Crewel

spot begin reaching out towards me, their hands returning with knives and forks full of steaming, white meat. I’m being eaten alive.
    I bite my lip to keep from laughing and focus on what I now know. I have located both Jost and Loricel. I want to follow Jost, but this is my only chance to find the information I need to get to Amie if I want to pull her location up on the loom.
    ‘Show me the offices,’ I command, and the scene shifts to a busy building where smartly dressed men and women bustle about with stacks of papers. It’s a scene outside the Coventry. My command must have been too vague.
    ‘Show me the offices inside the Coventry,’ I try, and the image flickers to nothing.
    Pulling the digifile from my pocket, I slide open the secret file and am delighted to discover that Enora included a map of the compound. I shift the image, searching until I find what I’m looking for: the research laboratories. Next to them I spot a single room twice their size. It’s marked ‘repository’. They’re both located near the clinic where I was mapped. Calling up the labs on the wall, I see a few men clad in white jumpsuits busily working with tubes and looms. Their workday must not end at the traditional time. I close my eyes and mutter, ‘Repository.’
    I can’t look. Something about the large block on the map raises the hair on my neck. Slowly I open my eyes. Large steel shelves rise up in neat, symmetrical rows, lined with thousands of tiny metal boxes. Moving closer, I examine them to find each is labelled with a sequence of fourteen numbers and letters. It takes me a moment to realise I’ve stopped breathing.
    Fourteen.
    03212144 WR LM LA
    The sequence drilled into my head as a child.
    ‘It’s how we’ll find you if you’re ever lost,’ my mother said.
    It’s how they find each of us.
    Date of birth. Sector. Metro. Mother’s initials. Child’s initials.
    I stare at the box in front of me. Whose sequence is this?
    My hand reaches out to open it, but my fingers hit the wall screen.
    ‘It’s an illusion,’ I remind myself. The screens look so vivid that for a moment I thought I could reach out and riffle through the boxes.
    I nearly drop the digifile from my sweaty hands, trying to find the information on the map, but thankfully it’s there: a list of coordinates that will call up the Coventry’s weave on the machine. Sitting at the loom, I punch in the codes and watch as the Coventry’s weave spins across it. Next to me the command panel blinks red, flashing a reminder: partial within boundary diameter. It means I’m looking at a piece of the weave that contains the very location I’m in. Maela showed us this piece before, but I wonder now, as the warning light flashes at me, if I’m risking its stability to manipulate the compound from within the compound itself. But I can’t think of a better – or safer – idea. And, I argue to myself, why would Enora have given me this info if I wasn’t meant to use it? But . . . if I’m being honest, this is possibly the stupidest plan ever. I’m not sure if it’s possible to remove a piece from the loom’s weave and place it into the room’s actual weave. Probably because no one has ever been desperate enough to try it. Except me.
    I run my hands along the top of the loom, the weave shocking the tips of my damaged fingers. Slowing them to a soft trailing motion, I adjust the view on the loom, zooming into the weave until it focuses, mirroring the map Enora left me on the digifile, and then I see the outline of the repository. Keeping my fingertip carefully on the spot, I tease a few strands of the area out, carefully, so as not to remove the entire room from the weave, which would surely draw immediate suspicion. Holding it delicately in my left hand, I reach up into the air with my right, and concentrating until the room’s weave shimmers into view, I draw apart the strands of this room, hoping my theory is correct and that I can transplant threads from the loom into the weave of Loricel’s studio. If so, then I hope to create a rift between her studio and the repository that will allow me to enter the secure facility. I weave the strands from the repository into this space and cautiously peek through.
    It’s not a bad first try, except that I’ve woven it in upside down and I’m looking at the ceiling, the storage units suspended overhead. There’s no way I can open those boxes this way, so I step back through to Loricel’s studio