“They wanted you to be a Tailor?” I ask.

“Oh yes.”

“So you ran away from your family?”

“You ran, too,” Dante points out.

“That’s different. My parents forced me to run.”

“Why do you think they did that?” he asks.

“They lock Spinsters away.” I think of the doctor and nurses and the clinic where they were going to map and alter me. “The medics went home for the night. They had lives. Only the Spinsters were kept in a cage.”

“Did they invite you over for dinner?” Dante asks. “You don’t know anything about them. What they do to Tailors—it’s a fate much worse than being placed on the loom.”

Worse than false windows and constant surveillance? “I doubt it.”

“Tell me, Adelice, how many Tailors did you know before you came here?” Dante asks.

“That doesn’t prove anything,” I start.

“Had you ever even heard of Tailors before?”

“No,” I say in a quiet voice.

“Spinsters are locked up,” Dante says. “Tailors disappear. We are forced to exist on the periphery or to go along with the Guild’s schemes and adopt fake lives and occupations, chosen by the Guild for whatever diabolical plot they’ve concocted.”

“And since you wouldn’t go along with that?”

“They would have killed my family,” Dante continues. “When a Spinster is retrieved, everyone celebrates. When a Tailor is retrieved, he vanishes. And often his family does, too. No one can know Tailors officially exist because of what we do. Tailors can’t create like Spinsters or Crewelers, but we can alter their creations.”

“How?”

“Sometimes it requires special tools to adjust a person or a thing.”

I’m reminded of the clinic at the Coventry, where I lay on a cold, steel slab as a dome of gears and wheels mapped my mind.

“Tailors can remove memories, adjust emotions, even undo things entirely.”

“Undo?” I repeat in a whisper.

“Watch,” he commands me, and as I do, his finger slips into the leaves of a fern near the door. At first it looks like he’s massaging them, but then I see what he’s doing. He’s teasing apart the very strands that make them up. Most objects, even people, look like one thick thread on a loom, but I’ve seen them close enough to know that they are comprised of multiple thin threads twisted delicately together. Dante is pulling the fern apart. At first nothing happens, and then he tugs against a strand and it separates from the others. It’s golden in his fingers and as he pulls it slips out from the other strands. The effect is instantaneous.

The fern’s leaves wilt, withering into brown, drooping, then shriveling until they become so brittle that the plant crumbles into dust before my eyes. A moment ago it was alive and now it’s nothing. It scatters like ash to the floor.

My eyes are wide as Dante releases the golden strands and they vanish, evaporating like smoke when met with too much air.

“You ripped the time right out of it,” I say breathlessly. “I never even realized threads had time strands.”

“They aren’t easy to see.” Dante brushes his hands together as though they’re dirty. “I unwound it.”

“But why would time exist within a strand?” I ask.

“All things have a season, Adelice. You and I, we both have natural lives to live. We’ve been granted so much time and when that’s up…”

“We die,” I finish for him.

“If something doesn’t kill us first.” It’s an attempt at humor, but it falls flat. Probably since we both know that people like us aren’t likely to die of old age.

“If you can pull the time from a plant, then you can pull it from a person.” I shudder at the thought of seeing that.

“Yes.” Dante pauses and his jaw tenses under his smooth skin. “Or you can warp it. You can divorce it from the natural order of things to suit your purpose, which is exactly what the Guild has done.”

“Warp,” I repeat, and then it hits me. The Bulletin story we found with the photograph of Cormac. The propaganda film. I knew hundreds of years had passed in Arras, but no one could tell me exactly how many. Loricel was cagey about how long she had acted as Creweler. Cormac never seemed to age. At the academy we studied civic responsibility, not history, because Arras’s history never changed. It moved along pleasantly. It was orderly. Nothing in Arras progressed except technology.

Not even its leaders.

“How many years?” I ask, because I need to hear him say it, even though all the pieces are falling into place now, beginning to reveal a secret I could never have imagined. “How many years have passed on Earth since the Exodus to Arras?”

“Sixteen years, give or take. On Earth, it’s probably close to the year 1960, but we can only guess. It’s hard without days and seasons.”

I’ve never been good at math, but even I can figure that out. If sixteen years have passed on Earth, nearly two hundred years have passed on Arras. Generations in Arras have lived and died before those left on Earth have even forgotten the war.

It doesn’t make sense. It isn’t possible. “Are you telling me that Cormac Patton is over two hundred years old?”

Dante’s eyes shift to mine, and I see fire in them. “That’s exactly what I’m telling you.”