Page 130

The Threshold

Sleep came in pieces, shallow and strange, threaded through with the sound of the Fracture breathing.

Maia surfaced from it slowly, aware first of warmth, then of stone, then of the low persistent hum that had become as familiar as her own heartbeat. For one suspended moment, she didn’t know where she was.

When she remembered what day it was, her stomach lurched.

She didn’t move just yet. The alcove was narrow, the fabric rough beneath her, and the pale light filtering through the cracks in the stone had shifted. It was warmer now, more gold than violet. Time had passed. How much, she couldn’t tell.

Caelith sat at the far edge of the alcove, his back against the wall, one knee drawn up. He wasn’t watching her. His eyes were fixed on the far wall, on the dimly lit markings carved into the stone. He was listening to something she couldn’t hear.

She allowed herself to watch him a small while before she spoke. In the dim light, the glass veins beneath his skin caught the gold of the dawn and held it, and she thought again how there was nothing in her experience she could compare him to. He was not what she had expected when she arrived in Eryssan. He was not what she had expected of anything.

“How long have I been asleep?” she said softly.

He turned his head. His face relaxed slightly as he looked at her. She realised he had laid his ragged shirt over her while she slept, and had sat there in the cold without it.

“A few hours,” he said. “Not enough. But we don’t have time for more.”

“A few hours!” She sat up too fast. “Caelith, you should have woken me.”

“There was nothing to do before the current cycle of calibration ends. But when it does, we move.”

She sat up straighter, and her body reminded her of the previous night in a long catalogue of aches. Her hands still stung from her wounds. She flexed her fingers slowly. “What time is it?”

“Past the second bell. The alignment has been running through the night.” He paused. “It’s accelerating.”

She felt it as soon as he said it. Not through her ears but through the soles of her feet, through the stone beneath her. The hum was deeper than it had been when she fell asleep. More insistent. More confident.

“How long do we have?”

“Less than two days,” he said. “Perhaps significantly less if they are able to move it faster.”

She suddenly couldn’t make herself move. Three days when they were in Eryssan had seemed enough time, back when it was a number rather than something she could feel happening beneath her own hands.

She thought of Selinne still in the city. Her father, wherever he was, still writing letters to an address she might not survive to answer.

She made herself stand. Then she moved to the doorway of the alcove and looked out into the chamber beyond.

Julen was there.

He was leaning against the far wall with his arms crossed and his eyes open, though they had the slightly unfocused quality of someone who had been awake for too long. When he saw her he straightened immediately, relief crossing his face before he could arrange it into something more composed.

“You look terrible, Colwyn,” he said.

“Thank you, Julen.”

“I mean it kindly.” He pushed himself upright, wincing slightly as his injured side protested. “We have a problem.”

“We have several.”

“A new one.” He glanced toward the corridor. “About an hour ago, I heard movement above us. Not patrols. I don’t know what, but it’s all moving in the same direction.”

Caelith had appeared in the doorway behind her. “Toward the convergence point?”

Julen nodded. “I think so. Whatever they’re moving into place, they’re doing it now.”

Maia turned back to Caelith. “Then we can’t wait.”