Kitabı oku: «Meridian», sayfa 4

CHAPTER SEVEN
MARINA

It’s impossible to tell time in a dream. I’ve been out so long, I nearly missed Anne-Marie’s birthday dinner.

Unlike the hinged door Tobin’s dad installed at their apartment, Anne-Marie’s is a standard sliding panel. I knock, and her smiling face appears as it moves into its pocket, leaving a clear path inside.

“She’s here,” she yells over her shoulder, and I’m yanked inside.

I was expecting something like Tobin’s house, but this one’s mostly metal and ceramic—inorganic materials considered safe from the Fade. There aren’t any rugs, and the lights are stark white. Pictures of Anne-Marie and her brother cover the walls, and while I see a few of their mother, there aren’t any of Mr. Pace.

“Mom!” Anne-Marie’s still shouting, even though her mother’s in sight. “Marina’s here.”

“Hi, Marina,” her mother says.

“Hello, Ms. Johnston.”

“None of that, now. My name’s Dominique. You two go sit down. We’ll eat in a few minutes.” Anne-Marie’s mother smiles at me before turning her head away with a scowl. “Trey! I want you out of that room in five minutes!”

She swirls past us with bowls in each hand, only stopping long enough to deposit them on a clear glass table.

“She’s, er . . . different.”

“She’s got help in the kitchen,” Anne-Marie says, tugging me over for a look.

Mr. Pace is here, but I’m not sure I’d call what he’s doing “help.” He’s picking at the food from a large bowl on the counter. When Anne-Marie’s mother warns him off, he flicks part of what he’s eating at her. She stomps across the room to take the bowl, but he hides it behind his back until she makes a grab for it, and then he pins her into a hug that quickly turns into a kiss.

Dante and Silver are bad enough, but parents? Ew .

“He’s over a lot more since the lights went down. Mom’s been floating.”

Arc Fall seems an odd reason to visit family, but what do I know?

“Trey, five minutes! I’m serious!” Anne-Marie’s mother pokes her head out the door of the kitchen, not smiling for the moment it takes to yell her son’s name down the hall.

“That’s his fourth five-minute call,” Anne-Marie says, rolling her eyes.

“Is he in trouble?”

“Nah. Just Trey back to his normal, antisocial self. The record’s six days, but he was sneaking out during the day to snag food, so it doesn’t really count.”

It seems like siblings should be alike, but Anne-Marie and her brother don’t even look all that similar. They’re both tall, and both dark, but while Trey turns more into a Mr. Pace clone by the day, Anne-Marie looks like her mom.

Connections are so confusing.

Not at home, Cherish offers. I have to bite down on the response I want to give.

Thankfully, a knock on the door interrupts her at the same time loud laughter comes from the kitchen.

“Get that, will you?” Anne-Marie asks. “If I don’t set the table, those two will forget we need plates. Honestly, you’d think they were the teenagers.”

She heads for the kitchen with a hand over her eyes, declaring, “I’m coming in! Act parental!” while I go back to the door. So this is what it’s like to have a home that people want to visit.

We can return to home, Cherish says. Remaining is selfish . Stupid. Inferior .

She doesn’t usually go for insults.

“Hey,” Tobin says when I open the door. His eyes are brown—I check. Col. Lutrell’s are still silver.

“Hey.”

I want to say more, but I can’t decide what should come next. Maybe it’s Cherish sabotaging things from the inside, but every time I see Tobin now, it’s like a wall goes up between us. I swear sometimes he actually looks blurry, and when I try to talk to him, like I did in the Well, I can barely string a sentence together. I want to hold his hand, but mine won’t move.

He doesn’t move, either, so maybe he doesn’t want me to.

“Are we late?” Col. Lutrell asks.

“Not really. Anne-Marie’s mother’s sort of caught up in something.”

There’s another snort of laughter from the kitchen, followed by Anne-Marie’s frustrated groan.

“Daughter still in the room!” she shouts.

“I can imagine.” Col. Lutrell grins, winking at us as he excuses himself to go back her up. I wonder if he can tell something might be wrong with Tobin. Could he have seen Tobin’s eyes? Can sense my suspicions the way I sense emotion? I know his hearing’s sharp, but I don’t know what other Fade traits remain with those exposed yet not included in the hive.

Maybe that’s why he led the not-rescue mission when I was taken. If he’s the colonel from Honoria’s book, it would have been safer for him to risk the Fade. He’d already lived through contact.

“I thought I’d slept through dinner,” Tobin says, but he doesn’t look like he got much rest. “Dad said I was screaming so loud, he thought I was in pain.”

“Nightmares?” I ask.

He nods, face paler than I’ve ever seen.

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I dreamed I got caught on the Arc when it was turned on, so I was burning up. I don’t know if he believed it or not.”

I wish I could get him to say more without telling him I had a nightmare myself. Maybe mine wasn’t an exact copy.

“Trey, get your butt out of that room and into this chair now !”

Anne-Marie’s mother sweeps back into the room with another set of steaming bowls.

Cherish leaks through, assigning Ms. Johnston a Fade-name that encompasses steam for her temper, mixed with something diamond hard and bright.

“Trouble?” Tobin asks, to shift the conversation off dreams.

“Anne-Marie claims it’s normal, but it started with a countdown and progressed to an ultimatum, so I’m not sure I believe her.”

“No, that’s pretty much normal,” he says. Everyone’s moving toward the table, so we join them.

Anne-Marie’s mother and Mr. Pace—her father—tote the last of the food out with Col. Lutrell bringing a large tray to set in the center.

This doesn’t smell like dinner in the Common Hall. It’s not wilted or reeking of vitamin supplements, and the plates aren’t flat squares broken into sections. They’re round and made of glass with blue flowers at the edges to match the blue glasses beside them. The plates sit on plastic mats with the silverware set out on each side instead of rolled into a napkin that smells like bleach.

“Nique’s stuff is great,” Tobin says when he realizes I’m staring at the food.

He’s said before that if it wasn’t for Anne-Marie and her mother, he’d have starved the first few days after his dad went missing. They even tried to make him move in with them, but he wouldn’t leave his apartment, or the Well it conceals. It seems a silly secret now that the stars are there for everyone to see, but neither we nor Tobin’s father have shared the knowledge of the door in their closet that leads to the Arclight’s tunnel system.

Another shiver goes down my arms, acknowledging another clue. If the colonel’s been here since before, it would explain why his room has access to the tunnels that others never knew about.

“Why isn’t Jove here?” I ask Anne-Marie. “I thought you invited him.”

“Uninvited,” she snarls. “I only eat with people I like.”

Oops . . . I missed another fight.

“And I don’t like people who tell me I look like a dandelion stalk with the fluff blown off now that I’ve cut my hair.” She stabs her table mat with her fork.

I would have thought getting his jaw broken for running his mouth once would have made Jove more careful.

“Trey!” Anne-Marie’s mother leans back in her chair to shout down the hall. This time, the scowl doesn’t ease when she turns her attention to the rest of us. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. Do you know he wanted me to invite the Fade who healed him to dinner? I mean I’m grateful for what it did for him, but dinner? Do they even eat?”

I cringe at the it and find myself mumbling an answer to her question, though I wish I’d remained silent. Cherish is fuming.

“They’re vegetarians,” I say. At least the ones who began as humans; it’s a little more complicated for the ones who are born Fade. Either way, their bodies need fuel.

“Oh . . . Marina, honey. I’m sorry. I don’t mean it like that. Trey’s just been so odd since, well, you know.”

“I know.” I nod.

“It’s driving me crazy—and it’s only getting worse,” she says. “Maybe I should invite that Fade over and see if it knows what’s going on in his head—Trey! That’s it.”

“Uh-oh,” Anne-Marie says as her mother runs out of patience. The countdowns are done.

Mr. Pace leans over and whispers something, but it doesn’t help.

“No, what I’m going to do is drag him out of that room and down the hall by his collar. I’ve warned that child. . . .”

She throws her napkin onto her empty plate, storming off down the hall, still demanding her son come out. The shouts stop, replaced by a beep loud enough that we can hear it at the table. Tobin glances down, embarrassed, and the two men snicker.

“Parental override,” Anne-Marie says. “Trey’s too old, but his door hasn’t been rewired, yet. She can still open it.”

Just as I’m debating whether or not to crane my neck and see if Anne-Marie’s mother makes good on her threat to haul Trey to dinner despite her diminutive size, a shriek from the hall stops the laughter around the table. It’s the same sound Anne-Marie’s mother made the night she thought the Fade had taken her children.

“Stay—” Mr. Pace starts.

“Here,” adds Tobin’s father.

They’re on their feet and running in nearly perfect sync, the way the Fade do, and I’m the only one who notices. None of us obey. We rise as though we all have the same disobedient thought at once and race after them, in time to catch the last of what Anne-Marie’s mother tells them.

“His eyes . . . his face . . .”

She’s got her back to the wall, outside Trey’s room, and then slides down so her weight’s on the balls of her feet. Her hands are to her mouth, holding in another scream. She doesn’t move until we try to pass her. One of her hands shoots out to grab Anne-Marie’s.

“Don’t, baby. Don’t go inside.”

Anne-Marie’s the picture of silent terror, probably as sure as I am that her brother’s dead. Dead eyes and a corpse’s face, what else would make her mother act this way? She gives me a panicked look that’s very clear: find out what’s going on.

Listen, Cherish says suddenly. Hear .

But what good is it to listen if no one’s speaking?

They are speaking, she says. You haven’t heard . He hears .

I enter Trey’s room slowly. Mr. Pace, Col. Lutrell, and Tobin stand on the other side of the threshold, with a wide gap between them and Trey’s bed. He looks fine.

Trey’s sitting cross-legged on his bed with a pad of paper in his lap. His room’s full of discarded pages—on the walls and floor, haphazard piles of them on the desk and chair.

He drew home, Cherish says. He sees home. Sick .

She doesn’t mean homesick. Trey’s pictures are all sickened versions of the Dark, even though he’s never seen it. The buildings are strange and unfamiliar, the animals menacing. Fade I don’t recognize with distorted bodies, and horror-stricken people I don’t know. Trey’s still drawing in a frenzy when his mother finally collects herself enough to come inside, holding Anne-Marie behind her.

“Trey, honey, can you look at me?” she asks. “It—it’s dinnertime. Please stop.”

“Almost done, Mom, I swear.” He sounds normal enough. It’s like he doesn’t know he has an audience, and he didn’t hear her scream.

“Trey, are you okay?” Anne-Marie asks.

I’ve crept closer to Tobin, leaning my cheek against his arm; his fingers twine between mine as the air compresses from the weight of worry flowing off so many people. I could choke from the stench of it.

“And . . . done !”

Trey’s answer is the final flourish of whatever he’s working on. He turns to face us, beaming and displaying the image of a ferocious tusked pig surrounded by ominous shadows.

“Any idea what this is?” he asks. “Wait, what are you all doing in here?”

No one answers. No one even breathes.

Trey’s face is swirled with Fade-marks, and his eyes are gleaming metallic gold.

CHAPTER EIGHT
TOBIN

“Get out of here,” Dad orders me.

“What’s wrong?” Trey asks. No one’s told him how he looks.

This pretty much blows Rueful’s “only willing hosts” line to bits. Trey has no idea what’s happening to him. How can that be willing?

So much for neutrality.

Mr. Pace starts stacking Trey’s drawings into a pile, as though that’s the problem.

“Am I in trouble?” Trey tries asking Annie.

“Move!” Annie’s mom pushes her to her room and uses her override to lock the door.

“Let me out!” Annie screams from the other side. She’s beating on the door, but she won’t even make a dent. “Mom, please! Let me out! Mom!”

Nique won’t do it. She’d rather have Annie locked in and scared than free to roam and turning Fade like her brother.

“What are you doing?” Trey asks. “What’s wrong with Annie?”

“Nothing,” Mr. Pace says. He grabs Trey’s wrist when Trey tries to leave his room. “You stay here.”

“But what’d I do?”

“Go.” Dad shuffles me and Marina out the door when we don’t leave on our own. “Marina, you’re welcome to stay with Tobin, but I want you both out of here. And I’m checking the entry alert, Tobin. You have two minutes to get to the apartment and ping me, or I’m coming to find you.”

Marina doesn’t say a word, but I know what she’s thinking, and none of it’s good. When we get to my place, she keeps going. I’m not stupid—she’ll go to him to sort this out.

I go inside and then stop the door so it can’t close all the way. Once I’ve tripped the entry sensor, so Dad will get the ping to tell him I’m home, I head back out, allowing the door to close behind me. Hopefully, he’s too busy to notice my tracker heading toward the Arc.

If Trey turns, I’m next.

No, Annie’s next. She was exposed first.

What am I thinking? Everyone is next.

“How did you beat me out here?” Marina catches sight of me halfway across the quad and crosses the rest at a jog. “How’d you even know I’d be here?”

“Closest crossing point. I took a different route.”

She stops beside me, at the edge of the Arc. The lamps are conserving power right now. They give just enough light so people can see where they’re going and find their way back. No one’s panicking yet, but they will. Then the lights will go completely hot.

“Were you put back on duty because of Trey?” Marina asks. “Are they tightening security already?”

“They wouldn’t start with me, and they wouldn’t put me here.” Sykes would be patrolling the short side. Trainees get dumped in low-priority sections. “The lights would be brighter.”

We’ll be at Red-Wall as soon as our elders declare Trey a security breach.

“How long have we got?”

“As long as Dad and Trey’s parents can buy us.” So, not long.

It’ll only take minutes to get Trey to the hospital, so long as he doesn’t flip out and fight them. Mr. Pace and Nique can stall Dr. Wolff for an hour or two before he either alerts Honoria out of habit or she hears about Trey herself. If they’re lucky, no one will see Trey en route and they’ll be able to lock down the hospital without details circulating.

Crap . I’m starting to sound like Honoria. Worse, I’m starting to understand her.

The only choices are to hide what’s happened or to start a riot with full disclosure. They’ve got to get Trey contained.

And then they’ll come for us.

Marina knows that, too. It’s why she’s here.

“You’re going out there, aren’t you?” I ask.

“Like you’re not here for the same reason.”

I’m here because I don’t believe in coincidence. Trey’s bait. The shadow-hugger probably planned this. He left Marina a trail of Fade-crusted bread crumbs, and she’s going to follow it until she loses her way home.

“It’s too dangerous,” I say.

“If Rue or one of the others knows something, then—”

“Then what ?” I snap, harsher than I mean to. Louder, too.

She flinches back, and I tell myself to get a grip before I scare her and she goes looking for him to protect her from me. I’m too jumpy. The nightmares were bad enough, but seeing them on paper, like Trey pulled them out of my head, was too much.

Touching those things changes people, no matter what they say.

“What if they expected this to happen, Marina? What if Trey’s just the first?”

“I don’t believe that.”

Of course she doesn’t. All she can see is the tragic hero who risked his life to save his lost love. Rueful’s a fairy tale. How do I compete with that?

“We should wait and see what Doctor Wolff says,” I suggest.

“I don’t trust Doctor Wolff.”

Right.

“Then we wait here. Honoria’s brother might show. We can—”

“Take a look, Tobin. What do you see?” she says.

I turn back to the Grey, but there’s nothing there.

Nothing. No one, and no Fade. There hasn’t been a night without at least a handful of them hovering in the Grey until sunrise drives them back. Tonight, there’s only the fog, coming too close and making my skin crawl. I can almost hear the click-clack of tiny feet marching up my arm.

I reach down for a rock and throw it, but it drops out of the air on its own without hitting anything.

“Bolt’s not coming,” she says. “No one is.”

Our night started with an invisible Fade on the front line. Now they’re at full retreat, and Trey’s jacked into my nightmares. What’s next?

“I can stop you from going,” I tell Marina.

“You’re not going to hit me.”

“No, but I can hit my wristband and send us straight to Red-Wall.” She might hate me now, but she’ll thank me later. “For all we know, Trey had a bad reaction, like an allergy. If it was serious—”

“Your eyes were silver.”

Her answer’s ice water to my face, knocking the air out of me.

She’s lying. She has to be. Marina picked a sore spot because she knew it would get a reaction.

“You don’t have to make up—”

“Your eyes were silver in the Arbor, when you saw the blood on my hand. Look at my hands.”

She removes her gloves and holds her hands out, palms up. She turns them over to let me see both sides, and the perfect, unscarred skin that’s replaced the cut I cleaned and the one from the broken bottle.

“What happened?”

“I fell asleep after Honoria’s presentation, and had a nightmare—your nightmare. The cuts were gone when I woke up. Your eyes were silver, and I’m healing like someone’s reknitting my skin from the inside out. We shared a dream, Tobin. Whatever’s happening to Trey, he’s not the only one. I’m not waiting. I’m going to find Rue. I’m not giving him a choice but to help—the end.”

“Wait.” I grab her by the shoulder as she steps forward. “What if it’s not a dream? What if it’s a premonition?” My voice sounds strange.

“It’s not.”

“What if the Fade are spreading again and we caused it by bringing down the Arc and letting them in?”

Never forget, Honoria’s voice drones in the back of my mind. It was a single mistake that put us over the edge .

“Tobin, listen to me. Rue will fix this.”

Sure he will. The mighty Fade Charming can fix anything.

I pull my gloves off my shaking hands, searching them for lines on my palms and knuckles. I check between my fingers in case they’re hiding, but it’s just skin. A fading tan from wearing the gloves so long, and fingernails that are clean, except for the one I tore trying to bite off a hangnail.

“You don’t have lines,” she says. “Neither do I. The silver was only a flash, but it was there.”

“Maybe it was trick of the light.”

“That’s what I thought. I thought it was Cherish, and her mind games, but now—”

“You said you couldn’t hear them anymore.” I take a step back. I want to throw up, but my stomach’s got a giant knot in it that hits my throat every time I try.

“Not them,” she says. “Her . She messes with my head sometimes.”

“But she’s you, isn’t she?” And since when is there a distinction? The shadow crawlers are an all-for-one deal. If you hear one, you hear the rest.

“I thought so, too, but I’m not sure about anything tonight,” she says. “Something must have gone wrong when Bolt and Rue healed you and Trey.”

I’m more concerned with the idea that something went right, and this is stage two. She might be convinced that the Fade mean no harm, but their definition of help isn’t the same as ours—that’s why they’ve stuck with Dad. We don’t always speak the same language. This could be their idea of “better.”

“You should have told me,” I say.

“I just did.”

Marina stands on the Arc with her foot hovering above the ground, but she can’t manage to take the first step.

“What if she’s stronger than me?” she says, but more to herself than me. She flinches, slapping at her ears. Did one of them say something back?

“If you’re crossing, I’m going with you, and it has to be now. Leaving after the Arc goes hot will set off an alarm.”

“This is a bad idea,” she says. “But I don’t have a better one.” She takes a breath, closes her eyes, and steps over the boundary into the Grey.

The short side used to be most dangerous place I knew; it’s where we were most vulnerable. Anytime the Fade tried to break in, they did it here, because it’s the only place you can cross and get back in a few hours. Now it’s simply the most convenient. A couple of other people are already out here, barely within sight of the Arclight, but none of them are the kids from Honoria’s speech.

“Tell me your dream again,” Marina says after we’re past them.

“I’m standing on the Arc, when it comes on and fries me where I stand.”

“Now tell me the real one.”

I don’t want to. If I recount it, then I have to think about it, and if I’m thinking about it, then I might as well be living it.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because maybe I’m wrong,” she says. “Maybe mine wasn’t the same and I only convinced myself it was.”

“That’s probably it. I doubt your brain is as twisted as mine.”

“I saw the Dark, Tobin,” she says. “But it wasn’t the place we went before, with the houses and families. It was like Trey’s drawings. The whole thing was one writhing monster, ready to devour the world.”

“I call that variation two,” I say. Number one is worse.

We’ve reached the point where the terrain begins to change. Murky water appears in puddles and then turns the ground to mush that sucks against the bottoms of my boots. That’s the only sound here beyond the wind and the occasional movement of the water.

This is part of the dream, too.

A creature I first mistake for a log makes a whipping motion with its long snout and tail before sliding into the water with barely a ripple. Its eyes shine red beneath the surface, where it lurks, watching.

“So, once we’re in . . . there . . . how do we find the nanobot?” I ask. “Do we call its—”

“His!” Marina snaps.

“Fine. Do we call his name or try to find our way back to the settlement on our own?”

“I think Cherish can call him, but I’m not sure I want—”

“Stop.”

I throw my arm up so she can’t walk any farther. Finding the Fade won’t be a problem; they’re here. She should have heard them before me.

The terrain shimmers and then splits, forming two solid bodies with ash-pale skin marked with nanites. They head straight for us.

One’s female, bigger than Marina, but not by much. She has a broad nose and wide eyes framed by spirals. The male’s a head taller than me, but it’s his hands that stand out. Most of these things come pretty evenly marked, unless they’re hurt and the nanites go to the wound, but this guy’s got nano-doodles all over his hands. He’s scarred, too. A jagged ridge cuts through his scalp, leaving him with a bald spot.

I don’t know about the female, but he was definitely human before he was Fade. They’re both dressed in fatigues similar to the ones our security personnel are assigned.

“What do they want?” I ask Marina as they fall into step on either side of us.

“They didn’t say,” Marina says, cocking her head like she’s listening to something. “I think they’re escorting us in.”

“What’s with the silent treatment?” Maybe the ones born out here have trouble with words, but someone who started off human should be able to speak. Honoria’s brother can.

“They didn’t say that, either.”

They urge us onward and set the pace. If I fall off cadence, one pushes me so I’ll keep up.

Once we’re at the Dark, they show us where to enter through the trees and vines, cringing away from a burst of light that ignites the sky behind us.

The Arc’s back on full power, burning across the short side. A moment later, there’s a siren wailing in the distance, calling everyone to safety while the alarm on my wrist and Marina’s flash red.

She looks at me, and I nod.

Honoria knows .