Oh, yes. Kisa can somehow feel the smooth cord wrapped around her skin just as she would any real thread. Yet unlike real threads, this one won’t come off. It appeared this afternoon, right when Kisa was creating the C-section’s first abdominal incision. She nearly startled, but regained control of herself, conscious of the repercussions of any jerky movement on her patient.

“Go away,” Kisa whispers now in English to the hint of red she can still see. Obviously, it doesn’t reply. It doesn’t reply when Kisa pleads to it in British-accented Korean, either.

Yet the hairs on the back of her neck still prick up. A slow trickle of anticipation crawls down her spine, and her limbs suddenly feel heavy with dread. Something has been decided, she senses. Something has been etched into stone, and there is nothing she can do to stop it. It’s life-changing, life-altering…

Life-ending. A knife to cleave twenty-two years in half.

Her spine stiffens. As it begins, Kisa sucks in a shallow breath, tasting something bittersweet at the back of her throat. It reminds her of her stepmother’s fixation with anti-aging creams. She stares down at the city below, heart thumping. It all happens so fast. Kisa doesn’t even have time to open her mouth, to scream a plea to her goddess.

For in an instant, her body is sliding off the roof and she is, for a perfect, brilliant moment, weightless and hovering over Seoul. But then gravity grabs her by the ankle and tugs her down, yanking her past rows and rows of gleaming glass windows all stacked upon one another, laughing as it hauls her toward the ground in a perfect swan dive.

Kisa closes her eyes.

It’s over soon enough.

Chapter Two

Seokga

New Sinsi, 2025

The only part of Seokga’s sessions with the venerated Dr. Jang Heejin he truly dislikes is when, halfway through the session, the grandmotherly shaman-turned-deity-psychologist inevitably asks him how his inability to find Hani makes him feel.

When she first asked him that, approximately two days after the Red Thread of Fate appeared, Seokga had fixed her with his cold green glare, leaned in close to the aging therapist, and demanded (in a voice sour enough to curdle milk): “How do you think that makes me feel, you stodgy old crow?”

Dr. Jang hadn’t even bothered with the pretense of writing something down in her ever-present leather-bound notebook. Instead, she snorted. It had taken Seokga aback enough that he’d finally (and begrudgingly) begun to trust the doctor Hwanin had assigned to him back in 1992 when he reclaimed his godhood in full (to make sure he didn’t “snap” again, as his brother so aptly put it).