Isaac Skinner could only live a real life between the sea and the star. Everything else was stalling and dreaming.

No matter what happened there—no matter how terrible—it was still better than everything else. Because when they left Oshun, suddenly the world was quiet and dull and none of it mattered. There was no chorus to greet him, no song to divide one moment from the next, no taste of bright metal on the breeze.

Everything faded to gray as they crossed into the abrupt silence of isthmus. It was like diving underwater—the muted noise, the sudden cold, the growing urgency as he sank deeper and deeper.

He lay across a wooden bench in the hold, with his eyes open, watching the circles of candlelight flicker on the sooty ceiling. His mouth tasted like ash.

He didn’t pay any attention to the others as they moved and talked and bundled Spelder into a hammock. Eventually the room became quiet. He could hear the faint hissing sound as the weavers worked the prismatic loom, sending the Albatross forward.

He might have stayed there for the whole voyage, with his head pressed against the wood and his arms folded over his chest, if Miriam hadn’t sat down across from him.

“Get up,” she said. Her face was dark, her silver hair floating in a cloud around her head. She seemed larger in the dim, uneven light.

Isaac swiveled and put his feet on the ground. He stared at Miriam across the narrow wooden table.

“I won’t mince words,” she said calmly. “If not for a good bit of luck, we would all be dead because of you.”

Isaac didn’t know where to look. Miriam’s face, solemn with disappointment, seemed a poor choice. So did the table. His gaze flickered to one side, where the weavers worked steadily, dressed in red uniforms and long gloves. They were ignoring the conversation, but Isaac was certain they could hear everything.

“I’m sorry,” he said, wondering how many times he would have to apologize for the same thing.

“Now, it ain’t the worst thing that I’ve ever seen,” she said. “Plenty of people get killed in Oshun by accident. It happens. But I don’t think you running off into the swamp qualifies as an accident.”

Isaac said, “But I heard—”

“And that’s the most worrying thing,” she said, pointing a finger at him. “You heard what, exactly?”

“A song,” he said. “It was clear as a bell.”

“Do you still hear it?”

“No.” The soft piano had disappeared, along with the winding chorus of the star, as soon as they left Oshun.

“Now, keep in mind I’ve been a wizard longer than you’ve been alive. Probably.” She gave him a second look. “And the whole time we were there, I didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary. No song like you talked about, anyway.”

“I’m not crazy.” He said this confidently, though his certainty was starting to fray at the edges. If he was losing his mind, how would he know?

“It doesn’t matter what you are. Sane or not, you can’t be pulling things like this. Maybe there’s something out there I don’t understand, making songs that only you can hear.” She shrugged. “Or maybe you’ve got some noise bouncing around in your head and you think it’s real enough to start chasing it. Either way, it’s bad.”

“I did save everyone’s life,” he said as mildly as he could. “In case you forgot.”

“If you hadn’t gone chasing that song, we wouldn’t have needed saving. In case you forgot.” She met his gaze with steady resolve. “I can’t let you become a wizard if your hearing’s wrong. Not in good conscience. Not if it’s going to lead to things like this.”

“What?”

“I won’t stand for it.”

“But you can’t just … ” Isaac said, and then his jaw locked up. Everything was going wrong, all at once.

“I can,” she said, “And I will. I’m stepping in now before someone gets hurt. We could’ve lost more than just an anchor back there.”

His face burned. “No.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s not up for debate. I’m just telling you the truth.”

“It’s Oshun,” he said, as if that explained everything. “I can’t give it up now, not after going back. You can’t expect me to.”

“It’s not worth risking everyone else on a ship,” she murmured, “for what you want. Do you understand that?”

“It wouldn’t be a risk. This was a mistake but I learned from it, alright?” There had to be a way out, he thought, some combination of words which would get Miriam to agree with him. “I’ll admit it was stupid and selfish to go running off like that. I don’t have an excuse for it. But I’ll never do it again, because I know how it turns out!”

“Ah. But that ain’t the problem. Everybody makes stupid mistakes, and I’d expect you learned a lot from this one.”

“Then what is the problem?”

“You heard something that wasn’t there.”

The pressure built under Isaac’s skin until he felt like he was going to shatter. “It was real. And I don’t see why that’s such a horrible thing. Isn’t a wizard supposed to listen?”

“Correct,” she said. She was still calm, her voice steady, her eyes glittering in the dark. “And if you can’t listen well, you’re worse than no wizard at all. Do you know what a skelfing sounds like?”

The question took all the wind out of his sails. He blinked. “No.”

“Silence,” she said. “Like the whole chorus gone quiet.”

He thought for a second, as the silence of isthmus pressed closer around them. “So? What does that have to do with—”

“You’re smart enough, Isaac. You ought to be able to figure this one out.” She leaned in. “Any wizard has to be listening for that silence, always. As soon as they catch a hint of it, they’ve got to warn the crew. Every wasted second is another chance for things to go sour. If you happen to hear some tune, real or imaginary, you might not notice the silence until it’s on top of you.”

“Oh.”

And Isaac was suddenly miserable, because Miriam was right. If the piano was ringing in his ears, he might miss a subtle, growing quiet until it was too late. And he didn’t know how to disagree with that.

He didn’t even know if he should.

“But I might never hear the song again,” he protested weakly. “It might never be a problem.”

“Maybe. But I can’t stand for a wizard who might miss a skelfing. It is what it is.”

Isaac’s face twitched. Rage ran through him, hot and wild, with nobody to blame and nowhere to go.

And yet he was comforted by the bitter certainty that he would find a way back. He refused to abandon Oshun, with its star so fresh in his memory. He would do anything, anything, anything to keep returning.

This was merely a problem he hadn’t solved yet.

His mind turned the issue over on its head. What did he have to say to fix this?

Now the pieces fell into place. He saw the answer, so clean and elegant that he had no choice but to accept it. His trembling resolved into steady breaths.

He lowered his voice. “I made it up.”

She raised an eyebrow.

“I didn’t hear anything. No piano, no song, nothing. I just wanted a reason to stay.” Now he was lying to paint himself a liar. It was almost ironic.

“And you think that’s better?”

“No. If anything, it’s worse.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“I told you, I wanted to stay.” It was remarkably easy to make the rest up. He could almost convince himself it was true. “I thought if I just spent a few more minutes there, maybe half an hour, it would be easier to leave again. So I made up the song to buy some time. I don’t know how you switch back and forth like this.”

Miriam was staring at him like she wasn’t sure what she was looking at.

“I am sorry,” he said, because that seemed important. “And if I knew how it turned out—with the storm and the monsters and the anchor and everything—I never would have done it. But I hadn’t been to Oshun in seven years and I wasn’t ready to leave.”

And that was perfect; just enough detail and heartfelt regret to make it seem real. He held his breath and watched Miriam.

She finally said, “I don’t even know what to make of that.”

Isaac glanced at the weavers, who were still pointedly ignoring the conversation. He wasn’t sure if he’d won, but at least he hadn’t lost yet. He felt only a twinge of guilt, for he was quite certain this was the only way.

“Let’s play chess,” Miriam said, and it was not a suggestion so much as an order.

Isaac blinked. “Sure.”

Miriam went to a cabinet and fetched a chessboard, setting it on the narrow table. The candles over Isaac’s head cast a strange, ghostly light across the board. The pieces almost seemed alive, moving and breathing, as their shadows swayed and grew.

“Do you know how to play?”

“No.”

She walked him through the basic moves, how rooks charged across the board and knights leapt sideways, and showed him how to win—in theory, at least. “No plan survives first contact with the enemy,” she said as she reset the board. “But you still need a plan. Ready?”

“Now?”

“You’ve got to start somewhere. Go ahead.”

Isaac moved one of the pawns.

From the way Miriam exhaled, he could tell it was not a good move. It didn’t seem to matter what he did after that. All of his pieces were caught behind other pieces, tripping him up, while she built a complex structure of knights and bishops and pawns. She erased his whole army, one by one, until he had only a king and a lonely rook.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Do you resign?” she asked.

“Never.”

She made a few efficient moves and ended the game quickly. He tipped his king over and let it roll across the board.

“You’re reckless,” she said, staring at the grid of dark and light squares. “It’s easy to confuse reckless and brave. But brave knows when cowardice is called for, and reckless charges ahead regardless. A brave apprentice is a good one. A reckless one is a menace.”

He sat quietly, and tried to look less reckless.

Harley emerged from the bunkroom, rubbing her temples. She still seemed a little dazed, but her gaze was sharper and her movements more deliberate than when Isaac first found her.

“How have you been?” Miriam asked.

“I can’t sleep,” she said. “It’s totally impossible. I just stare at the back of my eyelids.”

“That’ll be the honey. It should wear off by the time we reach SEIDR.”

“Are you guys playing chess?”

“I was teaching Isaac how to lose. Would you like a game?”

She shrugged. “Why not? I need a few lessons in losing too.”

Isaac got up and watched as they reset the board, lining up the two armies to stare at each other. He was grateful for the break; the conversation had exhausted him completely.

Miriam and Harley played with a casual concentration, calculating possibilities that Isaac could not guess at. Every move seemed to have a dozen strings attached. It was interesting to watch the pieces dance, and listen to them clack against the polished board, but he had no idea who was winning.

At last Miriam made a swift, decisive move and Harley sighed, knocking her king over. “Amazing. Mate in five, right?”

“Three. Look.” Miriam shuffled the pieces around and Harley groaned, covering her face with her hands.

“I blame the honey,” she said between her fingers. “It’s got me thinking all slow. Wanna play again?”

As they re-assembled the armies, Isaac turned and crept up the stairs. He was getting sick of the smoke and the claustrophobic warmth.

The blank space of isthmus was refreshing, despite the absence of wind or anything that resembled air. In contrast with the wild and whirling maelstrom, the horrors of an awakened sphere, and the constant music of Oshun, it was impossibly empty.

He spent some time on the deck of the Albatross, looking out over the void. At a glance it seemed false, as flat and featureless as black paper, but he sensed its depth was incalculable. It was much larger and more important than he would ever be.

“Thinking about jumping?” Harley asked from behind him, startling him.

“Only as a last resort,” he said. “Did you win?”

“No. Nobody beats Miriam except—” She coughed. “Well. She’s pretty damn good.”

“Do you play a lot?”

“Oh, loads. I’m just awful at it.” She leaned on the railing. “It’s nice up here, isn’t it?”

“It’s peaceful.” Isaac didn’t know how to feel about isthmus; it was frightening in theory, but there was nothing out there to be frightened of. Just space and silence. “But I wouldn’t call it nice.”

“Scared of the dark?”

He chose his words carefully. “I wouldn’t want to be here alone.”

“Hell no. If I was by myself up here, I’d get real and not-real confused real fast.” She laughed. “Does that even make sense? I’m not usually this loopy, I swear.”

“I know what you mean. It’s like—” Isaac tried to find the words for the sheer nothing which enveloped them. “—anything could be out there. Anything at all.”

“Exactly. It’s great.”

“Doesn’t it remind you of the skelfing?”

“A little? Not really.” She tapped her foot against the deck, and her voice became slow and stumbling. “It’s like the opposite. This place is hard to understand because there’s really no substance to understand. But the skelfing was hard to understand because I couldn’t—I don’t know what I was trying to understand. But it was still there. God. It’s hard to talk about.”

“You don’t have to—”

She shook her head. “Not like that. It’s just hard to say it right.”

Everything she said only made Isaac more curious. Still, he held his tongue and observed the grainy nonexistence of everything.

“It was like hearing some terrible news,” she muttered eventually, “and realizing that everything is going to change, everything is going to become worse. And then you forget the terrible news, but you still know that something awful is happening. You’re not sure what it is, but you know you can’t escape it.”

All at once Isaac thought of the crocodile.

And as soon as it crossed his mind, he flinched and looked up, adrenaline spiking as if he’d made some terrible mistake. He was consumed by the sudden fear that merely thinking about the beast could summon it here, in this featureless space where all things seemed equally possible.

And above him for a moment he almost glimpsed scales, or one scale—the same size as the ship, just as dark as its surroundings and yet subtly glistening.

Then it was merely nothing.

He said, “I know what you mean.”

***

Felix Marchetti had nothing but time.

Normally he would be running from one task to the next, fixing rifts and teaching classes and researching the fractal. Normally, he would be weaving. But all of that had been ripped away, and there were too many empty hours in the day.

He stalked around Natalia’s house, glowering at everything that moved. He ate all their leftovers and lay on the couch watching old mobster movies, with his hair in a glorious red tangle that made him look appropriately distraught. He’d spent hours getting it just right—messy enough to be unruly, but not completely unmanageable.

It all ended when Natalia came home to find him drinking milk directly out of the carton. She snapped, “Enough is enough. Find something to do, alright? Something that isn’t raiding my fridge or staring mournfully out the window.”

“They took my lab, Nat,” Felix said, wiping his chin.

“Yes, you mentioned that before. It’s not a license to sulk around my house forever.”

“I have nothing,” Felix groaned.

“That’s ridiculous and you know it. You have loads of things. You have—” Natalia cast about vainly for inspiration and saw the family photo hanging on the wall. “—a niece and nephew who would love to spend more time with you.”

And so Felix started teaching Elsie and Marco how to weave.

They were just about the perfect age—young enough to believe anything was possible, and old enough to listen without interrupting and reach the top of the loom without standing on their toes.

There were a couple of spare prismatic looms in the garage. Felix had stolen them from SEIDR ages ago. Now he wiped off the dust and cobwebs and put one in the living room, squeezed between the TV and the piano.

He collected the children’s winter gloves and brought Elsie and Marco to the couch for a very stern lecture.

“You are both about to learn something amazing,” he announced. “You are going to learn how to weave the very substance of reality. It is one of the most extraordinary things in the world, and you will be lucky to experience it first-hand. But you have to listen to me the whole time and you must never take off your gloves. Understand?”

Elsie and Marco both nodded. They had the same brown eyes, the Marchetti eyes, and they wore very serious expressions. Marco had a little bit of snot coming out of his nose, but Felix was willing to forgive him for that.

He handed over the gloves. They were a bright green, patterned with little snakes and lizards.

Felix’s phone rang, but he ignored it and sat down at the prismatic loom. It was an old one, with a few nicks and scratches, but it worked just fine for training purposes.

He’d taken a red lamp out of his workshop and placed it on the loom. Now, he directed Elsie to turn off the overhead lights. In the sudden darkness, the lamp glowed a brilliant, fiery scarlet.

“You can only see the fabric under red light,” he told his attentive audience. “Gather around.”

Elsie and Marco crowded around the loom, goggling at the strange carvings along the legs. “Is it magic?” Elsie asked.

“It’s science.”

Felix drew a thread out of the loom. It was always so satisfying to see that first vivid line of blue. He never grew tired of it.

“Wow,” Marco said, his mouth hanging open. “I saw that in a movie one time.”

“You did not,” Elsie said, elbowing him.

Felix’s phone rang again. He wished he’d muted the damn thing. “This is the fabric of reality,” he said loudly, over the trumpeting ringtone. “The fundamental substance of the universe we inhabit.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It’s important,” he said. “Don’t touch it without your gloves. Don’t put your face near it. Marco?”

Marco stepped back. “What happens if you touch it?”

Felix considered the truth, but it seemed too complicated and too boring to be an effective deterrent. “Your fingers and toes will fall off,” he said.

Both of the children backed away from the loom.

“Don’t be afraid. Everything you see,” Felix said, and spun the fabric through his gloved fingers, “is made of this. Everything in the universe has the same source, and it’s all encoded here. Every single second is just another strand of this.”

“Am I made of that?” Elsie asked. The blue line was mirrored across her wide eyes.

“Yes,” Felix said. “And so is everybody else.”

“What about me?”

“Everybody else includes you, Marco.” Felix sat back, dropping the thread and letting it gradually disintegrate into the air. “Now, normally it’s invisible, but the prismatic loom helps us pick out the individual strands. It’s called distillation.”

“Your phone is ringing,” Marco said.

Felix closed his eyes as the trumpets blared. “I am aware. Look—”

“Felix!” Natalia shouted from somewhere in the house.

“What!”

“Get up here!”

“Why?”

She didn’t answer. He sighed and shut the top of the loom. “This concludes our first lesson,” he said. “Any questions?”

The children looked too startled for questions. It reminded Felix of his first experiments with the fabric. Of course, he’d been quite a bit older, and a lot more shaken to discover the universe could be condensed into a single thread if you knew the right tricks. Marco and Elsie seemed surprised, but they’d been equally surprised when they found out tadpoles turned into frogs.

“When can we do it again?” Elsie asked as Felix got up.

“Tomorrow,” he said, and their faces lit up. He was always pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to make them happy.

When he climbed to the top of the stairs, Natalia was waiting on the landing, staring at him with a strange, complicated expression.

“What?” he asked.

“Someone from SEIDR called. They were trying to get in touch with you.” The phone dangled from her hand.

“Bad news, I imagine,” he said, though his heart jumped. There was a reason he always ignored SEIDR’s calls.

She shook her head. “They found Harley and Spelder.”

“Alive?” he whispered.

“They’re both fine. Spelder has some kind of leg injury but—”

Harley was alive.

Felix hugged her. “Thank God,” he croaked, pulling back. He coughed and scrubbed his eyes. “I mean, I can take or leave Spelder, but—”

“Felix!”

“He’s such an asshole, Nat.”

“That’s not a capital offense.”

“Whatever.” The rest were irrelevant, as long as they found Harley. Felix could not have hoped for better news.

***

When he returned to his workshop at midnight, there was a sense of inevitability in the air. He hadn’t planned anything, and yet he knew exactly what he was going to do.

He shut and locked the door behind him, sensing the modified fabric as it flexed and shifted and welcomed him back. His workshop was the perfect place for secrets. There were several hidden within its square walls, but only one held his interest at the moment.

He knelt and lifted the loose floorboard, retrieving the bone knife from its hole in the ground. It felt good to simply hold it again. The knife was already familiar, like he’d owned it for years. Like he’d been holding it for a very long time.

There was nothing that could stop him now. All his fear had been burned away by the awful voyage, the loss of his lab, Harley’s return—all the good news and bad news in a great, flaming pile. It all balanced out. Everything had changed, and now he was ready.

He strode to the loom, pulled back his old plastic lawn chair and sat down. And then he stopped, caught in a web of indecision.

Felix had enough mastery of the fabric to pick a specific point in space and time and distill it almost immediately. It was more of an instinct than a skill, guided by intuition and muscle memory and little else. And yet, with the whole universe at his fingertips, he found himself at a loss. There were too many options. Where could he possibly start?

He stared through the window, past his glassy red reflection, and caught a glimpse of the sky above the trees. It was a spectacularly clear night. The trees were black silhouettes against the liquid blue starscape.

And then he spotted his answer.

He grabbed his portable telescope from the closet and set it up in the yard. There were deep holes in the dirt where he’d placed the stand before, and the telescope sank comfortably into them. The evening air had a frosty chill, but it didn’t take long for him to pick a star.

It was a nice dim one, just to the left of Orion’s Belt. He fixed the telescope upon it, so it was right in the center of the viewfinder. Through the lens, it was a brilliant silver dot, twinkling against the black.

It would do nicely. He ran back into the workshop. He had to work fast, before the Earth spun away and the telescope lost track of his star.

Fortunately, he was the best weaver. The image of the star was fresh in his mind, and he reached it quickly. With a little spinning and tinkering, he drew out a long line of blue, taut and hovering like a ghost on the air.

It perfectly matched the star in the telescope—he felt it through the gloves, through his fingers, through the color and quality of the fabric.

Now he grabbed the knife. It was waiting at his side, clean and sharp, unnaturally white under the blood-red lights.

With one stroke he severed the fabric of reality.

There was a slight snick, and Felix held his breath. But nothing else happened—no sparks, no catastrophes, no divine voices.

He held the dangling blue line pinched between his index and thumb. It wavered and flashed with tiny pops of gold. He could not estimate its length, or width, or whether it had any normal physical properties at all. It danced across his eyes like a blurry afterimage, all light and no edges. All he knew for sure was that it existed, it was blue, and it belonged to him. A frantic joy rose up in his chest.

He put the tiny scrap of reality on his desk and hurried back to the telescope. When he leaned against the eyepiece, squinting into the dark, he saw nothing at all.

The star was gone.

He’d taken it, and now it sat on his desk, reduced to its most elemental form. It was like scratching out a line in the records of the universe. He’d cut the fabric as it rippled through billions of years, changing the course of history.

Felix Marchetti could kill stars, and now a grin split his face as he realized he could trim reality itself as he liked.

It couldn’t possibly end well, but you already know that.