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“I’m a thinker. A Tailor. A Spinster. A spy,” he says. “But most important, I’m a Creweler.”
“I don’t believe you,” I say, because I need it to be false. I need to believe he doesn’t have these abilities.
“Oh, rest assured, Adelice. Thanks to your measurements, our scientists have been able to synthesize a genetic compound that has given me the same set of skills you possess.”
I stare at him, trying to wrap my head around this. The thing is, it’s not simply that Cormac has been altered to have these abilities. They’ve been synthesized, like in the earliest experiments with the serums on Earth. Experiments that had gone horribly wrong. The fact is, Cormac is merely a test case, which explains the unpredictability of his behavior and his erratic attitude in the past few weeks.
“I thought you seemed off,” I say to him. “I wrote it off as stress, but it seems it was more than that. You’ve been running your own personal Cypress Project all along.”
Cormac hadn’t been losing his mind. He’d been warping it, pushing his own genetic abilities to the brink.
“I don’t need your condescension, Adelice,” Cormac says. “Nor do I appreciate it.”
“You’re insane,” Dante says. “Can you appreciate that?”
“I’m powerful,” Cormac says. “If I were insane I wouldn’t be nearly as successful as I am.”
“You have an entire world living a lie—”
“That they’re eager to believe,” Cormac interrupts me.
“You think lies are that easy to swallow?” I ask. “Arras knows you’re full of it, Cormac, and soon they’ll have proof.”
“And who is going to show them?” he asks. “You?”
“Believe me, I’m up for the challenge.”
Before he can retort, a shrill siren sounds. Jax has managed to trip the protocols and set off the evacuation alert. Now we merely ne
ed Cormac to say the pass code and Protocol Three will be initiated.
That shouldn’t be hard, given his god complex.
“I see you didn’t come alone,” Cormac says. “What were you saying about wanting to come back and make things work?”
“I have no idea what’s going on,” I say, keeping my face blank. In truth, I don’t know where Jax is.
Cormac holds up the PTD that Jax gave us to communicate and waves it at me. “Who’s at the other end of this?” he asks.
“No one you know,” I say.
“Not my dear Erik then? Pity. I would love to rip that nuisance right out of Arras. But it is someone you know, Adelice. You pulled a little trick once at the Coventry,” Cormac says, “and I’ve often thought of it. You disregarded proximity standards. Do you remember?”
I know what he’s talking about. I had called up the repository in Loricel’s room and rewoven it into the strange screens in her studio, so that I could enter it and search for information about my sister. Because I was manipulating the space around me, I risked the integrity of the Coventry’s weave. It shouldn’t have been possible for me to do it, and it probably wouldn’t have been if I had been using any loom other than Loricel’s. Still, the loom had warned me by issuing a proximity alert. I have no idea what that has to do with the PTD that connects me to Jax, though.
“I’ve had them install a toy in my office,” Cormac says. He presses a button, opening a hidden panel in his wall to reveal a gleaming new loom.
“That’s your problem, Cormac,” I say. “A loom isn’t a toy. Arras is doomed if you think it is. You can’t even access it within the boundaries of Arras.” Now I know why he mentioned the proximity alert. It isn’t safe to weave and do Crewel work within Arras. That’s why the coventries exist between Earth and Arras—as a safety measure. And Cormac is disregarding that. I’ve spent too much time laughing off his drinking to realize his real addiction is power.
“Let’s see what we can do with it anyway,” he says.
He presses a series of buttons on the side of the loom and it whirrs to life. I strain against my bindings, trying to get a better view of the loom.
“You know how dangerous that is?” I ask in a quiet voice. “You’ve made your point.”
“No, I have not,” he screams, moving back toward me and getting in my face. “Because you still don’t respect me. You don’t fear me.”
“That’s what this is about?” I ask. “You want me to fear you? Well, you’ve got what you wanted. Seeing you playing with that loom with no regard for its power or the consequences of your actions frightens me, Cormac. And if you were sane, it would frighten you, too.”
