Witch's Pyre (Worldwalker #3)(41)
Different Woven, Rowan thought. He was whispering to himself in his head, but Lily was in such close contact with him, and he was keeping so close to her physically, that she overheard.
Greater drakes, most likely, based on the size, he continued. Lily got an image of a dragon creature with iridescent skin, giant talons, and stunning wings. It was so large several people could easily ride it.
By the tanks for the greater drakes is where they made the mascots. The image that flitted through his mind looked like an enormous dragonfly-serpent hybrid, clinging to the mast of a tall ship. It seemed to scan the sky, looking for danger, and its double-decker wings filled the sails with wind while it wrapped its long, scaly tail protectively around the rigging of the ship. Lily assumed that had to be a mascot.
Back there, the medium-size womb combs must have been where they made the guardians and other mammalian mixes. Lily got a glimpse of one of the guardians that they chained to the bottom of the greentowers.
So what are these smaller vats for? They aren’t really womb combs. There are more of these than any other, but I can’t think what would grow in them. Fast germinating Woven—the kind that hatches from an egg, mostly likely. Rowan pictured something that looked like wild Woven to Lily. They were mostly insect, but also part reptile or mammal, and none of them were the same. Who would want to grow so many, and why?
The vats stood like sentinels, lined up in perfect formation in the long-forgotten dark.
“It’s an army,” Lily whispered. A chill ran down her spine as she said it, and she knew she was right.
Rowan turned to her, discarding the notion out of hand. “No, this type of Woven serves no purpose. They’re made from the leftover genetic material of the useful Woven, like the guardians, drakes, mascots, and cleaners—cleaners are mostly insectoid,” he explained, seeing her confused look. “After you make a few batches of useful Woven you just throw whatever remains into one of these vats and see if anything good comes out of the mix. You have to destroy ninety-nine out of a hundred because all that most of them can do is eat and fight and . . .” He trailed off, a stricken look on his face.
“Pretty accurate description of the wild Woven around the Thirteen Cities, isn’t it?” Lily said.
“No, because wild Woven reproduce like crazy.” Rowan shook his head, unable to accept what was staring him in the face. “We make sure they’re sterile—all of the Woven that we make in the womb combs are sterile. They can’t reproduce.”
“So how did the wild Woven start reproducing?” Lily asked gently.
“It was almost two hundred years ago. An accident—”
“Really?” Lily took a deep breath. “What if it wasn’t?”
His eyes looked inward, and Lily could feel the skin on the back of his neck begin to crawl. “There are so many vats,” he said, starting to think the unthinkable.
“Enough to flood the continent with wild Woven,” she said. “And if you make it so they can reproduce, you’d only need to use the vats once.”
Lily ran a finger through the film of ancient dust that lay on the otherwise-pristine vats. The questions that she’d been asking for months and the answers she’d been given that didn’t sit right with her started to come together into one terrible truth.
“What if the wild Woven were designed to reproduce like crazy, designed to be poisonous so humans couldn’t survive by eating them, designed to attack humans even if they weren’t provoked? There are too many things about them that don’t make sense, too many rules, unless you start thinking that they weren’t an accident.” She tapped the side of the vat. “These certainly weren’t made on accident.”
Rowan sat down hard on the dusty ground. He was looking into the empty palms of his hands, but he wasn’t seeing anything. Lily sat down next to him and leaned her back against the steel. She could feel a thousand thoughts running through his head, like clouds racing across a wind-blown sky, and she waited. The thought clouds in his mind turned dark and crackled with lightning. Finally, he looked up at her.
“We need to find out why. I need to know what happened, not just guess,” he said. “Ivan knows. That’s why he sent us down here.” He laughed bitterly. “A parting gift before we walked out the door.”
Lily nodded. She could feel a yawning pain building in him at the thought of all the people he’d lost to the Woven. Of the childhood that was stolen from him by violence and hunger. She wrapped her arms around him and let him squeeze her tightly to the ache in his chest. No matter how many times Lily tried to push him out, Rowan managed to dig down deeper into her. He was fitted inside her so tightly now that no blame or bitterness between them could keep her from wanting to protect him from this terrible lie he’d lived with all his life.
Lily. Come quick. You have to see this.
Rowan and Lily jumped to their feet, both of them feeling the urgency in Tristan’s call in mindspeak, and hurried in his direction. Lily noticed that the floor had begun to slope upward, when she slipped on something. Rowan’s hand shot out and steadied her before she fell to her knees. She looked down.
“What is that?” she asked. She and Rowan inspected the coating on the floor. Rowan crouched down and touched the slippery substance, rubbing fingers and thumb together.
“I think it’s wax,” he said.