“Only one?” I ask.

“One active mine. Once they expend a spot, they move to another. We estimate there are about one hundred active mining locations at any time, but there are thousands of abandoned ones,” Dante says. “Arras always needs more. It’s growing every year.” His eyes flicker to the sky directly over us.

If Arras is up there, it’s hidden from view, even at the boundary of the Interface. Dante parks the crawler in a patch of grass, and I leap from it, kicking off my thin flats and stretching my toes in the cool blades. It tickles my skin and I’m reminded of home, of the grass woven into the yard I played in as a girl, and I have to fight the ache of longing that tumbles through me. Turning around, I look at the world the sun touches. There’s some vegetation, although it’s sparse and unruly. I stare up, unblinking, into the bright sky, looking for an aeroship like the one we saw the first time we were here. But no ship comes and soon purple spots blossom in my vision. Dropping my gaze, I stare out to the other side and catch my breath—across the top of a far series of mountain peaks runs a long fence. Metal. Sharp. Modern. On the way here, Dante warned me that one of the Guild’s mining operations was located nearby, and here’s the proof. I don’t want to know what lies beyond that fence.

Jost and Dante are busy checking equipment, ready to get started with the operation as Erik and I watch. They move with purpose, unloading thin panels from the small cargo space in the crawler.

“How does it work?” I ask.

“Basically, these collect the solar energy,” Dante says as he mounts a panel on a rack behind the vehicle.

“And that?” I point to a cord snaking its way from the rack to the back of the crawler.

Dante opens the cargo door wider and I spot a long, squat control board. “It monitors the intake of solar energy as well as the panel’s temperature level with bypass diodes. Collection occurs in cycles so the panels don’t overheat and crack. We need to hook them up to a solar tracker to ensure the rack tilts them toward the sun. It takes hours to fully charge a panel.”

“So we’ll be here awhile,” Erik says, pivoting around to take in the entire view—how the raw weave blocks the sun, the Guild’s fence, the sparse vegetation. “Arras lies over it…”

I have to assume so, based on our escape from Arras, when I ripped an exit through to the mantle that we now see overhead.

Erik takes a few steps back, surveying the world around him. Then he leans down and touches the ground. A moment later his eyes rise to the border between the sun and the weave.

“Then this is where it begins,” he says softly.

At first I don’t follow, and then it hits me: everything Loricel told me and everything I’ve learned. Arras has to begin and end. And it does, I realize. At four distinct points. Dante called them resources, but I know them as something different—coventries. Four distinct coventries.

“It’s hard to fathom,” I whisper. “But it must be.”

We both start turning, looking for what we know is nearby. If only I knew what it looked like.

“There!” Erik points to a spot in the distance.

“Come on,” I call, picking up my pace until I’m jogging toward it. If we have hours to kill before the panels are charged to capacity, we might as well look around.

“Whoa!” Dante calls, but we don’t listen.

In the distance, barely close enough to see, something rises up in a wind tunnel. Sparks fly off the twisting strands, and all around the building are large gears and tubes. My eyes follow the tubes back as they snake off. I know where they lead—to a Guild mining site. One of the ones Loricel had to visit each year. The ones I would have been responsible to maintain as Creweler. I pull back. Nothing good can come of going there. Even from a distance I can feel the frozen deadness of the area, the corrupted world around the drill site.

But I walk backward, staring at the strange cloud that rises farther and farther up into the sky until it covers the sun, and the dark, glittering strands that stretch out past it, covering the Earth. It’s separate from Earth and separate from Arras, and around it strands radiate, knitting together into the Interface, as though it’s creating the Interface’s weave.

We’ve found a coventry.

“Is that…” Erik’s voice trails into a question.

“A coventry,” I guess. It rises like a tower, tubes and gears taking it above the surface of Earth. Due to the Interface, we can’t see the actual compound where we once lived. The tower fades past the mantle like a castle nestled in the clouds. But I know it’s there.

“How?” he asks.

I drop down to my knees and drag my finger along the ground, drawing a square. “Think of it this way. Arras has four coventries, right?” I don’t wait for him to answer me. “They each rest on the border of the Endless Sea—or that’s what we’re told.”

“But why is it here?” he asks, his eyes on the wind tunnel circling the tower.

“It’s not really,” I say. “It’s up there, but that tunnel actually plumbs the elements of Earth and sends them up to Arras. Spinsters use them on the loom. We weave them into Arras, but we have to mine them from somewhere.”

“So you take that”—he points to the twisting strands—“and make it into Arras.”

“Yes,” I say. “That’s why we have to be in the coventries. To keep Arras bound together correctly.”