“Have you told anyone about us?” Dante asks me.

I shake my head. “I wouldn’t know what to say.”

“I can barely believe it myself,” Dante says.

“But you suspected it. Why?”

“You said your last name was Lewys and, well, because of your mother,” he says.

“You know her?” I ask.

“Of course, she’s your mother.”

I’m having a difficult time composing sentences, and thoughts, for that matter. It doesn’t make sense. It’s not possible. “So you knew her.”

“Yes,” Dante confirms.

“But Benn Lewys was my father,” I say, trying hard to sort this in my mind.

“Benn was my brother,” Dante says.

“He didn’t have a brother,” I say.

“No, his brother left.” Dante blinks several times as if resetting himself. “I left, because the Guild was coming after me.”

It doesn’t explain anything, especially not his claims about his past—our past—or how he wound up on Earth. Still, my mother hinted at this, so I concentrate.

“But,” I say, struggling, “you aren’t old enough to be my father.”

“About that,” he says, scratching his temple.

“Yes?” I prompt.

“Things are different here.”

“Do you have time machines?” I ask sarcastically.

“We don’t need them. Time doesn’t flow rapidly on Earth like it does where we came from. Arras is a construct, so its time is not bound to the same physical laws that time on Earth is. For every month that passes on Earth, a year passes in Arras. So if you’re sixteen years old—”

“It’s only been sixteen months since you left,” I say. If he’s right, then half a year has passed on Arras since we left. It will be spring again, and Amie will graduate primary academy soon.

“I feel like I’ve barely been away, but here you are. I didn’t know,” Dante says. “I wouldn’t have left Meria if I had known she was pregnant.”

He wants me to understand. He wants forgiveness.

“It doesn’t matter,” I say. My words are glass, smooth and cold, and I know he can see right through them. “You still left her.”

You left me, I add silently.

“You don’t understand. Meria refused to come with me,” Dante explains. “She didn’t want to run. I showed her the mark of Kairos so she could come if she changed her mind.”

“Why does this matter?” I ask, gesturing to the techprint—a symbol that’s lost its original meaning to me. Now it’s another secret—another lie.

“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?”