He doesn’t offer me any more placation; he quietly exits back to where we left Falon. Erik pulls me into his shoulder and I free my tears, sobbing.
“I don’t know who to trust,” I whisper.
“Me,” he says, rubbing my arm. “And Jost. No matter what, you will always have us.”
I know that, but even as I cry in his arms, the distance between us feels like too much to overcome. It’s a distance we’ve created out of necessity, and if we breach it, I can’t guarantee I won’t lose Erik, but I know one thing.
I will lose Jost.
“Erik, I can’t lose you,” I say. “I can’t lose either of you.”
His arms tighten around me, and for one second I want him to storm the wall we’ve built between us. I want him to help me forget this. But instead he only whispers, “You won’t. I won’t let that happen. I promise I’ll never let you go.”
And even now, wrapped in an embrace, we’re a million miles from each other.
We stay on the observation deck, watching the aeroship pass along the Interface. A series of hooks and pulleys built along the ship’s external skeleton grip and gather the strands of the Interface. We’re not flying, we’re crawling across the web of strands. Dante approaches us as the skeleton’s gears and hooks latch and lock, tethering us to the Interface semi-permanently.
“This is a loophole,” Dante says.
As he speaks, strands of the Interface rotate violently, curling in on one another in rapid and graceful precision until a long funnel of chaotically woven strands extends in a gentle diagonal toward the ship, opening a few feet from the deck. I take the risk and look up into the mouth of the loophole. It’s hollow as I expected, a perfectly round shaft of strands that stretch and swim in a kaleidoscope of color. My eyes squeeze shut and I listen for the music of the strands. It comes in a surge of violins, the notes sharp and lingering. This is all I need. I could climb through there and go back. But back to what?
“How did you do this?” I ask.
“Arras doesn’t control every talented person,” Dante says with a shrug.
That’s the understatement of the century.
“You have people on the inside,” I surmise.
“Of course,” Dante says, “a resistance wouldn’t be much good without spies.”
“What do your spies say about me?” I ask, recalling that Falon recognized my name immediately from her intel.
Falon appears at my side. “It’s my job to keep tabs on what’s going on up there. And girl, you’re all over my stream.”
“They put me on the Stream?” The color drains from my face. There’s no way I’ll ever make it back into Arras safely if everyone there is looking for me.
“A stream of information,” Falon assures me. “I have a web of spies, people who pass info to me from inside the coventries and ministry offices.”
“The same people that pass Kincaid info?” I guess. “You sell it to him.”
“Information is good business,” she says. “I can control what Kincaid hears and use the money he pays me to buy some people off him.”
“Buy people?”
“Refugees don’t come here for free. If they don’t have the credits, they owe their sponsor,” Falon says. I detect a note of disgust in her voice.
“That’s how Valery wound up at the estate,” Dante says.
“Speaking of, how is Deniel?” Falon asks him.
At the mention of his name my stomach constricts as though a wire is coiling tight around it.
Dante hesitates and shakes his head. “Gone.”
“Gone? Where?”
“Not where,” Dante says. “He was unwound.”
“What?” Falon asks, unmistakable anger in her voice.
“He attacked Adelice, tried to alter her. He was a spy,” Dante says.
“A spy?” Falon echoes. “Who authorized his credentials in Arras?”
“I’m not sure,” Dante says.
“Too bad,” Falon says, sighing. “He was talented. I should have known when he asked to go to Kincaid. We could have used a Tailor like him.”
“A crooked Tailor does bad work,” Erik reminds her.
“True. I guess we got lucky,” Falon says.
“How does this work?” I ask, still mesmerized by the tunnel of swirling light and color.
“It’s a convolution of space-time. They’ve twisted the strands of the Interface with those naturally occurring on Earth,” she explains.
“The slub is at the other end,” Dante says.
“Who puts in the slubs?” I ask.
“We make some, but others are pre-existing,” Dante says. “There were slubs in Arras when it was created.”
“We’ve been utilizing this slub for months, but if Deniel was a spy it may have been compromised.”
“What happens if the Guild discovers the slub?”
“Sometimes nothing,” Falon says. “They use it to send spies through. Sometimes they send a battalion of Remnants instead, if they want us to know they know. Worst-case scenario is Protocol One. They adjust the whole metro.”
My mind flips back to a hazy memory. The night of my retrieval. “They change the citizens’ memories.”
“Yes,” Falon says. “It’s a combined effort. Spinsters reweave the whole piece, removing the slubs, and meanwhile the Tailors adjust the collective memories of the population. All without ever knowing what the other group is doing. And then the passage is closed. There’s no way for the refugees to get through.”
I turn and stare into the loophole, watching the colors swirl and the light shifting around the twisted strands. It calls to me. But that’s only a space between. Arras isn’t my home anymore, no more than Earth is. If I could, I’d lose myself in the raw beauty, build a life in the very fabric of the universe, among the possibility. But I have plenty holding me here and plenty calling me home. There’s no time for staying in the space in between actions.
“They’re coming,” Falon announces.
I look but see nothing. I shut my eyes and listen. The strands hum and if I strain I can hear the twang of time running tinny through the soft melody of the matter around it. Combined, the sounds are quite lovely, but if I wasn’t paying close attention it would sound like static. I retrain my focus and hear voices. Shadows cast themselves down the convolution of the loophole and a small band of people slide through. There are only five or six of them.
“Evening, Walter, what ya got?” Falon asks, exchanging a salute with the man heading the group.
“Only a few. Five adults. One kid.”
I look closely at the group. I hadn’t seen a child, but then he’s there, clinging to his mother’s leg. He meets my stare, eyes saucer-wide. He’s dressed in a typical academy uniform, but he can’t be too old. He must have started academy this year. I smile at him, but he darts behind his mother’s skirt.
His mother is stoic, looking at us warily. Her dress is worn and I notice that she pulls her thin sweater sleeve up to hide a tear in it. She holds her head high, but I spy a few dark spots by her ear that stretch to her neck. Bruises.
“This is the one with credentials,” Walter says, leading a tall man over to Dante and Falon. The man turns his head so they can observe the hourglass techprint hidden along his hairline.
“What can you do?” Dante asks.
“Me?” the man says. “Nothing. I have intel for Dante.”
Dante doesn’t betray that the man has found him; instead he turns and looks to the woman and child. “And this intel secured your passage for six?”
“I wasn’t leaving her,” the man says. “Not after what’s been done to her. I know what happens to people who come here on credit, but believe me, my intel is worth our passages.”