables under her skin. But worse than the physical seizure were the threads—dozens of them flaring to brilliant crimson life, pulsing in rhythm with her racing heart.
"Hold her down!" Mira shouted, but Kael was already moving.
Not to restrain his sister.
To save her.
The world slowed as his ability activated. Time became viscous, malleable. Through that crystalline perception, he could see exactly which threads were killing her—the ones wrapped around her heart, the cluster choking her lungs, the massive tangle that was slowly strangling her brain stem.
His hand moved with surgical precision, invisible fingers finding the critical connections.
*Snip.*
*Snip.*
*Snip.*
Each severed thread sent a shock of agony through his own system. He felt his life force drain away with each cut, felt new lines etch themselves across his face as gray streaks spread through his dark hair like frost on glass.
Lyra's body went limp. Her breathing steadied.
And Kael collapsed forward, catching himself on shaking arms as decades of borrowed time came due all at once.
"What the hell..." Mira's voice was barely a whisper. "What did you just do?"
Kael looked up to find her staring at him with a mixture of horror and fascination. In her eyes, he could see the reflection of what he'd become—older, grayer, marked by the price of salvation.
'So much for keeping secrets.'
Kael's legs felt like water beneath him, but he forced himself upright. The silence in the room had weight to it—heavy, expectant, dangerous.
"Rooftop," he managed, his voice rougher than it had been minutes before. "We need to talk."
Mira's eyes tracked the new lines carved into his face, the silver threading through his hair like premature frost. She opened her mouth, then closed it again.
'Smart girl. Questions later, when we're not in a room that might have ears.'
The climb up the maintenance ladder felt like scaling a mountain. Each rung sent tremors through muscles that remembered being decades younger just moments ago. Behind him, Mira moved in stunned silence, her breathing the only sound in the narrow shaft.
The rooftop door opened onto cool night air and a sky scattered with dying stars. The city sprawled below them, a maze of flickering lights and deep shadows. In the distance, the Cathedral District's spires pierced the darkness like accusatory fingers.
Kael slumped against the rooftop's edge, finally allowing exhaustion to claim him. The stone was cold against his back, grounding him in the present moment.
"Alright," Mira said, settling beside him with careful precision. "Talk."
'Where to even begin?'
"I can see them," he said finally. "Threads. Connections. The invisible lines that bind everything together." His hand moved in the air, tracing patterns only he could perceive. "Most people have hundreds. Thousands. Links to family, friends, fate itself."
Mira's brow furrowed. "And you can... what? Cut them?"
"Manipulate them. Redirect them. Transfer them." The words tasted bitter. "Every time Lyra should have died, I found the threads that would kill her and moved them elsewhere."
"Moved them where?"
Kael met her gaze steadily. "To myself."
The silence stretched between them like a taut wire. Mira processed this, her analytical mind working through implications.
"That's why you look older," she said. Not a question.
"I've been borrowing time from my future to pay for her present. Tonight..." He touched the new lines around his eyes. "Tonight cost me about fifteen years."
Mira was quiet for a long moment, staring out at the city. When she spoke again, her voice was softer.
"Ava's getting sicker too. The treatments aren't working anymore." Her hands clenched in her lap. "I've been terrified that one day I'll wake up and she'll just be... gone."
"That's why you helped me break into the Cathedral District."
"That's why I'll help you do it again." She turned to face him, something fierce burning in her eyes. "But this time, we find a real solution. Not borrowed time, not temporary fixes. Something permanent."
Kael looked at her—really looked. Around Mira's form, golden threads shimmered in the starlight, some reaching toward him, others stretching into the distance toward her sister.
'Interesting.'
A distant sound cut through the night—shouting from the direction of the city walls, followed by the deep toll of warning bells.
Both of them tensed.
"That doesn't sound good," Mira muttered.