Zayn had learned early that people broke in two ways.
Some shattered loudly—screaming, begging, throwing themselves against their cage until they tore their own Threads apart.
Others broke quietly.
Those were the ones he preferred.
They were easier to use.
***
Sera sat at Mera's table, fingers wrapped around a chipped mug. Her hands shook, but she kept them flat on the wood, as if pinning herself in place. The room was empty except for the three of them; Renn had been sent out "to find bandages," which was true and also an excuse.
"You shouldn't have brought her here," Mera said, leaning against the wall with her arms folded. "If the Temple's watching flagged names, they'll start sniffing around your little rescue."
"Good," Zayn said. "Let them sniff. Dogs that follow the wrong scent are dogs not guarding the door I use."
Sera's gaze flicked between them. "You talk like this is a game," she said hoarsely.
Zayn met her eyes.
"This is not a game," he said. "Games have rules people agree on. This is hunger. The only rule is who eats."
He watched the words land.
Sera flinched, then straightened.
"You saved me," she said. "I owe you. I hate that."
"Excellent," Zayn thought. "Debts wrapped in resentment last the longest."
Aloud, he said, "You owe me nothing."
Mera raised an eyebrow. Sera's eyes narrowed.
"You just—" Sera began.
"I made a choice," Zayn interrupted gently. "To remove you from a path that ended with your Thread ripped out and your body used as a tool. That choice benefits me. You are useful. That is all."
Silence thinned the air.
Most people, given that speech, would object. They would insist they were more than tools. They would sputter about dignity, morality, gratitude.
Sera did none of that.
Her jaw clenched. "Then use me properly," she said. "Don't drag me out of one cage to leave me dangling in another."
Zayn smiled, small and approving.
"A good answer," he said. "You learn quickly."
He leaned forward, folding his hands.
"Here is what I want," he said. "I want the clinics. I want names, layouts, rites. I want to know which wards tear Threads and which only whisper to them. I want to know where they keep those they call 'hopeless'. In return, you want… what?"
Sera's fingers tightened on the mug.
"My brother back," she said. "Not… like he is now. Whole."
Zayn tilted his head.
"You ask for a miracle," he said. "Not a trade."
"I don't care what you call it," she said. "If the Temple earned his emptiness, then they can lose something too."
Zayn watched her for a long moment.
Inside, his thoughts were cold and precise.
"Option one," he counted. "Tell her the truth: her brother's Thread has been shredded and fed to a Well. Impossible to retrieve. She will break loudly. Useless, but honest. Option two: Lie. Promise. Use her anger as leash. Option three: Tell a partial truth. Offer a different kind of revenge."
He let silence stretch until it hurt.
Then he said, "Your brother is gone."
Sera's face went white.
"If you're looking for comfort," Zayn continued evenly, "Mera has tea. Renn has pity. They will both tell you what you want to hear. I will not."
Sera's lips trembled. "You didn't even look," she whispered.
"I saw the Well," Zayn said. "I saw husks crawl out, stuffed with stolen Threads. I saw the Temple's experiments. They do not 'heal' Fray; they strip people down and use what's left to patch their precious Loom."
His voice stayed calm, almost gentle.
"Whatever it is wearing your brother's face now," he said, "is not the boy you remember. It is a mask stretched over absence."
Tears spilled over Sera's lashes. She didn't wipe them.
"You can't know that," she said.
"I can," Zayn replied. "Because I saw what happens when their work fails. Because one of their dead things looked at me and recognised what I am."
Sera's hands shook harder.
"And what are you?" she asked.
Zayn smiled.
"Empty," he said. "By choice, not by force. That is the difference between us and the Temple. They hollow. I carve."
He let that sit.
Then he softened his tone, just a fraction.
"I cannot give your brother back," he said. "No one can. But I can make sure the people who did this never do it again. I can tear the clinics out of this city's Threads the way they tore him out of yours."
Sera swallowed. "How?"
"By understanding them," Zayn said. "From the inside. Through you."
There it was. The hook.
He watched her rage war with grief, her need for something—anything—she could strike against.
"If I do this," she said quietly, "if I help you destroy them… what happens to me?"
Zayn considered lying.
He didn't.
"Most people used in a war between monsters die early and cheaply," he said. "If you want better odds, you will need to be more ruthless than they expect."
Her laugh was wet and bitter.
"You're asking me to become like you," she said.
"No," Zayn said. "I'm asking you to stop pretending that refusing to act makes you better than the people who do."
He leaned closer.
"You sold Temple secrets to save your brother," he said. "That was not a holy act. It was a selfish one. Good. Selfishness is honest. Now, instead of selling doors to gangs, sell knowledge to me. At least my lies will be cleaner."
She flinched as he put her worst choices into clear words.
Then, slowly, she nodded.
"All right," she whispered. "Tell me what you want to know."
He did.
He asked about clinic intakes, about which priests smiled too wide, about the order of rites. He asked about the hymn they sang before bindings, about the colour of Thread‑smoke when something went wrong. He asked which corridors people never came back from.
Sera answered in a low, shaking voice.
Mera watched, face unreadable, as Zayn gently peeled Sera's memories open and laid them out on the table like knives, choosing which to pick up and which to leave.
Every so often, he slipped in something else: a compliment, a cutting observation, a seed.
"You noticed that detail. Good."
"That hesitation? That's why they marked you as weak."
"You feel guilty about living when he didn't. Use that. Turn it into spite. Spite survives longer than grief."
He saw the words lodge in her.
Dark empathy, some would have called it: understanding someone's pain well enough to weaponize it.
To Zayn, it was simply efficiency.
"People drown in their own emotions," he thought. "If you give them a direction to swim, they will call you saviour. Even if the current leads straight into hell."
By the time he was done, Sera was pale and hollow‑eyed, but her shaking had stopped.
"You're bleeding," Mera said quietly.
Zayn blinked.
He glanced down.
Blood stained his sleeve where his earlier burn had cracked open. He hadn't noticed.
"Minor," he said.
Sera frowned. "Why?" she asked. "Why push yourself this far? If you only care about yourself, why not flee this cursed city and let it eat itself?"
Zayn looked at her, considering how much to show.
Then he let a sliver of his real darkness surface.
"Because running means leaving the knife in someone else's hand," he said softly. "And I do not trust anyone but myself with a blade this sharp."
He held up his bloody arm.
"This world," he said, "tried to throw me away once. The Loom tried to record me as a lesson—a warning about hubris. It failed. I am not content to merely survive its second attempt. I intend to edit the lesson."
He leaned back.
"You think I am doing this for you? For your brother? For Mera? No. I am doing it because I refuse to live in a pattern someone else wrote. If I have to break clinics and Seers and temples to get a blank page, I will."
Sera's voice was barely a whisper. "What happens to us when you're done?"
Zayn's eyes were very calm.
"If you live," he said, "you will have the privilege of deciding what to do with a world that no longer remembers what it used to be. If you die, you will not care."
Mera shook her head slowly. "You don't even pretend," she said. "Not even a little."
"Pretending wastes time," Zayn replied. "Honesty is faster. It lets everyone see exactly how far they're willing to fall."
Sera pushed her chair back and stood.
"I'll get you more details tomorrow," she said, voice steadier now, eyes darker. "There are records I can copy. Roster lists. Patient tags. You'll need those if you want to hit the right places."
"You're not going back there," Mera said sharply.
Sera looked at Zayn, not Mera.
"If I don't," she said, "they'll notice I'm gone. They'll come here. You said it yourself: I'm already on their lists."
Zayn met her gaze.
"She is right," he said. "They will hunt a fleeing lamb harder than a quiet one in the fold. For now, she is safer inside the mouth than at its feet."
Mera slammed her hand on the table. "You're sending her back into the clinics as bait."
"Bait implies I value the fish more than the worm," Zayn said mildly. "In this case, I am interested in both."
Sera flinched—but she didn't back down.
"Tell me what to look for," she said.
He did.
When she finally left, hood up, shoulders squared with brittle resolve, Mera rounded on Zayn.
"You're going to get her killed," she hissed.
"Probably," Zayn said. "If she's careless. If she's unlucky. If the Temple is faster than I am."
"And you're all right with that?" Mera demanded.
"No," Zayn said.
She blinked.
"I prefer she live," he said. "Alive tools are flexible. Dead ones are only lessons. But I will not warp my strategy around the survival of one frightened acolyte. That is how heroes die and worlds stay the same."
Mera stared at him with something like horror.
"You sound proud of that," she said.
He shrugged.
"Pride is for things you didn't have to pay for," he said. "I will pay for every absence I make. That is not pride. That is accounting."
He moved toward the stairs.
"Where are you going now?" Mera asked.
"To rest," he said. "Tomorrow, I start planning how to dismantle a religion without anyone noticing until the altars are already gone."
Mera's laugh was bitter. "And if the Loom itself resists?"
Zayn paused halfway up.
"Then," he said, "I will teach it a trick it has never seen before."
He looked back, eyes cold and almost amused.
"How to forget that it ever tried."
Up in his small room, alone, he washed dried blood from his arm and stared at his reflection in the warped glass.
"This is who you are now," he told himself silently. "A man who rescues a girl from one horror just to feed her to a different fire, because the flame is his."
For a flicker of a moment, Elric Veyne's ghost rose in the mirror—eyes sickened, mouth forming the word monster.
Zayn smiled slowly at his own reflection.
"Exactly," he thought. "At least one of us has finally learned to accept it."
Outside, the Temple bells began a low, measured toll.
Under the clinics, in the sealed room where Sera Danel's body lay strapped, the heart monitor skipped a beat.
Then another.
The thing waking up inside her skull smiled without lips.
It remembered nothing of who she had been.
But it remembered a column of light, a man who erased moments, and a single word burned into the Loom:
Empty.