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Dante hesitates and his eyes grow distant, reflecting only the rippling water of the fountain. “They know everyone’s genetics. They knew your mother’s and they knew mine. That’s why they wouldn’t let me marry her. You’ve been in the Coventry. You know women need permission to give birth in Arras, but anyone can get pregnant,” he reminds me.
“But what do they do if they don’t get permission?” I ask.
“Earth isn’t the only world with a grey market. There are secrets in Arras, Adelice, but they’re bought at a cost.”
“Then why didn’t you stay? If there was somewhere to hide—if you loved my mother?” I ask.
“It was too late. If I’d left earlier, I could have set up in the grey market, but we didn’t know anything was wrong until my marriage request was denied. We knew then that whatever was in my file meant I couldn’t stay in Arras.”
He had wanted to marry her. The Guild hadn’t merely denied my mother’s request to have more children or placed my parents in menial jobs, the Guild had dictated the course of their lives with one simple denial. One that colored how my parents perceived each demand of their government thereafter.
“But why would the Guild want you?” I ask.
“Like I said, I have my secrets.” He runs a hand through his hair, evading my question. “Did your family have the radio? The books?”
I nod a yes.
“And the stories of Earth?”
I shake my head slowly. “Loricel, the Creweler at the Coventry, was the first person who told me about Earth. They must have forgotten.”
“Impossible. They chose not to tell you,” Dante says.
“So they knew, but why would they train me to fail at testing?” I demand. “They could have brought me here.”
“Meria had no desire to come to Earth,” he says in a cold voice, and I realize then that sixteen years in Arras may have given my mother time to move on and build a life, but Dante hasn’t had the same advantage. His scars are fresh. The damaged parts of him are still tender.
“This isn’t possible. Nothing you’ve told me makes sense. You can’t be my father, and Arras doesn’t run on an accelerated timeline.” Each of my words is louder than the last, as though volume can erase the information Dante has given me.
Dante pauses to consider this, and then he stands and walks to a fern lilting near the fountain. “Spinsters use a loom to see the fabric of the universe,” Dante says. “They work within the constructed weave of Arras.”
“Except Loricel, the Creweler,” I point out. “She could capture the threads without a loom. They even used her to help gather the raw source materials here.”
“That’s an entirely different level of skill,” Dante says, his forehead wrinkled in concentration. He’s trying to explain things and I’m interrupting him. “Very few women have that ability.”
The way he emphasizes women sends ice through my veins. Loricel alluded to this once, in her studio at the Coventry: There are rumors of departments where men work wit
h the weave, but the Guild always denies it.
“It’s different for men,” he continues. “We don’t need looms, but we can only alter things that already exist.”
I can’t hold back the questions now. “We? You can weave?”
“I can alter,” he clarifies. “Same materials, different results. Spinsters can create, while Tailors can only alter what’s already present. I’m a Tailor.”
“That’s why you ran.” Loricel was right about the secret departments employing men, and they had wanted Dante to be part of it.
“You met some of us there, I’m sure. A medic who healed you or maybe an assistant of some sort,” he says. “They were Tailors.”
My encounter with the medic who healed my leg during my retrieval is hazy from the Valpron I was administered that night, but I can recall how easily Cormac had him ripped. Cormac did it as a reflex, like the man was the least important person in the world. If these men exist within Arras, the Guild has a very different way of handling them. “Why aren’t we told about this?”
“Alterations are a specific skill. If the public knew what Tailors could do to them—how we can manipulate a person’s body and mind—there’d be little point to our skills. A renewal patch is alteration on a very limited scale. It’s the closest the public comes to knowing what we do. We’re more useful if we operate in secret. I ran before the Guild could force me to become a Tailor for them.”
“They wanted you to be a Tailor?” I ask.
“Oh yes.”
“So you ran away from your family?”
