Arclight (13 page)

He pulls each snow globe out one at a time, making a semicircle on the floor around us, and telling me a story with each one.

“This is Paris,” he says. “They called it the City of Lights.” He winds up a key on the bottom, and a sad, tinkling song plays while a couple dances on a bridge in the snow inside the ball. “It was my mother’s favorite, because all the stories about it were romantic. It’s where her sixth-greats-grandparents got married.”

“Is that them in the ball?”

“Maybe.”

He names the others, Lisbon and London, Tokyo and Montreal. Five of them he says are all the same country, but different places: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, and Miami. And the colors . . . there’s so much color. The world outside wasn’t painted white and grey and sallow yellow. It was bursting with color and music.

“Are we close to any of these?” I ask.

“New York’s north of us. Miami’s as far south as you can get before the continent ends. We’re closer to the north, but there are hundreds of empty miles on every side.”

“I like this one.” It’s not a glass ball on a pedestal; this one’s a dome with no trees or houses covered in white. Instead, a green stick stands in the center. Silver glitter shaped like stars falls down around it.

“It’s a desert,” Tobin says, taking it out of my hands to shake it. “That green thing’s a cactus; it’s like a tree that doesn’t need water.”

“It’s beautiful,” I say.

“Don’t you understand, Marina?
This
is what I wanted you to see—I think it’s where you came from. If there are people still out there, then they have to be in a place like this where there’s light and heat in every direction.”

“Where is it?” I ask, peering deeper into the dome, searching for some clue or connection.

“On the other side of the Dark, maybe.” He shrugs. “Close enough to reach at a run?”

I wish I could say his prompting spurs a memory, but it doesn’t.

“Or maybe it’s like the stories they tell children to help them sleep, and it never really existed,” I say sadly. The green stick doesn’t carry the same familiarity as my secret flower bush.

Tobin shakes the dome hard, setting it down so the stars fly and fall back to earth.

“And I think I’d remember seeing the stars swirl like that,” I say.

“Watching the stars fall is definitely something you don’t forget.”

“Stars can’t fall.”

They light the night. If they fall, the darkness is absolute.

“Not like this, but . . . here, look.”

He burrows through the box, lifting out a stack of old paper books. The pages are glossy and thin, with photographs and a lot of words blocked into columns. Right on the front, there’s an image of giant cinders filling the night sky while people sit on a hill and watch.

“Falling stars,” he says. “See?”

“What is this?”

“They’re picture books from right before the evacuation to the Arclight,” he says, passing me one. “These are all we have left.”

The paper’s so smooth and delicate, I’m afraid I’ll tear it just by turning the pages, but Tobin handles his carelessly, flipping the sheets with his thumb.

“What happened to the others?”

“Some fell apart. I cut one up when I was little. I didn’t know they were rare, I just liked the pictures.”

Tobin reaches back into the box and retrieves another bundle of pages, but these aren’t bound. They’re yellowed and crisp. Even with his cautious movements, bits flake off, coasting to the floor.

“The newspapers didn’t last as well, but you can still read pieces if you’re careful,” he says.

Newspapers aren’t as interesting as magazines. The pictures are smudged, and washed out in places. Some of the pages have holes where entire sections are missing. Large letters declare things like
Epidemic After Containment Failure
and
Military Maintains Silence
.
Affected Areas Devour Townships
and
Missing Persons Total Tops Four-Hundred-Thousand
. Tobin picks up a brittle page with a header of
Calvert County Quarantined: Symptoms to Watch
, but it goes to pieces in his hands.

“What’s a nanite?” I ask, trying to decipher the diagram of a tiny machine that looks like a bug.

“I don’t know what half of this means. They’re old words no one uses anymore.”

He sets what’s left back in the box; I return to the magazine.

“These are stars?”

Lighted streaks fall like rain with fire on their tails, as people on the hill point at the brightest and biggest. Children and adults, all with wonder on their faces, enjoying the night.

“They’re fragments of rock that burn when they touch the sky,” Tobin says. “People called them stars because of the glow.”

“They’re . . .” I don’t know what to say. What’s more than beautiful? “I’ve never seen anything like them.”

I lay my hand against the page, but it’s false as a reflection. It’s nothing but a memory someone else has forgotten.

“Come on.” Tobin grabs my hand, abandoning the box of treasures in his dad’s room, and drags me with him to that tiny door I passed in the hall. The few towels he hasn’t gone through line the bottom shelf inside; sheets and blankets fill another. There’s a pillow wedged between cardboard boxes on the highest one.

“It’s a linen closet,” I say.

“I told you, this place has a lot of secrets
if
you know where to look.”

Tobin holds up one finger on his good hand, like he’s going point to something, then reaches inside and flips a panel that’s perfectly matched to the wall.

“Press there,” he says, placing my fingers on a metal plate with tiny skids for traction.

The plate gives way under my hand, and the entire sidewall of the closet disappears into a pocket, revealing a narrow passage beyond.

T
HE
passage is long, empty, and more claustrophobic than the bunkers. Metal pipes run the length of the ceiling, snaking down the walls to disappear into the floor. Steam drifts back and forth at a lazy pace, blown around by the air from separate vents, never quite able to escape the middle ground between them, like the fog that fills the Grey.

“You want me to go in
there
?” I ask.

“You have to turn sideways and scoot through, but it gets wider inside.”

Tobin shoulders past me and slips into the passage, turning a circle with his uninjured arm out wide.

“I’ll pass,” I say.

“I’ve used this tunnel since I was so small Dad had to carry me.”

“But it’s dark.”

“Give me five minutes. If you’re still scared after that, I’ll bring you straight back.” He reaches for a flashlight propped on the floor beside the opening, and turns it on. “Trust me.”

A very real, very loud part of me wants to say no, turn around, and run screaming. It tells me I was too late treating his shoulder, and this is how the madness starts. A normal person, who looks and sounds like himself, who acts like himself, but gets the urge to walk into the darkness and never come back. Luring friends and family because the Fade have his mind.

However, that part of me disagrees with a tiny voice, growing stronger as I watch Tobin with his hopeful look, biting his lip, stretching his hand out for me to take. Slowly, I edge my hand toward his, closing my eyes as he wraps his fingers around it and tugs.

Once I’ve cleared the door, I look back and forth between the tunnel and Tobin’s apartment. The flashlight’s beam turns the passage an eerie brownish-green, casting shadows at sharp angles. But inside the apartment, the light’s warm and sunny. It dims behind us as we walk, until all that remains is the thin streak from the flashlight and the dull blue glow from our alarm bracelets.

I try to get a look at Tobin’s eyes, to see if they’ve taken on that metal shine like the Fade that attacked us in the hall, but his face is hidden in shadow. Just like his hands, and my hands, and our feet, and everything else that exists outside the beam.

“Almost there,” Tobin says, as though he can feel my nerves choking me. “Step up.”

At the other end of that command lies an open space with three more tunnels branching from it. An almost useless bulb hangs above us, dimmer than the flashlight. There could be a thousand Fade in here, and I’d never know.

“Hospital,” he says, slashing the flashlight toward the tunnel on the left. “Common Hall,” is the middle one. “The Well,” he names the last.

He steers me right, and we start toward the Well, but he never tells me what it is.

The world behind us no longer exists. It’s bleak and empty, and no matter how hard I try to keep my word, my legs are heavy, slowed by the twisted scenarios usurping my attention. Tobin could have turned Fade; he could be on his way to the Dark right now to join the others. Or, confident that I’m Fade-proof, he could have decided I’m a bargaining chip to trade for his father.

Neither possibility ends well for me.

At the point I’m ready to hit my alarm and alert security, something reflects the beam back at us. There’s a metal panel set into the wall, identical to the one in his linen closet. Tobin hands me the flashlight, jogging ahead. I let the beam shine up and into his face, but the relief at seeing his eyes still brown is short-lived.

He presses the panel, and the door slides away. Fresh air floods the tunnel, warm and sweet, as the seal breaks.

It’s a door to the outside. Out where
they
are.

How could I have been so stupid?
No one
is this at ease without light. Not after a Red-Wall. Not after a Fade slices into them. Not when there could be more of them anywhere.

“This way,” he says, taking my hand to pull me out into the darkness.

I press my feet against the cement, but it’s slick from the steam.

“Tobin, please don’t give me to the Fade,” I beg. “I know you think your dad’s still alive, and after what happened back there, you think they can’t hurt me, but it won’t work.”

“Give you to the Fade?”

I ignore the confusion on his face and pull against him, straining back the way we came.

“I won’t survive out there . . .
please
. . . I don’t want to die.”

“Marina, snap out of it.” Tobin shakes me by both shoulders, wincing when the motion pulls his wounded arm. That’s when I see my escape.

I swing the flashlight, aiming for the tender spot where I held the knife against his skin, but he ducks, catching it when I try to swing it again.

“Stop it!” he orders.

Even with only one good arm, Tobin’s strong enough to lift me off the ground. Either my flailing feet aren’t connecting with his legs as often as it feels like, or he doesn’t notice.

“Put me down! You are not giving me to the Fade!”

“No. I’m not,” he says, and totes me out into the night.

There’s no need for my eyes to adjust like when we entered the tunnels. When Tobin forces me through the door, it’s from one dark place into another. He takes three steps, then drops me.

My first impulse is to run, but he’s between me and the door. Behind me there’s only open space, and beyond that lurks the Dark itself, in collusion with the night.

“Look up,” he says, annoyed, plopping down on the grass with his legs crossed to do exactly that.

My curiosity wins out.

I crane my neck up, stiffly, as though my body’s still fighting my better judgment.

The sky’s ink-black, with barely a moon. Then the whole thing rips wide open as a cascade of burning streaks trail across in red and gold.

“Falling stars,” he says. “Do you still want me to take you back?”

Two minutes ago, I’d have said yes, but now I’d rather have my two minutes back so I could make myself not act like an idiot. I’m furious with myself, and that’s unacceptable, so I’ll be mad at him instead. I give Tobin my best scowl.

He laughs at me.

“Marina, this is one of the Wells,” he says, as though the answer explains everything, but it means no more now than it did inside the tunnel. “When the lights were first built, after the bonfires, they designed the Arc with pockets to see the night sky. They needed a window, so they made this.”

“We’re inside the boundaries?”

Tobin stands, taking a rock in his hand. He draws back, aims high, and lets it fly. The rock pings off something metal.

“We’re inside the Arclight,” he says. “The curve of the wall is designed to keep out ambient light.”

It’s a courtyard where the Arc’s shine dulls to barely a glow around the upper edges, like we’re surrounded by a giant halo. We must be near the center of the compound, between the rooftop lamps.

“It’s screened, with no access from the outside. The Fade can’t come here unless they breach the Arc again, and even if they did, no one knows this place exists anymore. It’s been forgotten.”

Tobin stretches his legs, leaning on his stronger arm. He looks peaceful, without the anger and frustration, or even fear I’ve seen on his face since the day I first came here.

“My dad loves the stars—so do I. People used to go up there, you know. That was the book I cut up when I was a kid—pictures of people standing on the moon, where the lights are brighter than you can imagine.”

The Fade took that from us. They stole the moon, and robbed us of the stars.

Slowly, as my brain accepts that Tobin is telling the truth, I convince myself to scoot closer and sit beside him, mimicking his posture and staring up. You can’t do this with the sun—it burns and blinds even those of us it protects. But at night, there’s nothing to keep you from the size of the sky.

Tobin lies back, and so do I. He points out clusters of stars that were named by men who died long before the Fade were fears, and tells the stories he’s heard from his father about how the shapes guided ships across oceans.

Every few minutes, another flare sparks to life from nothing. They sputter silently and disappear as though they’d never existed at all.

“Do they do this every night?” I ask.

“Every year, but not every night; Dad marks it on the calendar. I wasn’t going to come this year. I didn’t want to be alone.”

He changes his position on the ground, and maybe not-so-accidentally moves closer. I lean in his direction and point up.