Chapter 123
splitting. The white-fire seam gapes open, a widening canyon of light between the violet half and the rose half. The two halves lurch apart, then are dragged back together, then lurch further apart.
on the rim, both hands out, every gold stitch on the seam straining back to her fingers, her face grey with effort.
Kompis and Vigolas climb out of the cleft just as it tears wider behind them, Mingus scrambling up after.
Severer skiffs everywhere, Severers swarming over both halves of the star, shears snipping Orka's stitches one by one. The crew is fighting apart, still cut, still calling every move out loud.
gold script on his arms blazing. He doesn't draw a gun. He drops to his knees beside Mingus.
between man and dog: two loose gold ends drifting a hand's width apart in the air, warm, waiting.
reaching into the air and taking hold of both cut ends. He can touch them now. They're warm, like the fur of a sleeping dog.
looking into Mingus's kind brown eyes, and he doesn't feel anything. No pull. Nothing tells him to do it. It's a choice.
He ties them: a fisherman's knot, tight, simple, the first knot his father ever taught him. The gold thread closes between them.
The golden pulse line springs back to life: ba-DUM. ba-DUM. Brighter than it has ever been.
gasping, flooded. Everything he couldn't feel comes back at once, and more, because now he feels both ends: his love for the dog, and the dog's love for him, at the same time.
Kompis on his knees on a splitting star with his arms around a golden retriever, both of them glowing gold, a single blazing thread knotted between them like a lifeline. Gold script crawls up both his arms, the Lust Codex alive.
And Kompis looks up at his crew: five figures fighting apart, alone, cut. Five cut threads, their loose ends drifting toward him in the starlight like strands of hair in water.
Kompis runs through the battle tying:
Past Rougeina mid-Swap, he catches the cut thread between her and Smurjan and ties it in one motion. She lands exactly at Smurjan's back without looking, and they both feel it.
Past Drekk, he ties the thread between Drekk and the sleeping troll. Drekk spins and catches Trollmage before a Severer's shears reach him.
Past Kali, he ties her to everyone at once, a tangle of gold knots. She shrieks with delight.
staggering, because every knot puts both ends through him. Rougeina's fierce loyalty, Drekk's grief and gruffness, Kali's chaos, all of it in his chest at once. His nose bleeds.
last, the cut thread between them drifting. Kompis grabs both ends.
He ties it. Vigolas gasps: the pull, the warmth, the friendship, all back at once, and he feels Kompis's end of it too, flowing the other way.
The crew, re-tied, moves as one:
Rougeina Swaps and Smurjan is already there; Triple Pulse plus Moth-Swap, three Severers down in one beat.
Vigolas's Emerald Knuckle goes where Kompis feels he should aim it.
Drekk swings, and Kali borrows his sin for sixty seconds without asking (the knot makes it feel like lending).
The Four-Gun Volley: Fru Gnista lights the star, Tyst silently snaps a dozen shears, Lilla Ulv bounces between skiffs, Ivar roars.
The Severers break and scramble for their skiffs. The crew stands together on the rim, tied, breathing as one.
still holding the seam, every gold stitch she has straining, the star still splitting. Her hands are white to the wrist.
At the far end of the seam, Sax stands, alone, his slim shears opened around the white fire a mile long, closing slowly, inch by inch.
calm, looking across at the crew, tied again, glowing.
turning his shears, not at the star, not at the crew: at Orka. At the air in front of her mouth.
mid-sentence, holding the seam.
closing on the gold "&" glyph that forms in the air between her two balloons. snip.
her mouth moving, and the second half of her sentence doesn't connect. Two balloons, side by side, with nothing between them: no bridge, no "&".
(Nothing joins them.)
Every gold stitch on the seam lets go at once.
The Dawnstar splits. The two halves, violet and rose, wrench apart with a sound like a bell cracking, a canyon of white fire between them widening by the second, and the crew is on one half, Orka is on the edge, Sax is on the other.
on her knees on the edge of the violet half, reaching across a widening gap of fire toward the rose half, her mouth open, unable to say the one word that would hold it.