“I guess chivalry isn’t dead,” Dante mutters.

“What was that?” Erik asks.

“Nothing.”

But I can tell from the pinched expression on his face that Erik heard. He doesn’t want to admit why he’s so eager to volunteer, and I don’t want to think about it. About what it means. That Erik is protecting me, because I not only don’t need Erik to protect me, but I also don’t want him to.

I don’t want anyone to.

Erik holds very still as Dante pulls a thin blade from his pocket. But he doesn’t cut him. Instead he traces along the bare flesh of Erik’s wrist. I feel my stomach flip over, but as it does, I see what Dante is doing. He’s tracing the lines of Erik’s weave. A moment later, his fingers slip down and a trickle of blood appears at the spot.

I look to Erik’s face, momentarily abandoning my interest in the procedure. This can’t feel good. His teeth are clenched together but he gives me the barest of determined nods. He’s putting on a show for me, no doubt.

I shouldn’t have let him volunteer for me.

When Dante’s done, there’s the lightest hint of a scar traveling up Erik’s wrist, but it’s thin and hard to see. I wouldn’t notice it if I wasn’t looking.

“What did you do to me?” Erik asks, examining his hand. There’s some smeared blood on his wrist, but other than that and the small scar, you’d never guess that he’d been altered. It was so fast, so expert.

The thought makes me sick.

Anyone can be changed in an instant.

“I added some of that plant to your DNA,” Dante tells him.

“What?” both Erik and I say in surprise.

“What effect will that have?” I ask.

“He’ll probably turn green and start producing tomatoes.” Dante’s face splits into a full grin.

“Not funny.”

“You two are very gullible,” Dante says. “All I did was stretch your strand and then fuse it back together. That’s why there’s a scar.”

“Oh,” I say in a small voice, but I can tell Erik appreciated the joke.

“Any side effects?” Erik asks.

Dante hesitates but when he answers there’s no two ways about his answer. “No. There won’t be.”

It’s the calm, even voice my father used with me when I was a kid. If I asked if there were monsters in the closet, there weren’t. If I asked if I would be taken away at testing, I wouldn’t. If I asked him if I would make friends at academy, I would. The same even tone used to tell me what I needed to hear. Sometimes he was right about the monsters, but he’d been gambling on some of the others.

Of course there were monsters everywhere in Arras.

But why lie to Erik? What side effects can come from alteration?

“I’m starving,” Erik says. “Being a lab rat takes it out of you. Anyone else interested in food?”

“I’ll join you in a minute,” I hedge, knowing it’s me he’s waiting for. “I want to change first.”

Erik accepts this explanation and heads out of the greenhouse, flexing his wrist a little, like it’s sore.

“What did you do?” I ask as soon as he’s out of earshot.

Dante opens his palm to reveal a bloody chip of metal and circuits.

“What is that?”

“Tracking chip,” he says.

“How did you know it was there?” I ask. I take the chip even though it’s covered in blood.

“A guess.”

“But they can track our sequences in the mantle,” I say, confused. I turn the chip over in my palm, looking for a clue as to why it was there. Why bother when they could call up a personal identifying sequence and remove the individual strands so easily?

“They can track through most of the mantle, but the looms don’t see everywhere. There are slubs, irregularities in Arras’s weave, much like the ones near the Guild’s mines here.”

“Are the slubs caused by accidents?”

“There are no accidents in Arras,” Dante says in a quiet voice.

No, there aren’t, which means any irregularities, any slubs in the weave are man-made. It wouldn’t make sense for the Guild to put them there. They wanted total control. So why are they there? “I was tracked,” I tell him. “They put a transmitter in my food when I went out on a goodwill tour with Cormac.”

“I doubt it’s still there,” Dante says. “Transmitters like that break down too easily within the body, or pass through altogether. I’m surprised they bothered.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Probably to track you more conveniently. Perhaps Cormac didn’t want to use the looms, or maybe he wanted to be able to follow your movements throughout the day.”

That does sound like Cormac, but why bother with Erik?

“I wonder if they’ve been tracking him this whole time,” I say, feeling more sick every minute.

There’s a pause before he answers. “Probably not.”

That’s not reassuring.

“Do I have one here?” I ask.

Dante reaches for my arm. “I don’t see a scar,” he says.

“Erik had a scar?” How had I not noticed this?

“It was a pinprick. I wouldn’t expect the average person to pick up on it. But altered skin is different. I doubt even Erik knew he had it.”

“But why would he have it?”