Chapter 3

Chapter 3

JANICE

That is what I told myself, at least, in the moments before I began.

There are rules to what I can do, and I want to set them down plainly, because I think it matters—maybe only to me—that the limits are real and not just a story I tell to make myself feel less like a monster.

I cannot kill. Not directly, not as payment, not ever. Death is a door I am permitted to open once, for the person who is owed a second chance, and never again for them after that. Whatever else I do to Lumina, I cannot end her life. That is not mercy. It is simply outside what I am allowed to do.

I cannot torture without end. Pain has its place in balance—suffering is sometimes the only currency a thread will accept—but it must have a shape and a limit, a beginning and a close. What I was doing to Lumina, sealing her in the grey, letting her drift in fragments too thin to hold onto, was not meant to be eternal. It was meant to last until the thread stabilized around her absence. Two years, roughly, by my reckoning, though time moves strangely for anyone who isn't standing fully inside it. After that, the debt would be paid in full, and what happened to her after that was, in truth, not entirely mine to decide.

And I cannot take without giving something back in return. This is the part I think Lumina understood least, because I gave it to her almost as an afterthought, in the moment when she was breaking apart in front of me and I could not make myself take everything. I told her she could keep fragments. Pieces. I told her it was a concession.

It wasn't only that. It was also a rule. I am required to leave a door unlatched, however slightly, in every payment I collect. I have never fully understood why. Perhaps the rope itself insists on it, some small mercy woven into its own design, the same design that demands the payment in the first place. Perhaps it is simply how balance keeps itself honest—no debt fully closed, no thread ever entirely erased, only pressed thin enough to seem gone.

I gave Lumina an image. Her son's face. It was not generous. It was what the rules required, dressed up to look like kindness because I did not have the strength, in that moment, to let her see it plainly as the smallest obligation I was still able to meet.

Was it just?

I have asked myself that question in some form eleven times before, and I will not lie and say the answer gets easier with repetition. Justice implies a judge who could have ruled otherwise. I am not sure I qualify. I follow a shape older than my own will, a pattern that existed before I did and will exist after whatever I am finally unravels too. I do not choose who is owed and who owes. I only see it, the way one might see a debt written in a ledger that was never mine to write.

But I chose the fragments. I chose to let her keep something, when the rules would have allowed me to take it all. That choice was mine, small as it was, and I have learned to hold onto choices like that, because they are the only proof I have left that I am not simply the rope's hand moving without a mind behind it.

Sophia would wake into a life she believed was always hers. Xenois would wake beside her, certain of a devotion he had never truly built with her, believing the compulsion had never happened, believing the family in front of him was the only family he had ever known. The boys would wake with a mother who loved them in the plain, uncomplicated way a mother loves her children, and none of them would carry the scar of what she had once been, because in this thread, she never became it.

And somewhere in the grey, in fragments too thin to hold a full thought, Lumina would carry the one thing I could not bring myself to take.

I told myself it was enough. I did not entirely believe it. But I had learned, over eleven debts and longer than that besides, that belief was a luxury the rope did not require of me.

Only payment.