“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?
