Location: The Fold — Node 01
Time: Undefined — The Holding
---
Zhang Han woke up in a chair.
It was not a comfortable chair. It was the kind of chair that had been built for a purpose other than comfort—iron legs, iron arms, iron back, bolted to the floor of a room that had no windows and no door he could see. The air was cold and very still.
His wrists were shackled to the armrests. His ankles were shackled to the legs.
And around his torso, clamped snug against his ribs and his spine, was a collar of dark metal—segmented, fitted, humming very faintly. It did not press. It did not hurt. It simply sat there, and the longer he sat with it, the more he understood that it was not sitting on him. It was sitting between him and the world.
He could not feel the weave.
He tried. He reached for it the way he had reached for it every day of his life since he was a boy—the way a man reaches for his own hand—and there was nothing there. Not a gap. Not a block. Just absence.
He looked down at the collar. Then he looked up.
"Who dares," he said.
His voice came out hoarse. He swallowed, and tried again, and this time it had some of its old edge in it.
"Who dares lock me in this—this—do you have any idea who you are messing with? Do you have any idea what I will do to you? Do you have any conception of—"
"Mate."
The voice came from the corner of the room.
Zhang Han's head snapped toward it.
Gerry was sitting in a folding chair against the wall with his feet up on a crate. He had a paper bag in one hand and a hot dog in the other—a proper hot dog, with mustard and onions and a little paper sleeve around the bottom—and he was chewing with the slow, contented rhythm of a man who had nowhere to be and nothing to worry about.
He swallowed. He took another bite.
"You want some?" he said, around the mouthful. "There's another one in the bag. It's got relish. I don't know if you're a relish man."
Zhang Han stared at him.
"You—you pesky brat—you don't know who I am. You clearly don't know who I am. You will unhand me this instant or I will—"
Gerry took another bite of the hot dog. He chewed. He swallowed. He licked a smear of mustard off his thumb.
"—or you'll what?" he said.
Zhang Han opened his mouth. Closed it.
He reached for the weave again—instinct—and found nothing. Nothing at all.
The collar hummed.
His breath caught. His eyes dropped to the metal band around his chest. Then to his wrists. Then to his ankles.
"What," he said, "is this."
"It's called a Mute-Lock," Gerry said. "Neutralizes the frequency. Keeps a walker from walking, if you take my meaning."
"You—you can't—I am a Weave Walker. I am a sophisticated Weave Walker. I know the weave better than—"
"Mate." Gerry took another bite. "You're not walking anywhere. I've seen you try. The collar's not going to blink."
Zhang Han's jaw worked. His hands clenched against the armrests.
"Fine," he said, and his voice had shifted—lower now, smoother, the voice of a man who had spent his whole life negotiating his way out of rooms. "What do you want? Money? I have money. Power? I have more than you could spend in a lifetime. Accolades? A job? A position? I can give you any of it. I can give you a favor that will set you up for the rest of your life. All you have to do is—" he tried to gesture with his shackled hand, "—loosen this. Just a little. Just enough."
Gerry rolled his eyes.
"Right. I untie an elitist SS-ranked super soldier. Who also happens to be a Weave Walker. Not just any ordinary one—one who actually knows the weave." He took another bite. "Yeah. That's a brilliant idea."
Zhang Han went very still.
"What," he said, slowly, "did you just say?"
"I said you're a Weave Walker."
"You—you know what a Weave Walker is. You know what the weave is."
"Yeah."
"Then who are you? Who are you really?"
Gerry considered this.
Then he leaned forward, took the hot dog out of the wrapper, and pressed it gently against Zhang Han's mouth.
Zhang Han made a muffled sound of outrage.
"Eat your hot dog," Gerry said, "and stop asking questions. I'm the guy with the key. That's all you need."
---
Gerry pulled the chair back and stood. He left Zhang Han chewing on the hot dog and walked out of the room, down a corridor that had no windows and no doors.
The corridor was lit by a string of small white lights that ran along the ceiling. The floor was smooth and cold and slightly translucent, and under the surface of it, if you looked closely, there was something like movement—not water, not smoke, just motion in the dark.
At the end of the corridor, the building opened into a room with a window.
The window was the strangest thing in the Fold. It looked out—not onto a street, not onto a courtyard, not onto any sky he had ever seen—onto a darkness that was not empty. There were currents in it. Slow, deep, spiraling currents, like the ocean seen from a very great height. And every now and then there was a flicker, a distant ripple of light—like something swimming, very far away.
Gerry stopped at the window and looked out.
Behind him, in the sparring room, someone shouted.
---
The room was a cube, padded floor and padded walls, and in the middle of it, two men were trying to kill each other in the careful, practiced way that men do when they are not actually trying to kill each other.
Mateo had his cane. Miguel did not. That was the arrangement—Mateo had been practicing with the cane ever since they'd been given the veinframes, and Miguel had been practicing the counter, and they had been at it for three hours and neither of them had landed a clean blow.
Mateo came in with a redirect—a flat, sweeping motion with the cane, catching Miguel's lead leg and turning it aside. The motion had a shine to it, a thin layer of color riding on the cane like heat over asphalt.
Miguel answered with a slam—a straight-down strike that came from above and should have ended the fight immediately. It did not, because Mateo was no longer where the slam went.
Gerry watched from the doorway.
"The collar's still on him," he said. "The one on the other guy, I mean."
Miguel didn't answer. He was breathing hard.
"How are you holding up?" Gerry asked.
Miguel straightened. "Not steady," he said. "The—whatever these things are doing to the floor when we hit it—it's getting easier to feel, but not easier to control."
Mateo lowered his cane. "It's the same for me."
Gerry nodded. He did not explain what it was.
He didn't know what it was either.
---
He walked back to the window.
The currents outside had shifted—slow, deep, spiraling—and somewhere very far away there was a flicker of light that was not a star and not a ship. Just light, moving.
He looked down at his hands.
He had not felt them shake in years. Not since the night his mother had—
He stopped the thought.
His chest was tight. His eyes were wet. He wiped them with the back of his hand and told himself it was the cold.
The currents outside turned slowly in the dark.
---
It was snowing.
That was the first thing he remembered, always—not the cold, not the fear, not the pain. The snow. It fell in fat white flakes from a sky the color of old pewter, and it settled on everything like a slow, gentle burial. The trees at the edge of the road were black and bare and caught the snow on their branches. The road itself had gone white.
He had been eight.
He had a toy plane in his hand—a little wooden thing, painted red, with a propeller that actually turned if you blew on it. He was running along the path beside the road, holding the plane out in front of him, pretending the plane was flying and that the snow was a cloud layer and that he was up there with it instead of down here.
He did not see the man until it was too late.
The man's boot came out of nowhere and caught him in the ankle. He went down hard, the plane flying out of his hand, the snow coming up to meet him. He tried to get up. Another man grabbed him by the back of the coat and yanked him upright.
"Got 'im."
"Check the bag."
"Nothing in it but the toy."
There were three of them. Hooded. Face-covered. Their boots crunched on the snow as they closed in.
"Let go of my boy."
The voice was calm. It was not loud. It came from the road, from the edge of the trees, and it carried the way a bell carries in cold air.
The three men turned.
A woman stood at the edge of the road.
She wore a long coat the color of old blood, and a hood, and a wide-brimmed hat pulled low over her face. In her right hand she carried a cane—long, dark wood, silver at the tip—and she did not lean on it. She held it the way a swordsman holds a sword.
She was blind. Gerry had always known that. The hat and the hood were there to hide the milky sheen in her eyes, and she had never, ever needed them to see.
"Unhand my boy," she said.
The man holding Gerry laughed. "Sure. Where is he? I'd like to—"
She moved.
It was not fast, exactly. It was certain. She stepped off the road, into the snow, and her cane came up and over in a flat, precise arc. The man on the left swung his hook—a steel hook that hooked across the knuckles, honed and cruel—and she ducked under it before he had finished swinging, and the silver tip of the cane slammed into his neck. He went backward, gagging.
The second man came in with a knife. She caught his wrist with the cane's shaft, turned it, and put the tip into his eye. He screamed and fell.
The third and fourth came together, and this was the part he had never been able to describe. They swung their hooks and their knives and she was between them, and then she was behind them, and then they were on the ground and she was standing over them with the cane at her side, unhurried, breathing evenly, as if she had done nothing more strenuous than cross a room.
The man holding Gerry looked at his companions. Then at her.
"Let him go," she said, "and I'll let you walk."
The man let Gerry go.
Gerry scrambled, and stumbled, and ended up behind her, and stood there in the snow with his heart going like a rabbit's and his hands shaking and his breath coming out in little white clouds.
The man looked at her again. He did not walk.
He grabbed for her.
The palm came up. It was a flat, calm motion—fingers together, wrist loose—and the palm pushed forward, and a short, bright flame jumped from it. It was orange and hot and gone in half a second, and the air around it warmed and the snow beneath it scorched and the man it landed on—
The man it landed on was not a man anymore.
There was a moment of something that was not smoke and not fire and not anything Gerry had words for. And then there was nothing. The snow where the man had been was black and melted, and the air smelled of clean heat, and the man was gone.
She turned and picked him up.
"It's all right," she said. Her voice was warm and low and had nothing in it of the thing that had just happened. "I've got you. I've got you."
He held her as hard as he could. He was crying. He could not remember when he had started.
She hushed him.
"Come on," she said. "Let's go home. You're going to have hot chocolate and you're going to tell me about the plane."
He nodded into her shoulder.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
---
Gerry stood by the window of the Fold with his eyes wet and his chest tight and the currents outside turning slowly in the dark.
He did not hear Elijah come up behind him.
He did not hear him stop a few steps away and stand there, watching him, with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted and his eyes—in a way that only Elijah's eyes did—not quite looking at him.
He's crying, Elijah thought. And his frequency—
He paused.
His frequency is… there.
Wonko's voice came from somewhere behind him, dry and measured.
What is it?
Elijah did not answer for a moment. He looked at Gerry—at the shape of the frequency around him, the faint, quiet, slumbering shimmer that had been there all along and that nobody had ever noticed, not even Gerry himself.
He has it, Elijah said.
Has what?
The frequency. The weave. Whatever you want to call it. He has it. Elijah's mental voice carried a note of quiet surprise. It's dormant. It's always been dormant. I've been standing next to this man for weeks and I never noticed.
Wonko's voice was quiet. He's a Sutran?
I don't know if I'd go that far. But there's something in him. Something that's been asleep. Elijah tilted his head. Look at Lucian's. Look at Tyla's.
What about Tyla?
She was a weave walker—fodder for the Halcyon base. They sent her to capture me. She's got the bloodline too. Faint, but it's there. Elijah paused. The three of them—Gerry, Lucian, Tyla. All three have the frequency.
Wonko was silent for a long moment.
Then: You're not going to tell them, are you.
Not yet. Elijah's lips curved into a small, cold smile. They're lucky they have me. Because I'm going to turn them into cavalry.
You don't need cavalry.
I don't. His smile widened. But they're needed.
You've got quite the ambition, kid, Wonko said. Just hope it doesn't eat you back.
Elijah did not answer that.
He just looked at Gerry—at the slumbering frequency, at the tears on his face, at the memory that had put them there—and let the smile linger.
---