Sloane hit the underground rails thirty seconds before the lockdown grid sealed shut.
The train wasn't luxury-tier — it was a freight line dressed up in peeling neon and grime, one of the few zones where fashion couldn't track you. No mirrors. No Threadsphere. Just heat, metal, and breath.
The platform sensors buzzed as she stepped in, dress bleeding static after the cascade she'd triggered to escape the Gala. Her hem, scorched with signature heat, sparked off the floor like static fireflies.
She moved fast, body low, ducking past a vendor bot, past a drunk in a collapsed House Ignis jacket — counterfeit, judging by the way it twitched and coughed up sparks instead of heat.
The bomb hadn't been planted.
Cassien's words rang in her skull:
> "You're not just a rogue. You're the bomb."
How the hell had he known?
Only Ari knew the full details. And Ari would never—
"Exit two blocks north. Take the spiral stairwell. Don't stop," came his voice, low and urgent in her ear.
Sloane blinked. "You're in the grid?"
"I wasn't. Someone breached me. Only for five seconds — long enough to skim your vault."
Her blood went cold. "Who?"
"I don't know yet. But they didn't just steal your plan. They copied it. And launched it early."
Sloane cursed under her breath. The blackout, the scream, the death dress — none of it had been hers. Someone had hijacked her code and executed a version twisted just enough to send a different message.
That meant someone out there was mimicking her signature.
That meant she had a rival.
Worse — they wanted everyone to think she was the attacker.
She rounded the corner and bolted up the spiral stairs two at a time. At the top, the old steel doors groaned open, revealing her safehouse.
A neon sign flickered against a wall of deactivated mirrors: THREAD KILLS.
She slammed the door behind her, collapsed against it, and finally exhaled.
Then she heard it.
The sound of a slow clap.
Sloane spun around, one of her hidden shears already in hand.
Cassien Myrrh leaned against the wall like he belonged there.
---
"How did you get in here?" she hissed.
He raised an eyebrow. "Please. This place is barely encrypted. Your locks are street tier."
"Try that again, and you'll leave with a stitch across your throat."
"I'm not here to fight."
"No," she said. "You're here to threaten me. Or pin a murder on me."
"Neither," he said.
His voice was too calm. Too precise. As if he already knew her next three moves and had chosen not to play them.
"You were right," he said, stepping forward. "I don't remember you. But I've seen you. Once. Years ago. Outside the Myrrh Vaults."
Sloane didn't answer. Her fingers tightened on the shears.
"My mother was with me," he continued. "You were just a kid. Dirty, bleeding, dragging someone through a shattered runway. I remember thinking: that girl shouldn't have survived. She looked like she'd been cut out of a war zone."
Sloane looked away.
He stepped closer.
"You were cut out of one, weren't you?"
She said nothing.
"I didn't come to arrest you," he said finally. "I came because I think you're being framed. And if someone's using your design to kill members of the Court... then we're both already in play."
---
It was worse than she feared.
The fashion houses didn't just have wealth. They had legislation. Every major Court ruling went through fashion council first. Whoever controlled the designs controlled the laws.
Now someone was destabilizing that order — using fashion as assassination.
Cassien pulled a tablet from his coat, flicked a series of sigils across the air, and projected the last six seconds of Lady Juna's death.
The dress collapsed from the inside. But the code signature...
...was hers.
Her signature.
But twisted. The fingerprint of the threadline was identical, but something had distorted it — a line of code turned backward. Reversed, like someone had mirrored her blueprint in glass.
"Reverse-stitch mimicry," Ari said in her earpiece. "That's not just advanced — that's forbidden. It means someone had access to your original design code, not just a copy."
Cassien turned to her.
"There are maybe ten people on the planet who can pull this off," he said. "And only one of them works off-grid."
Sloane's heart sank. She knew the name before he said it.
Venna Krell.
A former high-thread hacker. A rogue designer exiled from House Myrrh a decade ago. And the last person to see Sloane's mother alive.
If Venna had her code…
This wasn't just about sabotage.
This was personal.
---
They didn't trust each other. But they had to work together.
Cassien laid out the deal:
1. He'd get her access to the Myrrh Vaults — a place she'd never be allowed near as an outsider.
2. She'd identify the mimicry in the corrupted code — and track it to its source.
3. If they both lived through it, he'd owe her a favor.
"House Myrrh doesn't owe rogues," Sloane said, arms crossed.
"I'm not offering it as a Myrrh," Cassien said. "I'm offering it as a man."
She looked at him.
For a second, his suit flickered again — deep plum. Vulnerability.
Cassien was beautiful in that broken aristocrat way. Sculpted cheekbones, sharp collar, but a crack in the veneer. Something about him always seemed like it was breaking just beneath the surface — like he hated his own privilege but wore it anyway.
Sloane couldn't decide if she wanted to cut him or kiss him.
Maybe both.
---
Later that night, in the belly of Myrrh Tower, she entered the vaults for the first time.
Everything was velvet, obsidian, and silence.
Threadwraiths — fashion constructs made from discarded memories and encoded silks — hovered in the dark like ghosts.
Sloane wore a dead-house disguise: an abandoned Atelier Leroi bodice with a broken grid pin. It shimmered enough to pass through auto-detection, but not enough to trigger loyalty scripts.
Cassien moved beside her, silent, his empathy weave cloaked.
They reached the mainframe.
Sloane placed her hand on the glyph reader.
The Threadsphere flared to life around her, pouring designs and memories into the vault like stardust. Her mother's threads — raw, elegant, unfinished — lay hidden among the archives.
She recognized the signature instantly.
Her throat tightened.
"She was here," she whispered.
Cassien's voice was quiet. "She built more than you know."
Suddenly, the air shimmered.
A ripple moved through the Threadsphere — cold and sharp.
"Someone else is here," Sloane hissed.
Then came the voice — warped, melodic, synthetic.
"Funny," it said. "I was about to say the same thing."
A figure stepped from the wall.
She wore nothing but mirrored fabric — a dress made of reflective threads that showed you your own face... dying.
Venna Krell.
Older. Sharper. And terrifyingly beautiful in the way only broken artists could be.
"I've missed you, Sloane," she said, lips curling. "And your mother's code."
Sloane drew her shears.
Cassien stepped in front of her.
Venna only smiled.
"Oh, lovers now, are we?" she asked sweetly. "Well. That makes it even more fun to ruin you both."