Threading the Orchard Sky

The salt pan held heat like a grudge. Laced boots powdered each step, the air combing their hair with static and the horizon trembling with mirage. Mara felt the seam before anyone else, the way the backs of her teeth told her about lightning. It gathered as a cooling at the base of her tongue and crept up into her inner ear until everything was slightly out of key.

Kei raised a hand without looking, trusting her body more than the instrument at his hip, and the four of them came to a halt. Jiro unlatched the pack cradle for the Loom. Tamsin crouched and pressed her palm to the pan. Everything was quiet in a way that made the skin on Mara’s arms pebble: no insects, no wind, even their breath seemed to be listening.

It looked like a crack until you watched long enough to notice it wasn’t on anything. A thread of air beaded itself into the narrowest curve possible, and on that curve condensation formed like dew despite the heat. The dew didn’t obey; it slid sideways, up and around a plane that hadn’t existed a step ago, and in its passage the world refracted. Tamsin drove the first titanium stake, and the sound of hammering went twice, once out loud and once softer, as if another hill replied.

Jiro paid out a filament that glittered when it crossed the seam, becoming both shorter and longer by a hair. Kei’s gloves were patched in three places, and he brushed the free edge with the back of his wrist. The Loom in the sling vibrated as if something had plucked it. Mara did what she always did and listened.

Against the inside of her jaw the seam sang—a thin, strained tone with harmonics like glass. There was a smell of bruised green that had no source in the salt. She slid her palm an inch into the cold, and the hair rose along her arm in a tidy line though she wasn’t touching anything but future. They fed a kite through as they were trained to do, a paper diamond stitched with microlattice so it kept its shape between worlds.

It fluttered on Jiro’s line for a second—fluttered too smoothly, as if an invisible hand had steadied it—then slipped sideways and vanished, the line describing an impossible angle. The tug on Jiro’s glove was patient and real. He grinned, that thoughtless flash of a child about to climb a fence, and then sobered when Kei cleared his throat. The salt around them was not a monotonous plate, not today.

When Mara stood and pivoted, the wrongness came from two more directions. Seams radiated as plenty, small arcs, a net half-knotted under a sky full of contrails from the world’s past airplanes that never had flown overhead. Through one, the heat moved with a different rhythm, a pulsing that felt like breath. Through another, a faded sound of bees whose bodies were the size of tears in the old myths.

The Loom was a narrow frame of alloys bound in stained handwraps. Jiro flicked the peg and it hummed until the seams rang in sympathy. Kei picked the one with the smallest mouth. We don’t blunder, he had taught them when they were five failures in, we learn to lean.

They set the anchors. They arranged their return lines so no one would be left holding a rope someone else had fallen through. On the other side the light was like biting into a fruit you had only ever known the smell of. The salt became soft loam, and shade arrived in the shape of trees trained on wires into arches and lattices that made tunnels of leaves.

The hum that had haunted Mara’s inner ear became a whispering of countless narrow paper tags strung along cords, each scribbled with ink in a hand she almost recognized. People had been here recently enough to forget their tools on the ground. A ladder lay on its side in the path, a pair of gloves caught in its rungs like a captured animal. The orchard was not deserted, though no one stood to meet them.

Their line stretched back through the seam, a silver umbilical kissing the air. And then a boy ran, not toward them but perpendicular to both worlds, following a thread that hung from nowhere like a dropped stitch in the sky. Mara’s legs moved without permission. The boy’s gait made her throat ache.

There are ways the bones of an ankle carry weight that belong to a single person in all realities. He lifted his knees too high at the start of a run, a habit learned on a childhood hillside that he always stumbled over. She had watched that in another life from a step above with a scraped knee and purpled knuckles while he laughed at his own clumsiness. The orchard made it worse, made everything smell like the summer he never reached.

She did not call his name because names were traps in this work; you wanted to say them and then you were caught. Instead she reached for the Loom. Kei’s hand touched her elbow and removed itself just as quickly. He understood the shape of her trembling and stepped away to examine how the seam hurt the edges of leaves.

It took them too long to notice that their arrival had frayed the orchard’s sky. Whether it was their presence or the anchors was irrelevant now; the air above the highest trellis had begun to pucker. Two clouds crossed like knife blades, and under their intersection the tags on the cords spooled steadily into empty space. Paper fed into nothing and came out somewhere else as smoke.

Tamsin flinched when a seam no wider than a horse hair ran through her sleeve and burned her skin without heat. Jiro swore softly in a language too far back to have records. The boy reached for the string hanging from the nothing and his fingers passed through and came out with pollen where there had been none. It dusted his cheeks in gold and then was gone, wiped by a wind that belonged to a place without orchards.

The seam above them brightened with their confusion. Kei shut his eyes and pressed his thumb into the old scar beneath his left ear. When he spoke, it was as much to the Loom as to the team. We can sew, his hands said, the way his hands always said more than his mouth.

He flexed and the Loom trembled. The first time he had taught them to stitch was in a classroom that had a crack instead of a chalkboard. The Loom had drunk their inventory dry of copper wire and emergency sutures before doing the work. Then they had learned that the Loom did not run on anything they could haul.

It ran on definite things given to it—names, habits, colors you would never see again. Kei’s scar was the shape of a color he could no longer find on any spectrum. When Mara had asked what he lost, he had said only that his tongue refused to make a certain syllable that had once been his mother’s laughter. We are not ready, Jiro said, and Tamsin’s forearm had begun to welt where the seam had kissed it, a neat blister in a line like an unraveling stitch.

The boy in the orchard glanced at them only once and then at the thinning cords overhead where his mother’s wishes, if that is who had written the tags, were disappearing into elsewhere. The orchard’s caretaker walked toward them along the path, her hands full of pruning shears and the steady resignation of someone who had been lifting griefs all morning. She saw the way the sky was unmaking itself and did not break to run. She stopped instead and nodded at Kei, at the Loom, at the seam that threaded their worlds.

In another version of this day, Mara would have let someone else. In this one, she understood the scale of what she was asking of herself and raised her hands in agreement. Memory was a long cloth. She would cut it.

The Loom warmed under her grip like a sleeping animal waking. She felt in her body the way it asked for a thread and she fed it carefully. She gave it the taste of the apricots that stained her brother’s wrists one summer, the salt-sweet grime they had licked off their own hands because no one was looking. The Loom took that and brightened, and the nearest seam accepted a stitch that made the air pull together as if exhaling after a long panic.

She gave it the exact angle of his shoulder blades when he bent over a map, how the bones stood out like directions. She gave it the sound his foot made on the third stair because the third had always complained. Each thread of him she pulled from her own head, the remembered weight of him on her back in the rain when they had been too small to have consequence. The seam closed with the taste of those nights in her mouth and left no mark but the phantom of a shape.

When it was over the orchard was merely an orchard. The cords hung with their tags again, the writing unspooled only by wind and time. Tamsin’s arm would bruise and heal. Jiro sat with his palms on his knees as if to keep himself from taking something else and turning it into an answer.

The caretaker set down her shears and touched Mara’s face like a person greeting someone they had met at a crossroads and expected not to see again. There was a clean quiet in the air now that did not listen so anxiously. Kei wiped the Loom with a rag that had wiped the Loom a hundred times in places like this. Mara looked around for the boy and found only a ribbon caught in a branch, trembling with both their airs until the seam finished its last breath and let go.

They left a stone at the seam site with a scratched circle on it, not as a claim but as a warning shape. On their side of the line, the salt pan seemed too bright. The heat met them where it had been waiting, patient as a stove. They walked until their anchor lines went slack and slack again and there was no resistance when they tugged.

The sky above the pan was whole. Mara cataloged the things she knew and found a shape missing. She could not have said who had taught her to braid grass, why the third stair in their barracks made the same complaint every time, why she sometimes tried to step a little higher on a flat floor. All she had left were the edges of those knowings, like dimples where a piercing had once been.

Kei did not ask. The wayfinders have a custom of not prying at each other’s holes. When they made camp between two pale stones, the hum in her inner ear had become only her pulse. At dawn, as they boiled water and shook dew from canvas, the seams across the pan kept their silence.

Jiro took a measurement that would become a circle on a map only he and a handful of others would read. Tamsin wound a new bandage and traced the welt on her arm with a finger as if reading. Kei stood and looked toward where the orchard must be, out past the curve of this world, and then toward another direction where a city had once blinked in and out of wrong weather for eight days before winking for good. Mara looked everywhere and could not remember a face she had carried inside for years, and then, without warning, felt relief as sharp as grief.

There are ways absence can be used. She lifted the Loom onto her shoulders and the weight sat perfectly; the straps had known the shape of her before she entered it. By midday, they were walking into the next wrongness, guided by a kind of music made of things she would not miss until they came to ask to be given.