Ella hopped off the fire escape and put away her tarot cards – they’d be of no use this time. Instead, she doubled her concentration, specifically on the twinkling points all around the alley. One-by-one, each of them stretched into their own silver threads – threads of fate – that cut through the fog and stitched together everything from dumpsters, to pipes, to windows, to even her pursuers themselves. At her peak concentration, about three dozen pulsing lines appeared to her – crossing, twisting, and weaving across the entire alley. Ella let her eyes dart between them, following their twists and turns, searching for just the right one – all while her enemies continued to close in.

“We know you’re in here,” one of them growled, his voice growing noticeably irritated. “You might as well give up and save us the trouble!”

“I could say the same to you!” she fired back, trying to play for time as she continued to work the alley. “Tell you what? Why don’t you give up and save me the trouble?”

He laughed. “Save you the trouble of what? There’s three of us and one of you!”

This time his taunts were backed by some disturbing new sounds: the patter of a pipe against a palm, the shatter of a glass bottle, and the soft whir of a twirling chain. Right on cue, three new threads formed as well. They stretched from inside the cloud to her skull, arm, and scruff of her neck respectively, causing Ella to swallow nervously. Maybe she should have just retreated up the fire escape after all. Or maybe one of these new threads was just the puzzle piece she’d been searching for.

With that idea planted firmly in her mind, Ella reached out and grabbed the thread wrapped around her neck. She then carefully snapped her wrist to hook it around the support beam of the fire escape. I better have read this right, she thought to herself, because the silhouettes of her pursuers were almost on top of her now. There was only one way to find out, so it was with a deep, steeling breath, that she took a few steps toward the man with the chain.

“I found her!” the shadowy brute shouted upon sight, before snapping his weapon back like a rattlesnake ready to strike. His excited bellow startled her briefly, nearly causing Ella to forget what she needed to do next. However, as she watched that chain whip forward, she suddenly remembered the thread in her hand. She yanked it with all her might, and then reflexively flinched. But there was no need to be afraid anymore, because the weapon was no longer bound for her throat. Instead, it wrapped itself around the fire escape’s support beam, stopping her assailant in mid-swing.

“What the?” he exclaimed, while looking back and tugging on the chain in confusion.

The poor guy didn’t even have a chance to contemplate his mistake, because before he knew what was happening, Ella had already picked up a nearby trashcan and smashed it over his head. The blood curdling crunch echoed even through the cloud as her assailant went down like a ton of bricks. Meanwhile, the ruckus quickly summoned over his accomplices, but it was too late; events had already been set into motion.

Fate had already been changed.

As the man with the chain went down, his weapon tugged on the fire escape. He was a big guy and the fire escape was old and rickety, so the force of his fall ripped it rather easily off its hinges – exactly as Ella predicted. After that, only the brief screech of metal against brick and the ominous shadow growing on the cloud could warn his poor friends before the whole thing came down on top their heads. But they didn’t notice it nearly soon enough. Meanwhile, Ella took a big step back and plugged her ears, but even that didn’t keep out the sound of wrenching metal or the sensation of the ground shaking the moment that fire escape landed. In fact, it crashed down with such force that she had to wait several seconds just for the ruckus to settle, at which point she turned back around to discover that the mist had temporarily parted.

Now she could see the fallen fire escape in its entirety – or rather, the abstract sculpture of twisted metal that it had become. It lay barely half-a-foot from her toes, along with the two fourth-year boys groaning underneath it. Meanwhile, the third – ponytailed upper-classman Demetri Yakov – stood flabbergasted on the opposite side of the wreckage.
“Hmm, that’s odd. I thought it was supposed to get you too,” Ella mused, nonchalantly.

Demetri looked down at his fallen comrades in disbelief. “Y-You… You can’t do that!” he wailed. He looked almost comical now, with his shaky knees and wide pupils – a far cry from the taunt-spewing bully just a few minutes earlier. Completely at a loss for words, all he could do now was point his broken bottle at her and let out a desperate war cry, before charging like an angry bull.