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“This could be a trap.”
“If you want to take your chances with them,” I say, wrenching my arm free, “be my guest. Those things are from the Guild, which probably means they’re after us.”
I turn my head enough to gauge his reaction. His eyes narrow a bit, but he starts running. “Who says they’re Guild?”
“Dante. He’s our one chance at getting out of here.”
“That’s your problem, Ad,” he shoots back. “You only hear what other people tell you.”
Before I can ask him what that means, we’ve caught up with the others, so I let it go. Remnant bodies litter the entrance to the safe house, and I turn away as Dante starts picking off the few survivors trying to crawl away.
“Is that necessary?” I ask as he circles around, checking each one to be certain they’re all dead.
“You saw what they did, and you want to let them go?”
“They’re people—”
He interrupts me, “They’re what’s left of people.”
The Remnant trapped under the door stirs, and Dante’s rifle swings toward her, but not before I see her face in the floodlight.
She’s nothing like the woman I remember. Her previously smooth skin is sallow and waxy. A few of her teeth are broken into stumps, and her eyes, once luminous emerald,
are still beautiful but something deadly sparkles in them now. Hideous scars run jagged across her flesh, but they don’t shimmer or flicker—these are not superficial scars, they’re deep and permanent. She struggles against the door that pins her to the ground, and without thinking I reach for the wild strands of the world around me until I latch onto a golden thread of time. It whips through the air as I draw it into a warp. The strand is longer than I expected, and it cracks against the natural elements around it, distorting the air into a blur of color and light.
“Stop!” I cry, but he already has, bewildered by my actions. And then it strikes me that Dante’s not looking at the warp in front of him, but at her.
“Who is she?” Jost asks.
Jost moves closer to my side, placing a hand on the small of my back to let me know he’s there. But he has no idea what we’re facing—who we’re facing.
Had she come for me? Had they sent her after me? Realization dawns in agonizing ripples. They’d removed her. I hadn’t given much thought to Cormac’s words before—she was found and removed—even when Erik warned me she might still be alive. But whether it was from my inability to comprehend what the Remnants were or my unwillingness to, I hadn’t seen this coming. It seems I’ve grossly underestimated the Guild’s cruelty. Again.
“It’s my mother,” I say, trying to pin the statement to the reality of seeing her here in front of me.
Jost’s hand slips and grabs the fabric of my blouse. I can hear his sharp intake of breath, but Dante stays calm, unmoved by my announcement. Almost as if he expected it.
“It was your mother,” he tells me, but his words are forced and he doesn’t move to get around my warp. “You’ve been keeping secrets.”
“Can you blame me?” I ask.
“Then they came for you,” Dante says, and I know it must be true. It seemed arrogant to jump to that conclusion before. Now it’s merely a fact. He addresses his next question to Erik. “How did they catch you?”
Erik steps into the light to face him. “The man I was trading with sold me out to the Guild.”
Erik had known the man was curious about his Guild paraphernalia. He must have figured out that Erik was a valuable refugee. And we’d let him walk into the trap alone.
“Why send her though?” I ask. The shell in front of me seems unaware I’m her daughter. I can’t see any benefit in using her against me.
“To scare you,” Dante says in a cold voice. “Whatever you’ve done to earn their wrath, they want you to know they’re coming for you and they’ll use any means to destroy you.”
It sounds like he’s speaking from experience.
“Are you going to kill her?” I choke the question out. It might not be my mother anymore, but the thought of standing back and letting him murder her claws across my body, squeezing my heart until I’m sure it will shatter. It will be like losing her all over again.
But Dante hesitates at my question, and the pained look on his face mirrors what I feel. He’s closer to this situation than he’s letting on. The Guild must have taken something from him, too. “Not unless you ask me to.”
Whatever the Guild has done to her, forcing her into a half-life, I can’t bring myself to end it. I think of the boxes in the storage facility. It’s possible the rest of her waits inside one, and if so, wouldn’t it be possible to save her—to mend the damage done to her in the sterile clinics of Arras? The technology exists to make a Remnant, perhaps it exists to fix one.
