What Answered

It was not a sensation. I cannot stress that enough.

I had been told, in one way or another, all my life, that I would never feel anything in the Between, and I had believed it, and I had been correct. I did not feel the thread. There was no tug in my fingertips, no sting of tautness, no hum along the length of the line. What I felt was something for which I have never found a better word than meaning. The world, which had been slack, suddenly pulled. It was as though a great sentence I had been reading in a foreign language were abruptly translated, all at once, into my own, and I understood it: someone, somewhere, had said yes.

It went through me from head to foot, and I opened my eyes.

I was not falling.

I was hanging in the air, in the middle of the cloud sea, at the end of a thread that no longer looked slack. It was drawn so tight it sang. I could see it flaring in the pearl light, red as a wound and bright as a star, from my fingers to something very close in front of me, and the something was a hand.

The hand was clamped around my wrist so hard that the knuckles had gone white.

I could not feel the grip. I want you to understand that, because I have never forgotten it. I could not feel a single thing. But I could see the fingers, and the way they had sunk into the silhouette of my arm, and I could see that the hand was shaking, a fine unstoppable tremor running up through the wrist and into the forearm and out of sight. I could not feel the hold. But I understood it, the way you understand a word in a language you have never learned, because it was written so clearly in the shape of the fingers.

I looked up.

Vaelira was looking at me.

If looks could kill, I would have died a second time, and I would have deserved it. There was no other word for it. She was hanging in the air above me with the light behind her and the sea unrolling beneath us, and every line of her outline was drawn as tight as the thread itself, and she was staring at me with an expression of such pure, concentrated, murderous fury that for a moment I could not make my mind form a thought. The color in the thread that joined us had turned from orange to a deep and dangerous red, the red of a forge with the bellows going, and it hummed.

And I laughed.

I am not proud of it. I have thought about it a great deal since. It was the wrong response, the worst possible response, a response that would have earned me a slap from anyone with less self-control and a great deal more from her. But I could not help it. It came up out of me like water out of the ground, helpless and delighted and absurd, the laugh of a man who has been told the world is going to end and has just been handed a cup of tea. I laughed like a fool. I laughed until my silhouette shook. I laughed at her white-knuckled hand, and at her furious face, and at the thread between us, which was singing, which was real, which she could see, I knew she could see it, because her eyes had flicked to it just once, quickly, before she wrenched them back to me.

"You idiot," said Vaelira.

Her voice was very low. It shook.

"You absolute, unmitigated, root-brained idiot. Do you have any idea what I had to do to get here? Do you have any idea what I tore?"

I had no idea. I tried to say so, but I was still laughing.

"Stop laughing."

I did not stop.

And here I must tell you about the space around us, because I did not understand it then, and I am not sure I understand it now.

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The Between is a stitched place. That is the nearest I can come to it. It is not a single cloth but a great many cloths, sewn together along seams that most of the dead never see and cannot cross. Vaelira, I would learn, had crossed one of those seams to reach me. Not carefully, not with the slow, deliberate patience of a seamstress, but in a single furious wrench, the way you would tear a sleeve to pull a drowning man from a river. She had done it without thinking. And the sound of it, which I heard only afterward, in the deep of my own bones, was the sound of a very large piece of fabric beginning to give way.

The space should have collapsed.

I could feel it wanting to. It creaked around us like the hull of a ship in a storm. The pearl light flickered. The cloud sea, which had been rolling so gently beneath us, went suddenly, unnaturally still, as though it were holding its breath. Somewhere in the distance, at the very edge of what I could see, a long pale fold in the world began to open, and I knew with a strange calm certainty that if it opened all the way, there would be no cliff, no clouds, no shelf, no thread. There would be nothing at all.

It did not open.

Something held it.

I did not see Iris. No one ever sees Iris when she does not wish to be seen, and on that day she did not wish it. But I felt her. Not as a sensation, for I had none, but as a kind of pressure, a vast and gentle stillness, as if some immense palm had been laid against the back of the world and was holding it, quite steadily, in place. The seam creaked once more, and settled. The light steadied. The clouds began, slowly, to roll again.

I do not know how long she had been there. I suspect she had been there the whole time.

I did not thank her. I could not. There was no one to thank.

And then, at the edge of my vision, another of the threads flared.

I turned my head. It was the second one, the one I had been half-afraid to look at, the one that ran from my left hand out into the distance. It had gone the color of a cut on a winter morning. And at the far end of it, a breath's length off, the air folded open like a page and Ilyrisse stepped out of it.

She had her hands open.

That is the thing I remember most. She came out of the fold with both hands held out before her, palms up, fingers a little apart, as though she had been running toward something and did not know whether to catch it or shield it. Her outline was disordered. The long calm line of her, that I had thought of as being made of glass, was not calm. It was broken, in the way that a still pond is broken when a stone is thrown into it. And she looked at me, and at Vaelira, and at the grip on my wrist, and I saw her understand that she had come one breath too late.

Her eyes went to my hand.

Then, to the thread.

I watched her see it. I want you to know that, because it is the thing I have carried for eons and it has never worn thin. I watched Ilyrisse, who had said I believe that you see them, who had said it's only yours, look at the shining red line that ran from my fingers to hers, and I watched the whole long careful edifice of her kindness come away from her like a shed skin. There was no more believe. There was no more only. There was only a woman with open hands looking at a thing that was there.

"Ilyrisse," said Vaelira, in a voice like a dropped plate.

She did not wait for an answer.

She threw me.

I do not mean that she let go. I mean that she swung her arm, with the whole of her fury behind it, and hurled me across the little distance of air that separated us, as one throws a bundle of laundry to someone on the other side of a courtyard. I sailed through the space between them with the thread trailing behind me like a banner, and Ilyrisse's open hands closed around me, and I was caught.

I did not feel that either.

But I saw her face come down over mine, or the smooth blank place where her face would be, and I saw her hold me as though I were made of something that could break.

And Vaelira, hanging in the air with her empty hand still clenched, looked at us both for one more instant. She did not say anything. Her outline was trembling from crown to heel, and the thread that ran from her to me was still glowing red, and I could see that she wanted very badly to say something and could not decide what. Then she turned her back on us, and tore a hole in the air with one savage motion of her arm, and stepped through it, and the fold closed behind her with a sound like a slammed door in a house made of glass.

She was gone.

The sea of clouds rolled on beneath us, pale and enormous and indifferent. The thread, the one that ran to where she had been, slackened slowly and began to fade. But it did not fade entirely, and I saw that, and I held onto it.

And Ilyrisse, without a word, closed her arms around me and vanished us both.