"Where—" Elowen began.
"I lost him." Serelith did not look up. Her voice was steady, but the corners of her mouth were too tight. "It isn't death. The thread slid sideways. The auxiliary tether—dark. My familiar can't lock. It's like—" Her wrist flicked, a rude little gesture in the air, as if to show two glued pages. "Elsewhere."
Elsewhere where? Whose elsewhere?
Elowen stepped one pace into the room and stopped at the chalk rim. The ink-and-azurite circles breathed a faint cold. Her eyes went to the thread-map hanging in the air. Presence lines hummed at slightly different pitches—some bright like wire, some faint like hair in water. One strand near the center was simply not there. Not snapped. Not frayed. Absent in a way that made the eye want to blink.
"What do you mean by sideways," she asked. Her tone was clean, almost flat. Inside, her pulse made a dumb argument against her training.
