Meridian (2 page)

I
chose to work in the Arbor,
I remind myself.
It makes me happy.

But right now, it makes me annoyed. Someone took my stepladder—
again
. Every time I have to track it down, I end up off schedule, so I thought using an upturned bucket made sense. But it was stupid. Really, really stupid and wobbly.

I still have to stand on my toes and stretch to reach the branch I need to sample, but if I can tip myself just a little bit more, my shears should be long enough to—

“Ow!”

The bucket topples out from under me, and the fall sends the points of my shears into my hand. But I got my trimming.
Ha! Take that, ladder thief!

I can’t stop myself from checking the blood.

It’s red. Nearly two months from my last breath off my old inhaler, I still bleed human red.

I hold my hand down, watching the drops run and collect on my finger, ready to drip onto the potting soil below. A million billion bits of genetic code that could tell me what the color of my eyes and hair would be had I been born human rather than turned into one.

Blood remembers everything. It could tell me the name of the father I still don’t know, but it just hangs there, turning tacky in the Arbor’s humid air.

You should be more careful,
a snide inner voice taunts.
Humans are imprecise.

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the day while the rest of the Arclight’s still sleeping. My dream-fogged brain tries to convince me that my skin’s the color of ash and that what thrums in my veins is thick and black, teeming with the tiny machines that used to fill and form my cells.

On those early mornings, it all comes back. I smell flowers and know my little sister’s close. The sting of pine needles tells me my mother’s there. All the layers stemming from the Fade’s connection to one another wrap me up in a whirlwind of comfort.

I remember my real name. I’m the warmth of a new day filtering past the Dark’s canopy, and the promise of adventure on an errant wind.
Cherish
, and cherished. I belong.

Then the hive’s voices dull, falling away until only Rue’s remains.

Never alone
, he said, but his final words to me were a promise he couldn’t keep. I’ll always be alone. No one else has ever been Fade, then human.

In the end the moment passes, and I’ve lost everything.

I
always
lose.

“Stop it,” I say out loud, bracing myself against the workstation. The
s
comes out as a hard hiss. “Go away!”

I plunge my hands into a bucket of irrigation water, watching the blood sink to the bottom among the falling silt.

You go
is the answer I get.

Weeks ago, when I was released from the hospital, I told Dr. Wolff and Tobin and everyone else that I had control of myself after the suppressant was out of my system. I didn’t know it was a lie. My memories were trickling back, but they brought something else with them—
Cherish
.

I thought she was an echo. I’d say or do something routine but feel a twinge or hesitate because it didn’t actually
seem
normal. Something as insignificant as sitting down with a tray at meals or opening my mouth to speak to Anne-Marie felt alien and uncomfortable.

That’s not how we eat,
I’d think.
That’s not how we speak.

As my memories returned, they were the memories of a Fade. I thought my brain was just having trouble filtering, but it escalated. I’d reach for a fork at my next meal, and my fingers wouldn’t move. I could see the fork, and I’d want to pick it up, only something interrupted the brain signal required to do it.

That’s not how we eat
, my inner voice insisted, until I finally realized it wasn’t a memory. Something inside me was trying to control my movements. Something that still thought of me as part of a hive—the voice never said
I
, it always said
we
.

The Fade are dual creatures. They can exist as an individual or as part of a hive mind, and the residue of the life I left in the Dark was still trying to make me act like a Fade.
Cherish
was trying to send me back to the shadows.

Things would be so much simpler if I could talk myself into taking the suppressant again. One puff off my old inhaler, and Cherish would drift back into stark-white nothing; I’d forget she ever existed. But if I let go of her, I lose my family and Rue.

I don’t know what to do.

I can deal with Cherish for another day. Just one. Just today. If I keep telling myself that, I may string enough days together to last me the rest of my life.

I dry my hands, reaching for the bulky gloves I’m supposed to wear.

Cherish doesn’t comment, but I know she hates them. Fade prefer to feel the soil, and it’s usually easier to humor her, but today she’s being difficult. She doesn’t get her way.

“Good children of the Arclight don’t search for ways around the rules,” I tell her. “We do our jobs and move forward.”

We are not the Arclight’s good child.

“I will be,” I say. I can’t be a Fade, but I can be the best human girl I can be. I have human responsibilities to the Arbor; she won’t distract me from them anymore.

The creatures are here again,
she says smugly.

Sometimes Cherish is more sixth sense than annoyance. She notices things I don’t, by virtue of the enhanced hearing I never lost. I’m busy snipping and cataloging leaf samples in jars, but she’s hearing the swish of a cat’s tail through air.

Something whisper-soft brushes against my legs, weaving around my ankles in a figure eight. I bend down to pet it.

“I wonder if those came from Mom’s monsters.”

A real voice startles me as Tobin’s boots shuffle into sight on the other side of the workstation. Even if Cherish heard him come in, she wouldn’t tell me. She doesn’t like him.

“Hey,” I say, as though it’s not odd to see him down here.

“Hey.”

He smiles, reaching out to stroke the cat’s ruff. It springs free with a hiss at the first touch of his fingers, and he laughs.

“Definitely Mom’s. They always hated me.”

He told me a story once, about how the cats in the Arclight came from his mother’s efforts to save a litter of abandoned kittens she’d found outside the boundary as a girl. He takes the Arbor cat’s disdain as proof that his mother left a mark on this place beyond the research Honoria used for my so-called cure.

“Is the shift over already?” I ask. I could check my alarm band, but I’ve spent weeks breaking myself of the habit of answering to that stupid screen on my wrist. I’d rather get my information elsewhere. Somewhere not controlled by the people who nearly killed me.

“I’ve been sent in search of Silver. She didn’t show up for rounds, so she’s become their latest excuse to get me away from anything interesting or important.”

“That bad?”

He shrugs.

“If you need someone skilled at watching lights flick on and off, I’m your guy.”

I toss my cut branch into an envelope, stick a label on the front, and set it aside with my other samples. Someone else will come to test them again, but they’ll do it after I’m gone. That way, they think I won’t realize they’re watching me.

“Have you seen her?” he asks.

“Silver doesn’t come down here.” Since hiding in the tunnels with Rue, she breaks into hives at even the mention of the Arclight-below. She claims she caught claustrophobia from Anne-Marie.

“Didn’t think so.” Tobin hops up onto the workstation.

“Isn’t sitting down the opposite of finding someone?”

“I asked Annie first, and now she’s got me looking for Dante, too.”

“Which means they’re together,” I say.

“And not wanting to be found, so I consider myself on break. I thought I’d see if you wanted to be on break, too.”

Cherish suggests the Arclight’s good children don’t take breaks.

“You look terrible,” I say, ignoring her.

He’s shaking, scanning the room over and over. Something’s rattled him—bad.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just insomnia.” Tobin picks at the clods of dirt around him, crumbling them into powder. He shakes my collection jars. He never looks at me when he’s lying. “I’ve slept about two hours in the last four days.”

He grimaces, grinding at his eyes with his palms.

“Tobin! You didn’t tell me it was that bad!” I sling my gloves off to take his hand and pull him to his feet. “I’m taking you to Doctor Wolff.”

This is a switch; usually, he’s the one threatening me with the hospital.

“I don’t need a doctor,” he insists.

“He’ll give you something.”

“Like he did you?”

“Low blow, Tobin.” Dr. Wolff giving him a sedative is nothing compared to my being perma-drugged to kill my memories. But if Tobin’s using that against me, this is serious. “It’s Doctor Wolff or your father. Pick one.”

“Marina, stop . . . please,” he begs. He’s got his feet planted, leaning back as hard as he can. If I were still Fade, I could move him, but plain old human Marina? Not a chance—and Cherish doesn’t miss the opportunity to point that out.

“You’re scaring me,” I say, letting go. “What’s so bad you’d rather dance around it than tell me?”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

The hairs on the back of my neck shoot up, tingling from an electric current straight off my nerves.

“You said the nightmares stopped,” I say.

After Rue healed Tobin, and we were released from the hospital, Tobin started having dreams where he was consumed by the Dark, drowning under a wave of black water. He claimed it was post-traumatic stress, but their voices remained in his head for way too long.

“They did stop
for a while
,” he says, mumbling the last part. “But they’re back—sort of. They’re different. It’s weird.”

Weird
and
Fade
are two things that do not need to occupy the same space as nightmares. Bad things happen when they do.

“Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. I hear—”

“You hear the Fade?”

A long absent dread uncurls inside my throat, spiraling toward my stomach, where it turns cold and sharp. Only this time, I’m not scared for me. Tobin shouldn’t be able to hear the hive.

“Not like that,” he says quickly. “And not always. It just drifts in sometimes, like a nightmare. I just don’t want to explain that to anyone else. You understand; they won’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I haven’t heard or seen your boyfriend since it happened.”

Calling Rue my boyfriend is like using “it” to encompass everything that happened to us. Tobin’s still dodging.

“They’re just your average, creepy-feeling, shadow-filled, something-awful’s-going-to-happen-if-I-fall-asleep nightmares,” he says again, with a half-choked laugh. “Though if you want to double-check and ask your ex, I won’t object.”

“I can’t hear Rue anymore,” I say. He hasn’t so much as come into view since the night we brought Tobin’s father and the others back.

My mother was here once—close enough to touch—but she didn’t bring my sister, and she was only interested in getting me to follow her into the Grey. I wanted to—I really did—but I was afraid of what would happen if I returned to the Dark. Cherish would have the advantage there. What if she’s stronger than me?

We are stronger than you,
she says, making me certain that I had made the right decision.

I can still see the mix of anger and sadness in my mother’s expression, and taste the way the air turned, like it was suddenly infused with bitter lemon. Even now, the memory makes my eyes sting.

Tobin leans forward and grabs my hands as I do. “You’re bleeding.”

Once, those words were enough to make my heart falter, but now they’re just a reminder that I pulled my gloves off fast enough to break open the cut from my clippers.

“I got careless taking samples,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing doesn’t leave bloodstains.” He wipes my palms with a towel dipped in irrigation water and then bends down to pick up the gloves I dropped. “Here,” he says with a lopsided grin. Usually, that’s enough to foil my attempts to stay annoyed, but this time it’s not his lips that have my attention, it’s his eyes and the metallic, silver shine in them.

“Tobin?”

The effect lasts a blink and a skipped heartbeat, and then his eyes are back to brown, and I’m back to remembering how to breathe.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Did you really come here looking for Silver?” The question’s a toss-away to help me collect my thoughts.

“Mostly, but Annie also wants me to remind you that you promised to help with her rotation. I think I was even threatened with food poisoning if you don’t comply . . . No, wait. That wasn’t a threat. That was Annie reminding me about dinner. She really does want your help, though.”

“I guess I’d better get going, then.”

“And I’ll get back to not finding Silver or Dante,” he says. “Why can’t they just use her room? I know Dante’s folks don’t want him home much, but Silver can come and go. They’d be a lot easier to avoid if I knew where not to look.”

I nod, washing my hands mechanically at the spout on the wall without sparing another look at Tobin’s face. When I pass the incinerator meant for burning rotten plants and refuse, I throw in my gloves and the towel he touched.

Just in case.

E
VENTS
that change the world seem like they should come with a herald or harbinger, but that’s not how it happens. The moments that mean the most happen in the pauses between breaths—easy to miss if no one knows they should be looking.

What did I miss with Tobin?

I should have noticed something before now. Tobin’s eye shine is more than a whisper of warning. It’s a plunge into an icy stream so cold, the surface grows solid over my head. It’s the pull of water away from shore before the waves crash down to drown us all in his nightmare.

“Tell me this is you,” I hiss to Cherish while in an empty hallway. Hardly anyone comes near the Arbor at this time of night, and I’m grateful for their avoidance. No one can see me talking to myself. “Tell me you’re playing with my head, or thinking about Rue, and somehow that made Tobin look different to me.”

But Cherish stays stubbornly silent.

If I call it stubbornness, then I can believe she’s really the cause—not Tobin.

The halls of the Arclight-below pass in a blur; routine by now, so I don’t think about where I’m going until I reach a door and need my wristband for access. Down here, you don’t need permission just to enter; you need it to leave, too. Every time I have to wait for the red light to turn green and let me through, my breath hitches and I wonder if this will be the day they change their minds. The point they turn on me and lock me away again.

Those fears have grown weaker the last few weeks, but if Tobin’s eyes are really silver . . .

The door snaps open, and I shoulder through as soon as I’m able, holding my breath when I pass the alcove that houses both Honoria’s office and the White Room, where Cherish died and I was born.
This is nothing but a routine shift change,
I tell myself.

I pass the familiar scrawl of
USAF
that someone stenciled on the wall between embossed stars; it streaks into a line at the corner of my eye. One of these days, I’ll ask someone what it means. By the time I reach the final panel that allows me into the Arclight-above, I’ve denounced and defended Tobin a dozen times.

I should tell Dr. Wolff,
insists the part of me indoctrinated by the Arclight’s rules. Nightmares, plus voices, plus eye shine, equals Fade.

Rue swore to me that the Fade don’t take unwilling hosts anymore. Tobin loathes the Fade; he’s terrified of them. No way would he agree to let them stay inside him by choice.

Did Rue lie to me?

Negative!
The suggestion makes Cherish angry.
Deceit is not a possibility.

“Okay, maybe it was an accident or an oversight.”

Nanites are tiny. Rue could have missed some when he took his back. Cherish has lasted this long, there’s no reason Rue’s contact with Tobin couldn’t do the same.

But where are the marks
? Tobin’s skin is clean.

Where’s the sensitivity to light?
The arbor’s full of sunlamps. Tobin works on the perimeter with the high beams every day—no Fade could stand that.

And his father would have noticed. Wouldn’t he?

Turning Tobin in would bring suspicion to our whole class, and at least half the upper-years. Anne-Marie and her brother Trey, Silver and Dante—they all put themselves at risk. I can’t tell them they might have been wrong. And I can’t lose another life. The Arclight’s all I have left.

If something happens to Tobin, it’s my fault.
I
brought the Fade.
I
begged Rue to heal him.

“Were his eyes really shining?” I ask, but Cherish only answers with a reminder that Tobin left the Arclight for me. She nudges me to do the same for him. Rue’s in the Dark, and he’ll answer my questions.

She’s baiting me, not helping. Her strength is in the Dark.

What I need is a cooperative Fade who’s willing to come here. One who might understand what’s going on, but who also knows why I can’t mention it to anyone else.

I need Honoria’s baby brother.

Schuyler Whit turned Fade in the first days, more than a century ago, and has lived as one ever since. I named him Bolt, for his appearance, with its sharp, slashing lines, and a presence that invokes the violent nature of a thunderstorm. I’ve watched people approach other Fade with curiosity when they venture out of the Grey toward the darkened sections of the Arc, but few bother with him. He looks menacing, but he isn’t, and his connection to Honoria makes him taboo. It’s a shame, considering he has a knack for defusing people’s tempers.

My panicked heart begins to calm. Bolt comes at least three times a week. Once I make it through my promise to Anne-Marie, I’ll find him at the Arc, and everything will be okay.

“Yay!” Anne-Marie cheers when I enter the midyear classroom she’s been assigned for the night. “One of you showed up, at least.”

It was no surprise when she declared her intention to follow a teacher’s path the moment we were allowed to choose. Anne-Marie and her brother are a perfect split of their father’s personality. Trey got Mr. Pace’s desire for a security position, and she got the teaching bug.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Dante?” she asks.

I’m still getting used to how different she looks with her hair cut so short that it barely rises above her scalp. It seems an odd choice of celebration, but she said the change was for her birthday.

I should figure out if I have one of those.

“Silver’s gone missing, and you know if they’re together—”

“No details in the kiddie classroom.” She holds up a hand to cut me off. She’d probably cover her ears if her other hand wasn’t balancing an oversize tub on her hip. “Actually, no details on those two, period. Neither of them understands the concept of oversharing. Or locks.”

Poor Anne-Marie swears she didn’t sleep for days after walking in on the two of them in a closet; something about Dante having a really big, really weird birthmark.

There’s a bluish aura around her, glowing brighter and bolder with her increased agitation. It’s the way Cherish sees people who have touched the Fade but who aren’t part of the hive. I’ve seen Anne-Marie’s since I got my memories back, but it’s especially vibrant today.

“Besides,” she says. “I doubt Silver’s with him, unless he’s finally convinced her to go out on the short side with him. Every day, he skips out on rotation early and makes himself go a little farther into the Grey. You’d think he was hunting for buried treasure out there.”

That’s a conversation I have no intention of continuing. One person having dark dreams is enough; I don’t want to think about it spreading. Thankfully, it’s only a passing comment, and Anne-Marie moves on.

“Could you get the chairs out of the way while I set out the cups and stuff?” she asks. “That was Dante’s job, but he’s useless.”

Easy enough, and if I’m both lucky and quick, I’ll make it out of here in time to beat Bolt to the Arc, so there’s no chance of missing him.

“Why are you setting out snacks like for a baby class?” I ask offhandedly, as I stack chairs against the wall.

“Mid-years get snacks.” She stumbles but catches the cup she drops before it hits the floor.

“They do?”

The air between us hardens, developing the sharper edge of a knife drawn to keep me back. It’s been a few days since I’ve experienced an emotion so strong I can taste it, and it takes a steadying breath to reacquaint myself with the phenomenon.

“Sure. On special occasions,” she says.

“Today’s special?”

Did I miss another holiday? There are so many days on the calendar, I can’t keep them straight.

“Birthdays are special,” she says stiffly.

Anne-Marie won’t look at me. The scent of oranges, which usually hovers around her, turns as acidic as the toner used to strip down tables in the clean rooms of the Arclight-below. It burns my throat when I breathe.

She’s hiding something
, Cherish warns.
Danger. Flee.

But I’m not the one who looks like she’s about to dart out of here.

“Anne-Marie?”

“Do the last row, would you? I have to pick up the kids from orientation.”

She swings the box off her hip, toward me, so I can either catch it or let it fall as she rushes for the exit.

“Anne-Marie!”

She stops, shoulders rising with a sigh, without turning.

“You have to face her sooner or later, and the longer it goes, the harder it will be,” she says. “You’re my friend, Marina. I hate what she did to you, but we need her. So long as she’s avoiding you, she’s no good to us. This place will fall apart.”

“What are you—”

I don’t have to finish the question, and Anne-Marie doesn’t have to answer it. The room changes in a way she can’t sense, with explosive rings spreading through the air from the door. Into the void behind them, steps a person who sets my every nerve alight with panic. Cherish becomes a wild animal running amok inside my skull.

Honoria hasn’t made many appearances since she shot Tobin while trying to prove he was no longer human. She’s avoided me altogether, which suits me fine, but to my continued annoyance, most everyone has fallen onto the same side of the argument as Anne-Marie. They think Honoria’s countless years here are an asset—no matter the mistakes she’s made or crimes committed. Even Tobin’s father has tried to get me to talk to her.

They don’t understand that when I look at Honoria, I lose myself.

To me, she’s the woman who almost murdered Tobin for the sake of her misconceptions. She’s the one who ordered me kidnapped and altered. She’s the one who tried to exile Tobin’s father and those who went with him into the Grey. She’s the one who tortured Rue.

Honoria’s a monster, and she’s staring at me like I’m the one who doesn’t belong in a room meant for human children.

I don’t, and that’s her fault, too.

“You can’t leave me alone with her.” I make a desperate grab for Anne-Marie’s arm, and the box nearly topples to the floor when she steps out of reach.

“You don’t have to forgive her; you don’t have to like her, but you need to find a way to live with her so things can get back to normal.”

Normal for the Arclight means sleeping all day and hiding under lamps at night, jumping at shadows that never meant us any harm. That’s not normal, nor is it an existence I want to return to.

“I don’t care if you have to draw a line down the middle of the building and pick sides, just do something.
Please try,
” Anne-Marie says, rushing back to hug me for some inexplicable reason. She lets go and turns very serious, scolding me with a pointed finger. “If either of you are dead when I get back, I’ll be really irritated.”

Then she walks out of the room, leaving me to face the one real enemy I have in the world.