Dante swallows hard and nods, but he doesn’t give me any details.
Her freedom means she’ll come after me again, but I have new enemies to worry about. The woman I knew as my mother is already dead. Even if I alter her I don’t think I can erase what’s happened. Would she remember what she’s done? The people she’s killed? I’ve spent enough nights contemplating how my own actions have led to deaths: Enora, my father, the nameless threads I ripped in cold blood. I was passive in those actions but I feel their blood on my hands like the sticky, black substance that coated my feet on the night of my retrieval. I can’t dismiss the past, it lives in my head and infects me. Even with her soul back, her morality intact, would my mother be able to calm the bitter truth of what she’s done?
And I know one thing for certain, my mother would want me to push forward, to find the Whorl, to get to Amie. I haven’t given up on that yet. I won’t let Arras and Earth be severed without reaching Amie first and removing her from Cormac’s control.
But Loricel’s words the good of the many whisper in my mind. I can’t sacrifice a world for a sister as much as I can’t sacrifice an opportunity for my mother. If I did, the groans of the dead would haunt me, calling to me, slowly driving me insane. Loricel asked me to think about my choices. At a loom to help others she made decisions. I have no loom now—merely passion swelling up inside me like a flooding dam ready to burst into action. Sometimes the only way to serve the greater good is to fight.
We pass along the coast in silence, weaving through abandoned metros, past service stations crawling with vines, tiny saltbox homes, and an endless series of unlit relics. No signs of life appear. I wonder what lies at the heart of the Interface. Someday, when this is over, I will explore and rebuild Earth. If I find nothing, I’ll build my own world.
I look behind me. Erik rides silently. Even if Jost knows nothing happened between Erik and me, it’s meaningless. I didn’t kiss Erik, but I wanted to. I ripped a deeper void between them than can ever be patched.
Erik didn’t kiss me that night either, because he loves his brother despite everything that’s passed between them.
Now that we’ve driven beyond the Interface’s boundary, overhead a sprinkling of stars peek out and the moon perches in the gray night sky. In Arras, a Spinster moves the time along, determining how the light will fade, whether the sunset will be orange or rose or purple. She places a false moon in the sky. Earth is a world born from nothing but potential. I think of the books in Kincaid’s library. The ones that contain theories on Earth’s origin, positing everything from a cataclysmic spasm in the universe to a creator placing it here, placing us here. I’ve seen in Arras what comes of the idea of a creator; I like the idea of randomness better. That we are born of infinite possibility and fade back into the fabric of the universe to feed new life. That the moon perches overhead simply because, and nothing more. I don’t want to live my life at the hands of another, I want to live my life now, deciding my own fate.
Whatever lies ahead of us on Alcatraz could change everything, but I choose the path of self-determination. Whether we find the Whorl—if we accomplish the separation of the worlds—I will listen to myself. My fingers find the techprint on my wrist.
I’m not meant to remember who I am. I have to discover who I am.
Alcatraz Island is full of men and women with scarred skin that shimmers and shifts. It’s not the decrepit old facility we expected. It’s full of white light that bounces off metal tables and blank walls. There are no bars on the cells, only thick glass. The prisoners beat against it, lick it, scratch at it, leaving bloody streaks from deeply torn nails behind, but we can’t hear them. We hear only a low hum from the energy powering this place. It must take so much of it, I think. The hum grows louder until it’s pulsing thick in my ears and I can feel it there in my head, under my skin, behind my eyes. I try to shake it out but it won’t fade. I tug on Dante’s hand. He’s closest to me, but he keeps walking forward, down a hall toward the black doors at the other end. He can’t hear me in here either. I cry out, but I can’t hear myself over the pounding in my ears. Around us more Remnants gather at the transparent walls of their cells, and they start thumping against the glass. Their faces constrict into masks of ferocious concentration. Their hands are balled in fists. I don’t have to hear them, because I can feel it. The ground beneath me shakes and concrete pillars spit dust over us as though the prison will collapse at any moment.
I run to Jost and pull on his arm, warning him to hurry, that they’re going to break loose. But when he turns around his hair grows lighter, and he morphs into Erik. I scream.
“Ad!” Dante’s call startles me from the dream and I arch in my seat, running a hand over my bleary eyes.
“You were asleep,” Erik says. He’s grabbed on to my seat, clutching it for balance.
“It was a nightmare,” I murmur, my mouth full of cotton.
“No one here to drug you,” Erik says with a wry smile, but it’s too soon to laugh about Kincaid’s betrayal.
“You want to stop for a second?” Dante asks, pulling Erik back in his seat. “Walk around?”
I shake my head. I want to put distance between Kincaid and the horrors of the estate. I want to move forward. More than anything I want to get to the Whorl—my future—and get on with it. I’m not eager to have total control of Arras, but I can’t let someone else have it either. Certainly not Kincaid. The Whorl will give me a chance to right so many of my mistakes.
The world outside the crawler is dark with night, and above us the sky is black and full of stars and milky bands of light. The ocean laps against the road, and I can see where parts of the pavement have crumbled and fallen into the sea.
“You think that bridge is safe?” Erik asks, his focus ahead on the faded burgundy bridge in the distance.
“Probably not,” Jost answers. “But we don’t have to cross it anyway.”
He takes one hand off the wheel and points outside to something planted firmly in the ocean—a towered compound rising up from the water. The familiarity of the stone towers unnerves me.
“What is that?” I breathe.
“Alcatraz Island,” Dante says. “It was a prison before the Exodus. The Guild keeps the Whorl there now. That man who came through the loophole—he found out about it.”
“After all these years,” I say, staring across the ocean, “you’ve found it.”
Jost slows the crawler when we reach a patch of shoreline that’s intact. It’s full of rocks and long, winding grass.
“High tide,” Erik informs me, helping me out of the back of the crawler.
“How do you know?” I ask.
“Fisherman’s son,” he reminds me. “The water has risen as close to the shore as possible. When the tide goes back out, the shore will stretch farther out.”
“What’s underneath it?”
“The water? Rocks and seaweed and seashells.”
“Seashells?”
“You’ve never seen a seashell?”
“No, I have. On the Stream, at least. But I’ve never seen the ocean until now.” The fake one programmed into my window screens at the Coventry don’t count.
“I never taught you to swim.” Erik’s words are an apology as he sweeps a finger along my jaw.
I bite the inside of my cheek, daring to say the thing I shouldn’t. “You will.”
I wander down to the fringe of the water with Erik, wishing it was daylight and warm enough to slip my toes in and feel the sea. The water goes on forever, at moments peaceful and then bursting with a wave that washes down with mighty force, nearly reaching our feet.