Lori Lee - Gates of Thread and Stone

Time never truly stopped. That, as far as I could tell, wasn’t possible. But I could slow it down for a few seconds, just enough to get the advantage.

The girl’s painted lips continued to move in minute degrees, her voice an indistinguishable thrum. I fought the threads that snared me as well, twisting out of the girl’s grip and pushing at the knife against my gut. The weapon was crude, nothing but a scrap of broken metal with one end wrapped in rags for a handle.

I couldn’t hold the threads for very long. Time slowed only in the space around me, and the mounting pressure to continue forward and catch up with the rest of the threads broke my grasp. Time snapped ahead, rebounding. I wrenched away, riding the momentum of speeded time, and hit the ground. Pain flashed up my arm.

Behind me, the girl gasped.

Dread rooted me in place. She saw.

I jumped to my feet, brushing off my palms as I spun to face her. She couldn’t have seen. No one but Reev was aware of my manipulations. For everyone else, the perception of time remained unbroken, preserving the belief that no one but the Kahl possessed magic.

The girl wasn’t looking at me. In fact, she wasn’t even standing. She knelt beside the alley wall, her knife jutting from her belly where she’d fallen against it.

I watched as she slid sideways into a boneless heap. Her head hit the ground with a crack . I flinched, searching up and down the alley, but if anyone saw what happened, they had already moved on. Nothing I could do would help her now.

As I turned away, the girl moaned. I glanced over my shoulder. I couldn’t see her face, but I could hear her mumbling.

I looked toward the exit to the open street. I should leave her. Her nervousness and the clumsy way she had attacked me made it obvious she wasn’t a seasoned criminal. But she wanted to sell me at the docks—she deserved whatever she got. The city would be better off without another desperate mouth to feed, and with people disappearing every year, what was one more?

Besides, this wasn’t a hidden alley. Someone would probably find her in time.

But what if she has someone waiting for her? A brother. A sister. A baby hungry for dinner. What would happen to her family if she didn’t get up again?

Stupid conscience.

The nearest runner was around the corner. Alerting the runners was the only way to get ahold of the Watchmen—short of walking into their local post, which I sure as drek wasn’t doing. But the runners charged a ridiculous tax for their services, credits Reev and I couldn’t spare, and while I could lie about my name, they’d demand an ID to verify citizenship.

I glared down at the girl bleeding into the dirt. Drek.

WHEN I WASten, Reev had spent one of his Sundays off work with me by the river. We’d scavenged for bugs on the muddy bank and wondered what mutant abilities we might get from falling into the murky water. He pretended to throw me in, and I had been so stupidly scared he would actually do it that I twisted my ankle fighting him off.

Reev had felt terrible. He promised not to be so rough, and I told him to shove his promise in the river because nobody put restrictions on my brother, not even my brother. It made more sense in my head.

He had carried me all the way to our box in the Labyrinth. I remember the way his hair scratched my face, the heat of his shoulder against my cheek, and the smell of the river—sickly sweet like rotten fruit—on his clothes. His voice murmuring unnecessary apologies had been the only soft thing about him. Everything else had been—still was—hard, unyielding, strong.

Safe.

I hadn’t wanted the weekend to end. I wanted another day. I wanted it so badly that when I woke up the next morning to find Reev still home, I thought I’d gotten my wish.

The thing was—I had. It was Sunday again.

Reev had gone to work only to discover that no one else realized it was supposed to be Monday. After the confusion wore off, chilled anger had crept into his face—his mouth went flat, and his eyes hardened into gray stones. He’d never looked at me that way before.

“Promise me,” he’d said, “you won’t do that again. Ever.”

I couldn’t speak because the change in him scared me so much. We’d seen the Watchmen take people—drag them away on their Grays, through the gates of the White Court, never heard from again. In the Labyrinth, we had a saying: Keep silent, keep still, keep safe.

But only Reev had noticed. There were no Watchmen pounding down our door.

The threads moved around me, growing more tempting the more they came into focus. Rebirth had wiped out nearly all the mahjo , the magic users. The Kahl’s line was supposed to be the last of them, and he used his magic to help the city. If I had a special ability, one that didn’t hurt anyone, why shouldn’t I use it, too?

“Kai,” Reev had said. “Promise me.”

We stared each other down, but the flicker of fear in his eyes finally made me nod.

I had broken that promise too many times to count. I couldn’t help myself. That had been the first time I’d realized I was different. Once I knew what the threads were and that I might be the only person who could see them, they fascinated me.

The next day, time had adjusted itself by continuing on with Tuesday. All around me, people muttered about how Monday had flown by, and they couldn’t remember a thing they’d done that day. It didn’t seem as if even Kahl Ninu had noticed. I’d never been able to repeat that level of manipulation, and I still didn’t know how I’d done it.

Every source of energy in Ninurta came from the Kahl’s magic, but nobody had ever seen him at work. New energy stones were available for purchase every month, and the Grays, constructed of magic and metal, continued to run the streets like shining beasts. Who were we to question it? I couldn’t do anything half as useful, but whether my abilities were magic or a freak of nature, I couldn’t say.

I didn’t dare call myself mahjo , even in my head. That status felt too attached to the Kahl, and I had no delusions about being his equal.

And now, with a hefty tax headed my way, maybe I should practice some control.

After the stop at the runners—who were so slow that they should have been called crawlers—I hurried to the DMC to dump off my bag just in time. I should’ve been more worried about the woman who had almost died than the state of our credits. But I wasn’t.

As I left the DMC, I stared straight ahead and walked quickly past the Watchman standing guard at the double glass doors. He followed me with his eyes.

A few days ago, that same Watchman had trailed me into the back room where I store my bag and offered me twice my weekly pay for “personal service.” Fortunately, my boss popped in a second later to see what was keeping me, and I escaped.

Outside, a stream of human traffic blocked the sidewalk. Walking was the only way to get around the city without a Gray, and the streets were fairly crowded this time of day. I waded through the pushing bodies to reach the other side of the street. I kept close to the shop windows, most of them dark or boarded over. A row of pigeons fluttered away as my shoulder bumped a sagging awning. I looked up, but they only flew far enough to find a new perch across the street.

For 358 days a year, the birds didn’t fly any higher than the buildings. As if they had forgotten how. But in five days, the clouds would part and release sunshine into the city. For one week a year, the river danced with lights. The trees dared to bud. And the birds took flight, becoming brown specks against a gray sky.