Chapter Eight #2
Her hand stops on a particular globe, and her expression shifts from rapture to confusion.
She picks it up, holding it to the light.
It’s empty.
Not dark. Not foggy. Just … empty. A perfect glass sphere with nothing inside. No scene. No moment. No screaming souls or burning theatre.
“What—” Time turns the globe over in her hands, examining it from every angle, as if the moment might be hiding somewhere inside the glass. “No. No, no, no. This can’t be right.”
“What’s wrong?” I ask, though a sinking feeling in my stomach tells me I already know.
“This globe.” She holds it up, her voice rising.
“It was the Millbrook theatre fire. The Grand Orpheum. It’s my favorite.
Do you understand? I’ve been watching this one since it happened!
I relive this moment constantly when I need a pick-me-up!
The panic, the stampede, the way time seemed to slow down for them as they realized they were trapped—” She stops mid-sentence, her copper eyes narrowing as they fix on me.
Then they shift to the tapestry, to the gap where ice-blue threads have woven around the absence I just created.
“You didn’t.”
“I don’t know what you’re—”
“Tell me you didn’t just erase the thread connected to my Millbrook fire.” Her voice is dangerously quiet now, controlled, which is somehow worse than if she were shrieking.
I glance at the tapestry, tracing the blue threads backward through time, tracing connections I failed to check before I ripped the thread out in my anger.
Oh.
Oh no.
“It was an ancestor,” I say slowly. “Seventeen generations back. Without them, the person who started the fire was never born, which means—”
“Which means four hundred deaths never happened. Which means one of my finest moments of mass panic and temporal distortion has been erased from existence.” Time sets the empty globe down with excruciating care, the kind of care that suggests she’s exercising enormous restraint to keep from throwing it at my head.
“There are thousands of other moments—”
“I hope you know,” Time says, her voice dripping with venom, “I look forward to that particular destruction constantly. Do you have any idea how rare it is to find a moment where that many souls experience time dilation simultaneously? Where every single second feels like an hour as they burn?”
“It was one moment—”
“It was my moment!” She whirls on me, and for a second, the clocks in her eyes spin wildly, out of control. “You don’t get to just throw tantrums and unmake reality without consequences, Fate! This is the kind of careless, petulant behavior that’s going to get us both erased!”
“Don’t lecture me about carelessness when you’re the one who let Kane and Rue slip through our fingers in the first place!
” I snap back. “If you had just stopped her heart two seconds earlier—if you had just frozen that moment in the cemetery before he could perform CPR—none of this would be happening!”
“Oh, so this is my fault now?”
“You’re the one who controls when things happen! You could have prevented the entire mess!”
“And you’re the one who weaves their fates!” Time gestures wildly at the tapestry. “You could have made her thread end differently. You could have woven her into a different corner, a different fate. But, no, you were too distracted to notice what was happening until it was too late!”
The accusation stings because it’s true. I should have seen it coming. I should have adjusted Rue’s thread before she became a problem.
But I didn’t, and now we’re dealing with the consequences.
“Fine,” I say, smoothing my expression back to neutrality. “What’s done is done. But we still have a problem. Rue Chamberlain and her little mercy project are spreading like rot through the OtherWorld. If we don’t do something soon—”
“We will.” Time turns back to face me, her composure restored. “But we have to be subtle.”
“Then we don’t touch her thread directly. We adjust the threads around her to make her world more difficult. More chaotic.”
“Chaos.” Time’s smile turns sharp. “Now, that’s an idea. Though we’d have to be careful. Our dear brother has a tendency to take chaos in directions we don’t intend.”
“Chance is a wild card, but he’s not stupid. He knows better than to interfere with our work directly.”
“Does he?” Time picks up another globe, showing a young man at a crossroads, a coin spinning in the air above his palm. “I’m not so sure anymore. He’s been … active lately. Moving pieces around the board with no regard for the endgame.”
I move closer to examine the globe. “What do you mean?”
“Just a feeling.” She sets it back carefully. “Moments that should have gone one way went another. Probabilities that shouldn’t have collapsed the way they did. Small things. Trivial moments. But they add up.”
“You think he’s working against us?”
“I think he’s working for himself, as always.
Whether that means against us or with us remains to be seen.
” Time walks back to the window, touching it lightly.
Her finger against the glass changes the opaque darkness, revealing the OtherWorld below once more.
“But if he’s meddling in our affairs, we need to know. ”
“Agreed.”
I join her at the window, looking down at the sprawling city of souls and reapers going about their assigned tasks. From up here, it looks perfect. Orderly. Exactly as it should be.
But I know better. Cracks are forming. Small ones, yes, but cracks nonetheless.
“There’s something else.”
“What?”
“Or rather, I should say that I suspect there is someone else.”
“Oh?”
“Mercy.”
Time makes a noise of disgust as her reflection in the glass hardens.
“Bite your tongue.” Her voice is carefully controlled. “She’s banished. She has no place here.”