Io didn’t lie often, but when she did, she committed thoroughly. Here was the lie she told herself, almost daily: she didn’t care about the fate-thread.
Thais had noticed it first, when she was eighteen and Io was ten, barely a year after their parents’ death. They were on the terrace of their old apartment building, lazing about in the first truly warm day after a fortnight of a relentless neo-monsoon. Early-spring pollen floated downwind from the gardens of District-on-the-Hill, making Io sneeze incessantly.
“That’s odd,” Thais had said, stretching one of Io’s threads between her fingers. “This thread seems to lead off to somewhere unknown.” She tugged it to show Io: like a beam of silver light, it arced across the roof and over the city, disappearing into the horizon. “It must be a fate-thread. How thrilling—my moira-born tutor said they’re rarer than the triple moonset.”
Io bounced on her feet, Thais’s excitement sugaring her tongue. These were her favorite moments: Thais coaching her in the Quilt about what moira-born like them could do, Thais excited, Thais smiling.
“What’s a fate-thread?” Io asked.
Thais leaned back on the slanted tiles. “Threads connect people to what they care about. A person you have met, an object you have used, a place you have been. You love it, deeply, and a thread is formed. But there are some rare threads that exist before the attachment is formed. They lead to whoever or whatever you are destined to love, one day.”
“Like your home-thread?”
Thais had a rare thread, too, which Mama always gushed about to anyone who’d listen: Have you heard about my Thais’s home-thread? That’s true love, isn’t it? It’s dedication to our home, to all of Alante. One day, my baby girl is going to do great things for this city, just you wait. The city was a part of Thais, a kernel of her soul.
“It’s nothing like my home-thread.” Thais dropped Io’s thread. “I earned my home-thread. I prove my love for this city every day. What have you done to deserve this?”
And she marched away, leaving Io to feel, for some reason, ashamed.
But that initial exhilaration was hard to shake. A passion she was yet to meet. A love she was destined to feel. It soothed her, like waking up after a particularly convincing dream. As she grew, the fate-thread birthed a myriad of possibilities: she would discover a new craft, find an eager friend, a long-lost relative coming to pull them out of the quicksand drop to poverty. Or—and she blushed to think of this—someone to hold her and kiss her like they did in the radio dramas.
And one day when she was fifteen, Io’s chest began… tingling. The fate-thread was moving. Every day, after school, she would climb to their roof and watch whatever lay on the other end of the thread edging toward her. She and her lovely unknown were celestial objects orbiting ever closer, destined for an inevitable collision.
He arrived the day before Winter’s Feast.
Thais had sunk into their sofa, exhausted after a double shift, clothes stinking of fried food. She slumped a leg into Io’s lap, over the homework she had been doing. “It’s a boy. Your fate-thread.”
Io kept her eyes on the notebook, swallowing her shock like a mouthful of bitter medicine. “How do you know?”
“I couldn’t leave you pining on the roof every night—you’ll catch your death. I followed your thread today. It leads to a boy.”
Ava hooted over the pot of bean soup she was stirring. “A boy! Tell us everything.”
Thais gave their sister a scornful look. “There’s not much to tell. He’s young, Io’s age, or maybe a year older. He just arrived in the city, spent the entire morning at the immigration offices at the West Gate.” Then she focused back on Io and her eyes softened. “I’m sorry, but—he was with someone, Io.”
Io pressed her lips together, in her best attempt at a poker face. Her mind was a whirlwind that she couldn’t comprehend. She didn’t even know this boy—she shouldn’t feel betrayed. And yet.
“So what?” said Ava.
“What do you mean ‘so what,’ you heathen?” scolded Thais. “How would you feel, if a girl came up to you and said you were destined to love her?”
“Depends on how cute she was.”
Thais rolled her eyes.
“How cute is he?” Ava asked, wiggling her eyebrows.
Io had felt suddenly very small, and very lonely. “Ava, drop it.”
“Oh, get over yourself, Io.” Ava jabbed the ladle in Io’s direction. “What if he is with someone? Doesn’t he deserve to know that there’s this thing between you, a fated thread? Maybe it’s not even a thread of love; it doesn’t have to be, you know. He could be your future best friend, or a cherished ally, or a faithful business partner, or your, like… art muse. You can’t hide behind your fears forever; you have to find him and tell him.”
“Let her be, Ava,” Thais butted in. “Wouldn’t it be cruel if someone approached your girlfriend and told her they were her fated soul mate?”
“Well.” Ava pulled the corners of her lips down comically in an eek face.
Thais nodded, her mothering instincts sated. “Telling him is not the right thing to do.”
The pressure around Io’s rib cage loosened; there was a right thing to do. Of course there was, and of course Thais knew it.
“What should I do, then?” she asked, eager for a solution to this unwanted problem.
“Cut the thread. Set him free.”
Her body rejected the idea instantaneously: her chest constricted, muscles tensing for a blow. She couldn’t cut it. For five years, the fate-thread had been her anchor, a constant reminder that no matter how hard life became—her parents’ death, their struggling finances, the sorrow she could see in her sisters’ eyes—there was something waiting for her, a thread blazing silver against the horizon. One day, it would come, and one day, she would be happy. It was fate, impossible and otherworldly and utterly hers. No, she wouldn’t cut it.
Thais read every thought, every feeling crossing Io’s face. A scowl surfaced on her sister’s brow. “It will be hard, but it’s for the better, sister mine. You don’t want to rob him of his choice, do you?”
Io said nothing.
After a while, Thais rose and went to wash. They ate bean soup. They discussed the latest mystery serial on the radio. In the months that followed, Io began to ignore the thread. It was especially hard now that the boy was so close; he had found a place in the Silts, Io had deduced, and Ava saw him frequently at the diner where she bussed tables. The fate-thread tugged at Io’s chest; often, before she knew it, she would take a step in its direction. But in her ruthlessly honest way, Thais was right.
The boy had a choice, and right now he was choosing someone else. Io had to respect that.
But she, too, had a choice. Cut it or keep it. The threads of Fate were manifestations of what you loved, and in turn who you were. Io had to find out what her fate was, who she was destined to become. Its light shone brighter than all her other threads combined, an anchor and a beacon and a promise of better things to come. She chose to keep it.
She stopped mentioning it to her sisters entirely, fearing Thais might convince her to cut it, and dreading Ava might talk her into seeking the boy out. A year after the boy arrived in Alante, Thais left them; with her left Io’s fear.
Sometimes, she caught Ava looking at her from the corner of her eye. Words bubbled on her sister’s lips, ready to take shape.
Even now, almost three years later, Ava would blurt out, “I saw him today.”
Io always remained silent.
“Don’t you want to know who he is, what he does?”
“I don’t care,” Io always lied, hoping one day, it would be true.
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