Altered

by Gennifer Albin

  “Jost and I can handle this,” Dante says.

  “He’s right. Those things are after something,” Jost says. It’s a warning. Jost thinks they’ve come for me, but there’s no reason to believe that. Except that they chose this safe house to attack. And that they took Erik as a prisoner. So actually there are several reasons to think that.

  “Maybe,” I grant him, “but they aren’t going to get it.”

  The security stream doesn’t show anyone near the main entrance, so we head there.

  “Don’t you have more men?” I ask Dante as we slip into the darkness outside.

  “They’re around. Some aren’t in yet, others are probably already sleeping before they take the early patrol shift,” Dante says.

  “Should we—I don’t know—wake them up?” I suggest.

  Dante grabs my arm to stop me, and his eyes look black in the night as he peers down at me. “It’s for your own good that I’m not getting anyone involved yet. Once Kincaid knows about you, he’ll expect an audience with you—and probably a whole lot more than that. And I won’t bring anyone else in until you explain things to me.”

  “I already did,” I whisper.

  “No, I want the whole story. It’s not a coincidence that they’re here, and I want to know what happened with that aeroship.”

  Before Dante can say anything else, Jost pushes him away from me. “Don’t touch her.”

  Dante whirls on him, but then calms himself. Instead of forcing it, he heads toward the building’s edge. If Erik weren’t in danger, I’d run now because I’m suddenly afraid of Dante’s intentions. He knows I took down that ship last week. I said something over dinner that spooked him, but nothing that truly gave away me or my unusual abilities. He didn’t respond this way when he saw the techprint. He was curious then, but now he seems to be repressing fury and I know it has nothing to do with the Remnant attack. He’s angry with me.

  I’m so preoccupied with this that we’re near the alley before I can process what we’re about to do. Emergency lights flood the area, bathing the alley in more light than we’ve seen on Earth, even during market hours. The unlit parts of the street creep along the corners of my vision, casting shadows into the small alley. Bodies seem to fade in and out of sight.

  They’re here, and they see us coming.

  “Get out your weapons,” Dante hisses.

  The small knife in my hand feels light and useless. I wouldn’t even know how to use it. I may as well try to punch our attackers. I should have asked Dante more about the Remnants. In fact, there are a lot of things I wish I’d asked Dante now that we’re staring down a group of maniacs.

  It’s their eyes that scare me. Pupils dilated and stretched past the irises, extending into an infinite nothing. They move with unnatural grace, leaping without fear of falling and bounding in long strides. The Remnants play with the shadows, popping in and out of sight, seeming to shift and change shape before my eyes. The darkness licks along their limbs, branching like poisoned veins across their arms and faces, but as one glides closer, the black streaks deepen in his skin. They’re scars, not tricks of the filtered light.

  “Can you weave us out of here?” Jost asks in a whisper, balancing the butt of his rifle against his shoulder and peering along its long, thin barrel.

  “I can likely freeze the moment, but there’s nowhere to go.” I see no point in hiding my weaving abilities from Dante if we need to use them. My eyes automatically draw out the strands around us. They’re tangled in a mutilated web. There’s no discernible pattern in the chaos. I can see Earth’s strands. I can touch them, but this world is too unpredictable for me to know for sure what would happen if I created a large warp in the strands.

  “I imagine your friend would feel pretty raw if you left him behind,” Dante adds. It’s in the weight of his words, how carefully they’re chosen, how they flow slowly from his tongue—he knows what I am. I don’t know how, but Dante knows I’m a Spinster.

  “One thing at a time,” I snap. “I thought we’d deal with the maniacs first.”

  “Let’s see what you got,” Dante says.

  “Find Erik,” I command Jost.

  He nods, but I can tell I’m more inclined to help Erik than he is, so I remind him in a low voice, “He’s your brother.”

  “He’s over there,” Dante interrupts us.

  Erik is wrestling with one of the Remnants, trying to hold his attacker’s body back with one hand while the Remnant grips his other.

  “Erik,” I cry out to him, and then instantly regret it because his head turns toward my voice. For a second, he loses his focus on the Remnant he’s fighting. But before the strange woman can attack him, Dante sends a shot tearing through her body. The Remnant woman trips back and goes limp. It buys Erik enough time to get to us.

  “Glad you showed up.” He’s panting.

  “Me too,” I say, hoping he doesn’t notice I’m shaking. “How did you know where we were?”

  “I didn’t,” Erik says meaningfully. “They did.”

  “What’s he doing?” Jost asks, and I turn to discover Dante has moved away from the group and farther down the alley. At first it looks like he has things under control, but then a Remnant backs him against a tall chain-link fence.

  Without thinking, I lurch forward, sprinting toward the pair with my knife in hand. The Remnant pins Dante to the ground, hands gripping his neck. Something whistles past me, but I don’t stop until I’ve reached them. My hand lashes out with the knife and slices across the Remnant’s back. The blade vibrates as it tears along flesh, and it makes my hand tremble.

  It’s not the kind of wound that will slow him down, but it does make him angry. Dropping his hands from Dante’s neck, the Remnant lunges forward onto his palms and hisses under his breath. Dante is free, but now the Rem is after me.

  Knife still in hand, I thrust it forward to scare him off. But he laughs. It’s a completely normal, human laugh, and it makes me lose my grip on the handle. I recover, but I’ve lost my defensive posture. Now instead of inching him back, I’m vulnerable. Slowly he moves toward me with a low growl, moving erratically and pushing me farther and farther toward the fence.

  I open my mouth to call out to Jost when a brick cracks against the Remnant’s skull. He crumples to the ground, and Dante waves for me to follow him.

  “Dante! Adelice!” I look over and see the boys beckoning to us. We sprint toward them and when we reach them Erik grabs my arm. The others keep moving but he holds me back.

  “Do you trust this guy?” he asks in a soft voice, even though we’re nowhere near anyone.

  “Do I have a choice?” I pull forward against his hand.

  “This could be a trap.”

  “If you want to take your chances with them,” I say, wrenching my arm free, “be my guest. Those things are from the Guild, which probably means they’re after us.”

  I turn my head enough to gauge his reaction. His eyes narrow a bit, but he starts running. “Who says they’re Guild?”

  “Dante. He’s our one chance at getting out of here.”

  “That’s your problem, Ad,” he shoots back. “You only hear what other people tell you.”

  Before I can ask him what that means, we’ve caught up with the others, so I let it go. Remnant bodies litter the entrance to the safe house, and I turn away as Dante starts picking off the few survivors trying to crawl away.

  “Is that necessary?” I ask as he circles around, checking each one to be certain they’re all dead.

  “You saw what they did, and you want to let them go?”

  “They’re people—”

  He interrupts me, “They’re what’s left of people.”

  The Remnant trapped under the door stirs, and Dante’s rifle swings toward her, but not before I see her face in the floodlight.

  She’s nothing like the woman I remember. Her previously smooth skin is sallow and waxy. A few of her teeth are broken into stumps, and her eyes, once luminous emerald,
are still beautiful but something deadly sparkles in them now. Hideous scars run jagged across her flesh, but they don’t shimmer or flicker—these are not superficial scars, they’re deep and permanent. She struggles against the door that pins her to the ground, and without thinking I reach for the wild strands of the world around me until I latch onto a golden thread of time. It whips through the air as I draw it into a warp. The strand is longer than I expected, and it cracks against the natural elements around it, distorting the air into a blur of color and light.

  “Stop!” I cry, but he already has, bewildered by my actions. And then it strikes me that Dante’s not looking at the warp in front of him, but at her.

  “Who is she?” Jost asks.

  Jost moves closer to my side, placing a hand on the small of my back to let me know he’s there. But he has no idea what we’re facing—who we’re facing.

  Had she come for me? Had they sent her after me? Realization dawns in agonizing ripples. They’d removed her. I hadn’t given much thought to Cormac’s words before—she was found and removed—even when Erik warned me she might still be alive. But whether it was from my inability to comprehend what the Remnants were or my unwillingness to, I hadn’t seen this coming. It seems I’ve grossly underestimated the Guild’s cruelty. Again.

  “It’s my mother,” I say, trying to pin the statement to the reality of seeing her here in front of me.

  Jost’s hand slips and grabs the fabric of my blouse. I can hear his sharp intake of breath, but Dante stays calm, unmoved by my announcement. Almost as if he expected it.

  “It was your mother,” he tells me, but his words are forced and he doesn’t move to get around my warp. “You’ve been keeping secrets.”

  “Can you blame me?” I ask.

  “Then they came for you,” Dante says, and I know it must be true. It seemed arrogant to jump to that conclusion before. Now it’s merely a fact. He addresses his next question to Erik. “How did they catch you?”

  Erik steps into the light to face him. “The man I was trading with sold me out to the Guild.”

  Erik had known the man was curious about his Guild paraphernalia. He must have figured out that Erik was a valuable refugee. And we’d let him walk into the trap alone.

  “Why send her though?” I ask. The shell in front of me seems unaware I’m her daughter. I can’t see any benefit in using her against me.

  “To scare you,” Dante says in a cold voice. “Whatever you’ve done to earn their wrath, they want you to know they’re coming for you and they’ll use any means to destroy you.”

  It sounds like he’s speaking from experience.

  “Are you going to kill her?” I choke the question out. It might not be my mother anymore, but the thought of standing back and letting him murder her claws across my body, squeezing my heart until I’m sure it will shatter. It will be like losing her all over again.

  But Dante hesitates at my question, and the pained look on his face mirrors what I feel. He’s closer to this situation than he’s letting on. The Guild must have taken something from him, too. “Not unless you ask me to.”

  Whatever the Guild has done to her, forcing her into a half-life, I can’t bring myself to end it. I think of the boxes in the storage facility. It’s possible the rest of her waits inside one, and if so, wouldn’t it be possible to save her—to mend the damage done to her in the sterile clinics of Arras? The technology exists to make a Remnant, perhaps it exists to fix one.

  “I can’t let her go without angering Kincaid,” Dante says. “The security feed will catch it, which means I’ll have to take her in.”

  “Do you have holding areas here?” Jost asks.

  “Not here. Kincaid has holding facilities on his estate, but I can’t protect you from him if I take you there. A refugee is one thing, but a renegade Spinster is another,” Dante tells me.

  “I’m guessing after this”—I gesture to the warp—“you couldn’t protect me from him regardless.”

  Dante’s attention turns to Erik. “You got a good bit of credit for that Guild paraphernalia, right?”

  Erik nods.

  “Then let me put this in terms you’ll understand. Adelice is the most valuable Guild paraphernalia on Earth,” Dante says. “Kincaid will want her.”

  And like that I’m an object. Something to be collected and used and sold, like a machine.

  “What if we don’t want to come along?” Jost asks.

  Dante faces him, his shoulders drawing up so that his slight difference in height feels more formidable. “He’ll come after you. We may not have looms here on Earth, but you can’t get far if Kincaid wants you. Your best option for staying alive—and keeping her safe—is to come as an invited guest. Otherwise, he’ll see you as a threat.”

  “We’ve been threats before,” I say, taking my place beside Jost.

  “You don’t need more enemies than you already have,” Dante warns us. “The Guild overstepped their bounds here tonight. Kincaid won’t overlook this. He’ll want retribution from whomever he can get to after this. At this point, you need him as an ally.”

  “I won’t be of any use to him,” I warn Dante. “The strands here are different. I can hardly control my abilities.” The warp I’d made to protect my mother was nothing like the large domes I’d built around Jost and myself in the Coventry. It would have stopped a direct bullet but he only had to change position. I’d barely been able to grab the correct strands.

  “You aren’t dealing with the precise patterns of Arras here. This is raw space-time—you can’t control it like you’re at a loom,” Dante says. “Not that I imagine most Spinsters could do what you did.”

  Jost steps closer to him and nods at my mother. “What will we do with her?”

  I’m grateful he’s changed the subject. I don’t want to explain more about my skills, especially since I’m only now grasping that here I can touch the raw matter of the universe.

  Dante’s face is grim, but he’s gentle as he lifts the remains of the steel door from my mother. Jost keeps a gun leveled at her, but Dante reaches to take her into his arms. She claws at him, howling, but her injuries prevent her from causing too much harm. Keying in the passcode, he holds her cautiously and eventually she goes limp in his arms as we wait for the door to swing open.

  “We have facilities where I can restrain her,” Dante says. “She will be fine there until we can move her in the morning. You should rest.”

  He tilts his head toward a hallway lined with doors.

  “Sleeping quarters,” he tells us, and then he disappears down the gray corridor without another word.

  For a moment, I question if I’ve done the right thing by keeping her alive, and if I’m making a mistake by sending her with Dante now, but soon worry gives way to a panic building inside me. It rushes through my limbs and stops me in my tracks. The boys freeze alongside me and I feel their concern. But I can’t put words to my dreadful realization yet.

  This is what the Guild does to traitors, and I committed treason of an extraordinary caliber when I ripped us from Arras to Earth. We might be safe here temporarily, but there’s no way to protect those we left behind, and now I know what the Guild does to those they perceive as threats—the monsters they create from them.

  And if I don’t find the resources to get back to Arras soon, there’s no way to prevent them from doing this to Amie.

  SEVEN

  IN MY SLEEP, I FACE THE GHOSTS that come for me. A wave of Remnants with Amie in the middle, reaching for me. I can only watch as Amie is swept into the crowd of soulless monsters. A new figure emerges where she vanished: a woman with wrists dripping red. The Remnants are gone now. I open my mouth to scream but no sound comes. Blood pools at her feet as she dissolves slowly into a puddle and then another woman rises from it. She’s naked, a long scar marring her belly, and her hair on fire. My mother. She points to me accusingly. Her eyes hollow. Dead. Because of me. I will the dream to change, coaxing my mind to wake up, reminding myself
this isn’t real. But when I open my eyes, I’m at a bar, a whiskey perched in front of me. Next to it rests a tiny card. I lift it to read the inscription.

  Drink me.

  I look around, wondering where this dream has taken me. The place is familiar, although it lacks the color of the real location I encountered in my travels in Arras. Here the bar isn’t rich mahogany but a slab of ebony in a gray world. My eyes fall on the swinging doors. He’ll arrive any minute.

  Cormac. The worst nightmare of all. But it’s not him. He’s stockier than Cormac with the same easy swagger, but his face is shielded by a fedora cocked too low.

  Even as I fight the dream, I drift in and out of consciousness until light breaks into the room. Suddenly Jost’s arms are around me, waking me.

  “I was dreaming,” I murmur.

  “Nightmares?”

  “Yes.”

  His arms tighten around me, coming to rest in a cross on my chest. I feel the steady thump of his heart against my back. “You can rest now.”

  I relax into the security of his embrace, but I don’t sleep. We’ve been on the surface barely over a week, and I’ve discovered so much. Too much. Seeing Valery, which I am increasingly sure was not my imagination. Being attacked by my mother. The strange experience in the Old Curiosity Shop. Cormac must have a hand in it all, but to what end? Does he hope to scare me back to Arras?

  The events of the day crowd my mind, each bringing a question that I can’t answer. Sleep becomes impossible while knowing my mother is locked somewhere in the safe house. I replay the attack and rewind farther and farther into my memories of her and my father.

  My parents were never risk takers. They’d hinted at rebellion in whispered conversations, but the only openly anti-Guild action they ever took was to try to keep me from being retrieved. If there was more to their treachery, it was as hidden as the mysterious tunnels under our house. I wish I could talk to my mother or that my father was alive to direct me. I resented when they got involved with academy issues or offered unwanted advice about classmates. Now I ache for their guidance.

  I close my eyes, trying to wash the memory of them from my mind, but they persist in the space between sleep and wakefulness. My parents were affectionate. Kind to each other. But what I remember most is how my father adored my mother. How he tried to fill the void of the third child the Guild would not grant or remedy the scars of her thankless job. Now she’s a monster created by the Guild. I squeeze my eyelids tighter, willing myself to sleep, but images from home haunt me. Love notes. Morning routines. My mother pinning up her hair. I catch a glimpse of an hourglass scar behind her ear and startle awake, but close my eyes again quickly lest Jost wants to talk.