‘You don’t have to explain yourself,’ I stop her. Even now I feel the burden of the raw weave pressing down on me. I can’t imagine what it’s like for her.

‘I couldn’t leave it,’ she says. ‘Not without a true Creweler in place to carry on my work. Adelice, you must know how I feel about the Guild. About Cormac, Maela, and their puppets. But that pulse you feel, that electricity, that’s not them.’

My fingers sting as she speaks, reminding me how they want to touch the raw material, but I do my best to push the feeling down deep inside me. ‘We don’t do it for them.’

‘No,’ she agrees. ‘We do it in spite of them.’

‘Will they keep watching me?’ I ask.

‘They didn’t stop watching me until I was seventy,’ she says. ‘Cormac is many things, but he was the first to realise I wasn’t a threat to Arras.’

‘I guess I have a while to wait.’

Fifty-four years.

Loricel opens her mouth and then presses her withered lips back together.

‘What?’ I ask, scanning the room. ‘They’re watching us now?’

‘The illusions in this room are too complex to track.’

Now I understand that she’s not sure she wants me to know the truth, because it might be too much for me to live with. Loricel needs to make sure Arras has a Creweler after her death, and if I leave, it won’t.

‘You have to understand my dilemma,’ she says finally. ‘My whole life is this world. I have given everything to it.’

‘I think I understand,’ I say.

‘I wish you could. But until you’ve devoted your life, fought human nature, harnessed matter itself, and contained it for decades, you can’t. It’s a lot to ask of anyone.’ The lines on her face deepen as she speaks, as though the weight of years is dragging down her very skin.

‘But if I don’t—’

‘Then it will fade away.’

My eyes find the floor, and I inhale for strength. ‘So you won’t stay, even if I leave?’

‘No,’ she confirms. ‘My age has passed. It is up to you. Of course, I hope you will stay. I believe that you feel the pulse and understand its importance.’

‘How long will it survive without a Creweler?’

‘They have enough material stocked to last a decade. Maybe,’ she answers. ‘But it will be chaos – an extended apocalypse. And Cormac will be in charge by then.’

‘Of the Coventry?’ I ask. ‘He acts like he already he is.’

‘He oversees us now, but soon he’ll be elected prime minister of Arras.’

‘He’ll have control over everything,’ I whisper.

‘Except you. If you stay.’

I take a seat on a velvet divan, working through this revelation. ‘Well, you don’t have to worry. My sister is here. I won’t leave her.’

‘That’s the problem,’ Loricel says. ‘I want you to make an educated decision. You know about the new remapping tech?’

‘They talked about it at the State of the Guild. They mapped me the other day,’ I tell her.

‘Cormac has mapped each of us—’

‘Even you?’

She nods. ‘He claims that they are trying to understand why some girls have the ability to see and touch the weave and others don’t. He’s particularly interested in why most men can’t see it.’

‘Most?’ I recall her saying she believed some men could weave.

‘Most can’t. There are rumours of departments where men work with the weave, but the Guild always denies it.’

‘Do you think they exist?’ I ask, realising I’m finally getting more of the story.

‘Definitely. The Coventry is just the face of the Guild. What we do is important, but many more than us are at work.’

I have a hard time imagining someone more powerful than Loricel. ‘More important than you?’

‘My – our – skill,’ she corrects herself, ‘is necessary to harness the actual raw materials. Without that Arras would decay and crumble from within. Then they need Spinsters to add and maintain, but our value stops there.’

‘But they still need us.’ The Western Coventry alone houses a hundred girls and women who work shifts around the clock. There’s no way Arras could survive without Spinsters.

‘Yes, but if they could simulate our skill, they would not.’

‘That’s why they’re mapping me,’ I whisper.

‘They haven’t figured it out yet,’ she says. ‘But the rate at which they are producing manipulation technology worries me. It will not be long.’

‘I can’t let them map me again,’ I say, balling up my fist in my lap.

‘They won’t ask your permission,’ she says with a wry smile. ‘Besides, they already have you scheduled for it.’

‘Is Cormac communicating through you now?’

‘No, it’s my job to lie to you. Cormac assumes I won’t tell you the truth, because he believes I’ll put Arras above you.’ She stops and studies my face for a moment. ‘Because I always have in the past.’

‘Always?’ I ask.

‘It’s not my place to make a decision for you, especially considering what they have planned.’ Loricel’s eyes drift to the floor and when she looks back up, they wander between myself and the walls of her studio.