Arclight (12 page)

“Do it.” Tobin covers his mouth and nose.

“You know this is going to hurt, right?” I ask as I light the lantern and prop the blade of the knife into the flame.

“And?”

“Right.” What’s pain compared to the danger of death—or worse?

I take a towel and do my best to clean his wound again while I collect myself. It’ll take a clear head to do what I’m about to, and steady hands. Right now, I have neither.

Tobin lies facedown on the couch. It makes it easier for me to work, but I think he does it so I won’t be able to hear him scream. We both know he’s going to scream.

My hand trembles as I reach for the knife.

“Do you want a warning?” I ask. “I can count it down, or—”

“No, just get it—”

The rest is torn away by a sound even the couch can’t completely muffle. Tobin’s free hand digs into the cushion; his face burrows into the corner between the arm and back. His legs kick at the other end.

It occurs to me that I have no idea how long I’m supposed to hold the knife in place. Tobin’s skin turns red almost immediately, but if I pull away too soon, I’ll have to start over. Even if he could stand it, I couldn’t.

Another shriek vibrates through his back.

“Almost there,” I assure him, laying my hand between his shoulders. The skin under my hand quivers. A thin coat of sweat breaks out down his spine, like it’s crying, too.

I glance at my alarm for the time, trying to guess at how many seconds Dr. Wolff counted off on the hospital clock, then back to Tobin’s shoulder. Where the skin’s bubbled up around the knife, the halo darkens. His blood grows thick until the crust crumbles into that hideous powder, and I chance moving the blade.

I pull it up slowly, trying to be careful, but it sticks, bringing Tobin’s already ravaged skin with it—and one more whimper comes through his back. I take the knife the rest of the way in one quick tug, then poke the blade back into the lantern flame.

He blinks at me, a new fear of fire evident in his features.

“Just cleaning it off,” I say.

Tobin pushes himself up on his hands, steadying his body against the pain so he can sit forward while I dress the burn. I don’t mention his red, damp eyes, or how smushing his face into the sofa left lines crisscrossing his skin.

“Did you get it?” he asks.

“It looks just like Trey’s arm.” The black powder brushes away with a swipe of a wet cloth.

“Good.” He breathes the word in and uses his voice to cover his pain. “What about you? Your hands?”

“I don’t think the Fade like me very much,” I say, and wiggle my fingers.

There. I said it.
I’m Fade-proof
.

Tobin pulls his dog tags over his head, brushing his thumb over an inscription I can’t see well enough to read; he drapes the chain into the flame to clean it. While he watches his blood bake away, I search the first-aid kit for some of that blue gel Mr. Pace used on my wrist, and layer a coat over the outline of the knife branded on Tobin’s shoulder.

At some point, Dr. Wolff’s going to hear about this, and, once again, he’ll be after me to take up medical training when I age up next year.

Suddenly I realize that I think . . .
I know
. . . I’ll be here next year. I’ll be in this place and with these people. Somehow I’ve accepted that this is as close to home as I can get.

“How’s that?” I ask.

Tobin tries to shrug, but his face betrays the pain he won’t voice. He rips off strips of tape and hangs them from his hand, staring off into the hallway at something I can’t see.

His hair’s gotten longer since the first time I saw him; it falls forward into his eyes so he has to brush it back with his hand. The burn must catch him off guard because he breathes in sharply. He closes his eyes until it passes, then he opens them, straight at me. The gesture makes me want to run, like he can see through me to one of those parts of myself I’ve lost.

“I hated you when they brought you in,” he says. “That’s the one thing I’ve wanted to say to you this whole time.”

Even though I’ve always known it, his simple confession hurts worse than the imagined versions I came up with on my own.

“But it’s not for the reasons you think. When the call came in, my dad was the first one to the Arc. He left so fast I didn’t get to tell him good luck. All I got was a note on the counter telling me he’d gone and promising he’d be back soon.”

I pull one of the strips of tape off his hand so I have an excuse to look away; he hands me another bandage square.

“Dad said we needed you, and you needed him, but the thing is, I needed him, too. I still do, but he left me. I hated you because one of these days you might wake up with a memory I’ll never have, and realize you got to say good-bye to my father. You might have seen what happened to him.”

He winces when I slip and have to pull the tape off his burned skin.

“Sorry.”

I’m not sure what else I can say. I’m sorry for hurting him, and it kills me that I’ve done it over and over. Not just with wounds that disappear beneath the pile of bandages and tape, but worse.

“People were so excited when they brought you back. We’d had false alarms before, but you were the real deal.”

“They sure didn’t act like it.”

“That was my fault, too.”

This time I do stare. I stop, holding the last layer of bandage in place, with the tape bunched up and twisted because I didn’t set it straight.

“Dr. Wolff put you straight into quarantine,” he says. “It was days before they gave us details, and all that time, all I did was fester, wondering why my dad chose you instead of coming home like he’d promised.”

“You have to know he tried.”

“I know, but it didn’t matter. They told us you were injured, and I thought . . . I know my dad, Marina. They couldn’t have gotten to you without going through him.”

No one survives the Fade
.

“I still don’t think he’s dead, but the idea that he’s out there, wounded—”

“I’m sorry.”

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry
.

“That’s the worst part of it,” he says. “
I
was the one who got Jove riled up in the beginning.
I
was the one who convinced everyone to treat you like poison. Annie’s the only one who wouldn’t listen.”

He stops talking, as though he expects me to start, but what can I say? I can’t say it’s a surprise, and I can’t say it’s all right. This kind of thing doesn’t heal with bandages and a little salve.

“Aren’t you angry?” he asks.

“I should be.” Everything’s jumbled, with flashes of anger being enveloped by something still and cool, like trying to spark a fire on soggy wood. We’re both broken, and I don’t know how to fix it.

“I’m trying to make up for what I did, especially after what happened to that Fade in the hall, and this, and—if there’s even a chance Dad was right. It’s . . .
you’re
. . . worth it.”

“As far as I’m concerned, the hall’s just another nightmare we shall never speak of again.” And like a bad dream, it’s best forgotten as soon as possible. I don’t want any incentive to think about the Fade or its crawling skin and freezing metallic stare. I don’t want the strange, dusty, moldy smell of its wrappings in my nose. I can exist happily without remembering the echo of that wailing screech that sent us all to the floor.

“You probably should have mentioned that to Annie. Once she’s out of the hospital, she and Dante will make sure everyone knows you’ve lived up to your reputation.”

“Yep. That’s me. Fade-bait.”

“Fade-
killer
,” he corrects.

Hearing someone say it makes it worse. I’m not a killer. I’m the scared kid who forgets to hide when the lights go out.

“Do you really think your dad’s still alive?” I pick the only subject I can think of to make him stop talking about my new status.

“I yell good-bye when I leave for class, and good morning when I go to bed. I keep expecting him to walk through the door. If he was dead, I’d feel it.”

I think I understand. I haven’t let go of the idea that my family still exists, either.

The itch I’d felt near the Arc returns, and I wonder if that’s what’s drawing me out—not the Dark or the Fade, but the buried knowledge that someone’s waiting for me to find them.

“We have to burn everything,” I say, stamping out the feeling.

“The sink in the kitchen is steel. We got lucky with the floor, but I don’t want to risk a fire getting out of hand.”

I gather the clothes and towels, assuming it’s safer for me to handle them, and pile them into the basin. Tobin throws the lantern in on top of it. Fire and light. With all our safety measures, and all our weapons, it’s the primitive things that keep us safe.

Within the cracking pop of green flames, I hear the screams Portman couldn’t muffle, the sound of Trey throwing up on the hospital floor, Tobin’s agonized cries into the couch cushions. I think of that twisty
V
in Honoria’s hairline, and wonder when she made her great mistake, who held the fire to her skin, and if saving her life cost her more than a little pain.

T
HE
room settles into a hush I can feel on my skin. It presses down, so heavy and uncomfortable I want to say something to end it, but I’m afraid to open my mouth. So I just watch until there’s nothing left but ash we can wash down the sink.

“I’m . . . um . . .” Tobin fumbles over the room’s new energy. “I’m going to go find a shirt that’s a little less—”

“Cauterized?”

“Yeah.”

I get a tiny smile before he takes off out of the kitchen.

I can’t stay in the room we just used for a crematorium; it reeks of char and decay. I can’t go back into the living room, where the echoes of what happened are waiting to get me alone. That only leaves me one option, which is to follow him.

A long passage, paneled like the main room, runs the length of the apartment. The first door is a bathroom. I can smell the damp even before I see the pile of towels lumped against the wall. Next there’s a smaller, closed door that can only be a closet.

Photographs line both sides of the hall—mostly Tobin, arranged in order from the time he was an infant. Collages of pictures show birthdays and achievements, ceremonies where new year-patches were awarded as he’s aged up so he grows in a progression of official colors. His parents are here, too; now I know the face of the man who saved my life. Col. James Lutrell was . . . is . . .
was
tall with plain brown hair cut short like Mr. Pace’s. His only defining features were prominent burn scars on the backs of his hands that say my rescue wasn’t his first brush with the Fade.

The photographs of Tobin’s mother stop when he’s very small, but he has her black hair, her dark eyes.

Is this what family’s like? Tobin in the middle, his mother’s arms around him, his father’s arms around her, the light around them all? I pick at the photos with my finger so I can see the ones below, but they all show combinations of the same three happy faces.

Tobin’s so sad in the first pictures after his mother disappears, clinging to his father like he’s afraid to let go. Suddenly it feels like I’m eavesdropping on another of his private moments, and knowing things to which I’ve no right. I smooth the pictures back in place and turn away.

“Tobin?”

“Down here.”

My uninvited tour of Tobin’s home takes me to a bedroom where I hear him from inside a closet that’s spilled most of its contents onto the floor. There’s stuff piled everywhere, even on the bed.

“Sorry, putting on a new shirt was more complicated than I expected. I gave up on buttons.” Tobin’s voice changes pitch as he tests the limits of his wounded shoulder, straining when the pain hits.

The next time we run, I’ll be on my own. No way can he carry extra weight now.

“Are you okay?” I ask

“I want to show you something.”

He maneuvers ahead of me into the last room on the hall. This one’s neat. The bed’s made, and the closest thing to clutter is a set of bags slung over the back of a chair.

“This is my dad’s room,” he says, disappearing into another closet. There’s a crash, then a muffled avalanche, before a solid, repetitive thud announces his return.

He tries to drag a huge box through the room with one hand. After a few steps, he stops and kicks it, pushes it with his foot, but it doesn’t move an inch farther.

“Let me,” I say. “You fight the monsters; I’ll handle the cardboard boxes.”

“Kind of a one-sided deal, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but I’m willing to brave the spiders and closet crawlies.”

Smiling’s getting easier all the time—for both of us.

Tobin relinquishes his position, taking a seat on the floor while I flip the lid open for a better grip and haul the box over.

“I should’ve thought to open it.” He scowls.

“Yes, well, you’re a guy. . . .”

“I knew it was a mistake to let Annie talk to you,” he grumbles.

“So . . . what’s in the box?”

“Take a look.”

I pick a glass ball out of a pile of tissue; it’s filled with water and shimmering flecks that spin when I shake it. There’s a dozen of them inside divided sections of the box.

“What is it?”

“A snow globe,” he says. “Relics from before. They were my mother’s, but Dad packed most of them up when she died. He only takes them out when he thinks I’m not looking.”

“This is snow?”

It doesn’t look right. It’s browning in places, and clumps of it float in the water. In winter stories, snow’s frozen and cold. It should melt in my hand.

“It’s not real.” Tobin takes the globe and sets it on the table. “But Mom kept dozens. They reminded her of outside.”

“She lived outside?”

“Her fifth-greats-grandparents did. She had a book that one of them had written in, but she read it so often it fell apart in her hands. Pages and pages about traveling the world to cities that don’t exist anymore, huge ships that sailed across the water, night and day. They had machines that could fly anywhere you wanted to go.”

I nod as though I believe him, but I’m only humoring him. Real flying machines are as unlikely as Anne-Marie’s incinerated raccoon. If people could fly above the Dark, why would we still be trapped down here?