Altered

TWENTY-FIVE

THE POOL STRETCHES OUT BEFORE ME. A dozen squat white lampposts line the space, their soft glow mirrored in the water below. It’s the indoor pool’s only light source now that no sun shines through the windows overhead. The water is as smooth as glass, gold-flecked tiles peeking through the cerulean surface. Although it’s quiet, I spot a shape moving forward under the water. Erik strokes evenly across the pool, the barest ripple following him. His hair is a golden halo flowing behind him. I wait by the side, surprised by how long he can stay under the water.

His head breaks through, shattering the water’s surface. He rubs at his eyes and smiles at me. “Ad, you scared me. What are you doing here?”

“I see you found swimming trunks,” I say. I’m not ready to address the real reason that I’ve come.

“Sort of. I’m using the fishing-village version,” he says. His arms perch on the side of the pool, and his eyes are as bright as the brilliant tiles.

I slip my shoes off and roll down my stockings. “And what does this version consist of?”

“Sorry,” Erik says, pretending to fan himself. “You’re distracting me. What did you say?”

I frown at him, sitting down and dipping my feet into the water. It’s warmer than I would have expected.

“When I was a kid, working the fishing boats in Saxun, we took off as much of our clothes as possible, without revealing our, uh, treasure, and jumped in,” he says, his lower lip inching up into a crooked grin.

“You have a treasure?” I say, widening my eyes in feigned innocence.

“You gonna pillage it?” he asks.

“I walked into that one,” I admit with a groan.

“Yes,” Erik says, “you did.”

His finger traces a spot on my calf, leaving a trickle of water on my bare skin, and I swat his hand away.

“That’s one huge scar,” he says. I frown and look to see what he means. A thin, pale line slants across my leg. “Where did you get it?”

“I don’t know,” I say, drawing my knees up and clutching them to my chest. “It’s probably from my retrieval night. They used a claw to pull me out of the escape tunnel. The renewal patch must have left a scar.”

“It shouldn’t have,” Erik says, squinting to get a better look at it. I don’t care about the scar. It’s only a remnant of a past life.

“Erik.” But I stop on his name, searching for the right way to ask him about what Dante told me about the tracking device. It doesn’t take me long to realize there is no right way.

“You’re going to chew off your lip,” Erik warns me, and I relax my mouth into a tight line. “Just ask me.”

“I want you to tell me how you wound up at the Coventry, how you got out of Saxun,” I say. The words jumble into one long exhalation.

“Why?” he prompts, seeming to disappear from the conversation. I know he’s upset. Erik distances himself, asking questions, when he feels cornered.

“I need you to tell me the truth,” I say in a quiet voice. He’ll vanish entirely if I push too hard.

“I can’t,” Erik says.

“Why? I promise it won’t change anything.”

Erik turns from me and stares up at the glittering ceiling. His arms spread wide against the the lip of the pool, revealing the sharp sinews of his upper body, built by years of handling fishing boats. “You can’t promise that. It will change things between us, Adelice. There are things in my past that I’m not proud of—”

“You think I don’t have regrets, too?” I ask. “My father was murdered. My mom is a monster. My sister is in Cormac’s clutches as we speak. And that all happened before I got to the Coventry and started messing things up.”

“This is different. Those things happened to you, Ad.” Erik hesitates, pausing to look at me for a fleeting moment before he turns away again. “The things in my past—they’re choices I made. I can’t blame anyone else for them.”

“You aren’t going to tell me?” I ask. I swish my feet through the water, watching the bubbles swirl around my toes. I know what he’s hiding, and he has to know that, too. He sees right through my feigned interest. He knows I want to catch him. If Dante’s theory is correct, Erik’s secret breaches our trust completely. If he could be honest now, we can rebuild it.

But he doesn’t want to.

Neither of us speaks, the silence extending so long that my toes shrivel and pucker in the water. “I know.”

“Know what?” Erik asks casually.

“I know that you can see the strands. I know that you can touch them.”

“That doesn’t necessarily mean anything,” Erik says.

“No, I know it does, and I’m hoping you respect me enough to tell me what it means.” I wait for him to rise to my challenge, but he stays silent.

“I can’t take it back once I tell you, Ad,” he whispers finally.

“I know that, but I need to hear the truth from you.” My voice is a plea, cracking from the pressure of my warring emotions. “Right now I’m betting my imagination is making things worse than they are.”

“I doubt it.” Erik scratches the top of his head and pushes out of the pool so he’s sitting next to me. Our feet dangle under the surface of the water, dangerously close to each other.

“I left Saxun to pursue a career with the Guild,” Erik begins, and I nod to show him I’m listening, that I care about whatever part of his story he’s willing to share—as long as there are answers at the end of it.

“I wasn’t cut out for fishing.”

“The pretty ones never are,” I joke, trying to lighten the mood. Erik gives me a small smile but his face stays serious. “What I’ve never understood is how. How did you get the Guild’s attention?”

“I gambled,” he said. “They brought a friend of mine into service, which is pretty rare, and when they came to Saxun, I approached a Guild official and told him I had something they wanted.”

“Risky,” I comment. “What was it?”

Erik takes a deep breath and speaks slowly. This is what he wants to avoid talking about.

“I showed them I could alter,” he admits.

Somewhere deep down I had known Dante was right, even if he hadn’t tied it up in a neat bow for me. He’d told me to keep Tailors at arm’s length, and I knew he was talking about Erik, but I didn’t want to believe it.

“You’re a Tailor?” I murmur in a voice so low that I’m not sure Erik can even hear me.

“I am,” Erik says.

My hand flies up and slaps him hard across the cheek before I even consider what I’m doing. “How could you keep that from me?”

“How was I supposed to tell you?” Erik says, rubbing the splotch of red left by my hand.

“It’s pretty easy actually,” I say, dropping my voice to mimic his deeper one. “Adelice, I can manipulate strands like you.”

I know it’s not that easy, but I wish it were.

“I wanted to tell you, but you don’t know everything about Tailors. Do you know what they do to us?” he asks.

Dante told me what they do to Tailors. They take them away like Spinsters, but Tailors are controlled even more tightly. The Guild wipes out their families systematically. They imprison them and ask them to do things to people—take away their memories, alter their feelings and personalities—I can’t even imagine what else.

“I wanted out of Saxun,” he says. “Doing alterations was my ticket. I didn’t know what I was getting into.”

“Does Jost know?” I ask.

“No,” Erik says quickly. “Ad, aside from other officials and my best friend, Alix, from Saxun, you’re the only person who knows.”

“Not even Maela?”

“You’re the first person I’ve ever told.”

“How did you even discover you could do it?” I ask.

“We don’t have to trade stories about our first time,” he says. “Like so many first experiences, it was an accident. I have no reason to believe the Guild would ever have known about me if I hadn’t approached them. I thought Alix might tell them, but I couldn’t spend my life in Saxun, especially once Alix was gone.”

“So you left and did whatever they told you to do?” I ask. I’m making it sound more dramatic than it was, but the betrayal is still raw, each new revelation stinging the tender, damaged skin of our relationship. Even worse, I know I’m judging him.

“I left without saying goodbye,” Erik says. “I was young and careless, and it never occurred to me that I might not see my family again. Saxun didn’t have a lot of Spinsters, let alone Tailors. There was no one there to guide me, to explain my skill to me. I thought I was special.”

“You thought you would be worth something to them?” I guess.

Erik nods, a far-off look settling over his face. “I thought I would be somebody. Now I know the best thing I ever did for my family was to leave them like I did.”

“They didn’t go after your family because you volunteered?” I ask.

“Alix helped me get access to a grey market Tailor. New privilege card, new last name—no questions,” he says. “They didn’t go after my family because they didn’t know about them.”

“That’s your face though, right?”

“Changed the name, kept the sexy,” he says.

“Why bother?” I say.

“I didn’t want my family to know where I went,” he says. “I was scared that the Guild would reject me if they knew I was the son of a fisherman.” A dark look passes over his face. “I was being a complete jerk, but it may be the only reason Jost is alive today.”

“I doubt he’d see it that way,” I say. Erik left his family without concern over how they would feel, and his recklessness saved them. The night of my retrieval I only thought of my family and me. I was too selfish to warn them, and I destroyed them. Funny how selfishness comes in shades of destruction and salvation.

“He doesn’t,” Erik admits. “Why do you think he hates me?”

“He doesn’t hate you.”

“He doesn’t like me,” Erik says.

I can’t argue with that.

“You need to tell him,” I say, grabbing Erik’s hand. “He’ll understand.”

“No,” Erik barks. He clutches my hand so tightly my nerves gasp in pain. “Promise me you won’t tell him—that you won’t tell anyone.”

“I promise,” I say, and he releases my hand. “But I still think you should tell him.”

“You don’t know Jost like I do,” Erik says, but the second the words leave his lips, he sighs.

“Did you do the things the Guild asked you to?” I ask, steering our conversation away from Jost.

“Yes,” Erik says. “I always did what they asked. I never saw any reason not to.”

He didn’t see anything wrong with manipulating people’s minds? With unwinding their bodies? “Why did you change your mind?” I ask. I need him to redeem himself. “You told me you were trapped at the Coventry. You helped me escape.”

Erik’s face hints at a smile, but it’s a sad one and he shakes his head. “I get to keep a few secrets.”

“Yes, you do.” I incline my head and meet his eyes. “I’m sorry I slapped you.”

“You’re stronger than you think, Ad,” Erik says, his hand reaching for his cheek.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“I definitely didn’t deserve to be slapped though,” Erik says, his voice dropping to a whisper. “There are repercussions for slapping your friends.”

“There are, huh?” I ask, waiting to see what Erik’s idea of a fair punishment for a slap is. His hands stay on the tiled edge of the pool, but he leans in toward me, shrinking the space between us.

And then his arms reach up and pull me down into the pool with him. We plunge into the water, and I struggle frantically, kicking my legs and pushing against Erik’s arms. When we surface, I gasp for air, spluttering a stream of foul-mouthed names at him.

“You’re only a little wet,” Erik says, dropping his hands from my waist.

I throw my arms around his shoulders, clutching at him. “No, idiot, I can’t swim!”

Erik’s head pops back a fraction of an inch to appraise me.

“Not everyone was raised in a fishing village,” I remind him.

“You like water. You love the ocean,” he says.

“I do, but that doesn’t mean I know how to swim. My family didn’t live near the ocean. I doubt even my mom knew—knows”—I correct myself—“how to swim. The closest I’ve come to swimming is my bathtub.”

“Your bathtub at the Coventry was huge,” Erik says, a guilty look settling over his face. His arms wrap tightly around my waist and I relax against him, feeling safe enough to enjoy the gentle airy pressure of the water.

“I could touch the bottom of my bathtub,” I say.

“Here,” Erik says, pushing me away from him. I shriek and splash, trying to stop him. “Put your feet down.”

My legs are still stroking against the water in frantic, helpless circles. “Don’t let me go,” I tell him.

He nods, and I relax my legs, surprised when my toes find the smooth grid of the tiled floor. The tension in my chest deflates a little, but I don’t let go of Erik’s arm. I make a mental note to ask my mom if she knows how to swim. She has no reason not to tell me. Another innocent question to fall back on.

“I’m going to teach you how to swim,” Erik says, drawing me back to the moment. “I’ll never forgive myself if you drown.”

“I’m not in the habit of jumping into large bodies of water,” I say, “but I’d like to learn how to swim.”

Erik’s hand squeezes my hip and I rest against him for a moment until I disentangle myself and take a tentative step without his help. Now that I can touch the bottom, my initial panic is subsiding. Still, I don’t go more than a few feet from Erik. He nods encouragingly and stops me when I get too close to the deep end.

After a few minutes, I remember I’m still fully dressed and I tiptoe to the end of the pool, careful to keep my head above water. Erik glides toward me, his hands lifting me out of the pool.

“Thank you,” I say, allowing myself to linger a moment on the edge, his hands still low on my hips.

“Don’t worry, Ad,” Erik says, pushing out into the water. “I’ll never let you go.”