Meridian (12 page)

“D
AD!
”
I call into the apartment.

Our lights are dimmed below half power, but turning the dial doesn’t make them brighter. I was only below with Marina for a few minutes when he radioed Mr. Pace to send me home. I figured it was important since he left before I got back, but where is he?

“Dad?”

No lights. No Dad. No way am I staying here like this. One more try, and I’m gone. I’ll wait in Annie’s apartment; he can come looking for me, if he needs me so bad.

“Dad!”

“In here,” he answers from the hall.

“Were you in the tunnels?”

“I had to check a few things.”

“A few, or two?”

As in the two creepers currently hiding out from the sun in our walls.

“They helped us, Tobin,” he says. “We can do the same.”

I flop into a chair and toss my jacket and boots.

“What’s with the lights?” I ask, ending the discussion of Rueful. “Did we blow a fuse, or did Honoria’s reroute dip into the building’s power?”

“Neither,” he says. I hear a sound behind him, and I’m back on my feet. “I was making the apartment more hospitable for our guests.”

“Guests?” That sound was the sliding panel to the tunnels in our linen closet. Surely, he didn’t—

He moves out of the way, to allow Schuyler to pass. Rueful’s leaned over his shoulder, barely able to walk; he can’t even raise his head.

“I’m out of here.”

“Tobin, wait,” Dad calls.

“Not as long as they’re here.” Schuyler doesn’t bother me, but the ink blot’s got to go. I will not sit here with him in the room. “I’ll wait with Marina.”

“Dominique took Marina home with her, and we’re locked down. No nonessential personnel’s allowed out unescorted.”

“Security, remember?” I ask, tugging on my trainee shirt.

“Consider your status temporarily revoked.”

I reach the door, but it won’t open. He’s set the parental lock.

“You can’t do this.” The door should swing out into the hall, but it won’t budge, even when I smash my shoulder against it.

“Stop before you hurt yourself,” Dad says. “I’ve already got one injured boy to deal with; I don’t need two.”

“He’s not a boy!” I snap, turning on him. Last night was too long, and I’m too tired to do anything more than shout. Schuyler’s made it to the table and put Rueful in a chair. “I can’t believe you let him into our home.
My
home! You know what he did to me—you saw it. He put that junk in my blood; I don’t know if I’ll ever get it out.”

Negative,
Schuyler says.

“Positive!” I counter, spinning around to answer him to his face.

“Tobin?”

Dad’s staring at me with the same blank horror he had on his face the day Mom died.

“What?” I ask.

“Why did you say that?”

“Because
he
keeps saying this isn’t their fault, and it’s a lie!” I keep trying to lower my voice, but it still gets louder.

He removed what was his. Yours remains,
Schuyler argues.

“None of them are ‘mine!’ Humans
don’t
come with nanites preinstalled!”

I try the door again; it’s still locked.

“He didn’t say anything, son. Neither of them did,” Dad says.

“He did. I heard him. He said—”

Negative.

My hands start shaking, still holding the doorknob.

“Dad?” What’s happening to me? I look normal—how can I hear them? “What did you do to me?” I demand of Rueful.

“It wasn’t them,” Dad says, taking a seat. His shoulders slouch and his head droops. He folds his hands into a fist, with his arms rested on his knees. I’m five years old, and he’s about to tell me Mom’s dead. “The nanites came from me.”

Involuntarily, my attention goes to his silver eyes.

“Good guess, but no.” He laughs. The nervous kind, used to buy time and calm down. “Tobin, how old am I?”

“I don’t know. I mean, I guess . . .”

I
should
know how old my own father is, but I don’t. We celebrate his birthday every year, but only with a single candle on his cake.

“Forty?”

“I was thirty-eight when I got these.” He holds up his hands to show me his scars. “Elias was forty-three. Doc was seventy-one. Sykes was two days past nineteen and begged me to burn his neck because he couldn’t reach. Honoria was younger than you.”

“But Honoria burned herself in the first days, to keep the Fade from . . .”

We called them Death Trees.
We.

“You were there?”

“He silenced his voice,” Schuyler says, bringing me back to the kitchen. Rueful’s slouched over the table where I eat my dinner, his head on his arm, breathing heavy and fast.

“You’re human,” I argue to my dad.

“And it’s a constant fight to stay that way. The five of us burned the Fade out at initial contact, and we’ve spent every day since making sure they can’t replicate out of control.”

“Why are you saying that?
You’re human.
Is it them? Are they making you say it?”

“I know it’s a shock, and this definitely isn’t how I wanted to tell you, but—”

“No. You and Mom were human. You had a human kid.”

“Tobin!” Dad grabs my shoulders and shakes me.

I need to hit something, like a wall or a door. Something hard enough to pulverize the Fade in my blood. I want to punch a piece of clanging metal so the sound will vibrate them to nothing. I wish the walking Rorshach would raise his head; I’d be happy to put my fist through that.

“What am I?” I ask.

“Same as you’ve always been.”

“Trey’s not.”

“That won’t happen. You’re—”

“Don’t lie to me! Am I going to turn?”

“I don’t know, Tobin. None of us had kids before you, Annie, and Trey came along. Honoria was the only one who came close, and her nanites rejected the embryo.”

“Did Mom know?”

“Everyone does, eventually. Honoria’s gone further than any of us, trying to purge the Fade completely from her body, and it shows, but the rest of us don’t age, Tobin.”

At the moment I want to explode, an intense calm overtakes me, forcing my temper to simmer. I’ve felt it before, when Schuyler’s stepped in to tamp down my anger. I should have known the first time he did that—Fade can’t connect to unincluded humans.

“Say something,” Dad says.

Instead, I walk past him to the hall. The tunnels are tempting, but I won’t run away. I stand in front of the collage of photographs pinned to the wall. They’re mostly me, with a few of my parents here and there. A very few are even older.

Dad’s followed me. I can feel him behind me.

“You said you were named for your fifth-greats grandfather,” I say, staring at the picture of a little boy at the beach, burying someone in the sand.

“I was.”

“Is this him?” He never said it was, but I always assumed. The photo was taken before the Fade, so who else could it have been?

“My mom took this,” Dad says. He reaches over my shoulder and takes the photo. “The boy’s me. Your grandfather’s the one under the pile. That’s your grandmother’s handwriting on the back.”

James making a sand daddy. The Cove ’23

I know the inscription by heart.

“I need to leave,” I say.

My father’s as old as Honoria—older.

My heart starts to race. Something taps on my head like it’s trying to chip through my skull and burrow in. I’m freezing, and then I’m falling toward the floor, no longer able to stand.

“I can’t be here.”

Shadows appear on the walls, but there’s nobody standing in front of them. They move toward the ceiling and grow long toward the door.

“Tobin, calm down.” Dad’s kneeling beside me.

“Get me out of here, Dad. I need to be somewhere else.”

A clanging sound bangs inside the linen closet where something’s trying to open the door. Something’s in the tunnels, and it wants into my house.

“Tobin . . .”

“I need . . . I need . . . I need . . .”

My hands
. My hands are bare because the Fade ate my gloves the way they tried to eat Silver. Spiky growths sprout over my fingers and wrists, wrapping tighter and tighter until my hands are bound together. Sludge pours down the walls to soak the floor and furniture. All our photos shrivel up and dissolve.

I lose my mother. Her smiling face crumbles in front of me.

“I can’t . . .”

“Tobin!”

Dad’s shaking me again, but this isn’t like waking from a dream. It feels real.

Tibby!

The name works my nerves like it has every time Rueful’s used it, and flaring anger burns out everything else. I hear
Tibby
over the rush of waves and the tinkling feet of a billion tiny mechanical bugs. The tide recedes, draining through the corners, and it almost takes me with it. My arms buckle where I’ve propped myself up on my hands, and I crash.

“What was that?” Dad asks. He puts a hand to my back, but he doesn’t try and lift me up.

“Me, drowning in the Dark,” I say, half into the floor. “It used to only happen when I was asleep, but . . .”

“You see the same things Trey did?” He checks my pulse and my forehead.

I nod, pushing myself up, and Dad leads me to the table to sit with Schuyler and Rueful.

“That was a bad one,” I say.

They are all bad ones,
Rueful offers.

“Could you not do the telepathy thing?” I ask.

“We fear the Darkness, too,” he says out loud.
They have no voices.

I glare at him for the silent add-on, but I think it was actually his idea of a joke. He’s needling me. The idiot actually smirks before he winces in pain again.

If this ends up making me tolerate him, I’ll chew every nanite out of my veins with my teeth.

“We need to talk about this, son,” Dad says. He pulls out the chair across from Schuyler.

“Later?” I say. “I think he needs you more than I do right now.”

Rueful’s head falls to the table. The crystals that stand in for hair cover most of his face. The hand that’s gone white hangs limp past the chair.

“Fine,” Dad says. “But I’m not letting this go.”

He turns his full attention to the Fade.

“May I see?” he asks.

Rueful shakes with the effort to raise his arm, but it won’t bend at the elbow. Schuyler reaches for Rueful’s robe and pulls it over his head to show Dad how far the damage has spread. The unlined patch has moved from his hand, up his arm, and across his shoulder.

When we left the Dark, he’d been wearing the same shirt he created for himself the first time I saw the Fade settlement, but whatever took his marks has dissolved the nanites that created his sleeve. His arm’s bare; the shirt doesn’t reappear until it’s nearly halfway across his chest. I can’t see his back to know if there’s a tree down his spine.

Negative,
he says.

I must have wondered too loud. I will
never
get used to this.

“Can you change the configuration of your marks?” Dad asks.

“No.”

“Can you dissipate the limb? Maybe it would separate the toxin out.”

“No.”

Rueful tips his good hand toward the table; his fingers turn to grains of black salt in a short heap. He raises his hand, and they sprinkle up into the shape of fingers again. The other hand shakes, but looks otherwise dead.

Dad places two fingers against his wrist.

“There’s a pulse, so there’s still blood flow. Do you have physical control of the hand at all?”

Rueful concentrates, succeeding only in bending his thumb, but it’s more muscle cramp than movement.

“The lack of lines makes me wonder if the blood is filtering red. I wish I could do some actual tests.”

No one has to say
negative
to that. Taking Rueful back to the hospital’s a bad idea.

“Can we call Doctor Wolff here?” I ask. He treated me on this table when Marina burned the Fade out of me. Surely, he can take blood or tissue samples.

“His risk, his choice,” Dad says, nodding to Rueful.

But Rueful doesn’t answer right away. He and Schuyler go into that weird Fade-trance where they’re talking to each other, but no one else is invited to the conversation. Out of curiosity, I strain to hear either of their voices as they speak, but I can’t hear anything except someone knocking on our door.

“Move,” Dad says urgently.

Whoever’s outside doesn’t let themselves in, but that doesn’t mean they can’t.

“If that’s Honoria or Sykes—” I start.

“Get him out of sight,” Dad says.

Schuyler and I lift Rueful by the arms and usher him down the hall into my room.

It’s a lot brighter than in the main room. The lamp’s hardwired to stay on, so I grab yesterday’s shirt off a chair, and throw it over the top. Rueful relaxes as we let him down on the bed.

Thanks,
he says.
Gratitude. Unexpected gratitude.

“I know the feeling.”

The lights in the main apartment brighten, shining under the door so no one will see anything amiss if they come inside. I crack the door just enough to hear what’s going on.

“She made me.”

Annie’s voice.

“Hall access is restricted. How’d you make it here without getting stopped?”

Dad.

“We have an escort.”

Marina.

Rueful tries to stand when he hears her, but Schuyler holds him down. He doesn’t put up much of a fight.

“You should have stayed at Dominique’s,” Dad says. I don’t know who their escort is, but they’re going to be in trouble.

The outer door closes. I slip out of my room, careful of the lights, to find out what they’re doing here.

Marina’s shaking sheets of paper in her hand.

“You see it, don’t you?” Marina asks Dad. “You see the difference?”

“I see something,” he says. “Are you sure these are what you think they are?”

“Absolutely, but Honoria won’t listen to me. I need your help.”

R
UE’S
in Tobin’s room. I can barely see him down the hall through the open door, but he’s there and he’s alive.

In
Tobin’s
room.

It’s shocking enough to see him inside the apartment at all, but Tobin actually gave Rue his bed.

“Is he—”

I start for Tobin’s door, but the colonel won’t let me pass.

“He’s fine. He just needs rest.”

He needs more than that; he needs the Dark. Cherish sobs in my head at the sight of so much of his skin missing its marks. Rue’s taken off his robe, and from what I can tell, he’s lost nanites in half his upper body, at least. The lines are lighter on one side of his face, too; his hair’s turning white and losing its crystal coating.

Rue struggles to sit up, but he’s not strong enough to stay that way.

Can you hear me?
I ask him.

Affirmed.

He stops moving so much.

Does it hurt?

It quiets. Silences.

Worse than pain, for a Fade.

I’ll get you out of here,
I promise.

When I turn away from the door, Tobin’s watching me.

“Thank you,” I tell him. “For helping Rue.”

“Sure” is all he says, but I can tell there’s more he wants to say. The look on his face is muddled, part anger and part fear, mixed with a lot of regret. He’s probably wishing he’d shut the door behind him when he came out of his room, then I wouldn’t have seen Rue at all.

Anne-Marie’s staring over Col. Lutrell’s shoulder as he examines the sketches.

“There was nothing like this out there when we went into the Dark,” she says. “They were all pasty, doodle people.”

I wonder if her mother’s sit-and-zip-it trick works for anyone else.

“You were out there for a lot longer than we were,” Tobin says. “Did you ever see anything like that creature?”

“No,” his father says. “No, I didn’t.”

“That’s because this creature didn’t come from the other side of the Grey where the settlement is,” I say. “It came from somewhere farther off.”

The colonel gathers up the rest of the pages I brought and heads for the door.

“Doc needs to see this,” he says. “Marina, you’re coming with me.”

The hospital’s quiet, except for the sound of the machines and Dr. Wolff making notes on Trey’s sketches, comparing them to pictures and X-rays. This would not have been my choice for places to wait, but Col. Lutrell insisted. He left Tobin and Anne-Marie at the apartment to babysit Rue and told our hall escort to keep me here until he returned.

Her name’s Snott.

Technically, it’s S. Nott, according to her name tag, but she refuses to talk to me or tell me what the
S
stands for, so she stays “Snott” to me.

Tobin would find that funny.

Anne-Marie’s mother gives me a stern look for disobeying her order to stay put, but she won’t do more than glare.

All that’s left to do is watch the clock and hope the colonel can convince Honoria to listen.

I hear them arguing before they reach the door.

“I don’t see why you couldn’t simply have brought them downstairs, if you want me to take a look. Why come all the way up here?”

“Because Doc’s using them, and your office makes Marina nervous.”

Honoria’s head goes up on my name. She sees me sitting here and starts to leave before she’s all the way inside. Her mood hasn’t improved since Silver’s attack, and the fact that no one has slept yet isn’t helping.

“Hear her out,” Col. Lutrell says, pulling her inside.

“Fine. Talk.”

“It’s a different hive,” I blurt, but that is
not
what I planned to say. “That’s what had Rue and the others on alert—look.”

I shake a drawing at her. I didn’t plan on doing that, either. I’m blowing this.

Honoria sighs, but she leans closer for a quick skim.

“Pictures of Fade. Like the dozen I’ve already seen.” She reaches back toward the cabinet and picks up a folder filled with more sketches.

“These Fade aren’t like the ones who’ve come into the Grey. Stand Rue next to a human boy, and aside from his marks, you won’t be able to tell which one is the Fade. Your brother’s even more human-looking than Rue.
I
looked mostly human as a Fade.
These
don’t.”

I shake the page again.

Trey’s sketches are spiked shadows with teeth. They’re all running, crouched at odd angles, suggesting their bones are no longer shaped the way they used to be.

I cross the room and yank the curtain away from Dante’s bed.

“Look at what they’re doing to Dante—don’t you see the difference?”

Dante’s rigid, despite the drugs keeping him sedated. His skin’s being slowly enveloped by a layer of onyx seeping from his pores.

She slides the curtain back into place.

“The Fade who were here earlier have been inside the hive for years; of course they look different from someone being newly overtaken,” Honoria says.

“Have you ever seen one Fade attack another?” I ask.

I don’t have to pull Silver’s curtain open. Dr. Wolff’s already done it so he can check her vitals and reload the inhaler canister on her mask. The protrusions have gone, leaving her skin torn and ragged, but she has no markings. The only lines are in her hair, where the nanites have fled the poison.

“Of course not.” Honoria isn’t scowling at me anymore, but flipping back and forth between the pages, studying them, running her hands over the surface so they come away with pencil smudges. “The hive’s a singular organism.”

“The nanites on Silver attacked Rue. When we pulled them apart, his hand didn’t heal. It turned bone white.”

Honoria’s face pinches; she looks to Col. Lutrell for confirmation.

“The boy was too weak to stand on his own, and he had his arm cradled to his chest like it was broken. He was in shock.”

“They’re
not
the same,” I say again. “Rue’s Fade retain their humanity, in part; whatever’s taken Dante and Silver doesn’t. They’re not healing Dante; they’re supplanting him.”

These Fade are like the ones from my nightmares; they destroy everything they touch.

“It’s a different hive. And now that the lights are down, Rue’s Fade aren’t the only ones coming in for a closer look.”

Honoria and Col. Lutrell gather around Trey’s drawings, joined by Dr. Wolff now that he’s done with Silver’s vitals. One by one, they consider the pages and then Dante. The pages and then Trey. The pages and then me.

“When Rue tried to communicate with the nanites in Silver, they defended their territory. They didn’t recognize him as part of their hive.
This
is what Rue and his Fade call Darkness, and it terrifies them.”

I slap the drawing in Honoria’s hand.

“None of my father’s notes mentioned anything like this,” she whispers to herself.

“With the time that’s passed, and given the independent evolution we’ve already seen,” Dr. Wolff says, “’it’s conceivable that a new strain may have emerged. Hives in nature are known to split if they become too large for one central unit to control.”

“Rue’s Fade separated from the main hive to preserve what they could of their hosts. They’ve tried to put things back the way they were.”

“Even if what you say is true,” Dr. Wolff says, “how would Trey have seen them? It can’t have been physical contact.”

“You said the dormant nanites Trey was born with reacted those Bolt used to heal him. Nanites are machines; Trey’s got turned on.”

“He touched the other hive,” Col. Lutrell says.

“And accidentally told them the Arclight still exists.”

Honoria’s defenses slam back into place so fast and hard, I can almost hear the whoosh of air as the doors come down inside her.

“All nice in theory, but there’s no way to prove it.”

“Actually,” Dr. Wolff says, “I think there might be.”

“You’re sure you can tell the difference between the nanites in Dante and what’s inside Bolt or Rue?” I ask Dr. Wolff.

“If the variation is wide enough.”

We stand beside the panel in the hospital, waiting for Bolt to answer my call. Honoria’s promised that if his blood doesn’t match the samples taken from Dante and Silver, she’ll let him and Rue leave.

Present,
Bolt says from inside the tunnel entrance.

“He’s here,” I say.

Honoria releases the lock and backs away, startling at the sight of a sedate Bolt waiting on the other side of the panel.

His marks are gone.

“It’s spread?” I ask, panicked.

Cherish screams, calling out for Rue. Bolt was fine when we left him. If he’s lost his marks this fast, then what’s happened to Rue?

My voice remains,
Rue says but weakly. Cherish calms to a tremor at the base of my skull.

“This way is easier for my other,” Bolt says. “My sister.” He pushes his sleeves up to show the concentration of Fade-marks below them. “I appear silent, because it is easier for my sister.” He steps out of the tunnel, hands shoved into his pockets.

When Fade move, there’s a fluidity to their steps. They’re a little too fast and a little too smooth, but this—this is a human teenager. Bolt’s copied Tobin’s easy slouch perfectly. He walks straight toward Honoria and stops. The last time he did this, she shot him.

“Hello, Honoria,” he says, voice heavy with the unfamiliar cadence of the words. “Or is it better to say ‘Hey, sis?’ I have missed your voice. May we speak?”

Honoria flinches back, wary of the hands she can’t see.

“Human speak,” he amends.

“Where’s the other one?” she asks, eyeing the open panel. “The troublemaker.”

“Fatigued,” Bolt says. “Help me return him to home.”

“We’ll see.”

“May I see your hand, young man?” Dr. Wolff approaches Bolt with the lancet in hands layered with gloves. He’s shaking hard enough to rattle the slides in the box.

“Do you want me to do it?” I ask. It’s not like I can re-expose myself.

“I always knew you had a knack for this sort of thing.” He passes me the supplies, but he’s wasting his breath. I can’t stand the idea of spending my life in a hospital.

“We need to see your blood,” I tell Bolt. “It doesn’t really hurt.”

Affirmative,
Bolt answers. He cuts open his hand with his own fingernail, giving no indication of pain at all, and holds it over the slide.

Rather than spreading out over the glass, his blood forms a neat black sphere in the center.

“
Very
human,” Honoria deadpans.

“Not human, but not dangerous,” I counter, handing Dr. Wolff the sample. “You’ll see.”

“Borrow, not keep,” Bolt warns him.

Dr. Wolff dims the lights so we can see the projection on the wall.

I’m surprised. Magnified, and with the lights dimmed, Bolt’s blood is human red, filled with tightly packed nanites. The blood cells are arranged in orderly lines, as opposed to the random, bouncing free-for-all of human blood.

“Borrow, not keep,” Bolt repeats, holding his hand out, which puzzles Dr. Wolff.

“He wants them back before the lights fry them,” I explain.

“Oh . . . right. Of course.” Dr. Wolff fumbles with the slide. “My apologies. I wasn’t considering the effect of the lamp on the sample.”

“Mistakes are acceptable,” Bolt says.

With the top plate removed, his blood re-forms the sphere it had first been and then flows into his pinkie, leaving behind a red stain.

“Well?” Honoria prompts.

“His sample is in keeping with previous blood tests,” Dr. Wolff says. “And it’s not at all similar to what’s going on inside our own young people.”

“He’s been a Fade for decades; they haven’t,” Honoria says. “Are you sure the difference isn’t due to initial infestation?”

“This is an image of the sample I took from Mr. Blaylock earlier.” Dr. Wolff focuses another image on the wall. “I think it’s clear that the two are unrelated.”

The blood cells on the wall are damaged and bent out of shape, ripped open by a more vicious version of the nanites in Bolt’s blood. Dante’s aren’t smooth. They’re spiked, plugged in between the red blood cells like gears, forcing them to align as violently as possible.

Honoria eases toward the wall in a daze. Her back turns mottled red where it interrupts the projection. She raises her hand to trace it.

“Either he was exposed to a throwback singularity among the hive,” Dr. Wolff continues. “Or what passed to him is not the same Fade that resides in this young man here.”

“It is not us,” Bolt says.

“They’re trying to reshape him from the inside out,” I say. “The others correct damage; they don’t cause it.”

“This is what we burned out of ourselves?” Col. Lutrell asks, advancing from the cabinets at the back of the room to stand beside Honoria, turning red along with her. “It looks like a virus.”

“They share physical attributes with the more basic viral agents I’ve seen.” Dr. Wolff’s voice gets softer, turning into a string of spoken thoughts. “I’d have to do some checking, but the possibilities . . . If the early samples were exposed by mistake. Perhaps an ill technician or research assistant. It could explain the Fade’s change in behavior. If their earliest exposure was to a virus, then they could have taken on viral properties—”

“Absorb and assimilate.” Col. Lutrell nods along. “The one who found Dante was a scout looking for any aberration, which is us.”

“It came looking for what they saw through Trey,” I say. “Rue’s people have been trying to guard us, but something slipped through.”

Apologies,
Bolt says.
Remorse
.

“They evaded us,” he adds out loud.

“Pull the samples Sykes brought in from Tobin’s patrol,” Honoria says. “Test them and see if they match. Find out if there’s one of these throwbacks loose on our border.” Then, with a curious softness that comes near hope as she goes back to Trey’s pictures. “Colonel, tell me what you see.”

She’s never called him that before.

Col. Lutrell picks up the drawing.

“Look at the reflections,” she says.