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“Normally, something this large…” He shook his head, and for the first time, I saw something other than anger in his expression. Resignation. Defeat. “I have to let it go. Hundreds, if not thousands, of lives forever changed. The weave unrepairable.”
My throat tightened. Thousands.
“This may overtake your entire city,” he said quietly.
The words hung in the air between us. Damning.
“I can fix it,” I said, the madness of the claim settling into my bones right alongside the desperate need to actually do it. Fake it ‘til you make it, or die trying. Again.
Zhenjun looked doubtful. The kind of doubtful that came from centuries of watching idiots like me promise the impossible.
“I have to try.” I stared at him, searching for any sign of hope. Or even humanity. Was he a god? I didn’t know. Didn’t care. In that moment, I felt like a lone firefighter begging for a rainstorm while the forest burned around me. “Please help me.” I also wasn’t too proud to beg.
His jaw tightened. For a long heartbeat, I thought he’d say no, walk away, and leave me to drown in the mess I’d made.
Then he nodded, and stepped past me to face the tear, hands raised to begin stitching. I took another edge myself, mentally grabbing threads on the verge of breaking to weave them stronger. One at a time, catching them before they broke, knotting others to reknit them, and carefully repairing the damage to reality itself.
The process felt like threading a needle during an earthquake, while blindfolded, and on fire.
The first few threads held. I felt the tear shudder, just slightly, responding to Zhenjun’s careful crafting and my clumsy hands.
It gave me a rising touch of hope. Maybe we could do this. Holy fuck, I hoped we could do this.
The next thread slipped through my mental fingers. I grabbed it again, fumbling, and managed to knot it to its neighbor. The violet pulse dimmed another inch.
Thread after thread. Inch after inch. The tear began to shrink, not fast, but shrinking. Scarred, but holding.
A dull ache pulsed behind my eyes, then slowly spread to my temples, as if the more I stitched, another needle of pain prodded my brain. Eventually, the throb found a rhythm, pulsing in time with the lightning twitches of the tear itself.
Whatever Gwen had gifted me at the bakery was long gone. Burned up. Thread by thread by thread. And there were still thousands left. Maybe tens of thousands.
My hands shook. My form wavered. The Reaper robes dissolved like smoke, leaving me as what I really was: a sleepy ghost in pajamas, trying to hold the sky together with nothing but stubbornness and hope.
A thread slipped, pulling the tear open and threatening others.
“No.” I growled and grabbed it, holding tight, though I couldn’t feel much of anything anymore. Not the ground. Not the rain. Not even the buzzing fire in my ghost brain. Bad sign? Probably. But I wasn’t stopping.
Sweat beaded on Zhenjun’s forehead as he carefully focused, closing gaping sections at three times my speed. But it wasn’t enough. The other side spread wide like a maw of writhing chaos, hungry to overtake everything.
If I’d been assessing from a distance, I’d have said we needed more Weavers. Another dozen would have been nice.
But only two of us?
No wonder Zhenjun was perpetually pissed. I’d be pissed too if I had to clean up every idiot’s supernatural mess with basically no backup.
The tear pulsed. In warning?
I felt something pushing against our freshly stitched edge. Something trying to come through. Or the opening wanting to expand on our side. Both sent a wave of panic through me. If we let this section reopen, I knew we’d never get this closed.
I cursed, gripping my section as if I could hold it together with ghostly hands. But I was fading. Even the stubborn panic that had carried me this far was burning low.
I couldn’t do this alone.
Could Angel help?
No. I dismissed the thought. He barely saw the threads at all. How could he begin to understand how to fix this if I couldn’t even explain it? And we didn’t have that kind of time.
Nat lingered in the distance; his gaze fixed on the tear. He could see the weave, that much I understood. But his perception and skill lent only to those already passed. How many would he have to take because of this? How many threads prematurely cut?
