Free The Lost Girl by Sangu Mandanna

souls, God will not welcome them.”
    There’s a movement at the corner of my eye. I turn my head to see Sean standing by the door. It’s difficult to tell how long he’s been there.
    “Is that true, Sean?” I ask him. “Does God hate me?”
    “Course not,” he says roughly. “God doesn’t hate anyone. Isn’t that the point? Look, I don’t even know if he exists, but it doesn’t matter. Who cares about heaven? We’re on Earth. And I know you have a soul, or whatever else it is that makes us human.”
    He gives me the cream and goes to turn off the news.
    “Wait,” I say.
    The man in the robes is leaving the armchair, and there’s a different man coming on. He’s tall, and too thin, with a sharp, handsome face. He must be fifty-five or so. His hair is dark brown and short, growing back from his forehead like a lion’s. He has a lion’s gold eyes and lazy grace, too. He unsettles me deeply, like there are spiders crawling along my skin. What’s worse is how familiar he seems. Like I’ve seen his face before.
    “Is that—?” I whisper.
    “Adrian Borden,” says Sean, and there’s a note in his voice that makes me think he might be aware of that spidery feeling too. He hesitates. “A Weaver.”
    “I know.” I feel like ice has filled my lungs. I’ve always known their names. Adrian Borden, Matthew Mercer, Elsa Connelly. Sometimes I think I even know their faces. I used to ask Erik questions about them, but I stopped when I was eight or nine years old and it struck me that not knowing made it easier to pretend they couldn’t hurt me. I must have seen all three of them, as a baby, when I was born and stitched in the Loom, but this is the first time I’ve looked into one of their faces since. All the years of terror, of fearing and resenting that dark thing on the fringes of my life, focus now on the face on the screen. It’s a funny thing, to realize that somebody you are looking at may have made you with his own two hands. To know those hands could unstitch you again.
    “Adrian Borden didn’t make you,” says Sean, as though he can see the conflict and fear in my face. “I asked Erik once. Matthew made you.”
    I suppose that makes it better, knowing it’s not this man on the screen. But what if Matthew is worse?
    “Erik knows them very well, doesn’t he?” I say, remembering the way I would pester him for answers as a young child.
    “He used to, anyway.”
    Sean sits down on the bed next to me. We watch the gold eyes and sharp marble face of the Weaver. “I met him once,” Sean says. “I used to go down to London a lot with Dad when he was still your guardian. I was quite little the one time he took me to the Loom. It was such a strange place. It seemed to belong to a different time. It was so old . Dad met him while he was there. Adrian, I mean. I don’t remember what they talked about, but I remember he scared me.”
    “I don’t like his eyes,” I say. “He looks like nothing would stop him if he wanted something.”
    Sean smiles wryly. “The Weavers have achieved the impossible, creating life,” he says. “But Dad once said Adrian wanted more. Now that he knows how to create life, he wants to find a way to prolong it. He experiments. He doesn’t stop. There have been rumors . . .” He hesitates. “About things he’s been doing. Grave-robbing. Strange tests on echoes.”
    “How do you hear about these things?” I ask him.
    “Dad and Erik, mostly. Also by skimming the Loom records. But a few stories have leaked into the news, like the grave-robbing. That was on the news last week, but no one’s been able to prove it.”
    I point at the screen. “Why is he doing an interview?”
    Sean shrugs. “To keep up appearances. It’s not like it used to be, before we were born, when the Loom could get away with staying completely in the dark. The Weavers do interviews every year so that people will think they’re normal. Respectable. Trustworthy.”
    I focus on the