Hellbender - Dana Cameron Page 0,105

chances are blown. But thank you.”

In an instant, I was there.

I didn’t recognize where there was and was afraid that I’d miscalculated. What I saw was a rippling wave of black, so black, I could barely detect that it was moving. But very rarely, every here and there was a break, a line of bright red or silver or pale blue that showed me the black was billowing in waves, like a silk sheet being shaken out. I tried to look beneath it, but no matter how far I followed it down, I couldn’t find the underside of it, and there were curves that made me wonder if I weren’t moving in circles, or some trick of the near light that altered or distorted my perspective. So I followed one of the red lines back, finding no end.

I pulled the sonic screwdriver out of my pocket—I would have used a rock if I’d had it—and threw it at the blackness. It caused a furious rippling, and now I could see, very distantly and less faintly, how the lines were interwoven, warp and weft.

A crack appeared in the fabric; there was a noise like ice creaking and glaciers calving. A flare of color like the aurora borealis and a portion of the dense black nothingness shattered, falling away to nothingness. I could see many of the fine threads now, bundled into very large groups, like individual strands twisted into a heavy rope. The larger bundles were like wires or circuits interconnecting, overlapping against the wider darkness. All the lives I knew or could imagine in the multiverse, intertwined and overlapping. Geoffrey had suggested there might be streams of particles bridging the overlapping multiverses, and maybe this was it.

I recalled the fight with the Administrator’s überdragon. My dragons had been on silver threads, ever so much finer than these cables, when I’d taken over command of them. The Trips had a red thread binding them together, and Carolina had a pale blue one associated with her.

I saw a heavy silver rope quivering and glinting starlight in the darkness of whatever meta-space the Makers and I shared. Strands emerged from that main rope to form new connections with other, crossing cables.

I followed the heavy silver cable until I found three cut edges; three cobweb-fine loose ends fluttered from the main rope, but already a kind of self-healing was occurring, reweaving new threads grown from the cut end into other circuits.

This is where I’d freed the dragons from the Makers. This is where I’d seized their power.

I traced their threads back to where they connected into the main rope. The silver threads of the dragons and many other silver threads were bound up with a blue one, barely perceptible, that was wound around them.

This blue thread was the Fangborn connection to the Makers and the way they could control us. While it was probably not the only one, it was the most obvious and easiest one for them to use.

I was going to cut the thread. This is how I would unchain the Fangborn.

I had no idea what side effects doing that might have. Most of the Fangborn systems I’d encountered were redundant, many times over, so this might not be the only way for the Makers to reach us directly. It probably contained elements of other powers in ways we didn’t understand.

But for now, it wasn’t a matter of prophecies or being the chosen one. There was no chosen one; Fangborn prophecies were fragments of communications intercepted by the oracles, imperfectly received or understood by them. They were not so much prophecies as someone getting a sneak preview of the workings inside the machine, the grand scheme of things. Maybe the prophecy that seemed to fit my situation was a part of a warning label for that thread: “Danger! Do not cut!” or “Caution! Live Wire!” or “Broken, removed for repairs.” But why were the Makers so intent on repairing it?

I didn’t know if I was acting as Atropos, severing a fateful, fatal thread, or if I was acting as Perseus, freeing Andromeda from the rock.

I summoned the katana and drew it back, ready to cleave that binding blue thread. I pressed the sapphire jewel I’d been given to do the Makers’ bidding.

The power surged through me and I suddenly had a good idea of what it was like to be in a jet going supersonic. I had no idea of the proper way to use the katana in real life; here, with