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“Credentials,” he says. “It’s not just the mark, but also the information the techprint contains. Most refugees and dissenters hide theirs along their hairline.”
That’s why the girl checked our necks, but because my father had burned mine into my wrist she almost didn’t see it. “Why is mine here?”
“Priority access,” Dante says in a grim voice. “If you’d made it out that night, our channels would have rushed your clearance. Kincaid’s men in Arras verify information, but the placement of your techprint would have granted you priority passage through a loophole.”
“A loophole?” I ask.
“It’s an exit from Arras. It’s how most refugees make it to Earth.
“I told Meria all of this. If she had left…” He pauses and searches my face as though he wants to tell me something, but he changes the topic instead. “You can’t imagine what it was like. A girl with fiery hair walks into my life with that mark, and you’re so like her, but—”
“My father marked me, not my mother,” I interrupt.
Betrayal flits across Dante’s face. His voice is raw when he speaks. “She must have told him about it.”
He’s hurt that she revealed his secret to her husband. His brother. “Yes,” I say, “because she loved him. Because he was a good man.”
“I never said differently.” But his body is saying it now. Every expression, every gesture, every pause is wounded. But then his posture changes, shrinking down before me. In my short time at the estate, Dante has never seemed vulnerable.
“I knew you the second I saw you,” he says. “I couldn’t explain it, even to myself.”
“That’s why you invited us back to the safe house,” I say.
“At first I thought you were Meria, altered a little, toying with me.”
“Mom wouldn’t do that,” I say defensively.
“The spitfire I knew would have, but I figured out pretty quickly you weren’t her,” Dante says.
“When you saw me kissing Jost.”
“I wouldn’t have put that past Meria, but no, I knew it wasn’t her. It was obvious you didn’t know me, but when you showed me that techprint and started telling your story—”
“You realized—”
“No, I don’t think I understood anything until I scanned the techprint,” he admits, “and even then, I wanted to deny it. But from the moment I saw you, you were as familiar to me as air in my lungs. I didn’t know why.”
“That sounds about right,” I say. I’d spent my entire first meeting with Dante trying to determine why he seemed so familiar, but how can you know someone you’ve never met? I can see my father—I can see Benn—in him now. Both are fair with dark features. Dante a younger version of the man I knew. “You had no idea about me?”
“No,” he says.
“But then how do you know you’re my father? If my mom married your brother—”
“It says so here,” he says, touching the print on my wrist.
“They never told me,” I say. The deception twists hard in my chest. Did it make Benn any less my father if he wasn’t biologically related to me? Does it matter that he never told me?
“They were protecting you,” he says. “The only way to protect my family was to run. If the Guild knew I had fathered you, they never would have let you be born.”
“Because you weren’t married to my mother,” I guess.
To my surprise this makes him laugh. “No matter what their politics are, no one in the Guild is that morally rigid. No, it would have been because they thought you would be too dangerous. I think you proved them right.”
“But why?”
“A child with your genetics can’t be controlled.”
“My genetics? How would they even know my genetics?”
