“You say their skin was rotting off?” Jax asks as we find our places at a long conference table.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Erik tells him.
“I can’t believe she’s gone,” Jax tells me in a soft voice. “She wanted to make things right with you. We talked about Enora and what she could remember. I tried to help her reverse more of the alterations they’d done to her.”
“Were you successful?” I ask. Perhaps Valery’s legacy would live on in helping us save the Remnants or the people affected by this disease outside.
“A little. Altering in reverse is tricky.”
I think of Amie and how eager she is to remember our mutual past, despite having gone through multiple alterations.
“Whatever these things are,” Dante says, “they aren’t natural. They infect quickly. We encountered several infested people on our mission, all at varying stages, even the girl’s adoptive mother.”
“But the mother didn’t hurt you?” Jax asks.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” I say.
“The Guild considers it genetic warfare,” Albert says, settling into a seat across from me. “Why waste valuable material if it can be used to fight your enemy? A common pest becomes an ally in warfare, even something as simple as Tineola bisselliella.”
“What?” Erik asks.
“Tineola bisselliella—a common fabric moth,” Albert explains. “I’m afraid this is my fault. When we considered initial concerns regarding the Cypress Project—theoretical issues and such—we discussed whether certain species on Earth might negatively impact the artificial weave. I made a joke about fabric moths.”
“Do I want to know what a fabric moth is?” My stomach churns as the conversation recalls the memory of Valery’s final moments.
“An insect that eats away at fabric.”
“Let me guess. In this instance we’re the fabric?” I say.
“I’m afraid so.”
“But why? Why unleash something like that here? These people were already as good as dead,” Dante points out.
“The Eastern Sector was rebelling. This ensures no one here can fight back,” Loricel says.
“How was anyone in the Eastern Sector going to fight back?” I ask.
Loricel gives me a grim smile from across the table. “Cormac is a thorough man.”
That’s an understatement.
“And yet you escaped him,” I point out.
“Patton can’t stand to waste resources,” Dante says.
“You knew she was alive then?” I ask, gesturing to Loricel.
“I guessed. Alive is relative to a Tailor, anyway. Cormac’s like Kincaid in that way. When he thinks people might be valuable to him, he keeps them around.” Dante shrugs as if to say this isn’t a big deal.
“But how did you rescue her?” I ask.
“That’s an exciting story that makes me look really good. Unfortunately, I’ll have to tell you another time,” he says.
“I’m not going anywhere until someone tells me what’s going on!”
“I see you’re going through the ungrateful-brat phase,” Dante says. “We saved you. Show some gratitude.”
“I had plans,” I tell him. “I was going to alter Cormac, maybe take on his appearance. But now I have no chance of ever getting close enough to him again. I’ll never save the rest of the Remnants or slow the drilling on the surface. I’m sick and tired of people trying to rescue me, of everyone thinking and acting like I can do nothing right. I had enough of that from Cormac.”
“Valery did it,” Dante says, finally ready to answer my question. “We had enough information to guess where Cormac was keeping Loricel. With a little alteration and a lot of luck, we got in.”
“And why couldn’t you just tell me that?” I ask him.
“She didn’t want you to know.”
“Why?” I can’t think of a single reason for her to keep this from me. Valery had a long way to go before she would be able to earn back my trust. Her participation in rescuing Loricel could only help in that regard.
“We barely made it out of the storage facility…” His voice fades away and slowly I begin to understand.
“Things got out of hand. I made a mistake.” Dante’s fingers tremble as he runs them over his cropped hair. “It’s gone.”
“What’s gone?” I ask him in a hollow voice, afraid I already know the answer.
“The storage facility—and everything inside it.”
My body goes cold and numb with shock. There’s no chance to save the Remnants now.
Except my mother, Meria, whose thread is tucked safely away in my baggage. Baggage that didn’t escape with me.
“I’m sorry,” he says in a soft voice. I know he is sorry, because to him it means Meria is lost forever. I saw how he looked at her when he freed her from Kincaid’s estate. Some things change with time, but others never do. Love like that leaves an imprint. It might fade with time, but it’s always there, waiting for you to catch it in the right light.
“Right now they have something to show us,” he reminds me. I become aware of the uncomfortable glances of the others in the room. I can’t bring myself to tell Dante I have Meria’s soul strand, not when he destroyed our chance at saving the others.
Jax looks for confirmation that he should begin, but my father can only manage a tight nod. A beam of light catches my attention as it bursts across the far wall, illuminating a screen with the image of Arras, and I’m grateful to think about something besides dead friends and a lost mother. The image is a basic map I once saw in academy. A rectangle with four points for the northern, southern, eastern, and western sides: the coventries. It’s strange to see it now, knowing there’s more to Arras than a map. This world isn’t flat. Arras isn’t limited by four corners. Now I see it as it is. Arras wraps and engulfs the Earth like a beautiful but deadly parasite.
Jax stands up, holding a digifile and looking a bit nervous. “This is how Arras is presented to the general population.”
“I’m not sure I got that far in school,” Erik says.
“Ignore everything he says,” I tell Jax, motioning for him to continue.
“Okay.” He swipes across the face of his digifile and the image begins to morph. “What the map doesn’t show is the dimensions of Arras.”
The map shifts into a half sphere and then a model of the Earth appears below it. Even though I’ve been to the other planet, I’m still in awe. It’s large and blue and round. Arras hovers over about a fourth of it.
“Arras exists over Earth,” Jax continues.
“We know that,” Dante says, but Falon shushes him.
“As I was saying,” Jax says, shooting Dante an annoyed look, “the two worlds exist relative to each other. However, Arras only exists because of Earth.”
“Okay, now you’ve lost me—” Dante admits.
“Dear boy, you’ve seen the mines. Use your imagination,” Albert interrupts him. The scientist is busy jotting notes. I can’t figure out why. I know he understands things we can’t quite grasp. But then he holds up the sheet in front of him, revealing a series of complex equations.
“I think I speak for everyone—except Jax—when I say what?” Erik says.
“I’m with Erik on this,” I say.
“Oh never mind,” Albert says. He crumples the paper into a ball and tugs off his sweater. He digs into its loose weave and begins pulling out a thread. It unravels until there’s a small hole in the arm of the sweater. “I could take this yarn and make a new sweater, correct?”
I nod.
“But if I did,” Albert continues, “I would destroy this sweater.”
“So Arras is unraveling Earth,” I say, “but we know that.”
“Unfortunately, the existence of Earth is more vital to the universe than my sweater is,” Albert says dryly. “If I unravel this sweater, it has no great effect on space-time, except to make me a bit colder.”
“What happens to the universe if Eart
h unravels?” I ask.
Jax jumps in. “A singularity.” But then he looks sheepishly at Albert as though he’s spoken out of turn.
Albert waves off Jax’s interruption. “No, explain with your images. It’s much easier to understand.”
“I got the sweater bit,” Erik says to Albert.
“What’s a singularity?” Jost asks. I’m surprised he’s here given that he finally has his daughter back. I suppose her return is a reminder of what he’s fighting for.
“Well, it’s sort of like this,” says Jax.
On-screen the image shifts. We watch Arras grow from the Earth, leaving behind a hole in its wake. Although Arras stays the same, the lines of light flowing into Arras from Earth leave a larger and larger hole. Eventually the hole grows so large that Earth begins to collapse into itself. A final bright flash of light leaves nothing more than a large black circle in its wake.
“What the Arras was that?” I ask.
“That’s a singularity,” Albert says in a grim voice.
“Basically, by taking Earth’s resources, Arras is jeopardizing Earth’s existence in the universe,” Jax explains.
“But where did it go? Where’s Earth?” Erik asks.
“In the event of a singularity, Earth will cease to exist. A massive well of gravity will pull everything—even light—inside the singularity, destroying Earth and Arras.” Jax pauses to let this sink in.
“What happens inside a black hole?” I ask.
“We don’t know,” Jax says. “Gravity is infinite in one, so it’s impossible to tell.”
“Meaning?”
“Nothing. Nothing will exist.”
“So in this scenario,” Erik asks slowly, “everyone dies?”
“Yes. Death. No doubt. The atoms might survive somehow and somewhere, or rather the leptons, quarks, and other subatomic knickknacks.” Albert says the words with a fair amount of annoyance, as though this is all perfectly obvious. But even hearing him say it doesn’t make it feel any more real.
“Cormac must not know this. Even he wouldn’t be so foolish as to destroy everything,” I say.
“He knows,” Jax says. “More and more of the Guild Tailors and scientists have been defecting—fleeing to Earth and seeking us out. We believe he’s planning a controlled demolition.”
“What does that mean?” I ask slowly.
“If he can mine enough resources from Earth and then control its destruction, he might be able to prevent the singularity.”
“Might?” Erik says, shaking his head. “Fantastic plan.”
“There has to be a contingency for this,” Dante says, running a hand through his hair.
And then I realize there is.
“Protocol Three.” To my surprise it’s Loricel who speaks.
“What is Protocol Three?” I ask Einstein. He has to know, with his intimate knowledge of the Guild.
“Cormac mentioned it. Well, actually, he sort of threatened it.”
“That does not shock me,” Loricel says. “Protocol Three is the ultimate threat response.”
“Stop speaking in riddles,” Dante demands.
“There are three protocols for dealing with trouble in Arras,” she says.
“Protocol One is alteration,” Erik says. He shrugs at me, mouthing, Misspent youth.
“The Guild employs Protocol One to contain information and deal with troubling behavior,” Loricel explains.
“They used it here,” I tell them.
“But the dissent was widespread and Protocol One became ineffective in coping with the situation,” she continues. “Which leads to Protocol Two.”
“They sever an entire sector from Arras,” I say.
“Have you ever wondered why it is the Guild of Twelve Nations?” she asks.
I swallow hard on the question and nod.
“Only four sectors remain of the original twelve,” Loricel says.
“The others were severed?” Jost asks.
“Yes. When a sector became too progressive, it was separated from the whole, or when a disease broke out, or if one wanted its independence. Protocol Two was how they dealt with these situations,” she explains.
“So Arras was larger?” Dante asks.
“It was more divided. Once a separated sector ran out of resources and unraveled, we extended the remaining sectors to take its place.”
“And no one noticed?”
“Over time as sectors were detached, we simplified the map and revised history to reflect that there were only four sectors. Because of education control, it was easy for the Guild to ensure the people only knew what they were told.”
“But it was happening all around them!” I can’t believe this, and yet I know it to be true.
“It’s easier to focus on the life around you than to see the whole picture,” she says.
“Then what will happen to this sector?” I ask. “What do you mean by ‘unraveled’?”
“Extermination?” Jost asks with disgust.
“The disease in the streets only increases the rate of the sector’s decay.”
“We need to get everyone out of this sector,” I say.
“What do you think we’ve been doing?” Falon asks in an annoyed voice.
“It’s been weeks!”
“Do you think you could have done better?” she asks.
“This is getting us nowhere,” Dante says. “We’re working on a plan, Adelice. We expect to have survivors out within a week.”
“What about the sick?” I ask.
“We can’t take them,” he says.
I can’t help but feel disappointed in Dante. He had once set my mother free even though the Guild had turned her into a monster, but now he was turning his back on the people of the Eastern Sector.
“Unfortunately, if what you say is true, the virus progresses so rapidly we have no time to find a cure,” Loricel says. “But the diseased represent a clear and immediate threat to our operations here.”
“It doesn’t sound like we’ll be safer on Earth,” Erik mutters.
Next to him Jost has gone pale. No doubt he’s wondering how to protect Sebrina. I want to kick Erik right now.
“Can we prevent the singularity?” I ask, trying to focus on something positive.
“That is what Protocol Three is for,” Loricel explains.
If the first two protocols alter people’s psychology and destroy whole metros, I’m not sure I want to know what Protocol Three does.
Albert is the one to finish the explanation. “Protocol Three will end the Cypress Project.”
“End it?” I echo. The Cypress Project was once an idea—the theory that with machines men could manipulate the most basic strands of the universe to create a perfect world. Now that idea was Arras itself.
“The men who created it were scientists. It stands to reason we would create a termination procedure if the experiment was deemed a failure,” Albert says.
“And Arras is a failure?” I ask, feeling slightly insulted.
“It will be a failure if it results in the death of two worlds.”
“But the people in Arras—”
Loricel holds up her hand. “Protocol Three will allow for total evacuation of every metro in Arras before the world unravels.”
“And that’s it?” I ask. “We press a button and then poof! No more Arras?”
“That oversimplifies things a bit, but—precisely,” Albert says.
In a way it’s what I wanted, but I’ve seen Earth and I know the hardships generations will endure rebuilding that world.
“You would let Arras go?” I ask Loricel.
She laughs at this. “I’ve been trying to let it go for hundreds of years.”
I can’t help it. I don’t want to see Arras destroyed. Does that make me the same as Cormac?
“You spoke to me once of the greater good,” I say to her.
“Age understands what youth cannot,” she replies, but she offers no other explanation.
“How do we do it?” I ask.
Jax and Albert share a look and my stomach clenches.
“That’s the hard part,” Albert says.
TWENTY-ONE
ACCORDING TO JAX, WE PRETTY MUCH HAVE to bust into the Guild offices in Cypress, hack their controls, and start evacuation procedures. Which will work—if we don’t get caught. Returning to Guild-controlled Arras unnoticed won’t be simple, especially if we need to break into the Ministry offices. But then there’s still the matter of the self-destruct code—a code only Cormac knows.
Because we wouldn’t want this to be too easy.
“I can get it out of him,” I say finally.
“I would love to know how you’re going to do that,” Falon says.
“You have to let me go back. I can claim I was kidnapped and escaped.”
“He’s not going to believe that,” Jost says.
“I don’t care if he believes it,” I say. “I only need to get close to him.”
Cormac might be eager enough to continue the wedding charade to go along with my lie, and I’d only need a little time to get him alone.
“No way.” It’s Erik who speaks, which surprises me, considering the distance he’s kept since I arrived. But one look at his face and I know he’s serious. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I open my mouth to argue with him, but Dante raises his hand. “It has been a long day. Adelice should rest. We should all rest.”
As soon as he says it, I realize I am tired. More tired than I’ve been in weeks. I can’t quite stifle a yawn.
“We need a plan,” Falon says.
“And we can come up with one eight hours from now. But we aren’t going to come up with anything if we’re tired and arguing,” Dante says in a gentle tone.
“I believe you should all spend the evening with those you love,” Albert advises. “Our time here is growing short.”
I don’t want to ask him what he means—whether our time in Arras is growing short, or our time in general.
“I’m going to see to Sebrina.” Jost looks at me and then at his brother. The two share a very serious nod. Have they perfected an entire secret code while we’ve been apart?