Chapter 16 – The Thread Between Worlds

Desert remained motionless. On this evening, however, it breathed in.

Yusuf trudged on, boots in death sand. Faceless child trailed behind, Codex strapped around its waist. Dunes stretched to either side, but something was amiss—that slope warped like in a bend, same fractured rockline side to side eternally, as if they were walking in a circle.

"The world is stuttering," stated the boy in a level tone, but with a note of concern. "It occurs when there are too many threads crisscrossing. We are near a Convergence."

Yusuf scowled, looking up at the sky. Stars flared abnormally, blinding in and out and flaring up again, never in a fixed position a second time. Sometimes all of heaven's dome went black as if a book had been shut over them.

"Convergence?" Yusuf shook his filthy, collapsing face in revulsion.

The boy stopped, its vacant head tilted sideways. "When memory is beginning to fail, it falls in upon itself. When worlds lose too many simultaneously, they fall in one upon another. The Codex deploys Archivists there. in order to untangle the knots." Wait. "Some do not come back."

Yusuf's stomach twisted. He recalled Rae's smile in the flash before she was consumed in ash. He recalled the piece of glass she shoved in his hand, still hurting considerably in his back pocket. He didn't want to be "one of the few that didn't make it back.".

As he walked, Yusuf began to make out white forms flit across the desert like illusions. People who weren't quite there. He saw a veiled woman balancing a clay jar on her head stroll by slowly and blur into white static. A boy giggled and ran towards something that wasn't there before disintegrating into shreds of light.

He braced himself. Half-strength, he pulled himself to knees, cheek rubbing against shadow to profile. Watch Yusuf.

"Elias?" the man whispered.

Yusuf's muscles accustomed to bracing. The name of his father.

The face of the faceless child shifted around to face the figure. A stillness descended upon the pages of the Codex in his grasp, quivering without a breath. "Don't answer," the child growled.

But still the man walked on, shavings of his memory flaking away from him like bits of dynamite spark. His shriek drew nearer, unabashed, more frantic:

"Elias! You came… you pledged…".

Yusuf's ribcage seared. All hope of response screamed—and when he attempted to speak, nothing. The desert itself was silent.

The figure flaked away from him before he could seize it. Wiped two-dimensional.

Yusuf looked at the boy. "That was—he knew my father."

The boy wrote the Codex more briefly. "He wasn't real. Shards wear kindly faces so you'll keep back. To remain here." Its voice was a quiver, a breath: "And yes… your father was here. The Convergence keeps a record of who arrives."

Yusuf's stomach was churning. What if his father had gone ahead of him so far?

Wind howled like torn paper. The Codex exploded in the child's hand, the ink flowing between pages.

"We can't wait," gasped the child.

Yusuf was too late to dodge Yoruba's disobedience, the desert ripping apart, crackling down a gash of a gorge that was impossible. The sky shattered, the stars shattering like splintered glass.

What Yusuf had last heard was Yoruba's scolding:

"Don't lose Yoruba And the world tore like a book on the hinge— —and Yusuf got between the pages.