She started to laugh.

“Thank you,” she said. And then, in a voice that was no longer hers but belonged to every patient who had ever entered Room 7: “Therapy complete.”

“The Loom doesn’t destroy the other realities,” he explained, as he always did. “It weaves them. It gives them a shared spine—a single, undeniable this . Your addiction isn’t to the fragments. It’s to the search for the one real thread. The Loom provides the thread.”

Dr. Elias Vane had a rule: never let the patient see the needle until the last possible second.

He pushed the plunger.

For a moment, nothing happened. Then Mina’s body went rigid, and her mouth opened in a perfect, silent O. Elias watched the monitor. Her neural activity, which normally looked like a shattered kaleidoscope, began to spin—not into chaos, but into a slow, deliberate braid. Three strands. Then seven. Then forty-nine.