Meridian (27 page)

I
’M
starting to take comfort in the sound of gunfire. At least it’s a human sound.

“Can you tell how many there are?” Tobin asks as we pick our way over the rubble.

The Fade are in front, claws out for traction. They pull Tobin and Anne-Marie and me to the top of the pile.

“Their voices are chaos,” Rue says.
Discord. Confusion.

“Is that a no?”

Rue glares. The lines across his stoic face tilt in toward the center point, the way a human’s eyebrows would draw together.

“What’d I say?” Tobin asks.

Rue hops down on the other side of the pile and reaches back to catch me as I drop behind him. Dog and Whisper come next, bringing Anne-Marie along with them, and then Bolt and Tobin.

“Seriously, what’d I say?” he asks me again when we’re clear on the other side. “Half the things he says make no sense to anyone sane.”

Inwardly, I bristle at the implication that I’m crazy, but I know that’s not what he means. He’s struggled with understanding Rue from the beginning.

“It was a no, Tobin,” I say. “Their number is in flux; you can’t count them.”

“How hard is it to say that?”

“Their voices are chaos,” Rue repeats, with a derisive puff of air through his nose.

We’re close enough now that the sound of gunfire bounces wall-to-wall along the hall leading into the lunchroom. Despite the volume we lower our voices. There’s nowhere to hide here, so we move in a collective crouch.

I don’t smell gas.

Black Fade-lines branch along the greenish surface overhead and on the walls. A whispering rush signals the arrival of more nanites, filling in the gaps and forming dimensional ridges, but that’s as far as they go. They’re watching us.

Anne-Marie absentmindedly twirls one of the serum darts between her fingers; everywhere she steps, the marks recede, only to fill back in when she’s passed.

“They fear the void as we do,” Rue says. “You carry the void.”

“Cool.” She swipes her hand through the air, causing a mass retreat.

Our order shifts, with Tobin pulling to the front of the line. He and Rue both stop at the entrance so that we bank up behind them.

“Annie, how many of those things do you have left?”

“Five, I think.”

“Then we have a problem.”

The room looks like a diorama of the Dark. Nanites coat every surface, from ceiling to floor, except the one our people have managed to hold, which is nothing but a table and the area around it. They’ve kept the Killers back by burning them. Hosted ones mill the edges of the room, growling and snapping.

“It’s going out!” Mr. Pace shouts. He’s standing back-to-back with Honoria, Trey, and Rami.

Rami reaches for one of three small jars on the table and throws it straight down into the waning flames. Some kind of oily substance rushes out from the shattered jar, and the fire flares up, spreading wider.

Definitely no gas.

“Not to rush you, James, but we’re down to two cocktails,” Honoria says.

“I’m doing the best I can,” Col. Lutrell answers back. He sits on the table in the center, with the two women from the Ice Cube, tinkering with some kind of small device. I guess that simple switch he was going to come up with turned out to be a bit more difficult. “Most of the wire we salvaged is completely corroded. It won’t hold long enough for a charge to pass through. Just give me—”

“I know, I know—five more minutes.”

As the fire flares, the nanites closest to it catch and burn. In response, the hosted Fade against the wall lunge forward, only to run directly into the rifle shots, which drive them back again. It’s a standoff, but it shouldn’t be; the humans should be dead.

“I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, but shouldn’t there be more?” Anne-Marie asks. “That swarm was miles wide and more than a thousand feet high.”

“Their voices are chaos,” Rue says again, straining the words for emphasis, as though we’re being intentionally dense. “Is there a better word?” he asks me.

Discordant,
he says
. Disagreement.

The cohesion has eroded,
Cherish says.
Fear causes chaos.

She tries to show me in terms I can process. A signal drew the wild ones here. They all heard it, and all responded, but once they arrived, some tried to leave. Even now, scores of them want to flee, but they can’t because the hive bond won’t allow it.

“They’re still afraid of us,” I say. “Too afraid to attack and risk the void. The hive mind won’t give them the freedom to run.”

“Anne-Marie, hand me a dart,” I say.

We’re at the very edge of the room, along the border the wild ones have set in place. A step forward will put my foot right in the middle of them. I take the dart from Anne-Marie and hold it by the feathered end, like a bomb I could drop at any second.

“You know what this is, don’t you?” I ask every nanite close enough to hear.

Before my foot strikes the ground, they flee.

“And you know who I am. You know my voice was removed from the hive.”

I take another step, and the same thing happens.

Anne-Marie fishes another out of her pocket and steps sideways; the Fade retreat, extending our safe zone by half a foot. She produces another dart for Tobin, and we arrange ourselves so that Rue, Bolt, and the others are inside a loose triangle. The wild ones won’t come near us.

“Annie?” Trey calls from the table. He’s nearest, and so he’s the first to notice us.

“Annie!” Mr. Pace echoes. “Get out of here.”

It must be a dad response—desired outcome before logical thought. Where does he think she’s going to go?

“Do you have any darts left?” Anne-Marie shouts to him, louder than she needs to, then wiggles her foot like she’s going to take another step to show him how the wild-Fade respond.

“They were with the rest of the gear we never recovered,” Honoria answers for him, directing her anger at Rami. “Spread out. See how far you can stretch the clearing.”

Anne-Marie and Dog stay near the door, with Rue and Whisper stopping five feet off. Rue holds his dart carefully, but his marks leave his hands all the same. Bolt and I take the next leg, leaving Tobin to go all the way. The wild-Fade along the walls step in closer, but those who come too close get shot, leaving sickly pale corpses along the edges of the room.

“How—” I start to ask.

“Phosphorus rounds,” Tobin answers. “They burn like flares.”

Mr. Pace nudges Trey to step off the table, onto the bench seat, and into the safe zone, where he can jog to his sister. The rest of the adults come behind him, with Col. Lutrell putting the final flourish on the device he’s rigging.

“Got it,” he says, and centers it on the table. “Tobin toss me yours.”

Col. Lutrell smashes the final jar of oil on the floor to start a new fire near where Tobin’s standing. Tobin pitches his dad the dart he’s been holding, which the colonel places on top of the device, hopefully guaranteeing the wild-Fade will leave it alone until it goes off.

“Let’s go,” he says. “The gas from the boiler won’t take much longer to reach this far.”

“Where are our kids?” Maya demands once everyone’s within the clearing.

“They left,” I say. “They said you’d know where to find them.”

“How long?” Rami asks.

“Right before we came looking for you.”

“Move faster,” Honoria says as we make our way to the doors.

This isn’t some tornado’s eye where we can pause for a breath; it’s not even the safety of being hidden within a Fade’s camouflage, where the enemy can’t see us. The wild ones are following.

“What happens if enough of them change their minds about chasing us out of here?” Anne-Marie asks.

Behind us, and on the sides, the walls close in, making sure we can’t get out through the lunchroom. By the time we’re halfway up the hall leading to the main area of the Ice Cube, I hear locking pins and pieces of a machine coming together.

“You had to ask, didn’t you?” Tobin says.

I glance back, already knowing what I’ll see, but it’s impossible to look away. The beast from my nightmare forms behind us. It grows paws and claws, and a set of sharp teeth. It grows legs, and that means it can—

“RUN!” I scream. Anne-Marie and Trey are farthest ahead. She turns to see what’s wrong, and suddenly, her eyes are twice as big as usual.

Cherish cries out for our father, who’s waiting with the others beyond the Ice Cube.

We’re coming,
she says.

Be there. Please be there.
That’s me.

Rue and the rest of our Fade drop back, trying to take the rear guard position, but Honoria refuses to relinquish it, and she and her brother end up running side by side. The bear-beast lowers its front shoulder to ram her, but Bolt jerks her out of the way, so he’s between her and the creature. She’s furious at first, but better sense and survival prevail. She raises her pistol and fires past Bolt’s ear, straight at the creature’s head, but it has no underlying body to kill.

A few scorched nanites fall dead, and the creature’s edges blur, but the bullet goes straight through into the facing wall.

We could really use one of those jars of burning oil about now.

“Lookout!” Tobin shouts, and I turn forward again, where I’m about to plow into the rubble pile left behind by the stairs.

Rue yanks me sideways as the creature smashes down with its paws. The beast can’t get through the debris, so it goes for Maya and the other woman.

“Over.” Rue points to the pile of rubble.

“We’ll be too easy to pick off.”

“And here, we’re trapped,” Tobin says.

“Over,” Rue says again.

He means to be reassuring when he shows me his plan to help us escape. One long, veiled shield, created by all four Fade, slowing the creature down enough that we can get out of here.

But you’ll be in direct contact with the Killers,
I say.
You could lose your voice.

“They fear us also,” Rue argues.

“That monster doesn’t fear anything. It has no mind, Rue.”

He shows me a retreat plan. Once we’re over the rubble, the Fade will follow, trusting speed and agility to give them the advantage they need. But it’s only an advantage against the wild ones with hosts, the ones hindered by physical bodies beneath the shell. We don’t know what will happen against something like this bear-beast.

“Marina!” Tobin shouts, and I realize he’s moved. “You’re up.”

“Rue!” I shout with every voice I have. He distracted me while the others went to work.

Bolt, Dog, and Whisper have formed a line—one Rue joins. Anne-Marie and her brother are already climbing over the top of the pile, with Rami and his people behind. Midway up, Mr. Pace and Col. Lutrell are reaching back for Tobin and me.

“Up you go,” Honoria says, dragging me up the pile so Tobin can get a grip on my hand and pull me with him.

I should be down there, standing beside Rue and the others. I’m the least likely to be absorbed, but if I go back, Rue won’t retreat. I fit my hands solidly to the rubble and start to climb.

It was hard to tell the size of the bear-beast on the ground, but up here, it’s worse. There’s no back half. It stretches on forever, down the hall and into the lunchroom, filling every space.

On the other side of the pile, the wolves we killed are smoldering, their carcasses filling the entry with the stink of burnt flesh and nanites.

“Our kids lived through this?” Rami asks, astonished. He fixates on something near the wolf that Dog and Whisper speared to the ground—Noor’s pink shoe—and bends to pick it up.

“No one fell,” Anne-Marie tells him as Tobin and I scramble down the steeper chunks of rock. “Our Fade distracted the wild ones. They had a fighting chance.”

“Go get your kids,” Col. Lutrell tells him. “We can handle ourselves.”

He and the woman whose name I’ve never heard nod and run out after a quick thank-you. Maya stops.

“We have com equipment,” she says. “If you feel like listening—”

Before she can finish, Mr. Pace is unclipping his radio and tossing it to her.

“We use channels two through six, on a rotation. Keep shouting.”

She stares at the little black box in her hand like it’s a magical thing, then hugs it to her chest and sprints off after Rami.

Where’s Rue?

Cherish blasts the question through my brain, trying to shame me for letting my ears hear anything besides his voice, and my eyes watch anything but the pile of rubble Honoria’s now descending. He has to be right behind her; she wouldn’t have left until everyone was on the move.

But there’s panic on her face.

“Go—go—go!” she shouts, waving her hands toward the door, her eyes wide and more silver than I’ve ever seen them.

I still don’t see Rue.

Honoria wobbles. She pitches forward as the pile beneath her feet begins to shift and then blasts apart from behind. A glistening black paw swipes a section of rubble out of the way, trying to dig a big enough hole in it to allow the bear-beast through.

Honoria claws her way to her feet, but I don’t see any of our Fade. The creature couldn’t have reached the blockade without going through them first.

“Rue!”

Any possible answer is drowned in a trumpeting shriek from the other side of the heap.

“Let’s go, Marina,” Tobin says, trying to pull me toward the door by the hand.

“But Rue—”

You run, I run.
Hearing Rue’s voice so suddenly and so clearly actually makes me yelp in surprise.
You lead, we follow.

Very pale hands appear in the gap created by the bear thing, grasping at rubble for leverage, and I see something I never thought possible. Honoria leans in, crawling across the pile, and pulls the Fade through—Rue, Bolt, and Whisper.

“Where’s Dog?” I ask, but the only answer I get is a nudge to keep running.

Honoria runs toward us, hooking my arm; she nearly knocks me off my feet. I have to turn midstride to keep from stumbling backward. She doesn’t let go until we’re outside and jogging down the front steps.