EIGHTEEN
I SLEEP SO HEAVILY THAT THE NEXT morning I have no memory of the prior night. When I look back at the time since Deniel’s attack, it seems like a dream, even though I feel far from safe. Sleep is the dark and lovely escape of my childhood, and nightmares are now an inevitability of my waking existence. They’ll come for me again and again, but in sleep, I’m finally free.
When I was little, I would lie awake and listen to my father checking the locks on our doors. The only thing I needed so I could drift away was the sound of locks clicking in place and if I heard them, I rarely had nightmares.
Once, soon after my parents starting training me to hide my gift, I dreamed I was tangled in a web, held captive by sticky strands that wound slowly around my short legs. They wrapped up my entire body until even my eyes were glued shut from the clinging fibers, and I waited to be devoured.
My father woke me that night, and I was still screaming even after he switched on the lamp that hung over my bed. Only cocooned in his strong arms did I calm down enough to relate the dream in choking, gasping sobs.
“You’re safe,” he whispered into my hair.
“But you weren’t there,” I sobbed.
He could have lied to me—told me he would never leave me—but instead he pulled away and took my trembling chin in his warm, rough hands. “When I’m not there, remember you have the strength to free yourself.”
“But I didn’t,” I protested.
“You will,” my father said, brushing back the wisps of copper hair caught in my tears.
I fell asleep in his arms and woke the next morning to find him sleeping in a crooked heap next to me. He’d stayed with me through the night. Looking back, it was almost as though he knew our time together was drawing to a close, as though he couldn’t bear to deplete my strength before I would need it most.
Now sleep asks no more of me than it once did. It is a refuge for me like it was when I was a child— perhaps the last refuge I have left.
My father is the first person I think of when I wake—my real father. The man who brought me up and locked the doors at night to keep me safe. I only knew him as a parent—someone who cared for me, providing food, shelter, and security—but now I know there was more to Benn Lewys. In the Coventry, I blocked the memory of my retrieval night, letting it fade into a fuzzy, Valpron-tainted recollection. If I didn’t think of it, it had never happened. The fact that I would never see my father again could burn out of my mind along with the other moments too painful to recall.
But now, knowing that Dante is my biological father and that Benn kept his own painful secrets tucked away, I want to remember. And for the first time since my retrieval, I have a conduit to my past.
I find Dante piling large glass panels and coiled wire into the back of a crawler.
“Going somewhere?” I ask, suddenly glad that I’d pulled on thick blue jeans rather than a dress.
“Yeah,” Dante says, pushing another panel into the cargo bed. There’s the hesitation of a question in his voice. He knows I’m up to something.
“I want to come with you,” I say, twisting a loose strand of hair tightly around my finger. “Maybe I could learn the family business.”
Dante slams the cargo door closed and wipes his hands across his jeans. “Sunrunning is hardly the family business.”
“Still, I’d like to see it.” I’m not exactly lying. I would like to understand how Sunrunning works, but I’m more eager for some time off the estate with Dante.
“I don’t know. I was planning to go alone—”
“I don’t feel safe here anymore,” I say in a low whisper, confessing my weakness to my father as I would have as a child.
“Fine,” Dante agrees. Apparently he’s as vulnerable to my entreaties as my father once was. “I’m leaving in ten minutes. Meet me out here.”
I dash back in to grab a few supplies—a bottle for water and a jacket in case it’s cool in the open-air crawler. Unfortunately, my quick supply run puts me in the path of Jost and Erik. I’m not eager to make a party of it, but I can’t say no when they ask to come along. It means Jost and Erik can help Dante collect the solar panels after they’re charged. Dante doesn’t seem too happy about it, but he doesn’t renege on his agreement to let me come.
“And you’re sure this is safe?” I ask Dante, my attention locked on the crawler. It has the same terrifying, cage-like appearance of the one we traveled in to the estate with the added bonus of no roof.
“Perfectly,” Dante says, balancing a thick glass panel on his shoulder. “Get in and stop worrying. I thought you were a rebel.”
“I haven’t quite hit the suicidal stage of rebellion though,” I mutter.
“What every father wants to hear,” Dante says. He looks away as soon as it slips from his mouth, but awkwardness crackles in the air around us. I can appreciate his attempt to lighten things between us, but I can’t laugh about this yet.
“How far are we going?” I ask as the engine thunders to life.
“Until we see the sun,” Dante says.
“We’ll be outside Kincaid’s territory?” I ask.
“Yes,” Dante answers, not taking his eyes off the road that leads from the estate.
The ride is as rough as I predicted based on the appearance of the crawler, but when we get closer to the border, where Dante will gather the solar energy to sell in the Icebox, light creeps across the edge of the Interface. We’ve been past the border before—the night we came to Earth—but we hadn’t stayed long enough to study the relationship of the worlds. Day never came once we’d passed under the Interface into the metro of the Icebox, only an artificial morning created by the solar charges in the street lamps. I had looked at the sky that day and it hasn’t changed since. At the time I was sad to think I had left the moon and stars behind without so much as a goodbye. In a moment I will see blue laced with cottony clouds. I will see the sun.
And when I do, we’ll be deep in Guild territory.
“But what is it the border of?” Erik asks as we cross into the bright light of morning. We’re out from under the Interface now. Arras’s cover doesn’t reach this far along the rocky, mountainous shoreline.
“The Interface between Earth and Arras,” Dante says over the rumble of the crawler’s engine. That’s hardly more than we knew before though. The relationship of Earth and Arras remains hazy, although we see the parasitic effects of Arras every day. “There’s a Guild mining operation nearby.”
“Only one?” I ask.
“One active mine. Once they expend a spot, they move to another. We estimate there are about one hundred active mining locations at any time, but there are thousands of abandoned ones,” Dante says. “Arras always needs more. It’s growing every year.” His eyes flicker to the sky directly over us.
If Arras is up there, it’s hidden from view, even at the boundary of the Interface. Dante parks the crawler in a patch of grass, and I leap from it, kicking off my thin flats and stretching my toes in the cool blades. It tickles my skin and I’m reminded of home, of the grass woven into the yard I played in as a girl, and I have to fight the ache of longing that tumbles through me. Turning around, I look at the world the sun touches. There’s some vegetation, although it’s sparse and unruly. I stare up, unblinking, into the bright sky, looking for an aeroship like the one we saw the first time we were here. But no ship comes and soon purple spots blossom in my vision. Dropping my gaze, I stare out to the other side and catch my breath—across the top of a far series of mountain peaks runs a long fence. Metal. Sharp. Modern. On the way here, Dante warned me that one of the Guild’s mining operations was located nearby, and here’s the proof. I don’t want to know what lies beyond that fence.
Jost and Dante are busy checking equipment, ready to get started with the operation as Erik and I watch. They move with purpose, unloading thin panels from the small cargo space in the crawler.
