“Your jilted fiancé,” she mocks. “Cormac misses you desperately. Tell me, Adelice, would you have invited me to your wedding?”

“Probably not,” I say coolly, although invisible screws twist my insides. “Maybe you can come to my funeral.”

She finds this very funny.

“I was told you were dead,” I tell her.

“Your mother is dead,” she says. “She died after she was stuck in cold storage for months.”

“Is that where you were?” I ask, thinking of the threads I removed as a Spinster.

“There were a lot of us that needed the procedure. I had to wait my turn.”

So they froze her until they could pull her soul strand. That means somewhere in Arras there’s a lab devoted to preparing Remnants to come to the surface.

“Will you tell him this?” she asks.

“Who?”

“The Sunrunner,” she breathes. “Dante.”

I stare at her. How does she know his name? “No,” I murmur. “Not yet. Why do you care if Dante knows?”

“I could lie and tell you we were prepped on him,” she says, “and we were, to a point. But I know Dante very well. It’s another reason Cormac chose me to lead the new contingent. You should ask Dante why I’m here. Why he didn’t execute me.”

“You’re here because Dante wants me to help him and he figured killing my mom wasn’t going to ensure my loyalty,” I say defiantly.

“Ask him when you’re ready to learn the truth then,” she says.

I’d suspected Dante was hiding something, but why does my mother know what it is? I’ve had enough of this conversation so I rap a couple times on the steel door and wait for the guard to open it.

She may not be my mother anymore, but she knows me as well as my mother once did, and that’s what scares me.

Dante is waiting outside the cell block as though he’s anticipating my next move. Lounging against the door, he looks agitated, even more so than he’s been since the Remnant attack. He’s dressed down from his flashy attire into a pair of jeans, and he’s fiddling with something in his hands. A digifile.

“Is this the best place to have this conversation?” I ask him in my most confrontational tone. Seeing him here, I’m sure that he knew my mother would direct me to talk to him.

“No, let’s go to the fountains. And, Adelice”—he pauses—“keep the questions to yourself until we get there.”

I do as he requests but only because I’m not sure what to ask first, and because the time it takes us to walk outside and down into the gardens allows me to calm the anxiety that has built up inside me since my mother pushed me to speak with him.

“The surveillance can’t hear much with the water,” Dante says as we sit on the edge of the fountain. It’s cold and water sprays my back slightly, but I don’t care.

“I know. Jost and I used this trick to block the audio transmitters in the Coventry,” I tell him.

Dante fidgets with the digifile, flipping it from hand to hand. “He’s smart. Seems nice. Do you love him?”

It’s a totally inappropriate question and it catches me by surprise. “I’m not sure that’s your business.”

“Fair enough,” Dante admits. “I was merely interested.”

Interested in what? Me? He didn’t ask flirtatiously—more like an old friend trying to catch up on the latest news. But we’re not friends. Not yet.

“I brought this so I could scan your techprint,” he says.

“I have questions first,” I say, holding my arm to my waist. “Lots of them.”

“I know that, Adelice,” Dante says in a quiet voice. “I do, too. I think some of the answers we’re looking for are encoded in that hourglass though.”

It never occurred to me to try to scan the techprint my father left on me. I’d accepted my father’s simple explanation that it was to remind me who I was, but now that I’ve learned it is the sign of Kairos, I realize it might hold more answers.

“I have one, too,” Dante says, revealing his wrist to me.

I swallow hard. Why has he waited so long to show me this?

“What does yours say?”

“Nothing spectacular. I had reasons for seeking refuge here,” he says. “It was my ticket in, and it helped me get in with Kincaid.”

“He’s more than a Sunrunner,” I surmise.

“Much more,” Dante says. “I can show you new ways of looking at the world, Adelice, but first, I need to see what that techprint says.”

Ready for answers, I thrust my wrist out to him. He takes it gently, and his hand is warm on my skin, sending the oddest sensation of comfort traveling up my arm. The digifile takes a long while to scan.

“Sorry, we only get the castoffs that refugees bring from Arras,” he apologizes, and then the information displays. I can’t read what it says, but the words reflect in his wide eyes.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” I ask.

Dante waits a long moment before he responds, and when he does, his hand grips my wrist tightly.

“It says I’m your father.”

TEN

THE MOMENT LOCKS IN PLACE, MY MIND frozen like a blank screen as shivers ripple from my fingertips to my throat. Suddenly I’m falling, but I never jumped. It’s the sensation of the world slipping away.

This is what my mother was trying to tell me, why she pushed me to seek answers from Dante. How is this possible? Dante is barely a year or two older than me.