Gates of Thread and Stone

CHAPTER 38

I SKIRTED AROUND Ninu’s body, now sprawled on the floor, and rushed to Avan.

“Are you—?” I cut myself off. It was an idiotic question. Of course he wasn’t okay. “I’m sorry.”

He gave me a rueful smile. “Why are you apologizing?”

His hand came up, fingers grazing my sore jaw. You’d think I would be used to getting punched by now, but the pain felt new each time. I leaned into his touch. I didn’t know what any of this meant, but I prayed Kalla was on our side.

Reev looked around, his eyes slow to focus. Then he hissed in his breath, reaching back to claw at his collar as if it pained him.

“Reev, stop,” I said, tugging at his hand.

Kalla’s heels clicked against the floor as she circled Ninu. He lay on his stomach, face angled away from me. No sentinels appeared to carry him away.

“Ninu held ultimate control over the collars,” she said. “Without him, Reev will recover shortly, although Ninu’s mark should be removed from the collar as a precaution.”

Relief made my body sag. I squeezed Reev’s hand.

Kalla cocked her head, a sudden awareness in her eyes. I searched the room. I felt it, too. The threads, the current, time itself—had stopped. The view from the window revealed the smoke from distant chimney pipes caught in still-frame, like a picture, and Grays fixed in place like figurines amid a miniature cityscape. The entire city, everything outside this room, had been frozen.

“Congratulations, Kai,” someone said. “You’ve liberated Ninurta.”

The voice was worse than Ninu’s, not because it burrowed beneath my skin but because I knew, deep down, that it was familiar. I knew it the way I knew the threads that currently snared the city like a giant spider’s web, inescapable even by me because, while I could manipulate them, he had woven the threads and designed their pattern.

The air in the room quivered, and then a man was standing next to Kalla. It wasn’t his presence that surprised me. It was the fact that I had felt him coming. Avan clasped my shoulder. I reached up to rest my hand over his.

“This is Kronos,” Kalla said. “Although I don’t think an introduction is really necessary.”

He didn’t look like anyone I remembered. But then I saw his eyes: watery blue like the icicles that formed on the tree branches in winter. He smiled. I didn’t smile back.

Any sense of relief I had before disappeared. I brushed away Avan’s hand and released Reev’s. My body tensed, waiting.

He extended his arm, the black folds of his cloak rustling in a current that only he and I could see. Kalla touched her fingers to his raised forearm, a simple but familiar gesture.

“You have questions,” she said to me. “But the answers have always been there. Ninu assumed that when R-22 disappeared, Irra had taken him for his hollows. So how did Ninu find Reev again?”

“The energy drive,” I said warily.

“And who do you think told Reev about the energy drive? Who decided to hold it there, practically on top of the Labyrinth?”

My mind ran through the possibilities. “But you couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have predicted that I would be attacked, that I would need to—”

I saw the face of the woman who’d attacked me that day in the alley. White skin, black-streaked Mohawk, and bright-red lips, the only splash of color against her pale features.

I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me again. “It was all you,” I breathed.

“You’re softhearted, Kai. I knew you wouldn’t leave me to die in that alley. And I made sure that the tax notice was delivered directly to Reev.”

I cupped my head in my hands. The attack; the energy drive; tricking Reev’s boss in order to send me to the Rider, the only person with the means of sneaking me into the White Court. So I could—

“You did all this,” I said, looking between Kalla and Kronos. “Why? To get me here to kill Ninu? How did you know who Reev was anyway? That he and I—”

“You know the answer to that,” Kronos said.

When he moved, his hair—as long as my own—rippled like water, its color shifting, liquid strands in constant motion. As with the rest of the Infinite, I couldn’t pinpoint his age. He was at once young and wizened. Looking at him was like trying to focus on stones resting in the riverbed beneath the swaying waves.

“Who am I?” he asked.

With absolute certainty, I said, “My father.”

Someone grabbed my wrist. I started, backing away only to realize it was Reev.

When our eyes met, I could see it was really him. A brief rush of joy filled me. “Reev.”

He opened his mouth, but Kronos cut him off.

“Welcome back, Reev.” He looked at me. “His final mission before his purification had been against me—Ninu needed his full force of sentinels to invade my palace. But I’d known at once that Reev was different from the others. His connection to Ninu had already begun to fray. I read into his past, his desire for freedom, and I granted it. In exchange, I’d left him a most precious charge.”

So he was the one who’d freed Reev. My dad. It felt strange just to think the words. My dad.

Reev’s hand tightened around my wrist. He had been meant to find me, to take me in. For some reason, knowing we had been designed to meet didn’t bother me. Reev was meant to be mine.

“To hide me,” I said.

“Ninu was one of the few Infinite with the power to, in a way, counter my own. You probably realized that in your duel.”

I nodded. It had been unbelievably frustrating.

“The blood of descendants who are not our own will not kill us, but it does weaken us. Ninu had managed to injure me in the battle before I could force him and his sentinels from my palace. But as long as I refused to reverse the River for him, I knew he would target you in my place. I couldn’t protect you.”

He had left me on a riverbank with no memory of who I was, no family, and no understanding of what I could do. The truth finally sank in. Ninu had been right. It was cruel. Letting me think I was human—the only thing I knew how to be because I sure as drek didn’t remember being one of them—it was too cruel.

I stared at Kronos. I could tell he wasn’t fully recovered. Irra wore the emaciated look like a perfectly fitted tunic, but Kronos looked ill. His cheeks were too wan, and his shoulders sagged beneath his cloak, as if all of time weighted them down. He might have been handsome if he’d been healthy.

“Why didn’t you tell me who I am from the start?” I asked Kalla.

She glanced dispassionately at Ninu’s body. “Ninu had few mahjo to begin with, but after Rebirth, he was especially careful not to leave any human descendants. Since we were incapable of killing him directly, we needed someone with the strength of a full-blooded Infinite—someone who could wield my scythe and not be drawn into death by it—but, at the same time, not bound by our laws. Kronos trapped you in a mortal body. You can age and sicken and die. It was a perfect disguise from Ninu, but we didn’t realize until recently that it was also the perfect weapon. And since Ninu wanted you, it gave you access to him.”

She hadn’t answered my question. They could have just told me all this. Instead, they had manipulated my every move—and now, recalling my conversations with Irra, I had little doubt that he’d been in on this as well. I had been as much a puppet as Ninu’s human decoy.

If they had told me what they wanted, would I have helped them? I didn’t hate my life. It wasn’t ideal, but I had Reev, a place to sleep, and enough food to keep me going. What did I care about their stupid immortal feud? I had always wanted to know where my powers came from, but that didn’t mean I wanted to be like them.

I didn’t want to be Infinite.

“Exactly,” Kronos said, watching me closely. “You wouldn’t have done as asked. Your humanity, your emotional attachments hinder you.”

I scowled. “You can read minds, too?”

“Your eyes give away your thoughts.”

“You wanted Reev dead,” Avan cut in.

I turned to him. He looked steadier, and he’d been watching the conversation unfold with an increasingly dark expression.

Reev added, “They probably expected Ninu to have me rebranded already. And once you killed him, there would have been nothing left—no emotional attachments—holding you to your human life. They would have used that to persuade you to join them.”

They thought Reev’s death would convince me to let my humanity go. They obviously knew nothing about humans.

From the moment Kalla attacked me in that alley, I had performed according to their script. But, because of Ninu, it hadn’t gone exactly as planned. Instead of just creating a mental block, Ninu could’ve begun Reev’s rebranding at any time, and he hadn’t. For that, I was grateful. They were out of their immortal minds if they thought I would want anything to do with them now.

“You screwed up,” I told them. “I’ll never be one of you.”

“I never intended for you to remain human, Kai,” Kronos said. “Ninu may be gone, but Reev’s life remains tenuous.”

I didn’t care that he was my dad. Reev was my family. I moved to put myself in front of both Reev and Avan, and silenced their objections with a glare. “If you hurt him, I swear I’ll never leave this body. I’ll find a way to bind myself permanently.”

“That’s impossible,” Kalla said.

“Then why do you look so nervous? I’d rather die human than be like you.”

A weak laugh pierced the room. It resonated in my chest. On the floor, Ninu stirred. It was the slightest movement, the most he could manage.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Yes. That’s the right choice. Don’t ever let them take that from you.”

I felt nothing but hatred for Ninu, but I understood his words.

Kalla’s perfect lips pursed. Even annoyed, she looked unnaturally beautiful. I should have realized it at the Raging Bull.

“Persistent, aren’t you?” she said.

“Well, it is rather difficult to pass on with our dear friend Time weaving his interference,” Ninu replied. “I stand now at the gates to your realm, Sister.”

I could sense all the tones and tremors in his voice. It conjured images of glass shrines that reflected the sunlight and billows of greasy smoke that reminded me of the market outside Zora Hall. Then he dragged in a shallow, wet breath, and the images dispersed.

“There are no more restrictions holding you. Help me along, won’t you, Sister?”

Kalla’s scythe appeared in a flash of light. She approached Ninu, weapon raised. I looked away, focusing instead on the stubble on Avan’s jaw. It was a good look on him.

Kalla’s blade whined as it sliced the air. I flinched.