“You aren’t going to live forever, especially if you allow so much time to pass between transplants. Are you searching for your replacement? Any likely candidates?” he asked, not bothering with subtlety.
“I’m afraid you’re stuck with me,” she retorted.
Cormac rounded on her, his face dropping so close to hers that she could smell the whiskey on his breath. “You will find a replacement. You can’t let this world go any more than I can.”
Loricel reached forward and straightened his bow tie. “Is that any way to speak to your oldest friend, Cormac? When I’m gone, who will you share your secrets with?”
“When you’re gone,” he said without hesitation, “I will dance on your grave.”
“And yet, I’ll be one who’s finally succeeded,” she hissed.
“Find your replacement.” He barked the order and turned on his heel. Pausing at the top of the spiral staircase, he called out, “We have contingencies, you old witch. You aren’t as powerful as you think you are.”
Loricel let the remark go. It was better to let him think he had her cornered. At least until she decided what to do. A puff of ginger fur leapt onto her lap and she patted her cat absentmindedly. Her mind drifted back to the girl. Maybe she was strong enough. Maybe she could be if she came here knowing the truth. Loricel had been lied to. She’d watched everything she loved slip away even as the threads that bound her to Arras became more inexorable. But the girl was young. Anything could happen if she came to the Coventry.
If she came to the Coventry.
There was no noise in the lab unless one counted the silence, which felt deafening. Loricel spent her days in a perpetual waking nightmare. Never quite asleep. Never quite awake. Always trapped in memories and stuck in what-ifs and might-have-beens.
Her hand twitched.
That wasn’t possible.
She flexed her fingers. They were free. An ache shot up her arm, but not a painful one. It was more like the delicious agony one feels when rising early in the morning and stretching the limbs. The sensation traveled up her other arm. It took her a moment to realize it wasn’t a dream. It wasn’t the memory of freedom. It was freedom.
The threads binding her body slackened and she crumpled forward, barely catching herself before she tipped over. No, someone had caught her.
“Steady there,” a soft voice advised. A woman’s voice.
Loricel leaned in and allowed the woman to help her, blinking as her vision returned. The world was a blur of colors and shapes that her mind couldn’t process.
“Give it a moment. They told me you’ll feel better soon, but your strength will take longer to return.”
The Creweler nodded, uncertain whom to thank for her sudden liberation. If she should thank her at all.
“Unfortunately, we don’t have much time. I’m using all sorts of Agenda tech to get you out of here, but you have to listen to me if you’re going to escape.” The woman paused, and Loricel thought she heard her swallow. “If we’re going to survive—both of us—you’ll have to trust me.”
“There is no one behind these walls I trust. Not anymore.” Her words came out in dry croaks, her voice foreign to even her own ears.
The softness in the other woman’s voice shifted to indignation. “I got you out of those gages, and I can get you out of here tonight, but you’re going to have to trust me. So what is it? Trust me or step back into their cage?”
For once a decision didn’t feel so impossible to Loricel. Whoever her savior was and whatever she wanted with her couldn’t be worse than staying here and continuing to be the Tailors’experiment. “Fine. What is this plan?”
The woman swam into view, and Loricel realized she was really still a girl. Slick oil-black hair pinned back in the artful work of an aesthetician. Large, almond eyes with irises as dark as coffee. Loricel knew her, although she couldn’t quite remember her name. The old woman had existed in a state of timelessness for so long that she couldn’t sort the details of her recent life into place.
“Friends are waiting to take you to the Eastern Sector where the Agenda movement is strong. When you walk out those doors”—she pointed to a set of large, steel doors that seemed little more than a nebulous gray triangle to the older woman’s still-blurry vision—“you will turn right. At the end of the hall, they’ll meet you. All you have to do is make it to the end of the hall. We’ve disrupted the security feed long enough for you to pass safely through.”
It could be a trick, but what would be the point of that? If Cormac wanted Loricel dead, he could have ordered a clean termination. There was no need for theatrics. No one knew the fate of Arras’s Creweler, save for the people who tested and tortured her in this lab.
“You won’t have much time,” the girl continued, stepping into the vault Loricel had recently vacated, “and I’ll need you to bind me here.”
“Why would I do that?” Loricel snapped. It would only implicate the girl in the escape.
“I’ve visited you quite often the last few weeks.” It was the only explanation the girl offered, but it was enough to tell Loricel what she needed to know.
“You’re the girl who’s been receiving my donations.” She spit the word out.
The girl nodded grimly. “I received one today. I was in the next lab recovering. It won’t be a stretch for them to believe you freed yourself and imprisoned me.”
“I hope, for your sake, that you’re one hell of a liar.”
“Trust me, I am.”
“And you’ve been Agenda this whole time?”Loricel asked, moving closer so that she could see the girl’s face more clearly.
The girl could have lied, especially if she was proficient with the skill as she claimed. Instead she squared her shoulders and shook her head. “I’m not Agenda. I’m simply tired of this experiment. It isn’t working.”
She didn’t have to tell Loricel that. The Creweler had overheard enough conversations to know the Guild’s plans to splice her genetic material with another Spinster’s had failed. “So you’ve turned tail and run to the enemy.”
“Any enemy who can put a stop to these cruel games is my friend.” Her words were cautious. She wasn’t a traitor. She was a survivor.
“And whose side will you be on in the morning?”
“My own,” the girl answered truthfully. “But I’ve seen things . . .”
“That make you question how far you’re willing to go for the Guild?” Loricel guessed. How could anyone who’d experienced half what she had not question their tactics?
“Where I stand doesn’t matter. You’re running out of time.” The girl let her words hang in the air. They weren’t so much a temptation as a warning. This was Loricel’s chance—and when she was free, she could once again consider what was best for Arras. The Agenda had to know where Adelice was. Her young apprentice had seen Earth by now. She knew the truth. Hopefully she could do more with the information than Loricel ever had.
Hope felt foreign as it settled over the old woman’s body, at once lightening the weight she’d carried for years and burdening her with its responsibility.
Loricel reached forward and grasped the girl’s wrist, bringing it roughly into the shackle that had bound her own minutes before. Then she paused and peered into her dark eyes. “There is something that matters. To me, at least. Forgive an old woman, but what is your name?”
The girl’s lips opened as the gage closed over her hand, and she looked fearlessly into the old woman’s eyes. “Pryana.”
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The Girl in the High Tower: a Tor.com Original Page 2
