Altered

by Gennifer Albin

  Valery.

  “Darling, you’re late for lunch.” Kincaid’s tone is simpering, and I get the impression he’s putting on a show.

  I meet Jost’s eyes and then Erik’s, and I know we’re debating the same question. Do we say something or pretend not to recognize her?

  In the end, Valery chooses for us. “You can’t rush perfection,” she simpers back, and the whole act is quite sickening. “That’s something Adelice knows.”

  “Then you’ve met our delightful new friends,” Kincaid cries in his giddy, childlike way. “Tell me how!”

  “I was Adelice’s aesthetician at the Coventry before I sought sanctuary with you,” she says.

  I can’t keep the words from tumbling out. “I thought you were dead.”

  “Thought or hoped?” The venom she displayed to me in our last conversation before she disappeared from the Coventry drips from her words, but she smiles brightly to cover it. We had been friends once, but Valery disappeared before either of us had come to grips with the suicide of Enora, my mentor and Valery’s lover. “Loricel aided my escape, and Kincaid granted me safe passage.”

  “Any enemy of the Guild is a friend of mine, and how fortunate I am to make such a lovely friend.” He draws Valery’s hand up to his mouth, and I see a flash of her red fingernails. Instantly I’m reminded of a moment I witnessed in the hall of the High Tower. Her red fingernails on Enora’s back.

  “But you’re—” I choke the last word back. If Loricel had managed to help her escape, why did she lead me to believe Valery was dead? It isn’t my place to bring up the past, not before I’ve had a private moment to talk to Valery about her change of … heart.

  Valery arches a perfectly shaped eyebrow at me, a challenge. “Forgive me, Adelice. We parted under trying circumstances.”

  “There’s nothing to forgive,” I murmur. “If I had known you were alive, I would have tried to help you.”

  “Others helped me,” Valery tells us. “Earth is far from the ideal hiding place, as I’m sure you’re discovering, but Loricel made a compelling argument.”

  “Which was?” Erik asks.

  “Run or be ripped. Not much of a choice. I might have done it years ago if I’d known about Kincaid. He immediately opened his home to me.”

  “I had not thought I could love again until Valery entered my life,” Kincaid says, raising her hand to his lips again.

  My head is starting to spin and I stare down at my plate, wondering if food might help me digest this news, but I discover it’s gone, stripped away by the valet while I was distracted. My fingers reach for a lock of loose hair and I twist it nervously. Valery and Kincaid can’t have known each other more than a few days. It doesn’t make sense.

  “My dear, your arm,” Kincaid says.

  Without the jacket I left in the drawing room, the burns I suffered from the falling aeroship debris are evident. They’ve healed into rough scabs that are more unsightly than painful. I shrug it off, flashing a smile at Dante, whose eyes narrow.

  “An accident,” I assure Kincaid.

  “They look like chemical burns,” Dante says. It’s an innocuous comment, but he’s already accused me of bringing down the aeroship our first day on Earth and I know he’s tallying this as further evidence.

  “I insist that one of my men take a look at it. Don’t let your time in the Icebox fool you,” Kincaid says. “We’re not all barbarians here. We have our own renewal-patching methods available.”

  I thank him although I have no intention of taking him up on it.

  “Ahh, dessert,” Kincaid calls as a server appears with another platter. “Sweets for my sweet.” Valery giggles and nuzzles his hand.

  “If I ever act like that, promise to kill me,” I whisper to Jost.

  “Deal,” he says without hesitation.

  This is why our relationship works.

  Across from us, Erik is chewing on his cheek in what I’m guessing is an attempt to bite back laughter at the absurdity of the scene in front of us.

  Despite the whirl of emotions I’m feeling, I take a spoonful of the custard in front of me. It melts across my tongue and floods my mouth with the slightest sweet creaminess. One more bite reveals spicy chocolate swirled through it.

  “Lovely, no?” Kincaid asks with greedy eyes.

  “It’s delicious,” I admit, but I set down my spoon. I’ve been a gracious guest, but I have something I need to do.

  “Kincaid has excellent taste in everything he procures,” Valery tells me. There’s a warning in her voice and I search her face for a signal, but it stays placid under her mask of cosmetics.

  “Dante said you could help us,” Jost says, clearly having grown impatient with the doublespeak.

  Kincaid leans forward in an ominous way, dabbing the corners of his mouth with a linen napkin. “We’re going to help each other.”

  NINE

  THERE’S NO LOGICAL REASON TO GO TO her, but I excuse myself from lunch early, ready to hold Dante to the promise he made when we left the safe house. Given the events of the past week, I’m reeling as though my world is turning so fast, spinning so uncontrollably, that I can’t count on my feet to hold me upright. When I left the Coventry, I was an orphan, but now my mother is alive. It’s too much to process. I knew who I was a week ago, but I’m not so sure anymore, and my mother is the one person who might have the answer.

  The guards give me a little grief when I ask to see my mother, but Dante himself called in the request, so they acquiesce.

  Of course, I’m not sure that I want to see my mom.

  They’re keeping her in the highest-security facility they have on the estate. A guard leads me there past dusty paintings, rolled-up rugs, and discarded busts, which they must have no additional room for in the main house. As we walk, he explains what will protect me from her trying to attack. I never thought I’d have to be protected from my mom. It seems like uncertainty is the only sure thing these days.

  “It’s a huge power drain,” the guard tells me as he leads me down a barely lit corridor, past dozens of empty cells. “We usually don’t keep Remnants more than a few hours before…”

  He hesitates, but I already know the answer.

  “Before you execute them,” I finish.

  “It sounds horrible,” he says. “But we’ve tried to help them. We’ve done everything we can. There is no redeeming these creatures.”

  “Creatures?” There’s disgust in my voice, but I know I’m being a hypocrite. Don’t I think of them the same way?

  “You’ve seen them. What they can do. You can waste your time feeling sorry for them if you want, but not all of us have that luxury.” He keeps his face turned from me as he speaks.

  I wonder who he lost to this dirty war between worlds. It’s in his voice—the pain of it.

  “So why are these such a drain?” I ask, shifting the topic back to the cells, which look ordinary enough to me.

  “These ones aren’t. We primarily use them for holding Rems before termination. But our newest visitor is going to be staying awhile. She’s been patched up and healed, so Dante wants to be sure she doesn’t try to escape.”

  “You catch a lot of Remnants?” I ask, wondering at the need for so many enclosures.

  “A fair few,” he hedges before abruptly adding, “We’re here.”

  He stops at a small gray door and enters a code. The door zips open and I follow him into the high-security cell. The room is lit by halogen but only enough for me to make out her shape lying in the corner. There are two sets of bars between us, which seems a bit excessive.

  “You want me to stay with you?” he asks, but I can hear how much he’s hoping I’ll say no, so I shake my head.

  “I’ll be fine,” I say confidently. After all, it is my mother.

  “Okay,” he says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. “Whatever you do, don’t stick your hands through the bars.”

  I glare at him. “Or she’ll bite me, right?”

  “No,�
� he says, pretty patiently considering how surly I’m being. He pulls something from his pocket and tosses it through the bars, but it doesn’t make it into the cell. Instead it cracks and sizzles as it makes contact with an invisible wall between the bars. A moment later a thin layer of ash drops to the ground.

  Well, that explains the power drain.

  “Don’t you think that’s a bit much?” I ask, staring at the ash.

  “You’ve seen them in action. What do you think?”

  He has a point, but I don’t tell him so. “I’ll keep my hands to myself,” I assure him.

  He gives me a bemused look and leaves me alone. My mother stays in the corner, not acknowledging my entrance.

  “Mom,” I call softly. Then I feel silly. Whoever this woman is, she’s not my mother anymore and she’s not likely to remember she once was. But to my surprise, she turns her head to stare at me.

  “Mom.” I try again.

  She rolls over, keeping her eyes on me. They’ve cleaned her up, given her fresh clothes, and brushed her hair. It strikes me as odd that they’d bother with such things for someone they don’t consider human.

  I smile, hoping to make her feel safe, to coax her into speaking to me.

  She bares her teeth.

  “Mom,” I say again, this time more sternly. Ironically, I’m channeling how she used to sound when I was being reprimanded.

  She closes her lips back over her teeth and then she starts to crawl toward the bars. This was a horrible idea. Why did I want to see my mother like this? What does it matter if they terminate her? This woman is nothing like the parent I lost.

  When she reaches the bars, she uses them to pull herself up. And then she brushes off her pants and turns her eyes to mine. I notice a scar, thicker than the rest, glinting silver-white on her forehead.

  “Adelice,” she murmurs, but it sounds more like a hiss.

  It’s not my mother’s voice. Still, she remembers me.

  “I’m not sure why I came,” I admit. My words bounce around the mostly empty room, leaving a faint echo.

  “You came to see your mother,” she says, “but we both know I’m not really your mother, Adelice.”

  I’ve seen Remnants attack, and the amount of destruction they can inflict, and yet, listening to her speak so coherently shocks me. She’d howled when we took her into the safe house.

  “You thought I’d be some kind of zombie,” she says.

  I nod.

  “You assume that because we attack you, we’re animals, but we’re not,” she says angrily.

  “Then what do you do with the people you take?” I ask. “Why attack at all?”

  She looses a hollow laugh. “Survival, child. We can’t all make it here.”

  “We’d stand a better chance if we worked together,” I say.

  “An idealistic dream,” she scoffs.

  It’s in the way she says it. The way her eyes seem to lock on mine but still look right past me. There’s something missing, something vital. Never has Remnant seemed like such a fitting term.

  “How do you know who I am?” I ask.

  She stares at me and her lips curl up at the corners. “You’re hoping I’ll admit to some latent memories, I assume. That deep down I remember being your mother.”

  I back up a few steps. Each of her words stings a bit more than the last.

  “Rest assured, I do remember my life before,” she says, keeping her eyes on me. “I remember getting coffee and making dinner and wasting every night trying to rescue you. What I don’t remember is why. Why I did any of it. But that’s not the only reason I know your name, Adelice.

  “We were prepped to look for you,” she admits with a wicked smile. “We were shown pictures, told about who you were and that we must retrieve you at any cost.”

  “Retrieve?” Nothing about what she’s telling me is a surprise except this.

  “Or kill,” she coos.

  That’s more like it.

  “I remembered you, of course. I could foresee every stupid move you would make. Coming to rescue your friend. It was my idea to snatch him. I would be embarrassed by how predictable you are—how much you let those boys influence your actions—if I cared. If I was still trapped in Meria’s pathetic mind-set. But I’m not. That’s why he put me in charge of the troops. Because I’m perfectly in control of myself. And because I know you.” She turns her eyes from mine and the scar comes into harsh relief, cutting across her cheekbone. Her clothes prevent me from seeing how far it goes.

  “He?” I ask, even though I don’t need to know who she’s talking about.

  “Your jilted fiancé,” she mocks. “Cormac misses you desperately. Tell me, Adelice, would you have invited me to your wedding?”

  “Probably not,” I say coolly, although invisible screws twist my insides. “Maybe you can come to my funeral.”

  She finds this very funny.

  “I was told you were dead,” I tell her.

  “Your mother is dead,” she says. “She died after she was stuck in cold storage for months.”

  “Is that where you were?” I ask, thinking of the threads I removed as a Spinster.

  “There were a lot of us that needed the procedure. I had to wait my turn.”

  So they froze her until they could pull her soul strand. That means somewhere in Arras there’s a lab devoted to preparing Remnants to come to the surface.

  “Will you tell him this?” she asks.

  “Who?”

  “The Sunrunner,” she breathes. “Dante.”

  I stare at her. How does she know his name? “No,” I murmur. “Not yet. Why do you care if Dante knows?”

  “I could lie and tell you we were prepped on him,” she says, “and we were, to a point. But I know Dante very well. It’s another reason Cormac chose me to lead the new contingent. You should ask Dante why I’m here. Why he didn’t execute me.”

  “You’re here because Dante wants me to help him and he figured killing my mom wasn’t going to ensure my loyalty,” I say defiantly.

  “Ask him when you’re ready to learn the truth then,” she says.

  I’d suspected Dante was hiding something, but why does my mother know what it is? I’ve had enough of this conversation so I rap a couple times on the steel door and wait for the guard to open it.

  She may not be my mother anymore, but she knows me as well as my mother once did, and that’s what scares me.

  Dante is waiting outside the cell block as though he’s anticipating my next move. Lounging against the door, he looks agitated, even more so than he’s been since the Remnant attack. He’s dressed down from his flashy attire into a pair of jeans, and he’s fiddling with something in his hands. A digifile.

  “Is this the best place to have this conversation?” I ask him in my most confrontational tone. Seeing him here, I’m sure that he knew my mother would direct me to talk to him.

  “No, let’s go to the fountains. And, Adelice”—he pauses—“keep the questions to yourself until we get there.”

  I do as he requests but only because I’m not sure what to ask first, and because the time it takes us to walk outside and down into the gardens allows me to calm the anxiety that has built up inside me since my mother pushed me to speak with him.

  “The surveillance can’t hear much with the water,” Dante says as we sit on the edge of the fountain. It’s cold and water sprays my back slightly, but I don’t care.

  “I know. Jost and I used this trick to block the audio transmitters in the Coventry,” I tell him.

  Dante fidgets with the digifile, flipping it from hand to hand. “He’s smart. Seems nice. Do you love him?”

  It’s a totally inappropriate question and it catches me by surprise. “I’m not sure that’s your business.”

  “Fair enough,” Dante admits. “I was merely interested.”

  Interested in what? Me? He didn’t ask flirtatiously—more like an old friend trying to catch up on the latest news. But we’re not friends. Not ye
t.

  “I brought this so I could scan your techprint,” he says.

  “I have questions first,” I say, holding my arm to my waist. “Lots of them.”

  “I know that, Adelice,” Dante says in a quiet voice. “I do, too. I think some of the answers we’re looking for are encoded in that hourglass though.”

  It never occurred to me to try to scan the techprint my father left on me. I’d accepted my father’s simple explanation that it was to remind me who I was, but now that I’ve learned it is the sign of Kairos, I realize it might hold more answers.

  “I have one, too,” Dante says, revealing his wrist to me.

  I swallow hard. Why has he waited so long to show me this?

  “What does yours say?”

  “Nothing spectacular. I had reasons for seeking refuge here,” he says. “It was my ticket in, and it helped me get in with Kincaid.”

  “He’s more than a Sunrunner,” I surmise.

  “Much more,” Dante says. “I can show you new ways of looking at the world, Adelice, but first, I need to see what that techprint says.”

  Ready for answers, I thrust my wrist out to him. He takes it gently, and his hand is warm on my skin, sending the oddest sensation of comfort traveling up my arm. The digifile takes a long while to scan.

  “Sorry, we only get the castoffs that refugees bring from Arras,” he apologizes, and then the information displays. I can’t read what it says, but the words reflect in his wide eyes.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” I ask.

  Dante waits a long moment before he responds, and when he does, his hand grips my wrist tightly.