group, and I braced myself against an angular steel post. “You look white as a sheet.”
“It hit me harder than I expected. I’m good.”
“If you’re sure,” he said, peering at me in concern. I waved him off, and he went back to the break, helping each kid find the correct strings.
Eliot joined me at the edge of the stage. “What were you doing?”
“Tuning, I think.” I’d corrected the pitch of a world plenty of times, but it had always been deliberate and difficult. Here, in a relatively stable world, the effort was minimal. “Not on purpose—it was a reflex.”
“Yeah, well, quit having that reflex. Not in front of this many witnesses.”
We rejoined the group just as my dad pulled a slender metal disk, the width of a matchbook, out of his pocket. “You’ve all seen one of these before, yes?”
“It’s a divisi knife,” Logan said, edging forward. “For cutting the threads.”
My dad handed him a piece of linen twine. “Hold it taut,” he said, and addressed the entire class, holding the silvery circle for us to see. “The edges are notched, with blades hidden inside. This allows you to manipulate the divisi without slicing off a finger, or wasting time opening and closing the blades. Once a cleaving begins, there’s no stopping it. Your only recourse is to keep cutting and weaving. If you don’t, both sides of the cut site will unravel.”
I shuddered. A Consort team had finished the cleaving I’d started in Park World. If they hadn’t, the damage would have been worse.
But there was a better way. Simon had strengthened Train World after we’d broken the strings, holding it together long enough for the Free Walkers to cauterize. He’d saved countless Echoes.
Simon was proof of the Consort’s lies—lies my father believed. He had no idea what he was teaching us to do.
With a last, puzzled look, my dad continued. “The idea is to separate the strings you want to cut, and fit the blade around them, like this. . . .” He demonstrated with the length of string Logan was holding out, the divisi tucked in the curve of his forefinger and thumb, slipping it into place. “In a real cleaving, you’ll cut a handful at a time. Take the side that connects to the stable Echo, the one you’re trying to preserve, and trap it against the heel of your hand, maintaining the tension.”
My classmates crowded around to get a better look, Callie towing me along.
“What do you do with the other threads?” asked Eliot.
“Nothing. Once you’ve cut enough of them, the cleaved world will unravel. Your focus should be on the Key World side of the strings so you can weave them back together. Watch.”
With a twist of his wrist, he sliced cleanly through the twine. The upper half dangled limply from Logan’s left hand, but the lower half was held taut between his right hand and my father’s.
“That’s the basic technique,” Shaw said. “We’ll be practicing it in class, so don’t worry. By the time we’re done, you’ll be able to cut the strings in your sleep.”
“What about the weaving?” Callie asked. “When do we get to see that?”
“Right now,” my dad said. “Reweaving is the trickiest part, because the unraveling has already begun—”
“Excuse me?” Maddie raised her hand. “Why don’t we cleave from the stable side? Wouldn’t it be safer?”
“It would,” my dad said. “But in this case, it’s a trade-off. We need to maximize the energy transfer of a cleaving, and working from the stable side limits the amount we can harvest. Additionally, we want the fabric to be as seamless as possible, to minimize weakness.”
We must have looked pretty clueless, because he chuckled and continued. “It’s like this stuffed panda Del had when she was a baby. Remember that thing, kiddo? You loved that little guy. You used to take him everywhere, and your mom was constantly having to fix pieces that were falling off, or spots where the stuffing came out.”
“Dad. Seriously?” The tips of my ears burned with embarrassment.
“I remember that panda,” Eliot whispered, grinning. “Stewie, right?”
“Anyway, no matter how carefully Winnie stitched that poor bear back up, those were the parts most likely to split again. How many times did Mom reattach his ear, Del? Five? Six?”
I closed my eyes and wished for a lightning strike.
“Cleavings are the same way,” my dad continued. “Exposed seams are the most likely to fray again, so the goal is to complete as much of the reweaving as possible before you cross