The Shadow Behind the Stars (24 page)

Existence—it will be exactly what we want it to be, with nothing bad and nothing hard and no more terrible questions. No more
why, why, why?

I've spun the thread; it is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

I pass the end to Serena. Her humming has not the hint of a false note; her hands are smooth as silence as they measure the thread.

Xinot takes the place she's marked. Her shears open wide—I think the wool all around makes room, cowering away from the deadly things. The blades straddle the thread. It lies softly in my sister's hand.

I am holding my breath. Serena is staring at the thread, eyes shining brighter even than this place.

My eldest sister brings her blades together—
snap
.

Except there is no
snap
.

The moment her shears have closed and the thread has been
sliced
, it melds back together again, and Xinot is as she was before, her scissors straddling the thread, poised to cut.

She glances at us, and for the first time since Tad died, there is a hint of uncertainty in her face. Then she turns back to the thread, and she
snaps
her blades together again, and again the thread is cut.

And then it melds together, and the scissors spring apart.

I don't know how many times Xinot tries to cut the thread. Too many to count. I forget there is anything but Xinot trying, anything but sharp black shears and glittering wool, anything but this moment.

It happens so many times; if we were human, I think we would maybe have died before Xinot has finally stopped and we are drifting motionless through the wool, staring at the uncut thread.

At last, Serena says,
Maybe if we bring it out into the light.

It takes a moment to understand what she is saying. She means out of the basket, which is where we are. She means somewhere not surrounded by all this wool, somewhere we used to be, a long time ago.

I blink, and then blink again, struggling to remember who I was before. There was something numbing. There were questions we could not answer.
Yes,
I say finally.
Maybe our power does not work in here. None of the gods are here, after all, not even our darkness, not even us.

That is true,
Xinot says.
Maybe we cannot do anything here.

So we take hands again, and I hold my spindle, and Xinot holds her shears and the end of our newly spun thread. We dive up, away from the deep, listening for the opening to the world.

Nothing has happened since we went away. We spent ages in the wool, forgetting who we were, trying again and again to
snap
that thread. But Tad still lies by the side of the road. I catch a glimpse of the oracle still edging away, up over a hill.

In entering the basket, we left time behind. Everything happens there, so nothing does.

Xinot is holding the thread, the one that will start the universe over again. She's marked the place to cut it, where Serena measured it out. She looks up at us, making sure that we want this, too. “If I cut it,” she reminds us, “everything will end.”

Serena says, soft through her tears, “And everything will begin.”

“Just as we want it to,” I say, my voice flat as that numbness returns. “No more pain, no more terrible questions.”

Xinot looks down at the thread, at her dark fingernails exactly at the end. “No more questions,” she says. “Is that what you want?”

Tad's skin is so pale, so glowing, that I think he might be made of starlight. It is a beautiful thing, the way he shines. It is terrible, too, and I say, “Yes, that's what we want. No more heartbreak.”

“No more death,” Serena whispers.

I say, “No more endings.”

Our eldest sister nods, sharp as her blades. “Very well,” she says, with a sort of darkening joy. “For little Taddeo.”

“For Aglaia,” I whisper, and Serena takes my hand.

We watch as Xinot's scissors straddle the thread, that one last time. We watch as they come down fast, together,
slicing
through the first thought, the new breath, the instant that will start it all over exactly as we want.

Snap.

A burning sea.

A frozen fire.

Snow of ash.

Earth of wind.

Silent screams and a shrieking silence.

There is an end to patterns. The world stops spinning. The stars go out.

The universe tears itself apart, and we are to blame.

FIRE.

Dark, orange, filling my lungs with heat, my blood with danger. I turn to my sisters, and they are looking back at me with the same fire in their eyes, consuming them.

We are dreaming of our threads.

Still, here, at the end of this world, our glory gleams in the dark behind our lids, coil upon coil, stretching far into our minds.

They are burning. When Xinot
snapped
that thread, they really did burst into flames out there in our house at the edge of the sea. The waves rise up and the sky falls down and all our glory burns. And still we dream of them.

It's as though as we destroyed them, they leaped from the flames into our thoughts. As if we are their safe home now,
as if they trust us to take care of them, despite what we have done, despite what we have chosen.

We can hear the darkness, too, howling all around us, in a panic as its patterns rip apart. Our threads are separate from the darkness, somehow. They are not angry with us. They are not asking for anything; they only spin and swirl and gleam as they have always done.

We are all three of us in pain as the world crumples. But this, the dreaming of our threads, I think is the most difficult. Even now, none of us can look away from them, our bright glory.

They murmur of what has been, of what would have been, of what happens now as the world falls apart.

Hesper is looking out the front door of her inn as streets split into chasms. She knows this is our fault. She is begging us to stop, to make it right again.

The boy who let us out through the wall is huddled in that dark space with a dozen city folk. They are hoping they will be safe, under so much stone. Of course they are wrong.

Our island, with its surging waves and rushing sky and beautiful, briny wind, is collapsing, whole rows of rocks falling into the sea.

Tad is still dead, so we cannot hear his thread. We cannot listen to all the things he might have been.

We see the oracle screaming. We see the moment when she realizes that this is her fault as much as ours, that if she hadn't
killed the boy, it wouldn't have happened, not yet anyway, not so soon. She falls to her knees on the side of a hill. She puts her head in her hands; she rocks, back and forth, sobbing.

We do not feel for her. There is too much crumbling, and she is only one woman.

Mountains shift and then take off like birds into the sky.

Far-off planets begin to shriek.

The void, the emptiness between the stars, shivers, knowing even it will wink out in the end.

Before it disappears, the sun whispers in my ear, just one thing, my name. He says it as though he loves me. He knows that I have done this, but he is not angry.