Altered (22 page)

“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.

DANTE LOCKS THE GREENHOUSE BEHIND US. I’M not sure why a bunch of plants and potting tools need to be secured, but I know Dante wouldn’t tell me even if I asked him. In evening’s dim light settings, the glass is black. I trail a finger along a pane, considering something Dante said earlier.

“I wonder how our family got a pass to go,” I muse.

Dante chuckles, moving toward the main house. “I should think that’s obvious given your ability.”

“You said we were made,” I remind him. “They didn’t choose the original Spinsters for their skills—they had none!”

“But they chose our families based on a list of physical and mental requirements. Decisions were based on potential,” Dante says, as I trail beside him.

“And then they made them into Spinsters,” I finish. “But wait, my mother wasn’t a Spinster. Or my sister.”

“Most genetic abilities skip around in a family,” he explains. “Not everyone gets the same eye color or body build, for instance. Remember the footage of the injections and surgeries in the film? It was genetic manipulation.”

“So the scientists gave us the gene?” I ask.

“I’d be lying if I said I understood half of it. Weaving is a cultivated recessive gene. Once it was added to a person’s genetic composition, it might reveal itself but that wasn’t certain. The first crop of Spinsters was very small and very weak. Early on, while the scientists created serums that increased ability, they depended completely on the looms.”

Dante claims ignorance, but he’s full of information.

“And those that didn’t have ability?” I ask.

“They were put into the population to breed more Spinsters.”

“And Tailors,” I add. “So now the Guild is trying to isolate those genes so that they can replicate them?” I guess.

“It will be much easier for the Guild to have total control over Spinsters. You’re right, Adelice,” he says. “I think they plan to make a dominant gene that can be spliced into hand-picked specimens. Then they can decide which girls to grant the ability.”

Girls who are easier to manipulate, I think. Girls who are obedient.

“My grandmother told me families fought the retrieval squads,” I say out loud. “All those women in the film looked eager to join.”

Dante’s mouth thins into a tight line and he tilts his head thoughtfully. “You shouldn’t believe everything you see in a film, Adelice, but I suppose you’re right. The circumstances here were terrible during the war, but I think things changed in Arras.”

“Changed how?” I ask.

“Nations merged, and laws were adjusted to meet everyone’s expectations. Conflicting national identities merged to create a cohesive whole. Those changes, coupled with resentment over having daughters whisked off in the night with little to no expectation of seeing them again. There was an adjustment period,” he tells me.

“How do you know about this?”

“Our family,” he says after a pause. “They took care to chronicle things despite the laws against it.”

“Were they members of the Kairos Agenda?” I ask. My parents had never told me these stories, even though they knew what I was—they kept this information from me.

“Not really.” Pause. I can tell he’s holding something back. “They were pacifists. My parents wanted to live comfortably and easily.”

“Until you showed your abilities?” I ask.

“It wasn’t my parents who asked me to run. They should have,” he says. Pause. “With the increasing amount of propaganda thrown at them, like the film, for instance, most Arras citizens stopped seeing the danger of the Guild’s absolute control. Bombs weren’t being dropped, so people went along with it, even as the laws got stranger and more restrictive. The Guild required everyone to marry and have children, who could then be tested for the gene. It’s how Arras wound up with marriage laws and skills testing.”