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The thread shimmered like liquid flames on Io’s palm, a razor of silver-and-gold twine. It was woven twice around each finger of her left hand, forming a misshapen mesh of fear and purpose. At night,before she dropped into whatever sad excuse for a bed she and Bianca had procured, Io would bind her left fist with cloth, then secure it in a sling across her chest.
It was a god’s thread, her only clue to the heart of the blasted conspiracy she had unearthed in Alante—she would rather cut off circulation to her hand than risk it slipping free.
She flexed her tired fingers, watching the raindrops scuttle over her knuckles. The thunderstorm had tailed them from Alante like a stray dog: five weeks of a relentless cycle of dust-stained rain, thundering blizzards, and infuriating drizzle. Bianca had pinched two leopard-print waterproof boater hats from canal drivers back in Poleon, but despite that, they were constantly drenched to the bone, so much so that Io’s leather jacket currently smelled like a dead rat dipped in moldy cheese. Five weeks of sloshing through rain and mud from one Wastelands town to another, of haggling for food and shelter, of bickering with the mob queen, of jerking awake, drenched in cold sweat, fumbling to check the knotted thread on her left hand.
Five whole weeks, and the thread had led them to this: the shack across the street and the figure inside it.
“It’s been six hours,” Bianca Rossi said. The mob queen was crouching on the slanted tin roof next to Io, eyes hooded beneath her wide-brimmed leopard-print hat and locked on the block of shanty houses. “I think we’ve waited long enough, cutter.”
Io was still cutter to Bianca: sharp, lethal, a threat. It didn’t matter that Io had broken her out of police headquarters, plotted the betrayal and punishment of Io’s sister with her, forsaken everything she knew so they could track down whoever had masterminded the mob queen’s fall. It didn’t matter that they had prowled through the Wastelands together, huddled close for warmth, fought back to back, cooked and ate over the same fire. In Bianca’s eyes, Io was and would always be a moira-born, the youngest of three sisters descended from the goddesses of Fate, able to see and cut the threads of life and love. Io would always be the girl who handed her over to the wolves who severed her life-thread and transformed her into an unwilling fury-born.
A lifeless wraith and a heartless cutter, what a pair they made.
“Six hours,” Bianca repeated, “and your stakeout has yielded nothing. Let’s just smash through the door and punch them until they spill all their secrets.”
While that did sound alluring, it would also be disastrous. For five weeks, the god had been giving them the slip, always two steps ahead. If they rushed into action now, they might not get another chance like this.
“The point of a stakeout,” Io replied sharply, pushing her long-distance spectacles up her nose, “is towatch. We can’t act until we know who or what they really are.”
“They’re asleep, that’s what they are.” Bianca flicked a wrist at the shack across the rooftops, where the figure had indeed been stationed for the entirety of these six hours.
Through the shack’s windows, outlines were cast in bronze firelight. Several bodies were nestled on bedrolls and in hammocks hanging from the ceiling, all of them refugees seeking shelter from the Great Tide that had slowly been scaling up the coast of the Southern Peninsula. Most were asleep, but one of them paced the tiny space from the stove to the window. He was an older, bald man who had arrived from the Southern Peninsula earlier that afternoon, in the same refugee group as the owner of the gold thread. His face had been tearstained and solemn; Io suspected that he might have been separated from family or friends on the journey here. Now he stuck his crooked nose against the rain-spattered glass of the window—for a moment, Io and Bianca tensed.
But the man couldn’t see them. To him, Io and Bianca were just two of the hundred shadows clinging to the roofs. Such was the perk of a water town like Hagia that balanced on thousands of thin stilts, tin shanties stacked on top of each other like a child’s toys, tidewater claiming the ground below at night; its access to electricity was very limited. No streetlights speckled the horizon—the dark was broken only by a few carefully tended fires, willowy smoke rising to meet the leaden thunderclouds above. Bianca, born and raised under the barrage of neon lights that was Lilac Row, hated the lack ofelectricity, but Io found it oddly charming. Firelight tinted everything in a rosy orange, like lips freshly kissed.
The man dropped the curtain back into place and lay on his bedroll. Minutes passed. He didn’t stir again.
Bianca cocked her head in that feline way of hers. “Is he asleep?”
Io called forth the Quilt, a tapestry of the silver threads woven between people and the things they loved. It was invisible to all but the descendants of the Moirae, the goddesses of Fate. The moira-born always manifested in three siblings: one to weave the threads of fate, one to elongate and measure them, and one to cut them. Io was the third, a cutter. In the Quilt, she could see past wood andconcrete, right to the bundle of silver threads that burst out of a person’s chest. The old man’s threads were completely motionless, and so were the threads of every refugee in the tiny shack.
“Yes,” Io said. “They all look asleep.”
“Finally,” Bianca drawled. “Now can we kick down the door and demand answers?”
