“It’s time to summon the loom,” she said, dabbing her face with her cape.

“I can’t,” Kane said, for once proud of his ineptitude. “And even if I could, I’d destroy it before I let you use it!”

Poesy paused in her dabbing to give Kane that same dazzling smile she’d served him in the Soft Room of the police station. She was laughing at him this time.

“I suppose it was too much to hope the loss of your memories would change your fundamentals,” she said, sobering herself. “I see now you haven’t changed at all. Such potential, yet so little interest in the act of creation. A fascinating apathy that I hoped to manipulate into loyalty after Ms. Bishop dubiously erased your memories. That was an accident, you know, but I thought it was good fortune for me. It provided me a chance to work with you directly. Your power, my creativity. But I can’t work with an instrument that’s developed intention.”

“I’ll never work with you,” Kane sneered. “Not willingly. You tricked me.”

She swept a hand over the front of her dress, and the tea stain bleached away.

“Well, it is a tricky business, creating a reality.” She gestured at the convoluted reveries around them. “But clearly I’ve figured that one out. What’s harder is maintaining it. One can’t hope to do it all alone; one must resort to delegation. And so I sought to create gods from worthy mortals. People like your friends. The Others!”

This last part Poesy said with mocking jazz hands.

“And that went well, too. But I needed more than a pantheon. I needed power. I needed to summon a loom, a source of infinite energy to produce my creations. And I needed to summon this loom in a form I could control. Manipulate. That’s where you come in.”

She dipped over Kane. Her skin glittered like cold gemstones beneath her dusted makeup. She made sure he watched as she removed the opal skull from her bracelet. It flared in the ballroom’s low light, assembling a wreath of spindles. A crown, made from bone.

Kane’s scars burned with recognition. She has the loom. She’d had it all along.

“You recognize this, don’t you?”

The invisible grip holding him to the throne tightened.

“Would you like to know how to summon the loom?” Poesy twirled the crown innocently. “It’s easy. First, you build an environment that can withstand an immense output of power, such as a reverie. Second, you neutralize every competing party with small feuds and love affairs, so they occupy one another completely. Third, you wait for the perfect moment, in which the very fabric of reality has grown threadbare, right before it’s about to tear open. That provides you with your opportunity to destroy the old reality and begin the new.”