Threadbare Part X - Cinders and Spindles
Elsha didn’t sleep much anymore. Not because of nightmares, though they came often, full of blue-lit ribcages and eyes that didn’t blink, but because her brain wouldn’t shut up. Every time she closed her eyes, it felt like a generator flipped on behind her forehead. Ideas. Memories. Faces. The Spine. Her father’s last breath stretched across a vat of pulsing meat.
And underneath it all, the constant hum of unfinished work.
She sat near the fractured control tower they’d turned into a makeshift command post, watching smoke thread through the sky like someone was still up there painting over what remained of High Roost. The top tier had mostly collapsed. Anything left had either burned or sunk into the cloud belt. Occasionally, a spire chunk would fall through, screaming like a meteor. They didn’t even flinch anymore when it happened.
Elsha’s ribs itched under the bandages. Her leg still dragged a bit. But she was healing.
Everyone was.
Well, except the ones who weren’t.
A lot didn’t make it. Some were already hooked to the city’s bones when the rupture came. Others didn’t know how to live without the hierarchy, the ceremony. You build your life on chains, and when someone cuts them, you don’t always get up and walk away. Sometimes you just lay there. Confused. Bleeding out in the freedom you swore you wanted.
Corran called it the lull. The part after the revolution, where you start wondering if you should’ve just kept your head down.
Elsha hated the lull.
That’s why she was working.
“We’ve mapped 48% of the broken tether lines,” Rienne said, sliding a screen across the cracked desk toward her. “Thirty-two are beyond repair. Twelve might be salvageable.”
“Don’t salvage them,” Elsha said.
Rienne blinked. “What?”
“No more tethers. That’s the old way. We connect on our terms, or we don’t connect at all.”
Corran sighed from the corner. “You want to float loose? That’s chaos.”
“That’s honesty.”
He rubbed his temples. “You want to build a city on truth? People want plumbing, not poetry.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but I’m not rebuilding the same goddamn mausoleum we just tore down. I’ll sleep in the dirt before I let silk and hierarchy creep back into the cracks.”
Corran looked at Rienne. Rienne looked at the map.
“No more tethers,” she repeated, almost to herself. “Okay.”
**
Three days later, they descended into the Spine’s husk.
It wasn’t a rescue. It was a reckoning.
The lower vaults had survived the explosion. Barely. The organic core, the warm belly of the city where the bodies had been grown and drained, was a smear now. A collapsed cavity of rot. But below it, under the harvest chambers, behind a vault door coded to a gene-sequence only High Roost carried, were the memory cores.
Rienne cracked the lock with blood drawn from her own arm.
“It’ll think I’m one of them,” she muttered.
Elsha nodded. “You’re not. Not anymore.”
The door groaned open like it hadn’t been touched in a hundred years.
Inside: rows of silvered cubes, stacked like tombs. Each one glowed faintly. Each pulsed in rhythm. Like they were still breathing.
Corran pulled the first one free and jacked it into the portable relay they’d salvaged from a Midway logistics tower.
The images started slow.
A boy. Fifteen. Stripped, screaming. His name was Janto. They’d promised him ascension. He’d questioned the Spine’s ethics in a public forum.
Another. A woman. Eighty-two. Smiling. Volunteering. Her breath trembled as they inserted the feed tubes. By the end, her eyes didn’t blink. But her body kept pulsing. Twenty years of clean fuel.
Another. And another. Names. Faces. Stories.
Some begging.
Some chanting.
Some whispering like they understood the price and were grateful to pay it.
Elsha felt like she was watching a virus learn to smile.
“How do we show them?” Corran asked, voice low.
“All of it,” Elsha said. “No edits. No voiceover. Just the raw footage. Put it on the broadcast bands, drop it into every hub. Even if it kills what’s left of the old system.”
“It will kill it,” Rienne said. “People need comfort.”
“Then they can build it themselves,” Elsha snapped.
**
They called it “The Memory Drop.”
It hit every level simultaneously. A flicker on the feed loops. Then the first scream. Then the sound of a child’s prayer. Then thirty-eight hours of unfiltered horror, on repeat.
The city cracked.
Some refused to watch. Called it lies. Deepfakes. Propaganda. They held little salons in the half-lit corridors of collapsed spires, sipping old fogshine and pretending everything would go back to normal.
Others watched every second. Didn’t eat. Didn’t sleep. Just wept.
Most hovered somewhere between—angry, confused, boiling with guilt they didn’t ask for and shame they didn’t understand.
And underneath it all, something started to shift.
A realignment.
No leaders. No vote.
Just understanding.
The top was never sacred.
The city never floated on faith.
It floated on bones.
**
Elsha drifted.
Not away. Not above. Just through.
She flew the balloon again, or what was left of it. Her father’s rig was scorched and half-melted, but the frame held. The silk, patched with scavenged fabric, didn’t rise pretty—but it rose.
She moved between sectors, ferrying supplies and word. She didn’t carry orders. She carried options.
Build low, she told them. Build flat. Share lift. Don’t mimic the tower. Mimic the tetherless.
Some listened. Some didn’t.
Didn’t matter.
It was in motion.
And no one could stop it.
**
One night, drifting over the old waste channels between Midway and Low Drift, she heard a knock from below.
She almost didn’t believe it. No one knocked from below.
She lowered a line.
Tay climbed up.
Only... it wasn’t Tay.
Not the shell that had parroted the city’s voice. Not the white-eyed puppet.
This one was rough. Real. Scarred.
“How?” she asked.
“I think... I think I was never completely taken,” he said. “Something held. Something fought. When the Spine went down, whatever was controlling me burned out. I woke up in the wreckage.”
She didn’t hug him.
She didn’t cry.
She just made space on the floor and tossed him a canteen.
“You remember?”
“Most of it,” he said. “Not all. Some parts... I wish I didn’t.”
She nodded.
They drifted in silence.
When morning cracked through the fog like a split tooth, Tay looked at her and said, “What now?”
And Elsha, seventeen years old, daughter of a mapmaker, breaker of bones and cities, just stared out at the horizon and said:
“Now we live.”
Then, quieter:
“For real this time.”
**
Threadbare never became a name.
Not like that.
It became a warning.
A whisper.
A prayer.
In the new settlements, stitched along the ragged rim of what was left, people hung scraps of silk in the windows. Not whole banners. Not polished crests.
Frayed bits. Torn edges.
To remember.
Not the fall.
Not the glory.
But the lie.
And the girl who unraveled it.