Mera's door was already bolted when Zayn and Renn reached the boarding house.
Renn pounded on it. "Mera! Open up!"
The hatch snapped open. One of Mera's eyes appeared, hard and tired.
"You picked a fine day to be outside," she said. "Half the district's locked down. Wardens are dragging anyone with scorch marks to clinics."
Her gaze flicked to the blood on Zayn's coat. "Get in."
They slipped inside. The bolts slammed shut behind them.
The common room was quieter than usual. The bandaged‑throat boarder sat in a corner, clutching a mug with both hands. The ink‑stained clerk paced, muttering numbers under his breath. Everyone flinched at sudden sounds.
Mera set a kettle on the stove. "Talk," she said. "What happened at the Temple?"
Renn started. Zayn let him.
"Thread‑Well rupture," Renn said hoarsely. "Pillar of… something. Husks pouring out. They were eating Threads, Mera. Ripping souls out with their hands. And a Seer—mountain‑trained—was controlling it. Calling it cleansing."
Mera swore under her breath.
She looked at Zayn. "And you?"
He wiped dried blood from his nose with his thumb.
"I survived," he said. "It cost me."
He didn't elaborate. The less they knew about laws he could cut, the better.
Mera studied him for a long moment. "Your cuff?" she asked.
Zayn held up his wrist.
The metal circlet hung in two twisted pieces, edges blackened. The sigils were scorched into illegibility.
"The Well did not appreciate the competition," he said.
Mera's mouth tightened. "I only had the one," she said. "You just burned a very expensive favour."
"It did its job," Zayn said. "It hid me from Seers long enough for them to underestimate me. Now they know I exist. A bracelet won't fix that."
The room went still.
"They know?" the bandaged woman croaked. "The Temple?"
"A particular Seer does," Zayn said. "And he knows more than he should. He knew Elr—" He cut the name short, jaw clenching. "He knew things from my first life."
Mera sank into a chair. "Plenty of gods," she said quietly. "No mercy."
The kettle hissed.
Zayn's mind was already elsewhere.
"Sera first," he thought. "Then the clinics. Then the Seer."
He stood.
"Where are you going now?" Renn demanded.
"To the Temple," Zayn said.
Renn stared. "You just came from there. They nearly turned you into Thread‑meat. Are you addicted to almost dying?"
"I'm not going in through the front door," Zayn said. "And I'm not going in as Zayn. I'm going hunting for a girl who doesn't remember me and a brother who's probably already on a slab."
Mera's eyes flickered. "Sera?" she said.
"Yes," Zayn said. "If the Temple is scooping up compromised Threads for their experiments, her name glows on their lists. She sold them secrets, then backed away. They will call that corruption, not desperation."
Mera swore again, more viciously.
"She had a shift at the shrine today," she said. "If the Wardens pulled Temple staff after the rupture, she's either in a line or in a cart."
"Lines can be broken," Zayn said. "Carts can be lost."
Renn shook his head. "You talk about people like parcels."
"Accurate," Zayn said. "Some parcels scream when you move them."
He turned toward the door.
Mera's voice stopped him. "Zayn," she said. "Why? You could walk away. You don't love that girl. She's not your friend. You erased her memory."
Zayn looked back at her.
"Tools," he said, "do not get to ask why the craftsman sharpens them."
"That's not an answer," Mera said.
"It's the only one you'll get," he replied.
Inside, his thoughts were less clean.
"I don't save people," he told himself. "I secure assets. I erase liabilities. If I pull Sera out, it's because she knows a path into the clinics. Because she can be shaped. Because once the Temple is done with her, she's useless to me."
He tasted the lie in his own reasoning—not in the words, but in the edge of urgency under them.
"Elric would have thrown himself into the fire for anyone within reach," he thought with contempt. "I am not Elric."
He stepped back into the street.
The city was a wound.
Smoke and dust still drifted from the Temple district. Wardens had thrown cordons up, chalking sigils on walls and setting up screening posts. People queued, shivering, as Null‑bands brushed their wrists and Seers' assistants watched for "Thread anomalies."
Zayn and Renn kept to tighter alleys, moving parallel to the flow.
"Temple staff will be processed at the side gates," Renn said. "They don't shove acolytes through the same lines as traders. Bad optics."
Zayn nodded.
"Good," he said. "Fewer witnesses when we cut."
They reached a vantage point overlooking a narrower lane leading to a side entrance: a heavy door flanked by Wardens and junior priests. A line of Temple workers formed in front of it—kitchen hands, archivists, acolytes—each clutching a token.
Sera was third from the door.
She stood stiffly, hands wrapped around her own elbows. A faint bruise shadowed her throat, as if a strap had rubbed there recently. Her Thread quivered—thin and tired, but intact.
"Not yet," Zayn thought. "They haven't hollowed her. They will."
A Warden with a Null‑band moved down the line, tapping each wrist. Most Threads dimmed briefly, then resumed. When he reached Sera, his band pulsed harder. The acolyte at the door checked his slate, nodded.
"Flagged," he said. "Clinic group."
Sera flinched. "I'm not sick," she said. "I'm staff. I—"
"Thread‑irregularities require cleansing," the acolyte recited. "You'll be seen by our redemption ward. The Loom heals all who submit."
Sera's eyes flashed with something between terror and rage.
"My brother submitted," she said. "They said he was 'at peace.' He stares at walls and drools."
"Peace," Zayn thought. "Redefined as the absence of complaint."
The Warden gripped Sera's arm. She jerked away on reflex; his Null‑band flared, making her gasp as her Thread spasmed.
The acolyte sighed. "Resisting a Temple directive will only worsen—"
He never finished.
The moment his mouth opened on the next word, Zayn removed it.
Not the word itself. The fragment of time where sound would have carried. To everyone else, it looked like the acolyte simply… cut himself off, mid‑sentence, eyes unfocused for half a heartbeat before continuing with different words.
"—your evaluation," he said, annoyed. "Next."
Sera blinked, disoriented.
Renn glanced at Zayn. "What did you do?"
"Shortened an argument," Zayn murmured.
The Warden began to pull Sera toward a side cart hitched to a mule, where other flagged staff already sat, wrists loosely bound with prayer cords.
Zayn's eyes tracked the cart, the mule, the narrow lane leading away from the Temple.
He saw timing. Angles. Witness lines.
"Three corners," he thought. "Four Wardens. One driver. Two alleys for escape. Acceptable risk."
He stepped back from the vantage point.
"Stay here," he told Renn.
"Absolutely not," Renn said.
Zayn looked at him. "If this goes badly," he said softly, "they'll interrogate everyone connected to me. You are more connected than most. The further you are from this, the fewer moments I have to erase later."
Renn's mouth opened, then closed.
"Fine," he said. "But if you die, I'm selling your room."
Zayn smiled briefly.
"Fair," he said.
He moved.
By the time he reached street level, the cart was rolling, mules slogging through churned mud. Sera sat hunched, eyes on her bound hands. Two Wardens walked alongside; a third rode shotgun by the driver, hand on a Null‑dart baton.
The lane narrowed between a warehouse wall and a row of storage sheds.
Perfect.
Zayn stepped out from a side door wearing a Temple porter's apron he'd lifted from a hook seconds earlier. He stumbled theatrically, dropping an armful of crates right in the cart's path.
The mule balked.
"Watch it!" the driver snarled.
"Sorry, honoured one!" Zayn babbled in the Temple's cadence. "Emergency delivery—Council seal—Hunger stock for immediate disposal. They said hurry—"
"Hunger?" one Warden snapped. "Here?"
Zayn held up a crate. Old Hunger codes marked its side; he'd grabbed it from an unsecured stack by a shrine—empty, but no one needed to know that.
"Redemption ward only," Zayn said. "They said if I don't get it there in the next ten breaths, a Seer will—"
The Wardens swore creatively.
"Fine," the driver barked. "Move aside. We're headed there anyway."
Zayn staggered backward, dropping another crate. It smashed, spilling nothing but straw.
"Idiot!" a Warden snapped, stepping forward to shove him.
Zayn erased the half‑second where the man's hand would have touched his chest.
From the Warden's perspective, he blinked—and his hand was suddenly resting on the crate instead, shoving it aside. He frowned, disoriented, then shook it off.
Zayn used the micro‑stutter to slide closer to the cart's rear.
Sera's eyes flicked up.
For the first time since he'd wiped her, she looked directly at him without slipping past.
Some part of her recognized the shape of him, even if not the memories.
"Do you want to leave?" he asked quietly.
She stared.
"Who are you?" she whispered.
"A man who doesn't like seeing tools thrown away," Zayn said.
"Tools?" she echoed, incredulous and furious at once.
Zayn's lips twitched.
"Anger is good," he thought. "It means she's not hollow yet."
Aloud, he said, "Decide."
Behind him, the driver cursed at the mule. The lane ahead narrowed further—one more bend before the clinics.
Sera's jaw clenched.
"Yes," she said. "I want to leave."
"Good," Zayn said. "Remember that."
He grabbed the prayer cord binding her wrists and erased the knot's tying. It simply… wasn't there anymore. The cord dropped, ends loose.
Sera's eyes widened.
"Don't move until I tell you," Zayn murmured. "When I say 'fall,' fall."
He stepped away, circling toward the mule's head.
"Honoured one," he called to the shotgun Warden. "The crate markings—should they be logged under—"
The Warden turned, distracted.
Zayn reached into the Loom and plucked out three beats of time.
The cart rolled. The mule walked. Wardens breathed. But for those three beats, every action left no imprint—no cause that could lead to an effect.
Then reality snapped forward.
To everyone else, it felt like a moment of dizziness, a blink, a skip in the mind's record.
To Zayn, it was a gap he'd drawn like a blade.
"Fall," he said.
Sera toppled out of the cart as if she'd simply lost her balance. No one saw the instant her feet left the floor; their memories jumped from "Sera sitting" to "Sera on the ground". The nearest Warden swore, reaching down to haul her back.
Zayn erased the gesture. The man's hand never closed on her arm.
"Stupid girl," the driver snarled. "Get up."
Sera scrambled, using the cart's wheel to pull herself upright on the far side, out of their sight.
Zayn dropped the empty crate at the mule's feet.
Startled, the beast reared, braying.
The cart lurched forward, nearly overturning. Straw flew. Wardens grabbed for balance. One slipped in the mud, crashing into another; both went down swearing.
In the chaos, Zayn grabbed Sera's wrist.
"Run," he said.
They bolted into a side alley.
Behind them, shouts rose. "Hey! The acolyte—"
Zayn sliced the next two seconds cleanly.
By the time the Wardens' thoughts caught up, he and Sera were already halfway down the alley, around a bend, gone from any plausible line of sight.
"Threads don't teleport," one Warden muttered, baffled. "She can't have gotten that far—"
The driver kicked the mule, furious. "We'll report it," he growled. "Temple ledger will deal with her later. We have a clinic schedule."
He flicked the reins. The cart rolled on.
In the alley, Sera jerked free of Zayn's grip, slamming her back against a damp wall.
"What did you do?" she panted.
"Kept you off a table," Zayn said. "For now."
Her Thread fluttered wildly.
"You're one of them," she said. "A Thread‑twister. You pulled… something. I can feel… gaps."
Zayn tilted his head.
"I prefer eraser," he said. "Twisting implies creativity."
She stared at him, chest heaving.
"I know you," she said, voice shaking. "I don't know from where. There's a… itch in my memory where you should be. Did you—"
"Yes," Zayn said. "I took something from you. One night. In a storage room with crates and lanterns and very poor decisions."
Anger flared in her eyes. "Give it back."
Zayn's lips curved.
"No," he said. "That moment no longer exists. You have the bruise of it, not the bone."
She took a step toward him, fists clenched. "You've ruined my life," she hissed. "If the Temple thinks I'm corrupt, if the Wardens mark my name—"
"They already had," Zayn said. "Long before I touched you. I saw their slate. Your brother bought you that mark, one desperate favour at a time."
Her shoulders sagged.
"My brother," she whispered. "They took him to the clinics. They said they'd heal his Thread. He came back… empty. Smiling sometimes at walls. Laughing at nothing. No nightmares. No dreams. Just… lack."
She looked up at Zayn, eyes wet and furious.
"They call that peace," she said. "You call that tools. What do you call me now?"
Zayn considered her.
"Invested," he said.
She blinked. "What?"
"I rarely undo my work," Zayn said. "It's untidy. Now that the Temple is reaching for you, they touch something of mine. I dislike that."
"You saved me," she said slowly, "so you can keep using me."
"Yes," Zayn said.
She swallowed. "And what happens when I stop being useful?"
He smiled.
"Then," he said, "we negotiate about which parts of you deserve to keep existing."
She stared at him, horror and fascination warring in her gaze.
A distant horn blew—Temple signal, sharp and insistent. Wardens would soon sweep these side streets.
"We need to move," Zayn said. "You can come with me, or you can try your luck alone with a flagged name and a missing place in your memory. Choose."
Sera's hands trembled.
"You're a monster," she said.
"Yes," Zayn said. "But I am the monster currently standing between you and the ones who hollow Threads and feed them to wells. Decide quickly."
Her jaw clenched.
"Fine," she said. "I'll come. For now."
Zayn nodded once.
"Good," he thought. "She understands 'for now'. That's more honest than most oaths."
They slipped through the alleys, taking a jagged route back toward South Weir.
By the time they reached Mera's back door, the Temple bells had shifted to a steadier pattern—containment, not emergency. The city would tell itself stories tonight to make sense of the rupture. The Temple would blame corruption. The Council would blame unauthorized Thread use. The Loomists in the slums would blame fate.
Only a handful of people would know that a man who once fell from a mountain had pulled pieces out of reality again.
Inside, Mera took one look at Sera and swore.
"You were right," Zayn said, stepping past them to the window. "They are hollowing people. Using clinics as farms. Today, the Well spat some of their harvest back up."
Mera's face went grey. "How many?" she whispered.
"Enough to decorate the street," Zayn said lightly. "Not enough to satisfy the man running the experiment."
Renn paced, hands in his hair. "What man?" he demanded. "The Seer?"
Zayn's gaze went to his shattered cuff on the table.
"He knows my old name," he said quietly. "He tried to reach back and erase what happened on the mountain. He failed."
Sera stared. "Erase… the past?"
"Yes," Zayn said. "Apparently I am not the only one interested in editing the tapestry."
Mera sank into a chair, rubbing her temples.
"This city," she muttered, "was already hanging by a few Threads. Now we have clinics ripping them out, a Seer trying to 'fix' reality, and you cutting holes wherever it suits you."
She looked up at Zayn.
"What do you intend to do?" she asked.
Zayn watched the rain streak down the window.
"Survive," he said. "Learn. Leverage."
He turned, eyes cold and bright.
"And then," he said, "decide whose version of reality gets to remain."
Sera hugged her arms around herself. "And what if your version is worse?" she asked.
Zayn smiled—slow, almost gentle, and utterly merciless.
"Then," he said, "this world will regret that the mountain failed to kill me the first time."
Lightning flickered over the Weir tower, illuminating the Temple's distant silhouette.
Far away, in a sealed chamber under the Temple, the mountain Seer stood before a wall of glowing Thread‑patterns, watching one knot pulse darkly where Zayn's influence spread.
"Elric," he murmured, touching the pattern with two fingers. "You taught me to fear what happens when truth is ignored. Now I must teach you what happens when absence is allowed to multiply."
Behind him, on an iron table, a body lay strapped, eyes empty, mouth slack. The name on the slate above it read:
Sera Danel – Subject 0.
The heart monitor beside her ticked steadily.
And in the mind that should have been hers, something that was not Sera at all opened its eyes.