The walls started screaming.

  "That's new," Saoirse said to herself. Which it was. Saoirse had been many things in her time, but she liked to think she wasn’t a liar. At least, not to herself.

  Saoirse had lived in the Loom for longer than most civilizations lasted. Just after the start of her captivity, she'd seen its walls hum and pulse. Then it went dark, and Saoirse only had herself. The silent jailer hadn't given her the courtesy of releasing her before shutting off all the lights.

  She swore she could sometimes hear the ocean while sitting in the stark cell. Sometimes she thought she heard the wind. Today, she heard the sounds of boots echo through the Loom. It was vast and ugly, but Saoirse’s keen ears could hear the echoes of footfall, even in the Loom’s bowels.

  The screaming started once the boots were gone. The sound was almost musical. A high, keening pitch that started in the walls and worked its way into her teeth.

  Well, she thought, this is different.

  The floor tilted, then the ceiling, and then both at once. It shouldn't have been possible, but the Loom had never cared much for physics. She'd learned that early on, back when she still bothered being upset about her imprisonment. These days, she found the impossible geometry almost charming. Like a cage designed by someone with too much imagination and not enough sense.

  The screaming got louder. Cracks appeared in the walls. She eyed them closely but realized the wall was folding in on itself. It was like the designer had finally had enough of this forsaken place and had crumpled it like so much paper.

  Saoirse stood in the center of her chamber and watched the world end around her.

  She probably should have been afraid. A normal person would have been afraid. She'd stopped being normal so long ago that the memory of fear had faded to something like a half-remembered dream. Oh, she knew what it was supposed to feel like. She just couldn't quite reach it anymore.

  Besides, she'd tried dying before. It never took.

  The ceiling folded down toward her. The floor folded up. For one brief, almost peaceful moment, she was suspended in a shrinking pocket of space, watching the Loom devour itself from the inside.

  Goodbye, old friend, she thought. You were a terrible prison, but you were consistent. I'll give you that.

  She felt a pressure on her that reminded her of something. A moment she didn't like to think about. The final moment before she was brought to the room. Then the pocket collapsed, and she was falling.

  Not through air. Through nothing. It was the cold, empty nothing that existed between things that were real. Tír na nóg. She'd felt it before, eons ago, when Crom had reached across time and pulled her here. It felt the same now. Like being erased and rewritten, one heartbeat at a time.

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  And then, quite suddenly, she was wet.

  Salt water flooded her mouth. Cold shocked her skin. She broke the surface gasping, not because she needed air, but because the body had habits and drowning was one of the things it remembered how to do.

  Above her, the sky was wrong. No, not wrong. Different. She'd been inside the Loom so long she'd forgotten what the outside world looked like. The fog didn't fold when she stared at it. How refreshing.

  And there, high above the water, the Loom was becoming a single point.

  She treaded water and watched it happen. The fortress that had held her for eons, the prison that had kept her small and singular and contained. It was collapsing into a point of light, folding and folding and folding until there was nothing left but a pinprick against the fog. Then even that vanished, and the sky was just sky again.

  Huh, she thought. So that's what freedom looks like.

  She floated on her back for a while, letting the waves rock her. The water was cold, but cold had stopped mattering to her somewhere in the first few centuries of captivity. Or maybe the first few millennia? The Loom had never given her anything to measure by except her own heartbeats, and she'd stopped counting those long ago because they didn’t really matter anyway.

  The ocean stretched in every direction. No land she could see, but she noticed a single ship. A creature stood on its side watching the Loom collapse on itself. Then it engaged the engine and the ship moved east.

  She was left with nothing but water and stars and the gentle slap of waves against her body.

  Anyone else would have drowned. Should have drowned. She knew Dún Domhain would be somewhere to the south, but there was nothing for her there.

  The nearest shore would be miles away to the east. The kind of distance that killed swimmers, that exhausted even the strongest bodies, that turned hope into despair and despair into silence. She wondered what the humans had done to it.

  Saoirse smiled.

  She couldn't drown or tire. Even if she could, she couldn't die, no matter how many times the universe tried to arrange it. The Loom had made sure of that, had locked her into this form so thoroughly that even oblivion couldn't find the seams.

  Now, the Loom was gone, and she could feel the Heart. The thing that had made her into this.

  It was distant, a faint pulse against her awareness, like a pounding heard through walls. But it was there. The thing that kept her bound to this shape, this singular existence, this prison of flesh and bone and tedious humanity. Someone had taken it from the Loom before the collapse. Someone had carried it out into the world.

  Which meant someone had just handed her the first real chance she'd had in eons.

  She rolled over in the water and began to swim.

  The stroke came easily. Everything physical came easily when you'd had forever to practice. She cut through the waves like she'd been born to it, her body moving with a grace that had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with time. She'd swum oceans before. She'd walked deserts. She'd crossed mountains that didn't exist anymore and watched continents drift like lazy clouds.

  This was nothing. This was a morning stroll.

  She did not know where the Heart was going, only that it moved. She could feel the pulse growing neither stronger nor weaker but shifting, traveling along the ocean toward the archipelago.

  She adjusted her course and kept swimming.

  It was night by the time she broke through the veil of the Otherwhile. The stars wheeled overhead. The water held her up like a lover's hands. Somewhere ahead, the key to her freedom was waiting to be claimed.

  Saoirse laughed, and the sound scattered across the waves like silver.

  For the first time in longer than humans had existed, she had something to look forward to.

  Don't worry, little Heart, she thought. I'm coming. And we're going to have such fun together.

  She swam on through the dark, and the ocean parted around her as if it knew better than to get in her way.