“How does it work?” I ask.
“Basically, these collect the solar energy,” Dante says as he mounts a panel on a rack behind the vehicle.
“And that?” I point to a cord snaking its way from the rack to the back of the crawler.
Dante opens the cargo door wider and I spot a long, squat control board. “It monitors the intake of solar energy as well as the panel’s temperature level with bypass diodes. Collection occurs in cycles so the panels don’t overheat and crack. We need to hook them up to a solar tracker to ensure the rack tilts them toward the sun. It takes hours to fully charge a panel.”
“So we’ll be here awhile,” Erik says, pivoting around to take in the entire view—how the raw weave blocks the sun, the Guild’s fence, the sparse vegetation. “Arras lies over it…”
I have to assume so, based on our escape from Arras, when I ripped an exit through to the mantle that we now see overhead.
Erik takes a few steps back, surveying the world around him. Then he leans down and touches the ground. A moment later his eyes rise to the border between the sun and the weave.
“Then this is where it begins,” he says softly.
At first I don’t follow, and then it hits me: everything Loricel told me and everything I’ve learned. Arras has to begin and end. And it does, I realize. At four distinct points. Dante called them resources, but I know them as something different—coventries. Four distinct coventries.
“It’s hard to fathom,” I whisper. “But it must be.”
We both start turning, looking for what we know is nearby. If only I knew what it looked like.
“There!” Erik points to a spot in the distance.
“Come on,” I call, picking up my pace until I’m jogging toward it. If we have hours to kill before the panels are charged to capacity, we might as well look around.
“Whoa!” Dante calls, but we don’t listen.
In the distance, barely close enough to see, something rises up in a wind tunnel. Sparks fly off the twisting strands, and all around the building are large gears and tubes. My eyes follow the tubes back as they snake off. I know where they lead—to a Guild mining site. One of the ones Loricel had to visit each year. The ones I would have been responsible to maintain as Creweler. I pull back. Nothing good can come of going there. Even from a distance I can feel the frozen deadness of the area, the corrupted world around the drill site.
But I walk backward, staring at the strange cloud that rises farther and farther up into the sky until it covers the sun, and the dark, glittering strands that stretch out past it, covering the Earth. It’s separate from Earth and separate from Arras, and around it strands radiate, knitting together into the Interface, as though it’s creating the Interface’s weave.
We’ve found a coventry.
“Is that…” Erik’s voice trails into a question.
“A coventry,” I guess. It rises like a tower, tubes and gears taking it above the surface of Earth. Due to the Interface, we can’t see the actual compound where we once lived. The tower fades past the mantle like a castle nestled in the clouds. But I know it’s there.
“How?” he asks.
I drop down to my knees and drag my finger along the ground, drawing a square. “Think of it this way. Arras has four coventries, right?” I don’t wait for him to answer me. “They each rest on the border of the Endless Sea—or that’s what we’re told.”
“But why is it here?” he asks, his eyes on the wind tunnel circling the tower.
“It’s not really,” I say. “It’s up there, but that tunnel actually plumbs the elements of Earth and sends them up to Arras. Spinsters use them on the loom. We weave them into Arras, but we have to mine them from somewhere.”
“So you take that”—he points to the twisting strands—“and make it into Arras.”
“Yes,” I say. “That’s why we have to be in the coventries. To keep Arras bound together correctly.”
“But if you’re right about this,” Erik says, “then the coventries aren’t part of Arras. They’re located in between Earth and Arras.”
I follow his eyes up to stare at the snaking tunnel. We can’t see the compound, but I know he must be right. Hadn’t I always suspected everything about the Coventry was false? From the programmed windows carefully created to display a perfect setting to the strange walls in Loricel’s studios that she’d overridden to use exactly as she wanted. The garden filled with creatures and plants that should never have been able to coexist. The constant need for security. The coventries were between Earth and Arras, and that’s why we didn’t fall to our deaths when I ripped us through Arras to Earth. We’d been close enough to the surface in the Coventry.
“That’s why we have to rebound in,” I tell him, recalling the small station situated right outside the compound walls. “It’s why they guard us so closely. They don’t want us to know where we are.”
Dante and Jost stride up in the middle of my explanation, looking angry and out of breath.
“Are you trying to get killed? Do you know how close we are to the mines?” Dante asks.
“I know,” I say.
Jost looks at my drawing in the dirt, and I repeat Erik’s and my conversation as his eyes search the sky. “But the Guild officials must know how this works.”
“Maybe,” Erik says. “The Guild is funny about what it does and doesn’t share, and there are enough ministers occupied with keeping their heads up their—”
“They aren’t worried about it,” I finish for him.
Erik grins. “Sure, sweetie.”
“Did Maela know?” I ask him, gesturing to the strange site. “Did she ever mention anything about the mines?”
“Perfect example,” he says. “I don’t know, but I doubt it. You see, Maela doesn’t care about anything unless it directly affects her. She doesn’t care what you are weaving or why. She does as she’s told and she takes any opportunity she can to advance.”
“So she’s indifferent?”
“It’s the preferred disease of Arras,” Erik says, and his smile becomes anything but amused.
“We shouldn’t stay here,” Jost says in a low voice. “They must keep guards near here.”
“He’s right. Not that there are usually refugees from Arras running around the base of the slubs to worry about,” Dante says.
“Slubs?” Erik asks.
“You’ll feel it,” he says. “The areas near the drill are dead. The Guild has mined all the resources and left an irregularity in space-time.”
Loricel told me Earth was frozen around the mines, and I could feel the coldness creeping over my skin as we moved closer to them.
“I want to see the mines now,” Erik says, and before we can respond to him, he’s heading in the direction of the tubes.
“Me too,” I vote.
Dante groans but turns to follow him. “I knew why you wanted to come today, but I hoped you’d chicken out.”
“We’re too young and reckless to chicken out,” Erik calls back.
“He’s going to get us killed,” Jost growls, even as we follow him.
“Not if I get us killed first,” I say, trying to lighten the mood. He doesn’t laugh, so I take his hand and drag him after his brother.
We catch up with Erik, but no one speaks. There’s a sense of shared purpose in the silence, and we walk for so long that the sun shifts in the sky. First it moves high and glares over us and then it begins to dwindle down. We’re hours from the crawler and the solar equipment, but I won’t turn back until we see the mines. The area we’re exploring is outside the mountain range, and by the time we finally reach the steel fence, the sun hangs low. Not far from the fence, I spot a small creek a short way off. The rushing stream seems so vital after being under the Interface, where everything is inert, lifeless, or artificial.
“I’m going to fill up a few bottles,” Dante says. “Water near the source mines is pure, and we’ll need it for the hike back. Stay here until I return.”
