Meridian (3 page)

H
ONORIA’S
expression holds no emotion; there’s no hint of the decades she’s seen hidden in the colorless gray of her eyes. We don’t need to paint lines to divvy up space; this classroom might as well have the White Room’s safety pane running down its center. She stays on her side; I stay on mine.

“Do I need to tell you this wasn’t my idea?” she asks. For once, I’m sure she’s not lying. Her shock’s palpable.

Tobin says Mr. Pace took away the silver pistol she always kept tucked in her waistband, but I’d feel better if I could see her back to know for sure.

“Door’s open,” I say. “Feel free to leave.”

But no one’s going anywhere.

I step sideways and set out a bowl of cookies from the tub Anne-Marie left, but I never take my eyes off her. Honoria slides into the room, just as guarded.

I place another bowl; she moves another step. Bowl, step, bowl, step, until we settle into predatory symmetry, like the films we’ve seen in science class of long-gone animals fighting over territory.

With my focus on Honoria, it’s easy to forget the cushions on the floor that have replaced the chairs I moved. On my next step, I hit padded cotton rather than floor, and I drop the entire tub off my hip. Cookies go flying. Bottles of juice shatter, soaking into the napkins that land on top of them. And I blurt the first curse I’ve ever used in my life as I bend down to clean it up.

“Tobin’s rubbing off on you,” Honoria says, right beside me. Someone her size shouldn’t be able to move that quietly. “I wonder if you’ve had the same effect on him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snap. Hopefully, the look on my face is closer to a glare than “you terrify me.” How does Tobin flip the switch from fear to rage with barely a thought?

My hands are trembling now, so I cover by scrubbing at the spill. It’s grape juice, the purple color close enough to red that I’m having flashbacks of trying to stop the blood from Tobin’s chest.

“You realize those napkins are useless?” she asks rather than answer me. “You’ll go through the stack and only push the mess around. There should be towels in the cabinet.”

I crawl backward as she moves forward, furious that I let myself lose my footing with her, and end up sitting when I run into the cushions behind me.

“I don’t need your help,” I say.

All I need is to make sure that she never finds out what I saw in the arbor. I refuse to have Tobin’s screams haunt me every time I close my eyes because she decides to turn him into an experiment.

For once, Cherish seems in total agreement, echoing my fears with
protect
and
conceal
. It’s the way of the Fade—if you don’t want it stolen, keep it hidden from human eyes.

Conceal,
Cherish repeats, following the order with a burst of flaring light across a darkened sky. She’s named Tobin after the star shower we shared the night I followed Rue into the Dark. She doesn’t want me to go through the agony she felt when Honoria separated her from Rue; she’d have to feel it again. Honoria won’t touch Tobin—not if we can help it.

Cherish names her “Destroyer,” a raging flame that lays waste to the Dark and everything in it.

My attention drifts back to the lake of juice that looks more like blood the more it dries.

“Being stubborn only leads to a bigger mess,” Honoria says, still tracking me.

“Speaking from experience, are you?” The napkins have turned to a ball of soggy glop in my hands. I stop trying to sop up the juice, and reach for the broken bottles to put them back in the tub. “I said I don’t need your—Ahh!”

I pull my hand back with a hiss. A long shard of glass has imbedded itself into my hand, in nearly the same place I cut it earlier.

Honoria’s on me in an instant, as though the smell of blood draws her close. She tows me up with a gloved hand around my wrist, bringing the wound close enough for inspection. I glance at the blood to prove to myself it’s red, even as Cherish goes feral in my mind.

“Let go!” I order, bracing myself so Honoria no longer has control over where I stand or fall.

“Annie?” a voice calls from the hall. “Has Dante come back this way? Because I really can’t find him.”

Tobin.

A meteor shower goes off inside my head as Cherish calls his name over and over.

Translation:
He’s not Rue, but he’ll do.

“Tobin!” I call when he reaches the door.

“Marina?”

He’s stunned for a second, and I can only imagine how we look to him. Me bleeding. Honoria standing over me. Broken glass.

“What happened?” he asks, entering cautiously. “Where’s Annie?”

“She left,” I say.

“Marina’s hurt,” Honoria says at the same time. She jostles my hand to show off the glass. “And she’s acting like a child.”

“I broke a bottle,” I argue. “That’s hardly hurt.”

Getting shot is hurt. Being burned by lights until the lines that used to run my arms and legs melt off—that’s hurt. This is a scratch.

“Let her go.”

“You’re
both
acting like children,” Honoria says, digging at the piece of glass. Either her gloves are too thick or my blood’s too slippery because she can’t get a decent grip on the shard without driving it deeper.

“Ow!” I do the only thing I can think of—kick her in the shin.

Honoria glowers at me, but she lets go.

Two months ago, I wouldn’t have challenged her outright. I didn’t understand why I feared her until I saw the recordings of my torture in the White Room. I still feel that threat with her this close, but I’m stronger than I was then.

We are stronger than you,
Cherish intones.

Honoria grabs one of the fingers on her glove with her teeth and tugs until it comes free, then holds her bare hand out to me. Her skin’s nothing but crisscrossing lines of scar tissue from her fingernails up past her wrists, where they disappear beneath her sleeves.

She gives me an annoyed scowl and zero warning before yanking the glass out of my palm.

“Ow!”

“Keep pressure on it,” she says, pressing another towel and Tobin’s hand down over the free-flowing blood when she’s done. “It shouldn’t bleed long.”

“Ow!” I’m too shocked to say more.

“And close your mouth, you look like a fish.”

“You touched her—bare-handed,” Tobin says.

Of all the people inside the Arclight, Honoria is least likely to break the rules of contact with someone Fade-touched, and she’s always seen me as contaminated. What gives?

“I don’t wear these to protect myself; I wear them to protect everyone else. With you, there’s no need.”

She fixes the glove back in place and drags a chair across the room to the front.

“Are those burns?” I ask.

“Collateral damage,” she says in a weary voice. “I made a choice many,
many
years ago, and that was to not be like those who live outside this compound. I’m not like you. The suppressants help, but I can’t be cured with a dart and an inhaler. If I want to stay free of the Fade, it costs me.”

She can’t honestly think going from Cherish to Marina cost me nothing.

“The nanites have never stopped replicating in my system; when they start to spike, I do the only thing that works: I cut myself, drawing them to the wound, and burn them out again.”

“You
kill
them for trying to help you!”

“Help is a subjective concept.”

The only things keeping me in my skin and in this room are Tobin and the sound of laughter and feet. Anne-Marie returns with a line of students who go silent when they see Honoria waiting at the front.

“Everyone, stand to the side and mind the glass,” Honoria says. “Once it’s clear, you can take a seat.”

The children all file into a line against the wall, as though this were a Red-Wall drill. Anne-Marie joins me and Tobin as we lean against the teacher’s desk at the back while Honoria quickly clears as much of the mess as she can.

“What happened?” Anne-Marie asks, looking at my hand and at the towel wrapped into my fist.

“You abandoned her,” Tobin says, but she doesn’t take the bait.

“Marina?” she asks instead.

I can’t really explain beyond saying, “It was an accident.”

She scowls at me, as though dropping bottles of juice was a violation of her order not to try and kill Honoria.

“Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms and sets her sights on the front of the room, where the children have started to chatter nervously in line.

“I thought she left,” one boy whispers.

“She didn’t leave, she went nuts,” another beside him answers.

“Why’s she here?” a girl asks nervously.

“No one’s told you?” Honoria asks, silencing them. Her hearing’s as keen as mine—she caught every whisper. “Usually, those with older siblings get clued in early.”

She shoves the bottle bin under her chair and takes a seat. A reverent hush falls over the faces watching her with absolute attention.

“I’m here to tell you what lies beyond our borders, lurking out of the light.”

She raises her head, looking me straight in the eye.

“Today, I tell you the truth about the Fade.”

M
ARINA
twitches, ready to jump up, but Annie’s hand nails hers to the desk.

“This is how things work,” Annie says.

“How they stay broken, you mean,” Marina mutters, pulling her hand free to tuck it under her arm. Her other hand tightens its grip on the towel, but she doesn’t argue.

She should—and a lot more.

Honoria’s twisted truths nearly forced a war between us and the Fade—one we would have lost.

“This is her first chance to make it right,” Annie says. “I want to know if she takes it.”

“You think she will?” Marina’s hoping for a yes, I can tell, but she should know better.

“This is how we find out.” Annie shrugs. She pushes off the desk to replace the shattered juice bottles with new ones from the room’s snack dispenser.

“You don’t have to stay,” I tell Marina.

“I want to,” she says. “If Honoria’s going to lie, let her do it to my face.”

It wouldn’t be the first time.

I take a seat beside her on the desk, too tired to stand without moving. Every time my eyes relax, they conjure up shapes and shadows in the corners. I shake my head and focus on the front of the room, where the lights are brightest.

The scene’s surreal. Aside from Annie and the juice stains, it looks exactly like it did the day Honoria gave our class this speech—right down to the cookies and the cushions on the floor. The patches on the kids’ sleeves are the ones we wore. Honoria’s holding the same book she read to us. We could be watching a recording of that day, her voice is so similar.

“Sky’s gotten worse since he saw Dad beyond the safety fires. He wanders a lot, talking to himself. He doesn’t eat and doesn’t sleep. I catch him staring out the windows into the darkness, and I know we’re going to lose him, and soon.”

“Are you awake?” Marina asks, and I realize I’m drifting.

I was out of it just enough that the sequence Honoria read played out in my head, as though it was happening in real time.

I blink, and Marina’s hair turns to tarlike sludge dripping down her face. There’s an ocean of it all around, so deep that only the kids’ heads are above it. It’s over my ankles.

I wrench backward to pull my legs free, but they’re clean and dry, and the room is normal again. No one noticed a thing—except Marina.

“Tobin?”

“Sorry,” I say, lowering my feet off the desk. “Dozed off.”

She looks at me weird, but only for a moment before turning back to Honoria. I look for something sharp to hold in my palm. If I can squeeze it, the pain will keep me awake.

I don’t remember Honoria tearing up when she read this to us, but she is now. The light pinging off her eyes turns them shiny. It’s an illusion, but it makes me shiver.

She does the same and has to take a drink of water before she can read more.

“It’s how Tracey acted before she changed,” she says, monotone now. “And how Major Gardener used to stare before he went after his wife. Sky’s not listening to real people anymore. All he hears is Jimmy, and Jimmy’s been gone a week.”

Marina’s enthralled. This is all new for her, and she’s probably hoping Honoria will share something worth her attention, but she won’t. Honoria won’t even admit what she is—not here.

Her eyes don’t glow like a Fade’s, but she’s not completely human. She’s a freak of nature. Frozen, like the memory of the people in that book. Too many of our elders use that as an excuse for pity.

Her snapping was understandable,
they’d say.
It’s remarkable she fared so well for so long.

What a load of crap.

They’re lazy.

They’re so used to her doing the hard things and making the difficult decisions for them, they’ve put her on a no-fault system.
Whatever she did, she had a good reason.

They’ve forgotten how to think for themselves.

Even Dad, with his:
She was a kid, too, Tobin. She made mistakes. You don’t know what it took for her to become the woman she is.

Like he knows.

How can he buy into it, knowing she was going to let him rot outside the Arc? She hasn’t done a thing to keep people off his back when she’s the one person around here who could.

So his eyes turned silver—So what? Why can they accept her and not him? She’s had Fade in her blood a lot longer than he has.

Her eyes are silver now. Lines spiral out across her face to match the ones creeping down the walls.

I have to shake myself awake again.

Honoria’s rules won’t last. Not once our group ages up enough to have a real say in things. We brought down the Arc; we can bring her down, too.

These kids are already questioning her.

“But we know the Fade aren’t dangerous anymore,” a boy near the front says. No one in my year would have had the nerve when we were his age.

Honoria’s attention goes straight to him, as though he’s spoken some blasphemy. She turns her book in her hands, so that bits of gold and silver catch the room’s overhead lights where metallic lines are embedded in the shape of a bird and a bell. The gilded pages glint along the edge.

“Is this normal?” Marina asks.

“No.”

Usually, Honoria doesn’t stop talking long enough for anyone to pick out the holes in her story. And in a normal year she doesn’t lose their attention, but as Annie paces the room, doling out refills, the whispers start again.

One kid says her older brother is taking her out to the Arc, maybe even across it—
Does anyone want to come?
Another says he went far enough into the Grey that he couldn’t see the compound. Each claim gets bigger, counting numbers of steps as proof of bravery until the contest is settled by a boy in the back.

“I touched one,” he says. “I went right up to him and shook his hand.”

“Where?”

“When?”

“Which one?”

“A week ago,” the boy says. “And you know—
him
. The weird one.”

“They’re
all
weird.”

Marina cringes and says something under her breath I can’t hear. She’s locking down.

“They don’t mean you,” I tell her, squeezing her fingers so I don’t press her hand by mistake and make it bleed again. “You’re human now.”

“I know,” she says, but I think she means something else. She’s watching the boy at the back, like everyone else, including Honoria. The kid doesn’t even realize he’s the center of attention.

“The one with the slashes on his face and arms,” he says.

Schuyler
.

Marina calls him Bolt, but his
real
name is Schuyler. He told me. I’ve never told anyone that I heard him speak because he didn’t say it out loud; it was a one-time thing. It’s not worth spooking anyone. I know, and that’s more than enough.

Honoria’s hands tighten on her book. She clears her throat, and the whispers stop. The kids all look ashamed, caught in the middle of breaking a rule.

“The Fade are being hospitable at the moment; that doesn’t make them less dangerous,” she says. “Appearances of safety often mask unknown dangers.”

She glances at Marina, and Marina’s still grumbling. If Honoria doesn’t stop baiting her, she’s going to regret it. Anyone who can find the guts to hold a burning knife to my skin and save my life can find a way to do worse and save her own.

“You know what—forget this.” Honoria pitches the book onto the floor beside her. “I don’t need my journal to tell you what happened.”

Her journal? That’s a new one.

When Honoria gave us this speech, she told us it had been found in a scrap heap and that we should be grateful there was an account of what had happened. This group gets one less lie.

Annie rejoins us in the back, but she sits cross-legged on the floor, like she’s one of the kids hearing this for the first time. She holds a bowl of cookies on her head so I can take some.

My hands are corpse white, smudged with charcoal lines. Annie’s hair sprouts long tendrils that wrap around her neck—choking her.

“Toby?” she asks.

How can she talk when she’s being strangled?

“Toby! I said, are you done?”

I shake myself again, and my hands are still in their gloves and still in the bowl. Annie’s looking up at me from the floor, like nothing’s wrong, because it isn’t—not for her, anyway. Sykes was right. I’m losing my mind.

Annie puts her bowl in her lap.

“What’s going on?” Marina asks, nibbling on a cookie.

“Two hours of sleep in four days,” I reminded her.

“Then go home.”

“Not a chance.” I jam three cookies into my mouth. Maybe the sugar will keep me awake.

“I didn’t live here when I was your age,” Honoria says. “This was the military base where my father worked. He made wondrous things; good things. In the beginning the Fade were a tool meant to help people.”

“He made the Fade?” a girl asks.

“He created machines called nanites that were so small, they could fit inside a cell and unravel disease. Sounds like a good idea, right?”

They all nod.

But they can’t see what I see. Their shadows are pacing the wall, moving without them.

“I thought so, too,” Honoria says. She keeps swallowing, pausing for half beats in the wrong places. “But someone made a mistake, and they malfunctioned. My father tried to fix them, but the machines moved faster than he could. It wasn’t long before they covered everything.”

I remember us being the ones uncomfortable when I was listening to this as a kid, but now she’s the one who’s jumpy.

“No one called them the Fade, then; that came later. We called them the Darkness. The Shroud.”

The whole story comes out a halt, a skip, and a falter at a time. I wonder if she’s ever told it all before. How she was at school when the alarms went off and everyone thought it was a drill, until the trucks rolled by and they knew it wasn’t. Her dad came home shaken but telling her everything was fine—then he disappeared.

My head droops toward my chest, and my cookies fall from my hand to the desktop. I know I’m falling asleep, but it’s getting harder to fight.

“Hey!” Marina punches my arm.

“Thanks,” I say. The sting stops the crawling tingles I feel every time my eyes close. Honoria’s still droning in the background.

“Men from the base came to our school. They pulled me and my brother aside to ask us questions. The kind they’d only ask if something had gone so wrong, they couldn’t make it right again.”

“She should have told us this,” Annie says. “It’s better than the book.”

Maybe it is. I don’t know. Everything’s spinning.

“After that, my friends changed and disappeared. It spread. The world fell into a panic, all because my father thought the Fade were harmless.
They’re not.
This base thought it was secure.
Nothing is
.”

“So we should still be afraid of them?” No idea which kid said that. They’re all a blob of uniform blue with too many heads smashed together, bobbing in black water.

“Go home,” Marina says to me. “You’re about to drop.”

She looks like a Fade. But if she’s a Fade, she’ll go back to the Dark.

“Tell Rueful it won’t work.”

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

She’s human again. White-blonde hair. Blue eyes. Marina, not Cherish.

“Nothing to worry about,” I say.

Is Honoria still talking?

“Vigilance isn’t fear. Keep your eyes open and be familiar enough with your surroundings to recognize changes if they come. Never forget that it was a single mistake that put us all over the edge. Now get out of here and go home. No classes tonight.”

The kids stand. Some are happy they can skip out on class, but the rest—the majority—aren’t smiling.

“Do you still want to go out?” asks the boy who had met Schuyler.

“No,” the girl beside him shakes her head.

“How about you?” he asks another kid. “I bet he’s there.”

This one says no, too. He shrinks from the braver one. The one he’ll never forget has touched a Fade.

“Tobin!” Marina shouts in my ear. Annie swats my leg.

“Huh? D’you say something?”

“Snap out of it, Toby,” Annie says.

“Can’t.” I shake my head, but I’ve already lost the battle. Sleep’s going to win this round.

“Can you make it home?” Marina asks.

“I’ll be fine once I’m moving. Shouldn’t have sat down.”

“You look like trash,” Annie says.

Yeah, well, you look like one of them.
Spun black crystals for hair, glowing eyes, and lines dripping off into the rising dark.

“I’m fine,” I say again, then ask Marina: “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Her mouth doesn’t match the words, but it sounds like her talking.

“Home,” she orders, followed by Annie’s “Now!”

Lights flash in my eyes, and suddenly, I’m down the hall, standing at the mouth of the domicile wing.
The lights are out
. Then I’m at my door,
and there’s something crawling on the wall above it.
Now falling onto the couch—
I hear them click-clacking all around
.

Everything’s heavy and slow. I’m alone in the dark.

And then they come.

I hate this part.