Gates of Thread and Stone(77)

“Reev, stop,” I said, tugging at his hand.

Kalla’s heels clicked against the floor as she circled Ninu. He lay on his stomach, face angled away from me. No sentinels appeared to carry him away.

“Ninu held ultimate control over the collars,” she said. “Without him, Reev will recover shortly, although Ninu’s mark should be removed from the collar as a precaution.”

Relief made my body sag. I squeezed Reev’s hand.

Kalla cocked her head, a sudden awareness in her eyes. I searched the room. I felt it, too. The threads, the current, time itself—had stopped. The view from the window revealed the smoke from distant chimney pipes caught in still-frame, like a picture, and Grays fixed in place like figurines amid a miniature cityscape. The entire city, everything outside this room, had been frozen.

“Congratulations, Kai,” someone said. “You’ve liberated Ninurta.”

The voice was worse than Ninu’s, not because it burrowed beneath my skin but because I knew, deep down, that it was familiar. I knew it the way I knew the threads that currently snared the city like a giant spider’s web, inescapable even by me because, while I could manipulate them, he had woven the threads and designed their pattern.

The air in the room quivered, and then a man was standing next to Kalla. It wasn’t his presence that surprised me. It was the fact that I had felt him coming. Avan clasped my shoulder. I reached up to rest my hand over his.

“This is Kronos,” Kalla said. “Although I don’t think an introduction is really necessary.”

He didn’t look like anyone I remembered. But then I saw his eyes: watery blue like the icicles that formed on the tree branches in winter. He smiled. I didn’t smile back.

Any sense of relief I had before disappeared. I brushed away Avan’s hand and released Reev’s. My body tensed, waiting.

He extended his arm, the black folds of his cloak rustling in a current that only he and I could see. Kalla touched her fingers to his raised forearm, a simple but familiar gesture.

“You have questions,” she said to me. “But the answers have always been there. Ninu assumed that when R-22 disappeared, Irra had taken him for his hollows. So how did Ninu find Reev again?”

“The energy drive,” I said warily.

“And who do you think told Reev about the energy drive? Who decided to hold it there, practically on top of the Labyrinth?”

My mind ran through the possibilities. “But you couldn’t have known. You couldn’t have predicted that I would be attacked, that I would need to—”

I saw the face of the woman who’d attacked me that day in the alley. White skin, black-streaked Mohawk, and bright-red lips, the only splash of color against her pale features.

I felt as if the air had been knocked out of me again. “It was all you,” I breathed.

“You’re softhearted, Kai. I knew you wouldn’t leave me to die in that alley. And I made sure that the tax notice was delivered directly to Reev.”

I cupped my head in my hands. The attack; the energy drive; tricking Reev’s boss in order to send me to the Rider, the only person with the means of sneaking me into the White Court. So I could—

“You did all this,” I said, looking between Kalla and Kronos. “Why? To get me here to kill Ninu? How did you know who Reev was anyway? That he and I—”

“You know the answer to that,” Kronos said.

When he moved, his hair—as long as my own—rippled like water, its color shifting, liquid strands in constant motion. As with the rest of the Infinite, I couldn’t pinpoint his age. He was at once young and wizened. Looking at him was like trying to focus on stones resting in the riverbed beneath the swaying waves.

“Who am I?” he asked.

With absolute certainty, I said, “My father.”

Someone grabbed my wrist. I started, backing away only to realize it was Reev.

When our eyes met, I could see it was really him. A brief rush of joy filled me. “Reev.”

He opened his mouth, but Kronos cut him off.

“Welcome back, Reev.” He looked at me. “His final mission before his purification had been against me—Ninu needed his full force of sentinels to invade my palace. But I’d known at once that Reev was different from the others. His connection to Ninu had already begun to fray. I read into his past, his desire for freedom, and I granted it. In exchange, I’d left him a most precious charge.”

So he was the one who’d freed Reev. My dad. It felt strange just to think the words. My dad.

Reev’s hand tightened around my wrist. He had been meant to find me, to take me in. For some reason, knowing we had been designed to meet didn’t bother me. Reev was meant to be mine.

“To hide me,” I said.

“Ninu was one of the few Infinite with the power to, in a way, counter my own. You probably realized that in your duel.”

I nodded. It had been unbelievably frustrating.

“The blood of descendants who are not our own will not kill us, but it does weaken us. Ninu had managed to injure me in the battle before I could force him and his sentinels from my palace. But as long as I refused to reverse the River for him, I knew he would target you in my place. I couldn’t protect you.”

He had left me on a riverbank with no memory of who I was, no family, and no understanding of what I could do. The truth finally sank in. Ninu had been right. It was cruel. Letting me think I was human—the only thing I knew how to be because I sure as drek didn’t remember being one of them—it was too cruel.