As Isaac’s time trickled away, he began to lose track of it. Hours blended together beneath the rock. Day and night were lit by the same soft, even glow. He was increasingly aware of the weight of the earth above him. His week crept past in an endless roll, sunless and dreary and marked with a single goal: finding Felix.
It was a necessary evil. Or so Miriam claimed, despite Isaac’s protests.
“I’ve done this before, dear,” she said, with a craggy grin. “You’ve got exactly one lead, and that’s Felix Marchetti. Take it or leave it.”
She made it sound easy. But Isaac, once bitterly annoyed by the presence of Felix, was now equally annoyed by the absence of Felix. The weaver was more evasive than he had any right to be.
He was supposed to teach a class at the Reality Weaving Academy on Monday, so Isaac staked out the entrance. Much to his surprise, a group of students trickled out the doors at noon—right when Cosmological Fabric Theory was meant to start.
When Isaac asked one of the weavers why she was leaving, she sighed. “We got an email like ten minutes ago that today’s class was cancelled. I can’t believe I actually did the reading this time. What a waste.”
On Tuesday, Isaac met Miriam at one of the Institute’s cafeterias. She told him that Felix was off fixing a rift in southern Nevada, and the whole team was supposed to get back later that afternoon. Isaac waited in the parking garage for three hours, but when the riptrackers returned, Felix was not among them. Apparently, he’d decided to stay in Nevada for a while.
On Wednesday, Isaac heard through the grapevine that Felix had returned to SEIDR in the middle of the night, almost too drunk to stand, and wandered the tunnels singing sea shanties until someone told him to shut up.
On Thursday morning, bright and early, they ran straight into each other. Isaac was crossing a bridge, lost in thought; he made it halfway before glancing up to see Felix’s startled face.
“Hey!” Isaac said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
“And I’ve been dodging you,” Felix said, pushing past him. “Let’s keep it that way.”
“Wait—I just have a few questions about Caasi.”
“Who?”
“My doppelganger. The one who actually tried to kill you.”
“You expect me to believe that?” Felix called over his shoulder.
Isaac followed him, but the weaver had a long stride and Isaac had to run to keep up. They quickly reached one of SEIDR’s many docks.
Isaac stopped on the pier, watching Felix scramble into a rowboat. “Why don’t you believe me?” he asked.
Felix rapidly untied the boat and began to float downstream. He didn’t look back. “The first time I saw you, I almost paid with my life. You’re gonna have to try harder if you want to finish the job.”
“I’m not trying to kill you!”
Felix flipped him off and disappeared down the canal. The situation was dire.
In desperation, Isaac called Raimes.
***
Raimes’s office was hidden at the back of the Spire. It was a concrete box with an oak behemoth of a desk. The only light came from a glowing fish tank set into the wall, lush with plants and neon blue fish. They darted back and forth through the reeds in lines of flickering color that left Isaac mesmerized.
He pulled his attention away from the tank and said, “I need to talk to Felix.”
“I already talked to Felix,” Raimes said.
“But I haven’t. And I don’t know what else to do. He’s the only witness Caasi didn’t kill.”
Raimes fidgeted with a silver puzzle cube, sliding a piece of it back and forth. It made a scraping, metallic noise. “Felix told me everything that happened between him and your doppelganger. There really wasn’t much to it. The whole incident took less than thirty seconds—Caasi appeared, dropped the samovar, disappeared. I don’t know what you’re hoping to get out of that.”
“Anything,” Isaac said. “I’m not asking for much. I just want a conversation. A chance.”
“What are you going to find that I haven’t?”
“Some detail, some clue, some repetition or lack of it. Or nothing at all, and tomorrow I’m out of your hair forever.” Isaac’s voice was acrid.
“Look.” Raimes set the cube down on his desk and steepled his fingers. His face folded into a heavy frown. “I’ve noticed Felix has a bit of a … grudge against you, Skinner.”
“No shit.”
“I don’t want to make it any worse.”
“Don’t want to? Or can’t?”
“It’s a delicate situation,” Raimes said. “If Felix refuses to tolerate you, I can’t exactly force him to change his mind.”
“I just want to ask him some questions,” Isaac said. “It’ll probably take less than ten minutes. I don’t see why that’s so hard.”
“Let’s just say that Felix makes his own rules.” Raimes coughed. “I mean, he’s our best weaver. By a long shot. The director is very invested in keeping him happy.”
“Isn’t he also invested in catching Caasi?”
“Sure, sure. But I don’t think that requires Felix. Find another way to do it.”
“I’ve got one day!” Isaac yelled.
It was not what he’d been planning to say, and he regretted the outburst. Luckily, Raimes took it in stride. “You’ve got options,” he said. “Look, I—”
The door behind Isaac burst open. A young security guard in a gray duster stood in the entrance, panting, his eyes wide.
“I’m in a meeting,” Raimes growled.
“Two cores have gone missing,” the man said. “We just got the news.”
Raimes was on his feet immediately, masked in professional focus. “Sorry for the interruption,” he said to Isaac. “I’ll be right back.”
He strode out of the room and the door slammed shut behind him. His footsteps receded into silence.
Isaac managed to hold out for six seconds before he broke. Given an opportunity to snoop around, he couldn’t possibly refuse. He had almost nothing to lose.
He got out of his chair and circled around to the other side of Raimes’s desk. An enormous block of wood, it held seven drawers with burnished copper handles. One of the drawers had a lock.
Isaac tried to force it open, but it was far too sturdy. In quick, steady movements, he checked the other drawers, keeping his ears pricked for the sound of Raimes’s return.
The contents were boring—a stack of blank paper, an assortment of disgustingly sticky pens, a drawer full of rubber bands and a red stapler. There were at least a dozen mint tins, but they were all empty.
He shut the drawers, leaning against the desk. The fish made him feel oddly guilty. They watched him with silent judgment from behind the glass.
His eyes caught a glint of light from the silver puzzle cube on Raimes’s desk, and he reached for it on instinct. It was already half-solved; a large gap separated two interlocked pieces. Isaac placed his thumbs on the metal and twisted them apart.
A key ring fell onto the desk. Isaac’s breath caught in his throat as he grabbed it. Some of the keys were obviously too large for the lock, while others were the wrong material or shape. He flipped through the ring, narrowed it down to a set of four copper keys, and tried each of them.
The third one fit perfectly. The drawer slid open to reveal a stack of manila folders—very standard, very boring. He was about to close it when a sticker caught his eye.
One of the folders was labeled Isaac Skinner.
His hands reached for it automatically, but his eyes darted to the next folder.
It belonged to Laurel Gray. Of course he grabbed it. Of all his mistakes, this one strikes me as the most tragic. The answers were beneath his very fingertips. If he’d opened the first file, only God knows what might have happened.
But he opened the second. I cannot blame him; he didn’t think of himself as a mystery.
There were only a few papers in Gray’s folder. One was a photo of her, sitting on a park bench and looking up, taken from a blurry distance, followed by several dense pages of text—dozens of printed bullet points annotated with scribbled notes in the margins.
His heartbeat was so loud that he feared it would drown out Raimes’s footsteps. He could barely concentrate on the contents of the pages. It was a sudden glut of information, and his eyes kept skipping over the lines.
… estimated 96% risk within the next five years …
… including A. Paredes, M. Oleander, and H. Melo …
… contact with the divers over an eight-month span …
… notified of possible delirium …
… hidden during a routine check …
… stole a ship before she could be apprehended …
In the distance, something clicked, followed by a raised voice. Raimes.
Isaac stuffed the papers into the folder, threw it back into the drawer, and slammed it shut. And then he realized that he’d lost track of which key matched the desk lock. He began to flip through the ring again as panic surged through him.
Footsteps echoed down the hallway, loud and growing louder. He tried one key in the drawer. It didn’t work.
His sweaty hands and the jingle of metal on metal made him feel utterly exposed. There was no way he’d make it in time.
He tried another key and it slid right in.
Isaac locked the drawer, tossed the keys back into the puzzle box and folded it closed. It took him two seconds to scramble back to his chair and sit down hard, placing the box on the desk before him.
The door opened and Raimes walked in. Isaac tried to calm his frantic breath. He noticed his leg bouncing and put his hand on his knee to steady it.
“Again, I apologize,” Raimes said, sitting back down behind the desk. He had a new line of worry etched across his forehead. “I’ve got a lot to deal with at the moment. But I’ll give you a tip.”
“Oh?” Isaac said, and cursed his quavering voice.
“Yes. You’re not going to convince Felix to agree to anything he doesn’t want to do. But Natalia might be able to help you out.”
“Natalia?”
“His sister. She can generally get him to act less … like Felix.”
“There are two of them. Perfect,” Isaac said. His heart rate was finally beginning to slow. When he glanced at the puzzle box, he could see his smeared fingerprints over a warped reflection of his face. He hadn’t been caught.
He still had a day to figure it all out. All his hopes rested on this last, slim chance. It was a long shot, but Isaac had decent aim. If only he knew what he was trying to hit.
***
Isaac should have gone directly to Natalia. The sooner he spoke with Felix, the better. This could not wait.
And yet he found himself in the south cafeteria, winding between booths and tables to reach the furthest corner of the room. A devilish headache was starting in his forehead.
Miriam Oleander had few preferences and she stuck to them. When she wasn’t in the Guild, she could almost always be found here, sitting on a cushioned wicker chair and eating bowls of macaroni or cucumber soup. She stuck to an isolated nook, shadowed and cozy, where she could watch everything without getting involved in it.
Isaac sat down on the chair beside her, gazing out over the cafeteria. His skull felt like it was about to split down the middle.
“Well,” he said, “I think I found a way to get to Felix.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Then what are you talking to me for?”
Isaac could not remember everything he’d seen in Gray’s file, but two things stuck like ice picks in his brain. The first was the Divers, a term he hadn’t seen before—not in SEIDR, at least. The second was Miriam Oleander’s name.
“How well did you know Gray?” he asked.
Miriam frowned into her bowl, poking a slice of cucumber as it floated in a lazy circle. “This ain’t the time or the place for that, Isaac. You’ve got a good eye but all the subtlety of a five-alarm fire.”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
“What am I supposed to do?” Isaac snapped. “I didn’t know asking questions was such a terrible thing. No one explained any of this to me.”
“Alright, alright, look. I knew her pretty well. We met at the New Frog Chess Club. She took quite a few matches off me. She was a good player. I hope she’s doing well, now, wherever she may be. But I won’t say more than that. Not here. Understand?”
“So you think she’s still alive.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
“Are you scared of SEIDR?”
“I ain’t scared of anything,” she said flatly. “But I know when to keep my mouth shut. When it comes to weaver madness, it’s better not to poke around. You might get poked back.”
Isaac frowned. Gray and Caasi and Felix all chased each other in circles around his head. He glanced around; there was no one else in earshot.
“Can you answer something honestly?” he asked.
“I can try.”
“What … what kind of a place is this?”
“The Institute?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?” Her voice had become unusually sharp. Her eyes were piercing, her face stern and creased with deep wrinkles.
Isaac said, “I know it can be dangerous, if you’re unlucky or stupid or both. And it seems cruel, but not pointlessly cruel. Not evil.”
“Don’t try to fool yourself, Isaac Skinner. I can see you working overtime on it. Don’t bother.” She almost sounded angry. “You’ve seen what SEIDR is. It’s obvious. They might tiptoe around it, but they haven’t lied to you.”
“But I—”
“Not finished, dear. You wouldn’t be here unless you thought it was worth it. You close your eyes when they tell you to, because that’s the deal you made. Don’t pretend otherwise. Denial doesn’t suit you.”
Isaac’s gut clenched. He could not meet Miriam’s eyes. For a moment it seemed as if the pocket they sat in was encircled by wheels of rock, moving and grinding and turning like great and terrible cogs.
“Then it’s awful,” he said.
“Awful doesn’t begin to cover it.” Miriam gave him a hollow grin. “But you picked it, all the same. It’s the price of the fruit.”
***
Natalia was much easier to find than her brother. Raimes’s directions led Isaac straight to the studio, where the Institute’s scribes congregated. It was a warren of workrooms, stuffed with art supplies and reference books, surrounding a winding central river.
A few of the scribes were sitting on rocks half-submerged in the water, dipping their brushes in the canal and smearing bright lines of watercolor paint over their sketches.
Natalia Marchetti was among them, perched on a flat boulder. She had the same distinctive red hair as Felix, but hers was buzzed short against her scalp. She drew in quick, precise strokes with a charcoal pencil. Her hands were stained with blotches of paint, blue and gray and green.
Isaac ambled down the mossy path beside the water. A few small crickets hopped out of the way as he approached.
“Natalia?” he asked.
She turned toward him, along with the half-dozen scribes beside her. “Yes?”
“My name is Isaac. Raimes said that you might be able to help me out?”
“With what?”
“Your brother.”
She sighed and climbed onto the path to join Isaac, leaving her sketchbook and pencil on the rock. “Keep an eye on those,” she called back to her friends.
Natalia pulled Isaac into a tall alcove with a color-splattered wooden table. The air smelled like pine turpentine and wet clay. “So. Isaac. You’re the one he’s been complaining about, right?”
“I guess.” Isaac leaned against the table. Someone had carved the word SANK into the tabletop; he traced the grooves with his thumb. “He thinks I tried to kill him, but it’s just a misunderstanding. I have a doppelganger who tried to kill him.”
Natalia raised an eyebrow.
“Believe me, I know that sounds—uh, questionable, but it’s true,” Isaac said hastily. “You can ask Raimes, Yaz, Victor, anybody. They wouldn’t let me work here if I was a murderer.” Probably.
“That’s what I’ve been hearing. Everyone’s talking about it, you know. We haven’t had any doppelganger issues for a while. Of course, it’s exactly the kind of thing Felix would get wrapped up in, anyway. He’s so … ugh.” She scowled, picking at a sliver of green paint under her fingernail. Her voice became faster and faster as she spoke. “He’s always getting into these stupid feuds! He just can’t leave well enough alone. Unless it requires the slightest bit of actual effort on his part. It has been three months since he mowed the lawn, and he promised to do it every two weeks! Two weeks! He has time for all these bullshit vendettas, but I guess raising a finger to help out every once in a while is too much to ask. And—ah, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to rant.”
Isaac blinked. “No, it’s fine. That sounds annoying.”
“It’s annoying as hell. And you won’t believe the kind of excuses he comes up with. ‘Oh, sorry, the Academy threw me a surprise awards ceremony and I was out celebrating,’ or ‘I would have done it this afternoon but I was in the bathroom and my legs fell asleep, it took me two hours to escape,’ or ‘someone cut in front of me at the cafeteria and declared himself my mortal enemy,’ or just, God, some of the dumbest shit you’ve heard in your life.” She covered her face with her hands. “Sorry. I’m done. Is there anything I can help you with, Isaac?”
“Well, yeah. Felix. I really need to talk to him about the doppelganger thing, but he keeps avoiding me.”
“Oh, he’s great at that. I’d love to help, honestly, but he can be … uncooperative. And it’s hard to argue with him.” Natalia spread her arms helplessly. “They spoil him to death here, I swear.”
Isaac chewed his lower lip. “What if we made a trade? I could, uh, mow the lawn?”
“Really? Are you sure? I should warn you, it’s a big yard.”
“I don’t mind.”
She thought about it for a moment. “That would be amazing, honestly. I’d really appreciate the help. I can negotiate with Felix—it might take a while, but I’m sure he’ll come around eventually.”
“That sounds perfect.”
“Wonderful.” She beamed at him. “It’s a deal.”
***
Natalia’s house was out in the sticks, and it took them nearly an hour to reach it. Isaac groaned internally as soon as they turned down the driveway. Their yard was wild and overgrown, surrounded by a peeling, rickety fence. He didn’t have time for this.
As Natalia parked the car, two children with muddy hands came running across the yard, shrieking, “She’s back! She’s back!”
She scooped them both into her arms and began the long trek to the front door. Isaac followed her toward the house. Its walls were draped with green vines, its chimney catching the light of the evening sun. A large shed hid behind it, pushed all the way to the edge of the woods.
When they got inside the house, Natalia introduced Isaac to her husband, Otto, a blond man with a timid smile. He had a camera slung around his neck and looked like he’d been awake for five days straight.
Natalia offered Isaac a glass of lemonade and sat with him for a moment in the kitchen, planning for Felix’s arrival. “You probably saw his shed when we came in. Well, he calls it a workshop. I’ll try to catch him before he disappears in there. He likes to hole up for days at a time. Elsie, put that down!”
The last comment was directed at her daughter, who was wielding a pizza cutter and laughing maniacally as she chased her brother around the table.
After Isaac finished the lemonade, he started on the lawn. Natalia gave him a scything reel mower with a circular silver blade. It chopped the grass down with a quiet snick.
He was happy, despite the sweat dripping down his forehead and back. There was the buzz of cicadas in the grass, and the sound of birds in the trees, and the fresh wind that swept past him sporadically. The laughter of children drifted out from the house. He was almost out of time, but he could not bring himself to care. All his mad scrambling and questioning seemed so pointless now, in the shade of the fir trees.
Natalia had warned him to avoid Felix’s shed, so he gave it a wide berth. Still, every time he passed it, he couldn’t resist staring at the dark windows.
Eventually he circled around to cut the thin strip of grass between the shed and the woods. The shed’s door faced away from the main house and into the forest. The walls were made of weathered gray planks, dotted with lichen. The eaves were full of spiderwebs. It was a much larger building than it seemed from a distance.
Isaac stopped, leaning against the mower. The debate in his head was swift and decisive. He reached out and tried the door handle.
It was locked.
He stooped to lift a corner of the door mat, on the off chance that there might be a spare key underneath. He found only a lonely beetle.
Isaac decided not to pry any further, and went back to mowing before he could argue himself into doing something worse. He finally finished trimming the yard when the last traces of sunlight were piercing the clouds. It was a pink and gold sunset, slowly consumed by a dusky blue haze.
All his work for SEIDR seemed so dreary compared to that glorious sky. Suddenly Isaac was not quite sure what he wanted more—the distant promise of Oshun, or another mellow day under the sun. This was not so awful, after all.
When he returned to the house, Natalia thanked him and said that Felix was on his way. They waited until the flash of headlights cut through the gloaming. Natalia went out to meet him while Isaac lurked inside, peering out from a corner of the window.
Felix climbed out of his car and stretched. He made a beeline for his workshop, but Natalia cut him off before he could get past the house.
“Felix.”
He frowned. “Nat. Now is not the time. I’ve got an experiment I need to tweak.” A mosquito buzzed past his ear and he swatted it.
“You’re late,” she said, folding her arms.
“Late for what? You’re not waiting to have dinner, are you?”
“No, but I have a guest who wants to talk to you.”
“Who?”
“Isaac.”
“Isaac Skinner? You’re joking.”
“I’m not. He’s in the kitchen right now.”
Felix gestured wildly for a few seconds before finding his voice. “Why? He tried to kill me!”
“Well, he also mowed the lawn. Like you promised to last week. And the week before that. And the week before that.”
“I would’ve done it this week,” Felix said weakly, looking around at the trimmed grass. He hadn’t even noticed the difference.
Natalia shrugged. “Well, you’re too late. I told him that you two could talk if he took care of the yard, and he certainly delivered.”
“You sold me out for a lawn?”
“Could you skip the melodrama for one fucking second and just do me a favor?”
“He tried to stab me to death, Nat! Why would I agree to talk to him?”
“Oh my God.” Natalia threw up her hands. “He’s not going to kill you! You are so—so—”
“Look, if he’d shown up in your room with a knife—”
“—and everyone I knew said it wasn’t him? Given SEIDR’s track record with doppelgangers? I would probably assume he’s telling the truth.”
“I guess that makes you an idiot.”
“No, I’m pretty sure you’re just a coward.”
They stood facing each other, huffing, their faces mirroring stubborn frustration. A toad croaked from somewhere in the yard.
“Ten minutes,” Natalia said.
Felix sighed heavily. “Ugh. Fine. But if he murders me, the blood is on your hands.”
“I can live with that.”
“And I’ll haunt you.”
“Good. I’d never expect a little thing like death to stop you from pissing me off.”
Felix had to smile at that. They trudged back toward the house.
When the pair walked in, Isaac expected some kind of confrontation, but Felix just rolled his eyes and stalked past him.
“Where are the kids?” he asked.
“Otto took them to their piano lessons,” Natalia said. “They should be back soon.”
He grunted, turning toward Isaac. “Let’s get this over with.”
“We could talk in the shed?” Isaac suggested.
“Absolutely not.”
“You two are welcome to use the dining room,” Natalia said. “I’ll be upstairs.”
She swept up the flight of stairs, leaving Felix and Isaac eyeing each other warily.
By silent agreement, they sat at opposite ends of the long dining table. The room had an old, stuffy smell wafting up from the carpet. The walls were lined with black-and-white photographs of stormy, threatening skies and desolate prairies.
Isaac waited for Felix to say something, but the weaver simply glowered at him from across the room.
“Okay,” Isaac began. “Let’s accept, at least for the sake of this conversation, that I have a doppelganger, and I never tried to kill you. Could you tell me about the night when Caasi showed up? Just run through everything you remember.”
“Is this some kind of sick game where you pretend you weren’t there?”
Isaac took a long, deep breath to replace the scream that was building up in his throat. “I wasn’t there, okay? Or I would be finishing the job right now. I promise.”
Felix rolled his eyes. “Sure.” He leaned back, putting his feet up on the table. Grass clippings and dirt were crusted onto the soles of his shoes. “If you really want me to tell you all about it, you’re gonna have to answer one question first.”
“Fine. What question?”
“How did you find my sister?”
Isaac blinked. “Raimes told me she might be able to help.”
“Did he tell you our address?”
“What? No. She drove me here.”
“Oh.” Felix scratched his chin. “Okay.”
“So can you tell me what happened?”
“I suppose. You’d better listen well, because I’m not going to repeat any of this.”
Isaac leaned forward. This was, for all intents and purposes, his last chance.
“It was the middle of Sunday night. I was in my workshop, doing some research work. I heard a sound behind me and turned around.” Felix pointed at Isaac. “The door never opened, so I was pretty surprised to see you standing there. You were holding a knife in one hand and a big vase in the other.”
“It’s a samovar.”
“Samovar. Whatever. You lunged at me with the knife and started swinging it like crazy.”
“Did I—he—say anything?”
“No. But you looked mad. Unreasonably mad, considering you were the one attacking me.” Felix examined his fingernails, picking at the corner of his thumb. “So I dodged out of the way and avoided getting my vital organs punctured by your flailing. It was pretty uncoordinated, honestly. And then I kicked you and you dropped the va—samovar and disappeared.”
“You kicked Caasi?”
“Yes.”
“And he disappeared?”
“I told you I wasn’t going to repeat any of this,” Felix said. He started winding a lock of hair around his finger. “But yes. He vanished into thin air. Right in front of my face.”
“That’s it?”
“It’s not a terribly exciting story, I know. Sorry to disappoint. Are you satisfied?”
Isaac frowned. The weaver had stopped meeting his eyes, and was now entirely focused on fidgeting with his hair. His voice kept dropping lower and lower as the conversation went on.
Something felt off. So Isaac pressed, “Did you notice anything else? Any details about him?”
“He was dressed in some kind of tunic. It looked very old-fashioned. And he had some blood on him,” Felix said, his mouth twisting. “Just a bit.”
“On the knife?”
“No. Well, not that I saw. It was very clean. Completely white. Actually … ” Felix hesitated, as if he weren’t sure if he should continue, and then shrugged. “It looked like a bone.”
“Shaped like a bone? Or made out of bone?”
“It was curved and the handle was rough, not polished. It looked like the top half of a femur or something. It was sort of … porous.”
“Sounds like you got a pretty good look at it.”
“I did,” Felix said. “While you were trying to stab me.”
Isaac didn’t know how to respond to that. He looked down at the table.
Eventually, the weaver murmured, “It was too sharp. That was the first thing I noticed.”
“Knives are supposed to be sharp.”
“The cutting edge was—look, I can’t describe it. The edge divided my sight, and the room, into two … pieces. The whole line along the blade changed the shape of the space around it.” Felix glowered across the table. “I know that sounds crazy.”
“It sounds interesting,” Isaac said cautiously. “But I don’t know what it means.”
“It was too sharp. Like I said.”
A scrap of memory drifted across Isaac’s mind—the clean edges of the reality rift in Boston, the blue lines ending so abruptly and so perfectly.
Thinking out loud, he said softly, “Is it possible … in any way … to cut the fabric of reality?”
“Uh. No.” Felix snorted. “It’s reality. It’s not like … ugh. They should make everybody take Weaving 101. At least it would stop people from asking the dumbest questions. The distilled fabric might seem like a thread, but it’s not. Imagine it like the fundamental substance of the universe we inhabit, down to the sub-atomic level. They are one and the same. Cutting it would be like chopping physics in half. Like slicing math down the middle. It can’t be done.”
“Oh.”
“But if anything could do it,” Felix said quietly, in spite of himself, “it would have to be that knife.”
“It’s been ten minutes!” Natalia called from the top of the stairs. “Are you still alive, Felix?”
“I suppose,” Felix said, pushing himself back from the table. “Are we done here?”
“I guess we are,” Isaac muttered.
Felix returned to his workshop in a hurry, while Natalia offered to drive Isaac back to the Institute.
Isaac pretended to think about it, but he knew in his heart that he couldn’t go back. He had nothing. He didn’t need the humiliation of admitting it face-to-face. Being honest with himself was hard enough.
“Could you give me a ride back to my place, actually?” he asked. “It’s a little further north, but it shouldn’t take too long.”
He gave Natalia his address and she drove until the dark grass was replaced by drifts of snow. Eventually she turned down the gravel road that led to Isaac’s house. It was shuttered and dark, hidden in a thicket of trees.
Isaac thanked her, went inside and got a fire started. For a little while, he was warmed and cheered by the simple fact that he was home. Surrounded by safe, familiar things, his time at SEIDR seemed distant and faded. It was like he’d never left at all.
He made a small dinner and a cup of tea and climbed up into the loft. It was a low, triangular space with a cozy bed and two gable windows.
The night had grown old. Perhaps it was already Friday.
Isaac lay sprawled across his bed, eating his microwave noodles and sipping lemon ginger tea. It was time to face the facts: he had no idea how Caasi was jumping from one place to another, appearing and vanishing in the blink of an eye.
He considered the impossibly sharp knife, but it didn’t explain much. Perhaps his doppelganger had cut himself a path through Boston, but there was no rift in SEIDR’s museum. Or Felix’s workshop. The teleportation and the knife—the samovars and the subway ticket—none of it made any sense.
He had nothing. Not a clue, not a whisper, not a snowball’s chance in hell.
Isaac sighed and rolled onto his stomach, his head hanging off the edge of the mattress. He was far too tired to fall asleep, and drained of everything but a dull, heavy disappointment. It would have been better if SEIDR never came to his door, tempting him with the possibility of Oshun before yanking it away.
What a waste of time and hope. Still, at least he was home. There was no reason to delude himself any further. He would never go back.