Altered

“Sometimes it requires special tools to adjust a person or a thing.”

I’m reminded of the clinic at the Coventry, where I lay on a cold, steel slab as a dome of gears and wheels mapped my mind.

“Tailors can remove memories, adjust emotions, even undo things entirely.”

“Undo?” I repeat in a whisper.

“Watch,” he commands me, and as I do, his finger slips into the leaves of a fern near the door. At first it looks like he’s massaging them, but then I see what he’s doing. He’s teasing apart the very strands that make them up. Most objects, even people, look like one thick thread on a loom, but I’ve seen them close enough to know that they are comprised of multiple thin threads twisted delicately together. Dante is pulling the fern apart. At first nothing happens, and then he tugs against a strand and it separates from the others. It’s golden in his fingers and as he pulls it slips out from the other strands. The effect is instantaneous.

The fern’s leaves wilt, withering into brown, drooping, then shriveling until they become so brittle that the plant crumbles into dust before my eyes. A moment ago it was alive and now it’s nothing. It scatters like ash to the floor.

My eyes are wide as Dante releases the golden strands and they vanish, evaporating like smoke when met with too much air.

“You ripped the time right out of it,” I say breathlessly. “I never even realized threads had time strands.”

“They aren’t easy to see.” Dante brushes his hands together as though they’re dirty. “I unwound it.”

“But why would time exist within a strand?” I ask.

“All things have a season, Adelice. You and I, we both have natural lives to live. We’ve been granted so much time and when that’s up…”

“We die,” I finish for him.

“If something doesn’t kill us first.” It’s an attempt at humor, but it falls flat. Probably since we both know that people like us aren’t likely to die of old age.

“If you can pull the time from a plant, then you can pull it from a person.” I shudder at the thought of seeing that.

“Yes.” Dante pauses and his jaw tenses under his smooth skin. “Or you can warp it. You can divorce it from the natural order of things to suit your purpose, which is exactly what the Guild has done.”

“Warp,” I repeat, and then it hits me. The Bulletin story we found with the photograph of Cormac. The propaganda film. I knew hundreds of years had passed in Arras, but no one could tell me exactly how many. Loricel was cagey about how long she had acted as Creweler. Cormac never seemed to age. At the academy we studied civic responsibility, not history, because Arras’s history never changed. It moved along pleasantly. It was orderly. Nothing in Arras progressed except technology.

Not even its leaders.

“How many years?” I ask, because I need to hear him say it, even though all the pieces are falling into place now, beginning to reveal a secret I could never have imagined. “How many years have passed on Earth since the Exodus to Arras?”

“Sixteen years, give or take. On Earth, it’s probably close to the year 1960, but we can only guess. It’s hard without days and seasons.”

I’ve never been good at math, but even I can figure that out. If sixteen years have passed on Earth, nearly two hundred years have passed on Arras. Generations in Arras have lived and died before those left on Earth have even forgotten the war.

It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t possible. “Are you telling me that Cormac Patton is over two hundred years old?”

Dante’s eyes shift to mine, and I see fire in them. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

THIRTEEN

STEEL SNAKES AROUND MY WRISTS AND PINS me to the table. I struggle to see in the blinding light, and the smells of whiskey and renewal patches cause me to thrash against the cold metal. His Stream voice—the one that’s both patronizing and charming—melts in my ear. It oozes into my consciousness as his form comes into view.

“Darling, why struggle? You can’t stop this.”

I slam my chest against his, but it doesn’t help, and his breath stays hot on my ear. I feel Cormac’s lips press down against my skin and my body bursts into flames, my bones cracking and shattering, my blood rushing into my hands and feet. I’ve lost the ability to fight him, and all I can do is scream.

I wake with a start. I can’t escape Cormac any more than I can escape my dreams.

Cormac, who can’t die, who never ages, who uses Arras-knows-what technology to maintain his youth eternally. With each minute that passes here, many more pass in Arras, giving Cormac time to build a plan of attack. He won’t ever let me go because he has an endless amount of time to devote to finding me and destroying me.

In the Coventry, when I warped moments of privacy for Jost and me, I imagined lingering there, living an entire life safely away from my responsibility to the Guild. I never knew the Guild had done the same, creating a timeline that allowed them to move forward with unspeakable plots against those who rose up against them on Earth and in Arras. They’d corrupted the very strands of the universe.

Jost, Erik, and I breakfast in the sitting room of my suite the next morning. Through one door is my bedroom, and on the other side is the room they’ve given Jost. I thought the accommodations of the Coventry were luxurious, but these rooms border on lavish: heavy blue curtains line the walls and the intricately carved hearth looks to be hundreds of years old. I’m not sure I could even use it if I wanted to. Overhead, winged angels watch us from the painted ceiling. A valet brings coffee and pastries on a silver cart, but my choice of topic causes us to leave the food untouched. I’ve kept this from Jost and Erik for far too long, waiting until I could grasp it myself, but they need to know what we’re up against.

“So you’re saying Cormac is over two hundred years old?” Erik says. “I thought he looked good for his age.”

“Yeah, it seems like renewal patches are even better than we thought,” I say.

“But how?” Jost asks. “How would no one notice that?”

“I think that’s a question for Kincaid,” I say. “He must know about this if he was a Guild official once. He was probably here at the beginning.” The fact that Kincaid could also be two hundred years old sends bile rising in my throat.

“Are there more Tailors like Dante here?”

“I don’t know, but there are Tailors in Arras. Dante claims the Guild retrieves them like they do Spinsters, but that all traces of the boys and their families disappear,” I say.

“Makes sense,” Erik says.

“How does that make sense?” Jost asks incredulously.

“Well, if I was trying to hide the fact that I was two hundred years old from everyone, I’d cover up how I did it, too. If they use the Tailors to cover up their conspiracy, they have to ensure no one knows the Tailors exist,” Erik says, “and the Tailors have nowhere to go. They’re dependent on the Guild, even more so than Spinsters.”

“Unless they run,” I say quietly.

“And then they’re stuck here,” Erik adds.

Earth isn’t exactly a paradise, and the Guild has made sure it’s even less possible every year to inhabit it, by stealing more and more of the planet’s resources. What the Tailors do is monstrous, but deep down I feel sorry for them. I know what it’s like to be caged, to feel like you have no options. The Guild systematically destroyed every option the Tailors had. How could they fight that?

“Dante said Tailors are everywhere in Arras. Medics. Guards. Doctors,” I tell them. “Did either of you know about this?”