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‘It seems you won’t learn your lesson,’ she says between drags.
‘Maybe I’m not the only one.’
Maela smiles, and it’s a real smile this time, not the dazzling show smile she p
uts on for the others or the wicked grin she seems to save for me. This smile shows all the flaws carefully covered by cosmetics – the lines, the too-noticeable gum line. It’s a hideous sight.
Her face fades back into practised calm. ‘I’m willing to give you another chance. I’m not usually so forgiving.’
I picture the other girls, killed for less. Had they wasted away in cells or been ripped out and destroyed?
‘What happens?’ I ask, thinking of the shimmering threads hanging off the hook.
‘What happens when what?’
‘When you remove strands. Where do they go?’
She smiles again, but it is one of polished venom, not actual mirth. ‘Perhaps you can go to your training classes and find out, instead of wasting away in a cell.’
She leaves me here to ponder this, but deep down I know that they aren’t going to answer the kinds of questions I want to ask. Enora had genuinely not known the answer when I asked her the same question during our first meeting. But why hide what really happens if ripping is such an integral part of our jobs?
Unless the ripped could be saved.
7
I taste iron and my lip stings from where it split open against my teeth. So much for a low profile – not with Pryana in my training group. Maela officially released me a few days ago, shortly after our little chat, and even though I spent considerable time thinking of the right way to approach going back to training, I was still at square one. I’d planned to apologise, but the words never came. The other Eligibles seemed as cold as Pryana, clearly not impressed by my showdown with Maela. The looks they were giving me were pretty easy to read. In fact, they reminded me a lot of how the girls at testing had treated me. They thought I was awkward and incapable. And maybe they were right. Regardless, I found myself shuffling into the studio for our loom instructions without saying a word to Pryana. It probably wouldn’t have mattered anyway. It was obvious that she laid the blame for her sister’s death at my feet. I was a much easier target than Maela – and a much less dangerous one.
We were finally working on real looms again. After that first disastrous experience, we’d each been given three days of practice with an artificial weave before they allowed us to work on a real piece. The fake weave had felt lifeless under my fingers, but it was easy enough to work with. By the end of the first practice session I had proved my ability to alter easily enough. But, as if I needed another way to alienate myself, most of the other girls hadn’t. They were passable as Spinsters, but their work was sloppy or they took too long or they lacked the confidence to really dig into their tasks. By the end of the practice days, we all were cleared to try simple tasks like food weaving, but Pryana and I found ourselves singled out. We were both working on weather instead of food. I’d hoped this would give me a chance to talk with her.
I knew she’d be upset but I hadn’t expected her to come right out and hit me. I’m weak after several days in the cell and very little edible food and water, so Pryana’s blow knocks me on my butt. I’d like to think it’s because I was caught off guard, but I’ve never had an occasion to test my fighting skills. I can’t blame her for being angry. I wish I could slug someone for what the Guild did to my family.
‘I promise you,’ Pryana says, leaning over so her breath is hot on my face, ‘your life will be torture as long as I’m around.’
‘Fair enough,’ I splutter against the blood pooling along my gums.
She doesn’t like my answer. I can tell because her eyes narrow into slits. The whole situation is ridiculous. A feud entirely of Maela’s making. I meant well when I stepped forward to take Pryana’s place at the testing, and there was no way for me to know it was a piece containing her sister’s strand.
This won’t stop her from hating me.
Pryana settles back onto her stool and resumes her work, weaving furiously. It should make me mad, or at least indignant, but I think of Amie and how her fine blonde hair waves around her ears. It’s my fault what happened to them – to both our sisters. I started it all.
Our instructor, an over-eager older Spinster who should not be wearing so many cosmetics, doesn’t notice any of this. She’s busy flitting from Eligible to Eligible, guiding their work and offering encouragement. She’s an excellent teacher. I feel a pang and wonder how many teachers were named on assignment day in Romen. Not me. I return to the task of weaving a short rainfall over the north-eastern region of our sector.
My loom is larger than the other girls’ and its gears and tubes take up an entire corner in the room. It’s a much newer loom, usually reserved for the instructor to demonstrate on while the rest of the class practises. The other looms in the room are small, some even rusted, but all in working order. They are pressed so close together the other Eligibles can hardly move to work. Pryana works on one of them. Add that to her list of reasons to hate me. I sigh, thinking how long that list is getting, and how impossible it will be to get back in her good graces. But I can’t let myself get distracted when I’m doing something that requires this much of my attention.
Weather is trickier than food, because the strands that compose rain or snow have to be knitted into the ones that make up clouds, which are in the sky strands.
Rations are a simple alteration task. The raw material is available and woven into the supply chain to the farmers and store owners. Livestock and plants can be raised and tended by men, providing valuable roles for citizens, so all we have to do is weave the raw material onto new farms and then remove the crops for even distribution throughout the rest of Arras. It’s basic weaving – take a strand out, relocate it in a new piece, weave a new strand into the old piece to grow. Thus crops are farmed and food gets from farm to market. But it’s mind-numbingly boring work. Apparently over one thousand Spinsters in Arras’s four coventries do this day and night. Two hundred are stationed here, and I hope I don’t get assigned to the task. I bet Maela would love to stick me at a station doing simple addition and location for hours every day.
At least the weather gives me room to experiment. Our raw materials come from sources gathered and managed in the various sectors, a process they haven’t really explained to us except to flash some pictures of mammoth drills and large factories that separate and organise the strands. I take the material – slate fibres for the rain clouds, brilliant gold lightning thread – and weave them together. Then I insert them into the designated locations called up on my loom. It’s a gradual process, carefully adding the elements so that the storm arrives at the predetermined time, when citizens expect it. The teacher warned me how angry people can get if they are caught in a storm moving in too quickly or slowly. Too many mistakes and you’re demoted to something like the food-supply chain. The bands of time, which never stop moving across the loom, slowly eat away the threads we add. I use stock matter to replace them as quickly and precisely as I can. Otherwise there’ll be a dark-out in the area I’m working on. This happened once when I was younger, and my parents dragged us to the cellar to wait it out. It wasn’t dangerous, but when you’re seven, seeing the sky disappear is pretty scary. I had nightmares for weeks.
I love the feeling of the weather threads in my hands, and being able to work with a loom is much less tiring than weaving with my hands. No one else here seems to have the skill to work without a loom, and I’m more than happy to keep using the machine. The rain clouds swell against my fingers as I add them into the skyline, and the lightning bolts tingle across the tips. Somewhere in the north-east, it’s flashing across the horizon, warning of the impending downpour in case anyone missed the Stream weather schedule. I want to hate the work, but creating the rain is relaxing, fulfilling even. The tapestry is beautiful – a shimmering, shifting web of light and colour.
‘Adelice.’ My instructor beckons me to join her in a far corner. A few of my classmates notice but quickly return to their assigned tests. No doubt they expect I’m in trouble again.
But it isn’t just her waiting in the corner. Pryana is with her, and she’s not happy to see me.
‘I’ve been asked to send you two with the gentleman in the hallway,’ the instructor tells us in a lowered voice, so the others won’t hear.
