Altered

TWENTY-THREE

THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF STRANDS WEAVING IN brilliant discord through the greenhouse once I focus in on them. It’s taken me nearly a week to get to the point where I can see the strands on Earth without adrenaline pumping through me, and it’s now over two weeks since the mission left, making me feel like an empty well drained of every resource. Without the organized weave of Arras, it’s been harder to command my skill—both in manipulating the natural strands of the universe and in seeing them.

Now as I stare at them, I try to home in on one. I could grab any number of the overlarge room’s strands; the space around me is full to bursting. A low hum fills the air from the backup generator Dante has turned on to give us more light. The old halogen bulbs illuminate the room but their constant flickering seems to warn of their impending demise. Between that and the buzzing of the generator, it’s harder to feel the strands’ vibrance. The problem isn’t that I can’t see the strands, it’s that Dante wants me to find one specific thread—the time strand located within a petite orchid.

I’m trying to slip my fingers into the weave of the flower. I hold the strand at an angle, keeping a finger on the particular one Dante has asked me to find. I’m sure it’s easier for him to point one out than for me to find and grip the precise strand he’s referring to, which is exactly what he’s trying to show me. I gingerly grasp the golden thread and tug to pull it into a warp. My touch is gentle but the thread cracks through the air, splitting a petal in two. The pieces fall bruised to the ground. My eyes meet Erik’s; he’s watching from a nearby stool. He came for moral support, but I know we’re thinking the same thing: we’re going to be here forever.

“No,” Dante says. His tone is patient, which has the strange effect of making me feel very impatient.

“It’s occurred to you that this is hopeless, right?” I ask, dropping the strand in defeat and settling back against a table full of pots and plants. It creaks under my weight. I know how it feels.

“Only if you tell yourself it is,” Dante says simply, but he cracks his left knuckles as he speaks.

Never mind. The Zen master is getting a bit tired.

“If you are in a fight, your skill has to be controlled. What would happen if you grabbed the wrong strand?” It’s not a question. We’ve both seen what happens, but I’m getting tired of him constantly bringing up the ammunition factory as an example.

“We’d get out alive. That’s what matters.”

“Is it?” he demands. “And how can you be certain you would, with such a cavalier attitude?”

“I haven’t killed any of us yet.” I stop fingering the strands around me and plant my hands on my hips.

“You nearly did at the factory. You weren’t in control,” he says. “I’d call that dangerous.”

“I’d call that lucky. It bought us time.”

Dante shrugs, rubbing the frond of a tall potted fern. “We view things with a different perspective, Adelice. Your escape from Arras was brave but too risky. When you wield your power like that, you put everyone in your path at risk.”

“No one was hurt,” I argue, but this time my argument sounds small and weak, because I know he has a point.

“Perhaps not, if that makes you feel better, but how would you feel if someone was caught in the tear? If Jost, for instance—”

“I don’t need a lecture. I need you to teach me.”

“You’re missing the point,” he says. “You already know what to do. You have to learn to control your skill.”

So I’ve been told. Repeatedly.

“I’m trying!” I explode.

Dante sighs but his face softens. The crease in his forehead vanishes. “Close your eyes.”

“But—”

“Do it,” he snaps. “You need to find the time strand moving past you. You must isolate it if you want to protect the objects and people around you.”

“No sh—”

“Feel for the pulse,” he says firmly.

“Time doesn’t have the pulse, the matter does—the life,” I argue, but I keep my eyes closed. I can feel the matter around me. If I concentrate I can hear its crackling vitality under the room’s ambient sounds.

“Time’s pulse is different. It’s more like the wind—ephemeral, always changing a little. Matter is vibrant, throbbing with energy. Time is like a whisper. You can only catch it if you listen closely,” he murmurs. “Accept that you’re a part of it and that it’s a part of you like the beat of your heart.”

I clear my mind and reach out with my fingers. I don’t grab anything, I caress the strands around me. They pulsate, pounding with vital life. Strands of matter. I’m shocked at the sensation in my fingertips. Maybe I didn’t concentrate so intensely in Arras, but every strand I touch throbs through me. I drop them and focus on the space around me, tuning out everything but the thrum of the world. And then it’s there—a tinny whistle that fades in and out of my hearing. Almost metallic, it oscillates between a faint rhythm and a heavy, inelegant hammering. I let my fingers reach out, trying to match the sound with the tactile sensation. They close over a thin strand and I feel the intensity of its pulse shift, growing louder and more demanding in my hand.

“Better,” Dante says, breaking my concentration.

As I open my eyes, he fingers a glowing strand of time.

“I’m glad you approve,” I say. “But I can’t stop and concentrate in a fight.”

“Of course not,” he agrees. “That’s not what I’m trying to make you understand. You must let go to unleash your ability. You are strongest when you aren’t trying.”

I try to hold back a groan, but I can’t. “Then isn’t training the exact opposite of what I should be doing?”

“Don’t think of it as training, think of it as honing.”

“A differentiation worthy of a politician,” I mutter. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”

“You were made for this,” Dante says, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We both were. Weaving and altering skills aren’t accidental. They’re your genetic legacy. But you have to accept your gift. Once you do that—once you make it a fundamental aspect of who you are—it will be as simple as breathing.”

Something I’m looking forward to, especially if it means I can stop training and get some sleep. It’s going to be tricky, considering my parents trained me to ignore my weaving ability, not to accept it. I practiced that for years, and now Dante thinks he can undo that preparation.

“What happened to your hands?” he asks.

I hold out my hands and he inspects them.

“A Spinster punished me,” I say.

“By trying to destroy your fingers?”

“I wove razor wire and steel.” I pull my hands back, suddenly self-conscious about the scars that are still visible from Maela’s revenge.

“You’re lucky to have fingers at all,” he says. “But, Adelice, your skill lies as much in your mind as your hands. Stop being so tentative, it’s making you clumsy.”

“That’s what’s holding me back?” I ask.

“I’ve seen you let go when you need to. In that alley to save your mother and in the ammunition factory.”

“I thought you didn’t approve of my use of my skills,” I say.

“I didn’t. You reacted brashly,” he says. “But you relaxed and channeled your ability in those instances. Your hands didn’t stop you. Don’t let that stop you now.”

I nod, embarrassment growing a lump in my throat.

“I think we’re done for the day,” he tells me. “There’s a problem with the photovoltaic array at the power plant that I need to look into.”

“Is Jax helping you?” I ask. “I haven’t seen him in a while.” Jax and I aren’t exactly friends, but after Erik he is still the friendliest person on the estate.

A shadow passes over Dante’s face. “He’s on the mission.”

“He is?” I ask. “Sorry, I thought he had stayed.”

I consider accompanying Dante to the power plant, but even the sight of the smokestacks makes me cringe. I’m still embarrassed by my mistake at the ammunition factory. If Jax isn’t going to be there, I’m not sure I want to go with Dante. Thinking of the plant, I recall what he said earlier. “What happens if I catch someone in a warp?”

“In the best-case scenario, you merely trap them in the caught time.”

I know that from experience. I count on it actually.

“What if it’s more serious?” I ask quietly.

“You could damage their thread. Maim them. Kill them. That’s why it’s imperative you learn to focus on time. Grabbing matter uncontrolled is too risky. You know how delicate we are. One wrong move and you could rip someone in half.”

“What I really want to know is how to alter,” I admit.

Dante stops and gives me a heavy look. “I assumed so. It’s not as glamorous as it looks.”

“I saw what they did to Deniel,” I say. “I’m aware of how glamorous it is.”

“You saw the worst thing that Tailors do,” he says.

The worst? Yes, what happened to Deniel was horrible, but what about removing people’s souls or altering their memories? What about the other ways Tailors and the Guild take away people’s lives? Take away the very essence of who they are?

“Tailors can help people, too, Adelice. A trained Tailor can patch a thread and heal someone,” Dante says.

“I’ve only seen them do that to people they hurt in the first place,” I say, planting my hands on my hips. It’s true. My only experience with renewal patches is seeing them misused by men like Cormac and Kincaid.

“I need to know what I’m doing,” I say. “You’ve been teaching me this so that I don’t hurt anyone, but what I did to Deniel when he attacked me—that could have been worse. I need to understand how alteration works.”

“Fine. I’ll give you an hour, but then I have to check on that array.” But the look on Dante’s face says it’s anything but. He doesn’t want me to see this or understand this or do this. But why? “Maybe your friend will volunteer.”

I’m not imagining the way Erik swallows before he nods. “Sure.”

“Maybe we could start with something smaller and less prone to bleeding?” I suggest.

Dante’s jaw tenses but he bobs his head in agreement, gesturing to the fern he’d been fiddling with. It’s only a plant, but I don’t like the idea.

“I can unwind this,” he says, “or I can change the shape it grows in, make the leaves longer. I can steal strands from another plant and wind them through it, and create a hybrid.”

“Could you make it look like another plant?”

“Sure,” he says with a shrug, and as we watch he tugs apart the fern and then carefully adds its strands into a small bush. The plants blur and shift, growing, changing in front of our eyes until the stubby little bush is a baby fern.

“You are possibly the best gardener ever,” Erik says, clearly impressed. “Don’t tell my brother I said that.”

Dante grins despite his earlier foul mood.

“Make it grow,” I say.

He runs his hands over a leaf and it blurs, stretching into a long green leaf.

He turns to me. “You try.”

My hands tremble a little as I reach for the leaf. I try to focus and see the composition of it, where to slip my fingers, what pieces to manipulate, but I can’t.

“Relax,” Dante says. He moves behind me and places his hands on my shoulders. It’s a strange gesture, but having him there makes me calm.

The plant’s composition comes into focus and I concentrate harder until I’m reading it like a code. Each strand woven neatly through, certain threads knit tightly while others are loose. But when I pull on the strands, the plant crumbles into dust.

“Does that make me the worst gardener?” I ask Erik.

“Let’s say you don’t have a green thumb,” he says.

“Try again,” Dante urges. “You got the time with it.”

“I killed it,” I say in a bleak voice.

“Don’t look at it that way.”

“Is there another way to look at it?”

After a few more tries, I manage to get a leaf to stretch. It’s only a quarter of an inch, but it boosts my confidence. “I want to see how you alter a human.”

“You already saw that,” Dante reminds me softly.

“I saw a human unwound,” I say. “What good is my alteration ability if I don’t know how to use it?”

“I think being able to rip someone’s flesh apart is a pretty good way to use it,” Erik offers.

I shoot him a look. “The more I see outside of a stressful moment, the more I’ll be able to control my alterations when there’s a crisis.”

“So you want to practice on me?” Erik asks.

“Spoken like a true volunteer,” I say, giving him a sweet smile.

“Don’t try to charm me, Adelice Lewys,” he warns, but I already know I’ve won.

“Why don’t you watch for now?” Dante suggests. He reaches for Erik’s arm, but Erik doesn’t extend it.

“Wait, that seems like you’re going to touch me,” he says.

“You aren’t being terribly open-minded,” I tell him.

“Forgive me,” Erik says sarcastically. “I’m attached to my skin. Literally.”

“Never mind, we’ll do it on Ad,” Dante says. “You’ll be able to see as well.”

I don’t hesitate in thrusting my arm out to him. I sink back into my head, trying to clear my mind of distractions, waiting for my own composition to come to life but Erik pushes my hand down.

“Do me,” he commands.

“I guess chivalry isn’t dead,” Dante mutters.

“What was that?” Erik asks.

“Nothing.”

But I can tell from the pinched expression on his face that Erik heard. He doesn’t want to admit why he’s so eager to volunteer, and I don’t want to think about it. About what it means. That Erik is protecting me, because I not only don’t need Erik to protect me, but I also don’t want him to.

I don’t want anyone to.

Erik holds very still as Dante pulls a thin blade from his pocket. But he doesn’t cut him. Instead he traces along the bare flesh of Erik’s wrist. I feel my stomach flip over, but as it does, I see what Dante is doing. He’s tracing the lines of Erik’s weave. A moment later, his fingers slip down and a trickle of blood appears at the spot.

I look to Erik’s face, momentarily abandoning my interest in the procedure. This can’t feel good. His teeth are clenched together but he gives me the barest of determined nods. He’s putting on a show for me, no doubt.

I shouldn’t have let him volunteer for me.

When Dante’s done, there’s the lightest hint of a scar traveling up Erik’s wrist, but it’s thin and hard to see. I wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking.

“What did you do to me?” Erik asks, examining his hand. There’s some smeared blood on his wrist, but other than that and the small scar, you’d never guess that he’d been altered. It was so fast, so expert.

The thought makes me sick.

Anyone can be changed in an instant.

“I added some of that plant to your DNA,” Dante tells him.

“What?” both Erik and I say in surprise.

“What effect will that have?” I ask.

“He’ll probably turn green and start producing tomatoes.” Dante’s face splits into a full grin.

“Not funny.”

“You two are very gullible,” Dante says. “All I did was stretch your strand and then fuse it back together. That’s why there’s a scar.”

“Oh,” I say in a small voice, but I can tell Erik appreciated the joke.

“Any side effects?” Erik asks.

Dante hesitates but when he answers there’s no two ways about his answer. “No. There won’t be.”

It’s the calm, even voice my father used with me when I was a kid. If I asked if there were monsters in the closet, there weren’t. If I asked if I would be taken away at testing, I wouldn’t. If I asked him if I would make friends at academy, I would. The same even tone used to tell me what I needed to hear. Sometimes he was right about the monsters, but he’d been gambling on some of the others.

Of course there were monsters everywhere in Arras.

But why lie to Erik? What side effects can come from alteration?

“I’m starving,” Erik says. “Being a lab rat takes it out of you. Anyone else interested in food?”

“I’ll join you in a minute,” I hedge, knowing it’s me he’s waiting for. “I want to change first.”

Erik accepts this explanation and heads out of the greenhouse, flexing his wrist a little, like it’s sore.

“What did you do?” I ask as soon as he’s out of earshot.

Dante opens his palm to reveal a bloody chip of metal and circuits.

“What is that?”

“Tracking chip,” he says.

“How did you know it was there?” I ask. I take the chip even though it’s covered in blood.

“A guess.”

“But they can track our sequences in the mantle,” I say, confused. I turn the chip over in my palm, looking for a clue as to why it was there. Why bother when they could call up a personal identifying sequence and remove the individual strands so easily?

“They can track through most of the mantle, but the looms don’t see everywhere. There are slubs, irregularities in Arras’s weave, much like the ones near the Guild’s mines here.”

“Are the slubs caused by accidents?”

“There are no accidents in Arras,” Dante says in a quiet voice.

No, there aren’t, which means any irregularities, any slubs in the weave are man-made. It wouldn’t make sense for the Guild to put them there. They wanted total control. So why are they there? “I was tracked,” I tell him. “They put a transmitter in my food when I went out on a goodwill tour with Cormac.”

“I doubt it’s still there,” Dante says. “Transmitters like that break down too easily within the body, or pass through altogether. I’m surprised they bothered.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Probably to track you more conveniently. Perhaps Cormac didn’t want to use the looms, or maybe he wanted to be able to follow your movements throughout the day.”

That does sound like Cormac, but why bother with Erik?

“I wonder if they’ve been tracking him this whole time,” I say, feeling more sick every minute.

There’s a pause before he answers. “Probably not.”

That’s not reassuring.

“Do I have one here?” I ask.

Dante reaches for my arm. “I don’t see a scar,” he says.

“Erik had a scar?” How had I not noticed this?

“It was a pinprick. I wouldn’t expect the average person to pick up on it. But altered skin is different. I doubt even Erik knew he had it.”

“But why would he have it?”

“I don’t know, Adelice,” Dante says. “I guess the question I’d be asking if I were you is, how well do you know your friend?”

I don’t know him at all. I only know what he’s told me, what Jost has told me—but still I’m certain of my answer. “He didn’t know. I trust him.”

“Even if he’s lying to you?” Dante asks, wrapping the chip up in a handkerchief and putting it in his pocket.

“He’s not lying,” I say. “He didn’t know it was there.”

“That’s not what I’m talking about,” Dante says in a soft voice. “Your friend sees the strands.”

I knew that. I’d known that since my first training session at the Coventry, when Erik reacted to my proclamation about the fake windows. I’d even seen him grip the strands when we came through the Interface to get to Earth. It wasn’t news to me, and yet I’d never stopped to consider what it meant. “I’m sure lots of men can.”

“The strands of the Interface or the knit of Arras’s weave perhaps, but Erik is hiding something,” Dante muses out loud.

“If you were going to implant a tracking chip in someone, why would you do it?” I ask instead.

Dante hesitates and then looks me directly in the eyes. “There are two reasons I would implant someone with a chip. Because I didn’t want to lose them, or because they were dangerous.”

I don’t like either option. Mostly because even though I trust Erik, I know it’s both.