Arclight (14 page)

“That bunch there looks like Dante when the babies tried to climb him in the bunker,” I say. “See the way it’s bent from where one kneed him in the back?”

Tobin snorts.

“And that’s Anne-Marie holding Jove’s head in the ice bucket.”

Over and over, we rename the stars to our liking. He points to one image, and I move into his space. I spy another, and he encroaches on mine. Maybe they’ll lead us somewhere.

“What happened to you back there?” he asks without turning his head. “When we had the Fade on the ground, you kind of went somewhere else.”

“It’s hard to explain.” I pull my inhaler up, fidgeting with the ring.

“Did it do something to you?”

“I don’t know.”

He tucks his arm behind his neck, covering the blinking light from his alarm.

“Well, something happened. That thing saw you and it just . . .”

“Gave up,” I finish for him. I shiver as the sensation of cold water washes over my arms and legs again. “I saw things. I looked in its eyes, and I was in the Dark—running. I saw it, felt it,
everything
. It was like my mind split in half, or like the Fade had drilled into my head. It was searching for something.”

That sinister chill that has nothing to do with temperature returns, and I cross my arms over myself. What little space remains between us, Tobin covers, so we’re touching at the shoulder, and we both get the same idea at the same time. Our heads lean together, and the closeness kills the cold.

“Did it find what it wanted?” he asks.

“I don’t think so. My headache cut the connection.”

“Are headaches why you need this?”

He sits up and takes the inhaler out of my hand, holding it flat in his palm.

“Yeah.”

“What’s it like?”

My focus shifts again, as though my body is one place and my mind is another. “Everything buzzes. There’s too much distraction to concentrate on anything except everything at once, because it’s all too loud and too bright. My pulse crashes. There’s no air in my lungs. Then it gets worse.”

“That sucks.”

“Like you couldn’t imagine.” He makes me laugh; I can’t help it.

Tobin has many faces, but none are quite as endearing as the lopsided grin in front of me now. “At least the inhaler fixes it.”

“Not really,” I say.

He’s like Anne-Marie, thinking that a puff or two of “magic air” makes me normal, but it’s not like that. It’s more . . . dying in reverse. Everything switches back on, but it doesn’t pick up where I left off; I always lose something. All the color disappears beneath whitewash.

I pull the inhaler out of his hand and tuck it into my shirt, shaking the muffled feeling out of my head as I sit up completely and face him.

“Tobin, what’s the White Room?”

The question comes out of nowhere, and I hadn’t intended to ask it like that, but I need to know.

“A place that isn’t supposed to exist anymore,” he says, turning his attention to the ground.

“You mean like this one?”

“It’s underground.” He rips up a handful of grass and shreds the blades between his fingers.

Underground, like Dr. Wolff’s incinerator.

“It was the original hospital, in the sections that were walled off when they sealed the tunnel system.”

“But Honoria said that’s where they took the Fade.”

“I know.”

A shadow passes over his face, blending him into the night. I reach to touch him, even though I know he hasn’t moved.

“Tobin?”

“It’s just a cloud,” he says. “Hopefully they won’t last long. Clouds mean we can’t see the stars, and the real show hasn’t even started yet.”

“I want to see it,” I say.

“We’ll come back. By next week, they’ll be falling like rain. Dad said this was going to be the best year in a decade.”

“The Fade,” I clarify. “I want to see it up close.”

“We saw it close enough.” His shirt rustles, testing the freshly dressed wound, and reminding me just how close we got to the Fade tonight.

“I want to know why it was here.”

“You already do.”

“And that makes it worse. I need to understand. I want to look it in the eyes.”

No, really I don’t want that at all. I want to see it, but I don’t want it to see me.

“You think it’s worth letting that thing dig around your skull again? It can’t talk. How’s it going to tell you anything?” Tobin demands.

“It gave me back a memory, Tobin. I remembered the water. I don’t know what it means yet, but that thing knocked something loose, and if it can do it again—”

“No.”

“What do you mean, ‘no’?”

“No to what you’re going to ask me. I’m not wandering the tunnels on the off chance we’ll stumble across the White Room.”

“Not even to know what happened to your father?” I feel guilty using his dad as leverage, especially since I accused him of using me for the same, but I’m desperate. This way we both get our questions answered. “If that Fade saw me, it could have seen him, too.”

“How do you know it was even your memory?” Tobin asks. “It could have been a trick.”

“I know what I saw.”

It was too . . .
human
. . . to belong to a Fade.

“Some of the older tunnels opened into the Grey before they were sealed off. Others are so old they run under the Dark now. If the White Room still exists, it’s in those older parts; I’ve never gone that deep.”

“I want to try.”

Tobin’s scared. I can see it in the way he rubs the back of his neck with his good hand; I can nearly hear the argument in his thoughts. He’s trying to do what he thinks his father would want, but that’s at odds with what he wants himself.

“You were ready to claw me to pieces because you were afraid I was going to take you to the Fade, and now you want to go in search of one. Are you sure that thing didn’t do something to your head?”

“Not really, no.”

Tobin stands and starts to pace. Shadows cast across his face and arms. Dark circles fill the hollows of his cheeks and ring his eyes.

“The oldest tunnel I’ve ever used is the one that goes to the Common Hall. Dad only took me that way a couple of times, so I’d know how to find it if there was no other way out. It’s a last resort passage, not one you’d use by choice, and I haven’t been down there since I was ten. We’d have to start at the junction and mark the path as we go.”

That sounds suspiciously like a “yes,” despite his already having said “no.”

“When?” I ask.

“Not tonight. Mr. Pace is going to come soon, and I’d rather not have him find my apartment empty.”

The trip back feels shorter. I glance down the different shafts at the junction, repeating them to myself as he’d listed them off: Hospital . . . Common Hall . . . Well . . .

Common Hall . . .

Common Hall . . .

White Room
. . .

“What’s wrong?” Tobin asks. His earlier calm has passed to me, and he’s absorbed my nerves in exchange.

“All my answers could be down that tunnel,” I say. “Both our answers.”

Tobin shifts, putting his body between me and the route to the Common Hall.

“Maybe, but Honoria will have people crawling all over that Fade tonight; she’ll be there herself.”

I’m struck with an almost unbearable desire to bolt around him and charge down that tunnel on my own.

“We can’t risk getting caught down here, Marina. When I said no one knows about the Well, I meant it. It’s supposed to be sealed. I’m not losing this, too.”

He shuffles me along until we reach the point where that distant, muted hum becomes a constant once again. The tiny blip on my wrist that blinks in time to the wall alarms bounces off one wall. Tobin’s bounces off the other, and the flashlight finds the door.

Light from inside his apartment floods the tunnel, no longer joyous or comforting but harsh. I hide my face against Tobin’s side to block it. The scent of antiseptic and burnt skin from his shoulder mingles with the remnants of dirt and grass on his clothes from where he’d laid down in the Well.

The panel slides closed with a
thwack
and I let him lead me, blind, to the living room and the same couch where I’d burned him, to wait for Mr. Pace.

M
R.
Pace is furious over Tobin’s injury, not to mention the fact that we’d treated it ourselves. And I can live quite happily without ever seeing him return to the enraged caricature he became in Tobin’s living room, just before he called reinforcements to sanitize the apartment.

“Do you have any idea what could have happened?” Mr. Pace keeps asking, stalking the floor. “Of course you don’t. None of you know anything.”

He looks so old, lines appearing around his eyes and mouth where none had been before.

Behind him, a team of three tears up the carpet swatches Tobin’s father had installed and fire-washes the cement floors below.

They treat me and Tobin like we’re contaminated, forcing us into quarantine until Dr. Wolff arrives. He ensconces us in the makeshift hospital he sets up in the kitchen, so he can be sure I didn’t miss anything when I burned Tobin’s skin.

Tobin sits perched on his kitchen table, shirt off, watching his childhood disintegrate as the flames devour one more memory of his father.

“Dad’s going to be mad,” he says, still watching the sanitation team. “It took him forever to collect enough pieces to cover the whole floor.”

“And what would he say about you, Tobin?” Mr. Pace asks. “How do you think he’d feel trying to put back the pieces of his son?”

“Leave them be, Elias.” Dr. Wolff clucks his tongue when he peels the bandages away from Tobin’s skin. “It was a near miss, but a miss nonetheless. His skin’s clean, and the heat marks are well beyond the edges of the initial injury. Considering the conditions, and the skill level of the people involved, he was lucky.”

Mr. Pace brushes his hands over his skull, five times, maybe ten, while Dr. Wolff selects the evil scraper from the instruments he brought with him. We may have been lucky, but he’s not taking any chances. He double-checks everything, wearing multiple layers of gloves.

“Did Tobin’s skin ever branch black or halo?” he asks me.

Mr. Pace stops and turns my way; Tobin’s eyes plead silently for me to tell them no so this will end. Beyond them, blue flames lick at the cement floor, close enough to be convenient if they decide we’re contaminated, so I choose the lie and hope I won’t regret it later.

“No. I burned him because of what I’d seen with Trey and Portman.”

“You still should have called for help,” Mr. Pace says.

“We did the same thing you would have,” Tobin charges. “You wouldn’t have pulled anyone away from the bigger crisis.”

“You shouldn’t have been up here alone.”

“I wasn’t.”

The exchange between them shifts from the timbre of a superior chastising someone under his command, or a teacher scolding a student, to something more informal. Here, there’s no caste system enforced by the patches on our sleeves. Tobin and Mr. Pace become two people who care about each other, not because it’s a regulation for the older to protect the younger, but because they’re an extended family.

I
want
that feeling. I know I should have it, but I don’t.

“There’s a difference between a miss and a graze, Tobin,” Mr. Pace continues.

“Elias, not now.”

“Then when, Doc?” Mr. Pace demands. “Of all the unreasonable, bullheaded, senseless . . .
you
tell me when the right time is! Keeping these kids uninformed is only going to lead to more accidents—or worse. And you, of all people, should be agreeing with me. You’re the one who has to clean up the ones who fall through the cracks we make, and I’m the one who has to do it when you’re not fast enough.”

“Be thankful Marina was with us today to see what she saw, or this would have been much worse.”

Tobin’s skin pales as he absorbs Dr. Wolff’s words—
would
, not
could
. There are only absolutes with the Fade. Tobin came too close to needing more than a knife and a lantern to save his life.

“That’s exactly my point!” Mr. Pace snaps, making me jump. “Sorry. I’m not angry with you—either of you, but I’m so tired of this. After Trey . . . Trey nearly lost his arm, and now, if this had happened to anyone else . . .”

He picks up the nearest instrument from the counter and hurls it the length of the room, shattering a glass pane in one of the cabinet doors.

“Wonderful lesson for the young ones, Elias. No wonder you’re such a good teacher.”

“Keep it up, Doc. Next time I’ll aim for something else.”

“Hold on to your right shoulder, Tobin,” Dr. Wolff says, ignoring Mr. Pace. “You’ll have to wear a sling for a few days so you don’t do the muscle worse injury. I assume you know there’ll be a scar.”

Tobin nods, resting his hand against the top of his shoulder while Dr. Wolff ties his arm in place. When he’s done, Tobin’s arm lays anchored to his chest, beneath a cocoon of cotton bandages. It makes an ugly lump when Dr. Wolff helps him back into his shirt, leaving the empty sleeve to flop around limp.

“A few days with me and you’ll be good as new.”

“I don’t do hospital stays. I had enough of that place when Mom was sick.”

“Tobin, you can’t even dress yourself,” Mr. Pace says.

They think he’s being difficult, the same way they believe he’s deluding himself about his father, but I know better; he doesn’t want to be separated from his apartment. Without the door in his closet, he loses the Well and the stars; we can’t search out the White Room. Tobin isn’t being difficult—he’s clutching at hope.

“I can check on him,” I offer.

Tobin relaxes, a change so small, it would be easy to assign it to the pain in his arm easing.

“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Dr. Wolff says.

“Well, I do,” Tobin argues.

“Marina’s not capable of watching out for you, as well as herself, if another situation arises.”

“She did pretty well from where I was sitting,” Tobin snaps back.

“Honoria wants her somewhere safer than wandering the halls between her room and this one,” Dr. Wolff says, then turns his attention to my hand. To my relief he reaches for a clean roll of bandages, rather than the scraper. “Back me up on this, Elias.”