Altered

“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 interrupting 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?”