Meridian (14 page)

“It’s been weird since”—he rolls his shoulder—“but I didn’t know how weird until your boyfriend took back his nanites. And then I had to help hide him, and—”

“Why do you do that?” I ask, dropping his hands.

“What?”

“Make digs at me, use Rue for a weapon. You do it every time you’re upset, like it’s my fault I was born a Fade or my fault I was with him before I even knew you.” There’s a panel of knobs and buttons in front of us. I twirl them to have something to do with my hands besides hold his. “Rue belonged to Cherish; I chose you. Actually, I chose
me
and got you in the bargain. Stop making me wonder if I made a mistake.”

Rue chose you,
Cherish says.
He waits for you to choose me.

“I’m sorry. I just hate this. I know he’s out there, and we both know he’s going to be with you the whole way.”

“He won’t—”

“Don’t tell me he won’t.” Tobin fixes the paper clip where it’s come loose from the buttonhole. “If he’s anything short of dead, he’s not letting you cross the Dark without him, and I’m glad. I know how hard he’ll fight for you, but I should be there if—”

“So what if Rue’s out there? I
want
you here, so you’ll be here when I get back.”

I kiss him, quick, before I can change my mind or he can pull away. This time, there’s no awkward moment; the wall created by Rue’s interference is gone. But Tobin’s still downcast.

“I usually get more than a frown for one of those,” I say.

“Sorry, but I can’t shake the feeling it’s a kiss good-bye.”

“I said I’m coming back. Mopey Tobin is making me want to smack him, and I’d rather not leave here angry with you.”

“If it’ll make you stay, I’ll make you mad,” he says. The offer’s genuine.

“Tobin . . .”

“He thought you were coming back, too, okay?”

He spins the knob nearest his hand until it won’t turn anymore, then makes it go the other way.

“Nanobot
never
stopped believing he’d find you. He did everything he could to bring you home, and you never made it. Things happen, Marina. You changed. I don’t want you to change again.”

A shrill whistle calls our attention, and I poke my head out of the truck. Mr. Pace and Col. Lutrell are loading large canisters into the vehicle we’re supposed to take into the Dark.

“Let’s move,” Honoria calls, sweeping her hand toward it. Trey climbs inside, so terrified that he’s stopped blinking.

This is it.

“Make them give you a second warning,” he says. “It’s not like they’ll leave without you.”

“Honoria already hates me.”

“Then blame me.”

“I can’t stay, but maybe I can give you something else to think about.” I reach for the book in my pocket and hold it out. It’s too bulky to carry, anyway. “Read this. It might give you the answers your dad won’t. By the time you’re done, we could be back.” I kiss him again—on the cheek this time. It’s not as disappointing when a kiss on the cheek is nothing special.

I lay the book on the truck’s seat, before letting myself out of our bubble and back into reality. The cement floor’s nowhere near as cold as I feel on the inside, and the sound of boots against it isn’t nearly as hollow.

“Marina, wait!” Tobin calls after me, running to close the few feet I’ve put between us. He’s pulling something over his head that I can’t see until he slips it over mine. “Now you have to come home so you can give them back.”

“Your mom’s dog tags?”

He matches the kiss I gave him and stands there as I walk away.

I’m coming back,
I tell myself.

There’s an odd kind of relief when Cherish echoes with:
Yes, we are.

“Let’s go!” Honoria shouts, climbing into the back of the truck behind Mr. Pace.

I open the door on the other side, behind Col. Lutrell, and pull myself up onto the seat next to Trey.

“Hang on, kids,” Mr. Pace says. “This could get rough.”

The wall we’re facing splits open. Col. Lutrell turns a small metal key, and the truck becomes nothing but vibration and sound before we lurch forward with a rumble.

I
refuse to believe people traveled like this in the time before the Fade. Normal trucks could not have been this loud or this full of fumes, and they couldn’t have run with the people inside bump, bump, bumping along so violently that I have to hold my lunch in my stomach while holding the rest of my body in my seat.

The way Trey keeps swallowing and digging his fingers deeper into the back of the front seat tells me I’m not alone in my discomfort. He shifts, gripping the edge of our shared bench seat and leaning back on the headrest, eyes closed, like he’s in pain.

Honoria’s oblivious, swaying along with every bounce and rumble while hanging on to a ceiling-mounted handle above the door.

We run over something large enough to tilt the truck up on one side, and the momentum throws me to the floor, half leaning on Trey.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

“If we’d gone up another inch, I’d have been down there with you,” he whispers as I retake my seat. “At least we didn’t go the other way.”

He twitches his head toward Honoria to say he’d rather not have her land in his lap.

Trey’s as easy to talk to as Anne-Marie. He’s calmer, and he doesn’t speak nearly as fast as his sister, but they have the same presence, and they sound strangely alike.

“I hate trucks,” I say when we hit another bump that bounces me high enough to hit my head on the ceiling.

“Agreed.”

There’s no handle over the window on my side, only a space where one broke off a long time ago. I find a cold, metal buckle set into the cushions, but the button on it doesn’t seem to do anything. I was hoping it would get longer so I could tie myself in.

“That’s the release for the belt buckle.” Honoria’s watching me again. This time she’s amused. “It won’t work without the other piece, but you don’t want to use it.”

I completely disagree and start digging for the rest.

“If we have to bail out of here, you don’t want to be tied down.”

I find the strap but have to admit she’s right. I don’t want anything slowing me down if we have to run. I make do with hanging on to the pieces to stabilize myself.

“Is that the lake?” Trey asks, kind enough not to call it the marina. He rises up in his seat for a better view. “Annie never said it looked so depressing.”

“That’s where we started the fire that burned the Grey,” Honoria says, unprompted. She angles toward the window, fingers against the glass. “When we got here, someone had broken the boats.”

Her voice turns distant, and somehow heavier.

“As the sun sank, people started crying, screaming out because we didn’t know how far we had left to go. Without light, we were as good as dead.”

I bet she’s never shared this with the mid-year classes. It’s in her book, though, told in five pages of detail, back and front.

“There were these iridescent patches of oil and gasoline dancing across the water. I thought they were beautiful, but no one else noticed. They were all looking behind us at everything we’d lost.”

She blinks up, toward the ceiling, wiping her face with her gloved hand.

“One of the soldiers called for a flare. It caught the fuel trail and spread so far, I couldn’t see the end of it. People cheered, but that was the moment I knew the rules had changed too much. This was a world where water burned.”

How long has she rehearsed that story, wanting to tell it? The words are too perfect to be new.

The marina passes out of sight behind us, and I watch it go. That water changed Honoria’s life as a teenager; it did it again when Col. Lutrell and the others pulled me from it and brought me to the Arclight. The night she went out looking for her brother, she only went this far, according to her book. We’re officially beyond the boundaries she’s set for herself.

The view outside my window’s a blur of gray monotony, broken only by stripped trees at uneven intervals. It transitions into the line of demarcation between the human world and that of the Fade.

“Is that it?” Trey asks, leaning forward again.

It’s the sort of thing a person asks even though they know the answer. The unbroken shadow and gloom growing ahead of us can only be one thing. Col. Lutrell’s already slowed down in the marshes that have developed where the marina’s shallows touch the earth.

Stop,
Rue intones as we near the edge of the Dark, and Cherish thrills at the sound of his voice.

He’s here,
she cheers.
He’s not silent. I hear his voice!

So do I,
I answer back. Her enthusiasm’s infectious.

I send him the impression of a wave, which he returns. I can’t stop the smile appearing on my face.

Tell them to cease the machine,
Rue says.

“Stop,” I call out. “Stop the truck!”

We skid to a halt, tossing dirt up with the wheels. Everyone looks at me expectantly.

“What’s wrong?” Col. Lutrell asks.

None of them truly expects things to go right.

Ahead, pale bodies shimmer into view, standing shoulder-to-shoulder in a mimic of the Arclight’s boundary. Rue’s in the middle, directly in front of us.

“James—” Mr. Pace says, tapping Col. Lutrell on the arm, but the colonel already sees them.

“They’re everywhere,” Trey says, sinking back in his seat.

“They were waiting for us,” Mr. Pace charges. “They’ve blocked us in,”

“Drive through them,” Honoria says.

“Rue says we need to stop.” And since he knows this terrain better than any of us, listening to him is probably a good idea. “He wouldn’t hold us back for no reason.”

“I never said he had no reason.”

There’s no reaching Honoria once she’s set her mind to something, so I don’t bother. I open my door, grateful she warned me about making a quick and unrestrained exit. If she wants to go so badly, they can drive over me, too.

“Marina!”

Trey makes a grab for my arm, but it’s either for show or Dr. Wolff’s long-term sedatives aren’t completely out of his system yet. I drop to the ground.

The other doors slam behind me, followed by boots running to catch up.

Faster,
Cherish urges.
Go faster
.
We are faster
.

I choose to believe that the burst of speed pushing me toward the Dark is real. This is like the sudden healing of my hand, a latent Fade-trait I’ve somehow maintained, like my eyesight and hearing, to use when I really need it.

Rue breaks the line to meet me, scowling at Honoria and the others, now right behind me.

“You’re okay,” I say.

The marks are still paler across his palm, and nearly absent at his fingers, but they’re there. He’s no longer shaking.

Cherish begs me to allow her to touch him, or him us. Why not? What could a hug hurt?

“I was so worried about you,” I tell him.

Home heals,
he says.
Home is safer.

Then out loud: “You should not venture into Darkness unaccompanied.”

“Running off seems to be a recurring issue,” Honoria says.

She reaches out to drag me back, but Rue’s recovered more than his marks. He moves faster than I can track, switching our positions so that I’m nearest the Dark and he’s nearest Honoria. She curls her fingers into a fist before they can brush his skin, dropping her hand back to her side.

“Get back in the truck,” she orders me. “And you,” she snarls at Rue. “Get those things out of our way.”

“You do not hear, and your voice is silenced,” Rue says. “I will go with, not away from.”

“You want to come with us?” I ask.

“Truck’s full,” Honoria says.

“They know the terrain, and they know the opposition. How is this a bad thing?” Mr. Pace asks.

“You want us to approach potential
human
allies in hostile territory, dragging a line of Fade behind us, and you don’t see how that could backfire?”

“I go with mine.
They
go with mine. The others remain.”

Four Fade, including Dog, separate themselves from the group. But where’s Bolt? He’s not here. Neither is my family.

“We are assets, not burdens. I go with mine or you go nowhere.”

The perimeter of bodies seals itself into a solid barrier. I can still pick out individual faces, but in the gaps between each one, the Dark knits tighter. Even the trees cling to one another to bar our passage.

The Dark surrounds us; we’re inside their cage.

“There’s no going around,” Col. Lutrell says.

“He can see and hear things we can’t. Things
I
can’t,” I tell her. “Give him a chance.”

Honoria locks her jaw, making her face more severe. She’s not in control out here.

“Truck’s full,” she repeats, trying to salvage her pride. “If you come, you walk. Keeping up is your problem.”

“I require a moment,” Rue says.

“You get one minute.”

There’s no such thing as a battle too small to fight. Honoria gives Rue her back and returns to the truck. It’s a show of will for someone who has never trusted the Fade enough to make herself vulnerable to them.

Rue approaches the wall of the Dark, disappearing inside. Whisper and Dog, who stand on either side of his entry point, kneel down and surrender their marks to the whole as the rest of the Fade take on that unnatural stillness. They stay that way until we’re all back in the truck.

“What are they doing?” Trey asks.

Honoria’s watching them, too, but with less interest than suspicion.

“Communicating,” I say. “Probably telling the others we’re here. They won’t like the truck.”

There are pools of nanites within the Dark, for whom the sound of a spoken voice is too much to bear. They don’t bother with bodies or maintaining the illusion of human life. They spend their time enjoying the quiet so long as they can ensure the Dark stays in order. The truck’s engine, and the vibrations it causes, would throw them into a frenzy.

“Forty seconds,” Honoria says, checking the alarm on her wrist.

“You really think they want to help us?” Trey asks.

“I
know
they do.”

Our Fade blame themselves for the end of the human world; they aren’t looking for ways to betray what’s left of it.

“Looks like the conversation’s over,” Mr. Pace says.

Something’s happening at the door to the Dark. Dog and Whisper stand, their marks back where they belong.

Go now,
Rue’s voice drifts in.

“You can start the engine,” I say.

The veil of black crumbles, a waterfall of jet sand, sifting into nothing. What’s left behind is brown and green. Tree trunks and leaves that have been encased in nanites for years stand bare to the light of our lamps.

“They’ve cleared the road,” Col. Lutrell says. He shifts gears, bringing the engine’s idle hum back to a roar, and we’re off, spearing through the open space that used to be the Dark.