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I blinked through the strange array of colors, a vision I’d begun to understand was seeing the life threads, the energy that connected us all to the greater weave of existence. And I realized they were still connected. Even the motes, as scattered as they were.

But that made sense, right?

If they were Jude... parts of him... then they’d still be connected.

I lurched up and began herding the motes together. Would there be enough to bring Jude back? Could I convince them to reweave themselves as Jude had been?

The tone of the house shifted—a thick layer of silence descending. I glanced beyond Victor, who stood guard, and found Zhenjun in the hall, a frown curving the corner of his lips. Instantly, I worried he’d try to crush the motes, as he found them little more than fragments ejected from the weave.

I shoved past Victor to act as a barrier.

“They are Jude,” I said. “He’s a little scattered at the moment.”

Zhenjun’s gaze flicked to me, wary, but not angry or combative.

I stood my ground, arms spread slightly, blocking his view of the motes. “He’s not a fragment. He’s not a discarded piece of the weave. Jude’s here.” I waved at the motes that gathered around me as if I were a magnet, and I suppose to Jude, I was. The ring around my finger pulsed with warmth. Not gone. Scattered, a little lost, sure, but not gone.

Zhenjun let out a tired sigh. “He’s not the first to lose himself. I believe your Reaper friend has others tied to tomes in the library.”

“I can put him back together,” I promised, though I wasn’t certain at all that I could.

“You haven’t even found his remains,” the Marshal pointed out. He waved a regal hand at the motes. “Now his trauma has broken him, and he’s hardly touched the stolen memories.”

Stolen memories? Did he mean what the changeling had taken?

Zhenjun focused on the scar and frowned, gliding past me to the section and carefully squatting to examine the fraying edge.

“I think Jude stitched that.”

“This is decades old,” Zhenjun muttered, lifting his hands to repair the end of the scar. “Sloppy work.”

“If it was decades ago, he’d have been a child.”

Zhenjun paused. Had he forgotten that Jude was human, that we all started out as children? But he returned to his stitching without comment.

“If Jude repaired this as a child,” Victor said slowly, “how would he have forgotten he could do it?”

“Stolen memories,” I said. “The changeling. Or childhood trauma. Or both.” I wasn’t certain, but I knew it was all connected. Jude’s power wasn’t a sudden onset from a recent virus like most variant theories suggested. He’d had magic for a long time. Buried deep beneath someone’s manipulation. His parents? The changeling? Maybe something we had yet to discover?

“He stopped the merge as a child?” Victor asked.

And that was what this was, wasn’t it? The scar, a dirty restitching of a Veil tear, had paused the progression, even if it was now fraying.

Zhenjun smoothed his fingers over the last of the scar, obviously unhappy with the repair work, but finding it passable. “I could have taught him much in decades.”

He reached out to the motes, but they all avoided him.

“Please don’t,” I begged, reaching for the dark bits that floated away from him. They suctioned to me, and I tried to imagine them as mini Judes in chibi form, clinging to my warmth.

“I’ve watched every arbiter before him shatter,” Zhenjun said. “Some I had to put down. The rest—” He looked at the motes. “—they simply stopped existing. This chaos was caused by one single memory. How much of his sanity will remain after the others?”

“They weren’t Jude,” I said. “And they didn’t have me.” He was stronger than this. Broken, sure, but he’d come to me that way, and even then, I’d been determined to hold him together. He’d woven himself around me, rewired the curses carved into my skin, and shared his familiar with me. There was no me without Jude.

“Us,” Victor corrected, catching some of my thoughts. “Our team. He wove himself around all of us.”

I tipped my head in his direction, brow raised.

“I doubt he’d have shattered so easily were it not for stretching himself thin to protect us,” Victor added. “How many would have done the same? I won’t turn my back on his gift. If I can help, I will.”