Altered

  “About that,” he says, scratching his temple.

  “Yes?” I prompt.

  “Things are different here.”

  “Do you have time machines?” I ask sarcastically.

  “We don’t need them. Time doesn’t flow rapidly on Earth like it does where we came from. Arras is a construct, so its time is not bound to the same physical laws that time on Earth is. For every month that passes on Earth, a year passes in Arras. So if you’re sixteen years old—”

  “It’s only been sixteen months since you left,” I say. If he’s right, then half a year has passed on Arras since we left. It will be spring again, and Amie will graduate primary academy soon.

  “I feel like I’ve barely been away, but here you are. I didn’t know,” Dante says. “I wouldn’t have left Meria if I had known she was pregnant.”

  He wants me to understand. He wants forgiveness.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I say. My words are glass, smooth and cold, and I know he can see right through them. “You still left her.”

  You left me, I add silently.

  “You don’t understand. Meria refused to come with me,” Dante explains. “She didn’t want to run. I showed her the mark of Kairos so she could come if she changed her mind.”

  “Why does this matter?” I ask, gesturing to the techprint—a symbol that’s lost its original meaning to me. Now it’s another secret—another lie.

  “Credentials,” he says. “It’s not just the mark, but also the information the techprint contains. Most refugees and dissenters hide theirs along their hairline.”

  That’s why the girl checked our necks, but because my father had burned mine into my wrist she almost didn’t see it. “Why is mine here?”

  “Priority access,” Dante says in a grim voice. “If you’d made it out that night, our channels would have rushed your clearance. Kincaid’s men in Arras verify information, but the placement of your techprint would have granted you priority passage through a loophole.”

  “A loophole?” I ask.

  “It’s an exit from Arras. It’s how most refugees make it to Earth.

  “I told Meria all of this. If she had left…” He pauses and searches my face as though he wants to tell me something, but he changes the topic instead. “You can’t imagine what it was like. A girl with fiery hair walks into my life with that mark, and you’re so like her, but—”

  “My father marked me, not my mother,” I interrupt.

  Betrayal flits across Dante’s face. His voice is raw when he speaks. “She must have told him about it.”

  He’s hurt that she revealed his secret to her husband. His brother. “Yes,” I say, “because she loved him. Because he was a good man.”

  “I never said differently.” But his body is saying it now. Every expression, every gesture, every pause is wounded. But then his posture changes, shrinking down before me. In my short time at the estate, Dante has never seemed vulnerable.

  “I knew you the second I saw you,” he says. “I couldn’t explain it, even to myself.”

  “That’s why you invited us back to the safe house,” I say.

  “At first I thought you were Meria, altered a little, toying with me.”

  “Mom wouldn’t do that,” I say defensively.

  “The spitfire I knew would have, but I figured out pretty quickly you weren’t her,” Dante says.

  “When you saw me kissing Jost.”

  “I wouldn’t have put that past Meria, but no, I knew it wasn’t her. It was obvious you didn’t know me, but when you showed me that techprint and started telling your story—”

  “You realized—”

  “No, I don’t think I understood anything until I scanned the techprint,” he admits, “and even then, I wanted to deny it. But from the moment I saw you, you were as familiar to me as air in my lungs. I didn’t know why.”

  “That sounds about right,” I say. I’d spent my entire first meeting with Dante trying to determine why he seemed so familiar, but how can you know someone you’ve never met? I can see my father—I can see Benn—in him now. Both are fair with dark features. Dante a younger version of the man I knew. “You had no idea about me?”

  “No,” he says.

  “But then how do you know you’re my father? If my mom married your brother—”

  “It says so here,” he says, touching the print on my wrist.

  “They never told me,” I say. The deception twists hard in my chest. Did it make Benn any less my father if he wasn’t biologically related to me? Does it matter that he never told me?

  “They were protecting you,” he says. “The only way to protect my family was to run. If the Guild knew I had fathered you, they never would have let you be born.”

  “Because you weren’t married to my mother,” I guess.

  To my surprise this makes him laugh. “No matter what their politics are, no one in the Guild is that morally rigid. No, it would have been because they thought you would be too dangerous. I think you proved them right.”

  “But why?”

  “A child with your genetics can’t be controlled.”

  “My genetics? How would they even know my genetics?”

  Dante hesitates and his eyes grow distant, reflecting only the rippling water of the fountain. “They know everyone’s genetics. They knew your mother’s and they knew mine. That’s why they wouldn’t let me marry her. You’ve been in the Coventry. You know women need permission to give birth in Arras, but anyone can get pregnant,” he reminds me.

  “But what do they do if they don’t get permission?” I ask.

  “Earth isn’t the only world with a grey market. There are secrets in Arras, Adelice, but they’re bought at a cost.”

  “Then why didn’t you stay? If there was somewhere to hide—if you loved my mother?” I ask.

  “It was too late. If I’d left earlier, I could have set up in the grey market, but we didn’t know anything was wrong until my marriage request was denied. We knew then that whatever was in my file meant I couldn’t stay in Arras.”

  He had wanted to marry her. The Guild hadn’t merely denied my mother’s request to have more children or placed my parents in menial jobs, the Guild had dictated the course of their lives with one simple denial. One that colored how my parents perceived each demand of their government thereafter.

  “But why would the Guild want you?” I ask.

  “Like I said, I have my secrets.” He runs a hand through his hair, evading my question. “Did your family have the radio? The books?”

  I nod a yes.

  “And the stories of Earth?”

  I shake my head slowly. “Loricel, the Creweler at the Coventry, was the first person who told me about Earth. They must have forgotten.”

  “Impossible. They chose not to tell you,” Dante says.

  “So they knew, but why would they train me to fail at testing?” I demand. “They could have brought me here.”

  “Meria had no desire to come to Earth,” he says in a cold voice, and I realize then that sixteen years in Arras may have given my mother time to move on and build a life, but Dante hasn’t had the same advantage. His scars are fresh. The damaged parts of him are still tender.

  “This isn’t possible. Nothing you’ve told me makes sense. You can’t be my father, and Arras doesn’t run on an accelerated timeline.” Each of my words is louder than the last, as though volume can erase the information Dante has given me.

  Dante pauses to consider this, and then he stands and walks to a fern lilting near the fountain. “Spinsters use a loom to see the fabric of the universe,” Dante says. “They work within the constructed weave of Arras.”

  “Except Loricel, the Creweler,” I point out. “She could capture the threads without a loom. They even used her to help gather the raw source materials here.”

  “That’s an entirely different level of skill,” Dante says, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. He’s trying to explain things and I’m interrupti
ng him. “Very few women have that ability.”

  The way he emphasizes women sends ice through my veins. Loricel alluded to this once, in her studio at the Coventry: There are rumors of departments where men work with the weave, but the Guild always denies it.

  “It’s different for men,” he continues. “We don’t need looms, but we can only alter things that already exist.”

  I can’t hold back the questions now. “We? You can weave?”

  “I can alter,” he clarifies. “Same materials, different results. Spinsters can create, while Tailors can only alter what’s already present. I’m a Tailor.”

  “That’s why you ran.” Loricel was right about the secret departments employing men, and they had wanted Dante to be part of it.

  “You met some of us there, I’m sure. A medic who healed you or maybe an assistant of some sort,” he says. “They were Tailors.”

  My encounter with the medic who healed my leg during my retrieval is hazy from the Valpron I was administered that night, but I can recall how easily Cormac had him ripped. Cormac did it as a reflex, like the man was the least important person in the world. If these men exist within Arras, the Guild has a very different way of handling them. “Why aren’t we told about this?”

  “Alterations are a specific skill. If the public knew what Tailors could do to them—how we can manipulate a person’s body and mind—there’d be little point to our skills. A renewal patch is alteration on a very limited scale. It’s the closest the public comes to knowing what we do. We’re more useful if we operate in secret. I ran before the Guild could force me to become a Tailor for them.”

  “They wanted you to be a Tailor?” I ask.

  “Oh yes.”

  “So you ran away from your family?”

  “You ran, too,” Dante points out.

  “That’s different. My parents forced me to run.”

  “Why do you think they did that?” he asks.

  “They lock Spinsters away.” I think of the doctor and nurses and the clinic where they were going to map and alter me. “The medics went home for the night. They had lives. Only the Spinsters were kept in a cage.”

  “Did they invite you over for dinner?” Dante asks. “You don’t know anything about them. What they do to Tailors—it’s a fate much worse than being placed on the loom.”

  Worse than false windows and constant surveillance? “I doubt it.”

  “Tell me, Adelice, how many Tailors did you know before you came here?” Dante asks.

  “That doesn’t prove anything,” I start.

  “Had you ever even heard of Tailors before?”

  “No,” I say in a quiet voice.

  “Spinsters are locked up,” Dante says. “Tailors disappear. We are forced to exist on the periphery or to go along with the Guild’s schemes and adopt fake lives and occupations, chosen by the Guild for whatever diabolical plot they’ve concocted.”

  “And since you wouldn’t go along with that?”

  “They would have killed my family,” Dante continues. “When a Spinster is retrieved, everyone celebrates. When a Tailor is retrieved, he vanishes. And often his family does, too. No one can know Tailors officially exist because of what we do. Tailors can’t create like Spinsters or Crewelers, but we can alter their creations.”

  “How?”

  “Sometimes it requires special tools to adjust a person or a thing.”

  I’m reminded of the clinic at the Coventry, where I lay on a cold, steel slab as a dome of gears and wheels mapped my mind.

  “Tailors can remove memories, adjust emotions, even undo things entirely.”

  “Undo?” I repeat in a whisper.

  “Watch,” he commands me, and as I do, his finger slips into the leaves of a fern near the door. At first it looks like he’s massaging them, but then I see what he’s doing. He’s teasing apart the very strands that make them up. Most objects, even people, look like one thick thread on a loom, but I’ve seen them close enough to know that they are comprised of multiple thin threads twisted delicately together. Dante is pulling the fern apart. At first nothing happens, and then he tugs against a strand and it separates from the others. It’s golden in his fingers and as he pulls it slips out from the other strands. The effect is instantaneous.

  The fern’s leaves wilt, withering into brown, drooping, then shriveling until they become so brittle that the plant crumbles into dust before my eyes. A moment ago it was alive and now it’s nothing. It scatters like ash to the floor.

  My eyes are wide as Dante releases the golden strands and they vanish, evaporating like smoke when met with too much air.

  “You ripped the time right out of it,” I say breathlessly. “I never even realized threads had time strands.”

  “They aren’t easy to see.” Dante brushes his hands together as though they’re dirty. “I unwound it.”

  “But why would time exist within a strand?” I ask.

  “All things have a season, Adelice. You and I, we both have natural lives to live. We’ve been granted so much time and when that’s up…”

  “We die,” I finish for him.

  “If something doesn’t kill us first.” It’s an attempt at humor, but it falls flat. Probably since we both know that people like us aren’t likely to die of old age.

  “If you can pull the time from a plant, then you can pull it from a person.” I shudder at the thought of seeing that.

  “Yes.” Dante pauses and his jaw tenses under his smooth skin. “Or you can warp it. You can divorce it from the natural order of things to suit your purpose, which is exactly what the Guild has done.”

  “Warp,” I repeat, and then it hits me. The Bulletin story we found with the photograph of Cormac. The propaganda film. I knew hundreds of years had passed in Arras, but no one could tell me exactly how many. Loricel was cagey about how long she had acted as Creweler. Cormac never seemed to age. At the academy we studied civic responsibility, not history, because Arras’s history never changed. It moved along pleasantly. It was orderly. Nothing in Arras progressed except technology.

  Not even its leaders.

  “How many years?” I ask, because I need to hear him say it, even though all the pieces are falling into place now, beginning to reveal a secret I could never have imagined. “How many years have passed on Earth since the Exodus to Arras?”

  “Sixteen years, give or take. On Earth, it’s probably close to the year 1960, but we can only guess. It’s hard without days and seasons.”

  I’ve never been good at math, but even I can figure that out. If sixteen years have passed on Earth, nearly two hundred years have passed on Arras. Generations in Arras have lived and died before those left on Earth have even forgotten the war.

  It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t possible. “Are you telling me that Cormac Patton is over two hundred years old?”

  Dante’s eyes shift to mine, and I see fire in them. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  THIRTEEN

  STEEL SNAKES AROUND MY WRISTS AND PINS me to the table. I struggle to see in the blinding light, and the smells of whiskey and renewal patches cause me to thrash against the cold metal. His Stream voice—the one that’s both patronizing and charming—melts in my ear. It oozes into my consciousness as his form comes into view.

  “Darling, why struggle? You can’t stop this.”

  I slam my chest against his, but it doesn’t help, and his breath stays hot on my ear. I feel Cormac’s lips press down against my skin and my body bursts into flames, my bones cracking and shattering, my blood rushing into my hands and feet. I’ve lost the ability to fight him, and all I can do is scream.

  I wake with a start. I can’t escape Cormac any more than I can escape my dreams.

  Cormac, who can’t die, who never ages, who uses Arras-knows-what technology to maintain his youth eternally. With each minute that passes here, many more pass in Arras, giving Cormac time to build a plan of attack. He won’t ever let me go because he has an endless
amount of time to devote to finding me and destroying me.

  In the Coventry, when I warped moments of privacy for Jost and me, I imagined lingering there, living an entire life safely away from my responsibility to the Guild. I never knew the Guild had done the same, creating a timeline that allowed them to move forward with unspeakable plots against those who rose up against them on Earth and in Arras. They’d corrupted the very strands of the universe.

  Jost, Erik, and I breakfast in the sitting room of my suite the next morning. Through one door is my bedroom, and on the other side is the room they’ve given Jost. I thought the accommodations of the Coventry were luxurious, but these rooms border on lavish: heavy blue curtains line the walls and the intricately carved hearth looks to be hundreds of years old. I’m not sure I could even use it if I wanted to. Overhead, winged angels watch us from the painted ceiling. A valet brings coffee and pastries on a silver cart, but my choice of topic causes us to leave the food untouched. I’ve kept this from Jost and Erik for far too long, waiting until I could grasp it myself, but they need to know what we’re up against.

  “So you’re saying Cormac is over two hundred years old?” Erik says. “I thought he looked good for his age.”

  “Yeah, it seems like renewal patches are even better than we thought,” I say.

  “But how?” Jost asks. “How would no one notice that?”

  “I think that’s a question for Kincaid,” I say. “He must know about this if he was a Guild official once. He was probably here at the beginning.” The fact that Kincaid could also be two hundred years old sends bile rising in my throat.

  “Are there more Tailors like Dante here?”

  “I don’t know, but there are Tailors in Arras. Dante claims the Guild retrieves them like they do Spinsters, but that all traces of the boys and their families disappear,” I say.

  “Makes sense,” Erik says.

  “How does that make sense?” Jost asks incredulously.

  “Well, if I was trying to hide the fact that I was two hundred years old from everyone, I’d cover up how I did it, too. If they use the Tailors to cover up their conspiracy, they have to ensure no one knows the Tailors exist,” Erik says, “and the Tailors have nowhere to go. They’re dependent on the Guild, even more so than Spinsters.”