The cold, authoritative voice outside the door was a death sentence. James's blood ran cold. He was caught. His brief moment of hope curdled into pure terror.
The lock on the door didn't just click; it audibly sizzled. The wood around it blackened as the metal glowed cherry-red and dripped like wax. With a soft thud, the mechanism gave way, and the door swung inward.
Two figures stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the dim light of the corridor. They wore the seamless grey robes of the Master Weavers' Regulators, their faces hidden behind smooth, entirely featureless masks. The very air around them felt compressed, unnaturally still, as if their personal magic was so perfectly ordered it silenced the world around them. Each held a short, black staff that seemed to drink the light, humming with a low energy that made James's teeth ache. Null-weavers. Tools designed to disable mages.
"The Dissonant," the one on the left said. Its voice was the same as the one from the hall—flat, metallic, and devoid of any human inflection. "Come with us. Resistance is illogical."
Their masked heads tilted in unison toward the bed. "The girl is sick," the right one observed. "Terminal Pattern-decay. She is irrelevant."
That word—irrelevant—snapped James out of his fear-induced paralysis. A hot, defiant anger flared in his chest. Everything he had done, everything he was, was for Sophia. She was the only thing in the world that was relevant.
He had no chance in a real fight. They were trained hunters, and he was a boy who had discovered a strange trick an hour ago. He needed a distraction. Something loud. Something chaotic.
His eyes darted around the room, and his unique sense flickered to life. He looked not at the Regulators themselves—their personal Patterns were like impenetrable fortresses—but at their equipment. The null-weaver staff in the left Regulator's hand was a complex instrument, a tight weave of dozens of Threads. And in any complex machine, there are points of failure.
He saw it: a tiny, almost invisible knot in the Pattern regulating the staff's power flow. It was a minuscule flaw, an imperfection so small no ordinary Weaver would ever notice it.
The Regulators took a synchronized step into the room. It was now or never.
James focused all his will, all his rage, all his fear, on that one tiny knot. He didn't just pull. He tore at it.
The effect was instantaneous and violent. The null-weaver staff didn't just power down; its intricate Pattern shattered. With a deafening CRACK, it erupted in a shower of black sparks. A wave of pure null-magic, chaotic and uncontrolled, blasted through the small apartment.
The magical lights in the ceiling exploded. The warding symbols carved into the doorframe fizzled and died. The Regulator holding the staff was thrown back into his partner, both crying out in surprise as their own magical shields sputtered.
The room was plunged into darkness and chaos. It was the only cover James would get.
Pure adrenaline took over. He lunged for the bed, scooping Sophia's frail, sleeping form into his arms, blanket and all. The window was his only way out. But they were hundreds of feet in the air. A jump was suicide.
His gaze fell on the grimy stone balcony of the apartment building across the narrow alley. He turned his new sense on it, desperately searching for a flaw. He found one in the railing—a weakness in the Thread of [Structural Integrity]. He yanked at it.
Across the alley, a five-foot section of the stone railing silently crumbled into dust and pebbles, leaving a clear, accessible ledge.
The Regulators were already recovering, their featureless masks turning toward him in the gloom. He didn't have time for a second thought. Holding Sophia tight against his chest, he looked at the alley floor far below. He focused on the empty space between the buildings, on the powerful, ever-present Thread of [Gravity]. He couldn't break it, not completely, but maybe he could fray it.
He pulled, and the air around him seemed to thin. The heavy pull of the world lessened for just a moment.
He ran and leaped through the window.
For a terrifying second, he hung in the air, the fall unnaturally slow. Then gravity reasserted itself, and he crashed onto the opposite ledge with a painful, stumbling impact. His ankle screamed in protest, but he was across. He was out.
A high-pitched magical chime, an alarm, echoed from his apartment and spread through the district. They knew he had escaped.
Clutching his sister, James scrambled onto the roof and ran. He fled across the grimy, interconnected rooftops of the Outer Annulus, a world away from the pristine spires of the city center. Behind him, he could hear the Regulators giving chase, their movements unnaturally fast and silent.
He had to get underground.
He spotted a maintenance hatch and wrenched it open, revealing a dark, ladder-lined shaft leading down into the city's underbelly. He descended into the darkness, the sounds of pursuit fading above him. He found himself in the Undercroft, a maze of forgotten service tunnels and massive, groaning pipes. He navigated the metallic labyrinth until he found a small, abandoned storage closet, and finally, mercifully, collapsed inside.
He gently laid Sophia down on the cold floor. The chaotic energy and the rough escape had taken their toll; she was stirring, her face flushed with fever.
The reality of his situation crashed down upon him. He was a fugitive. He had attacked agents of the Master Weavers. He could never go back. He was alone, hiding in the guts of the city with his sick sister, with no food, no money, and a dangerous power he barely understood. He had escaped one trap only to fall into another, much larger one.
Sophia murmured in her sleep, her voice raspy. She was reciting a line from an old nursery rhyme their mother used to sing to them.
"When the Pattern breaks and fades…" she whispered, "…hide beneath the Sinking Grades…"
James had always dismissed it as a child's nonsense rhyme. But the words hit him now with the force of a physical blow. When the Pattern breaks. That's what he did. He broke the Pattern.
And the Sinking Grades. He'd heard whispers of that place. A myth, a ghost story told to frighten young Weavers. A district from the city's founding age that had supposedly lost its connection to the Great Pattern. Its enchantments failed, its foundations crumbled, and it sank down to the toxic, cloud-covered Ground below. A place where magic was said to be dead or unwoven.
A place where the Master Weavers' rules might not apply. A place where a Dissonant event might go unnoticed.
It was impossible. A legend. But it was also the only shred of hope he had.
Huddled in the darkness, with the sounds of the city's inner workings groaning around them, James had a new, impossible goal. He had to find a place that officially didn't exist.