The plan was simple. The execution was agony.
Voss entered a Threadless Rift with the intent to use Living Thread Sight on the creatures while they were still alive. Dead Threadless showed nothing. Living Threadless, viewed through the pushed frequency, should show the dark threads that composed their architecture — the inverted spectrum that was invisible to standard Thread Sight because it operated on a different dimensional frequency.
The Rift was C-rank. District 15. Four Threadless creatures inside a barrier dome that covered a parking structure. The clearance squad had been held at the perimeter — Voss had requested an experimental engagement window. Yara had authorized it. Forty-five minutes. If the barrier hadn't been cleared by then, the squad would enter and do it the conventional way.
Ryn was with him. She'd insisted. He hadn't argued.
"Ready?" she asked. Shield up. Medical lance primed.
"No."
"Good. Honesty. We're growing."
They entered the barrier.
The parking structure's interior was gray. Concrete pillars. Fluorescent lights that still worked, powered by the building's independent generator. The barrier dome pressed against the structure's upper floors, the blue membrane shimmering through the glass of the stairwell windows.
Four Threadless creatures occupied the second level. Voss could hear them — not sound, exactly, but the specific absence of sound that their bodies produced. No breathing. No footfalls. Just the displacement of air around forms that moved with mechanical precision.
He primed Living Thread Sight. Thirty minutes of void-staring in the lab before coming here, pushing Thread Sight against the Threadless corpses until the frequency shift was loaded and ready. The migraine was already starting — a dull pressure behind his eyes that would become a spike once he activated the pushed state.
They climbed to the second level. The four creatures were arranged in their standard formation — two forward, two flanking. They oriented on Voss and Ryn immediately. No hesitation. The awareness was instant, as if the parking structure itself had told them something had entered.
"Now," Ryn said.
Voss activated Living Thread Sight.
The world shifted.
The four creatures bloomed with dark threads.
Not the faint gold and green of human living threads. These were the inverse — strands of darkness that absorbed light rather than emitting it. They ran through the creatures' bodies in dense, interlocking patterns that matched the hexagonal lattice Mira had identified at the cellular level. Every strand was connected to every other strand. No isolated threads. No individual systems. A single unified network expressing itself through four local concentrations.
And the threads moved. Not the pulsing rhythm of human living threads — a steady, flowing movement, like current in a river. The dark threads circulated through the creatures' bodies in patterns that Voss's Thread Sight could follow. In through the legs. Up through the torso. Out through the arms. Back again. A circulatory system, but for thread-energy rather than blood.
The creatures advanced. Ryn moved to intercept.
"Wait." Voss held up a hand. "Don't kill them yet. I need more time."
"How much time?"
"As much as you can give me."
Ryn shifted from offensive to defensive. Her Triage Field expanded — not healing, but the field's secondary effect: a mana-dampening zone that slowed hostile creatures by disrupting their energy systems. The Threadless paused. Not stopped — the field didn't work on them the same way it worked on mana-based creatures. But they hesitated. Recalculated. The thread-circulation in their bodies stuttered, adjusted, compensated.
Three seconds of Living Thread Sight. Voss pushed harder.
The dark threads resolved into finer detail. He could see individual strands. Could trace their paths. Could identify nodes where multiple strands converged — the joints, the core of the torso, the center of the featureless head. Each node was a processing point. A nexus where thread-information was received, interpreted, and redistributed.
The creatures weren't just bodies. They were receivers. The dark threads ran into them from outside — from below, from the Rift point somewhere in the parking structure's foundation, from the dimensional connection to the Loom. The creatures were tethered to their source. Connected by threads that ran through the barrier's floor and disappeared into a place Voss could sense but not see.
Five seconds. The pain mounted. His nose started to bleed.
He looked at the thread-circulation pattern more carefully. In the human living threads he'd observed, each thread served a function — strength, speed, defense, mana. The dark threads were different. They didn't carry discrete functions. They carried something else. A pattern that Voss's Thread Sight could perceive but not interpret. Data. Information. The dark threads were a communication network.
The creatures weren't soldiers. They were sensors. Extensions of a larger intelligence, gathering information about this dimension and transmitting it back to the Loom through their thread-tethers.
Seven seconds. Record duration. The pain was catastrophic. Blood running freely from his nose. His vision darkening at the edges.
One more second. He needed one more second.
He focused on the nearest creature's head-node. The concentration point at the top of its body. The dark threads converged there in a dense knot — a processing center more complex than anything in the rest of the body. And at its core, something different. A strand that was neither dark nor light. A thread that existed at a frequency Voss had never seen — not absorbing, not emitting, but something in between. A channel. A link to the intelligence on the other side.
The creature turned its featureless face toward him. It had no eyes. But the thread-pattern in its head-node shifted — rearranged — oriented on Voss's Thread Sight like a radar dish locking on.
It knew he was looking.
Living Thread Sight collapsed. Voss dropped to one knee. Blood on the concrete. The world was flat and dark and throbbing.
"Now," he said.
Ryn moved. Shield bash to the first creature. Lance through the head-node of the second. She was efficient — two kills in five seconds, targeting the structural weak points with the precision of a woman who learned her lessons once and never forgot them.
Voss handled the third. Shadow Step, blades, joint cuts. Mechanical. His body operating on training while his mind processed what he'd seen.
The fourth turned and ran. Not toward them — toward the Rift point. Retreating. Carrying information back. The sensor reporting its data before being destroyed.
Ryn caught it. Shield throw. The heavy disc caught the creature at the knees. It stumbled. Voss closed the distance. Cut.
Four Threadless down. The barrier held for another twelve minutes — the Rift point was deeper in the structure, the connection to the Loom more robust — before destabilizing and closing.
Voss sat on the parking structure's concrete floor and bled.
---
Mira's lab. Three hours later. Voss's migraine had been reduced by Ryn's Triage Field from debilitating to merely miserable. He sat in a chair with a cold pack on the back of his neck and described what he'd seen.
Mira transcribed. Ohn paced.
"Dark threads that circulate rather than pulse," Ohn said. "That's consistent with my theoretical model. The Loom's thread-architecture is dynamic — it flows. Our dimension's threads are static after death because they've been severed from the source. The Threadless creatures maintain their connection to the Loom in real time. They're live circuits."
"The tethers," Voss said. "The threads running through the floor, back to the Rift point, back to the Loom. The creatures are physically connected to their source dimension."
"Physically and informationally. They are nodes in a distributed network. Kill one and the network adjusts. The information it was carrying — the sensory data about our dimension — returns to the Loom through the remaining nodes."
"Which is why the fourth one tried to retreat. Not self-preservation. Data preservation."
"Data preservation," Mira repeated. She pulled up a new model on her screen. The thread-pattern data Voss had described was already being integrated into a mathematical framework. "If the Threadless are sensors, the question becomes: what are they sensing?"
"Us," Voss said. "Our dimension. Our matter. Our thread-architecture. They're studying us the same way we're studying them."
"First contact protocol," Ohn said. She'd stopped pacing. "When two civilizations discover each other, the first thing each one does is gather data. The Threadless are the Loom's reconnaissance. Not an invasion force. Not a military probe. An exploration team."
"An exploration team that converts organic matter into alien tissue on touch."
"Which may be their equivalent of sampling. Collecting material for analysis. They're not attacking — they're taking readings. The conversion is the reading. The problem is that their reading methodology is lethal to us."
Voss thought about Corporal Hashi. Half her body converted to hexagonal cartilage. A reading that had killed the subject.
"If they're studying us," Mira said, "and they can see that their study methods are harmful, why haven't they adjusted?"
"Two possibilities," Ohn said. "One: they don't know their touch is harmful. If the Loom is a unified system without individual mortality, the concept of killing might not register. Destroying a local node — a creature — doesn't kill anything from their perspective. It just reduces the network."
"And the second possibility?"
"They do know. And the entity that tried to communicate through the tear was attempting to tell us. To warn us. To establish a contact protocol that doesn't involve lethal sampling."
The room was quiet.
"I need to go back," Voss said. "Into a Threadless Rift. With enough time to establish communication."
"You were in Living Thread Sight for eight seconds and you bled from both nostrils and couldn't walk for twenty minutes," Ryn said from the doorway. She'd been listening. Of course she had.
"The duration is increasing with practice."
"So is the damage."
"The ancient Carver's Echo pushed me further than I thought possible every time I needed it. Thread Sight adapts. It evolves. The pain is a threshold, not a wall."
Ryn looked at Mira. Mira looked at Ohn. Ohn looked at Voss.
"I need a Rift with a persistent tear," Voss said. "Not one that closes after the creatures are killed. A tear that stays open long enough for me to approach, push Living Thread Sight, and attempt to read the entity's thread-pattern communication."
"The larger Rifts have more stable tears," Mira said. "B-rank and above. The higher the mana density, the more robust the dimensional connection."
"Then I need a B-rank Threadless Rift. Cleared of creatures but with the tear still open."
"How do you clear the creatures without killing them? They fight back."
"We don't clear them. We contain them. Hold them in place. Keep them alive and connected to the Loom while I approach the tear."
Ryn's expression was the one she wore when she was evaluating a tactical plan that was both brilliant and suicidal. "You want to walk into a B-rank barrier full of live Threadless creatures, approach an open dimensional tear, and push Living Thread Sight past your threshold while surrounded by things that can convert your flesh to alien material on touch."
"Yes."
"Absolutely not."
"Ryn—"
"Not alone." She crossed her arms. "You go in with support. Squad 7. Full squad. Containment formation. I hold the Triage Field, Dex holds the line, you do your impossible thing in the middle."
Voss looked at her. At the scar on her jaw. At the steadiness in her eyes.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay."
Mira was already running projections on her screen. Ohn was back at the whiteboard, drawing connection diagrams. The lab hummed with the energy of people working toward something that mattered.
Voss sat in his chair with the cold pack on his neck and thought about dark threads that flowed like rivers and creatures that were fingers of a vast hand and a world made of the same material that he'd been reading in dead bodies for twelve years.
The Loom. The source. The place where all threads originated.
He'd been looking at echoes his whole life. Shadows on a cave wall.
Now he was going to look at the fire.
