Altered (6 page)

“Why did you run from Arras?” Dante asks us.

“We’ve lost people to the Guild,” Jost answers for us. “We saw through the Guild’s lies, and the truth brought us here.”

Jost is telling the truth without giving anything away.

Dante isn’t appeased by this answer. “Strange things have been happening around here. More Guild presence. A ship was downed from the sky. I can’t help thinking that your typical refugee doesn’t show up with the sign of Kairos printed on her arm.”

This is why he’s interested in us. “My father did it before the Guild killed him,” I admit. “Before I ran.”

“And he never explained to you what it was?” Dante presses.

“There wasn’t time. The Guild was onto us, so I had to go before I could ask. I assumed it was another Lewys family secret.”

“What did you say?” Dante asks.

His face is ashen, and I replay my last words, trying to determine which triggered such an intense reaction. Before I land on an answer, a red light pulses through the room in sync with a shrieking alarm.

“That’s not possible,” Dante says, jumping up and knocking his chair over in the process.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, unease creeping, unwanted, into my chest.

“It’s a perimeter alert. We’ve had a breech in one of the entrances.” He’s already starting down the hall, and we have to race to catch up.

“Remnants?” I ask.

Dante doesn’t respond. He’s busy sliding through screens on a companel. It’s Guild tech, much more advanced than anything we’ve seen on Earth so far.

How flexible are the Sunrunners in their alliances?

He lands on the security stream that shows the point of access. The feed glows green and white, so we can see the movement in the darkness outside. A handful of humans are tearing at Dumpsters in an alley.

“Is that here?” I ask.

“In the back,” Dante murmurs.

Jost thinks to ask a more useful question. “Is this normal?”

“That, maybe,” he says, pointing to the Rems leaping out from the garbage bins, but then he swipes the image to the next feed. “This isn’t.”

The stream shows a crumpled steel door lying on its hinges in the alley. One of the Rems is caught underneath it. It’s a woman from the look of her long hair, but I can’t see her face and she isn’t moving. The feed shifts to show Remnants inside a concrete holding area, much like the sally port we entered through.

“The Guild must have given them some fancy explosives to get through our doors,” Dante says. “They’re not here to blow us up, they’re trying to reap us.”

“Can they get in?”

“Doubtful. The holding areas are triple reinforced—two layers of concrete and steel supports in between. Anything they used to get through that would kill them, and we have our own booby trap that will be triggered if they try to take out the other door.”

The camera feeding us the stream of the holding area circles to the next corner of the room, and I feel my heart thumping hard in my chest. I’ve barely glimpsed the footage before the stream changes again, but the last image is all I can process.

They have Erik.

THE ALARM DOESN’T FADE AND ITS WAIL pierces the air, pounding in my ears. Thoughts and ideas tumble through my head as quickly as they evaporate. How did this happen? How did they know to bring Erik here? Has the Guild found us?

Are we being watched?

Dante wastes no time pulling rifles from a storage unit in the safe house. He starts to hand me one but hesitates, and I understand what he’s thinking. He doesn’t want me to go. Maybe Sunrunners don’t think much of girls, but I have my own tricks. I refuse the rifle, reaching for a short knife with a serrated blade.

“Jost and I can handle this,” Dante says.

“He’s right. Those things are after something,” Jost says. It’s a warning. Jost thinks they’ve come for me, but there’s no reason to believe that. Except that they chose this safe house to attack. And that they took Erik as a prisoner. So actually there are several reasons to think that.

“Maybe,” I grant him, “but they aren’t going to get it.”

The security stream doesn’t show anyone near the main entrance, so we head there.

“Don’t you have more men?” I ask Dante as we slip into the darkness outside.

“They’re around. Some aren’t in yet, others are probably already sleeping before they take the early patrol shift,” Dante says.

“Should we—I don’t know—wake them up?” I suggest.

Dante grabs my arm to stop me, and his eyes look black in the night as he peers down at me. “It’s for your own good that I’m not getting anyone involved yet. Once Kincaid knows about you, he’ll expect an audience with you—and probably a whole lot more than that. And I won’t bring anyone else in until you explain things to me.”

“I already did,” I whisper.

“No, I want the
whole
story. It’s not a coincidence that they’re here, and I want to know what happened with that aeroship.”

Before Dante can say anything else, Jost pushes him away from me. “Don’t touch her.”

Dante whirls on him, but then calms himself. Instead of forcing it, he heads toward the building’s edge. If Erik weren’t in danger, I’d run now because I’m suddenly afraid of Dante’s intentions. He knows I took down that ship last week. I said something over dinner that spooked him, but nothing that truly gave away me or my unusual abilities. He didn’t respond this way when he saw the techprint. He was curious then, but now he seems to be repressing fury and I know it has nothing to do with the Remnant attack. He’s angry with me.

I’m so preoccupied with this that we’re near the alley before I can process what we’re about to do. Emergency lights flood the area, bathing the alley in more light than we’ve seen on Earth, even during market hours. The unlit parts of the street creep along the corners of my vision, casting shadows into the small alley. Bodies seem to fade in and out of sight.

They’re here, and they see us coming.

“Get out your weapons,” Dante hisses.

The small knife in my hand feels light and useless. I wouldn’t even know how to use it. I may as well try to punch our attackers. I should have asked Dante more about the Remnants. In fact, there are a lot of things I wish I’d asked Dante now that we’re staring down a group of maniacs.

It’s their eyes that scare me. Pupils dilated and stretched past the irises, extending into an infinite nothing. They move with unnatural grace, leaping without fear of falling and bounding in long strides. The Remnants play with the shadows, popping in and out of sight, seeming to shift and change shape before my eyes. The darkness licks along their limbs, branching like poisoned veins across their arms and faces, but as one glides closer, the black streaks deepen in his skin. They’re
scars
, not tricks of the filtered light.

“Can you weave us out of here?” Jost asks in a whisper, balancing the butt of his rifle against his shoulder and peering along its long, thin barrel.

“I can likely freeze the moment, but there’s nowhere to go.” I see no point in hiding my weaving abilities from Dante if we need to use them. My eyes automatically draw out the strands around us. They’re tangled in a mutilated web. There’s no discernible pattern in the chaos. I can see Earth’s strands. I can touch them, but this world is too unpredictable for me to know for sure what would happen if I created a large warp in the strands.

“I imagine your friend would feel pretty raw if you left him behind,” Dante adds. It’s in the weight of his words, how carefully they’re chosen, how they flow slowly from his tongue—he knows what I am. I don’t know how, but Dante knows I’m a Spinster.

“One thing at a time,” I snap. “I thought we’d deal with the maniacs first.”

“Let’s see what you got,” Dante says.

“Find Erik,” I command Jost.

He nods, but I can tell I’m more inclined to help Erik than he is, so I remind him in a low voice, “He’s your brother.”

“He’s over there,” Dante interrupts us.

Erik is wrestling with one of the Remnants, trying to hold his attacker’s body back with one hand while the Remnant grips his other.

“Erik,” I cry out to him, and then instantly regret it because his head turns toward my voice. For a second, he loses his focus on the Remnant he’s fighting. But before the strange woman can attack him, Dante sends a shot tearing through her body. The Remnant woman trips back and goes limp. It buys Erik enough time to get to us.

“Glad you showed up.” He’s panting.

“Me too,” I say, hoping he doesn’t notice I’m shaking. “How did you know where we were?”

“
I
didn’t,” Erik says meaningfully. “
They
did.”

“What’s he doing?” Jost asks, and I turn to discover Dante has moved away from the group and farther down the alley. At first it looks like he has things under control, but then a Remnant backs him against a tall chain-link fence.

Without thinking, I lurch forward, sprinting toward the pair with my knife in hand. The Remnant pins Dante to the ground, hands gripping his neck. Something whistles past me, but I don’t stop until I’ve reached them. My hand lashes out with the knife and slices across the Remnant’s back. The blade vibrates as it tears along flesh, and it makes my hand tremble.

It’s not the kind of wound that will slow him down, but it does make him angry. Dropping his hands from Dante’s neck, the Remnant lunges forward onto his palms and hisses under his breath. Dante is free, but now the Rem is after me.

Knife still in hand, I thrust it forward to scare him off. But he laughs. It’s a completely normal, human laugh, and it makes me lose my grip on the handle. I recover, but I’ve lost my defensive posture. Now instead of inching him back, I’m vulnerable. Slowly he moves toward me with a low growl, moving erratically and pushing me farther and farther toward the fence.

I open my mouth to call out to Jost when a brick cracks against the Remnant’s skull. He crumples to the ground, and Dante waves for me to follow him.

“Dante! Adelice!” I look over and see the boys beckoning to us. We sprint toward them and when we reach them Erik grabs my arm. The others keep moving but he holds me back.

“Do you trust this guy?” he asks in a soft voice, even though we’re nowhere near anyone.

“Do I have a choice?” I pull forward against his hand.

“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.