Arclight (20 page)

“She was working with Dr. Wolff on a way to stop the Dark from spreading, but died before it could do any good. I bet she’d have known where you came from.”

“How?”

“She was obsessed with life before the Arclight. We used to have a room that was nothing but old books and magazines she’d scavenged out of storerooms and junk piles. Each wall had cut-out pictures from a part of the world she hoped still existed—plants and animals like you couldn’t imagine. If there was anyone who knew a place humans could survive out there, it would’ve been my mom.”

He smiles at something I can’t see because it only exists in his past.

“I wish I’d known her,” I say.

“Dad said she was a crazy kid. Once, when she was like fifteen, the stores ran too low, and they had to authorize supply runs—the ones where Dad got the carpet and chairs. While everyone else was grabbing building materials, she was sneaking kittens into her bag.”

“That was a pretty big risk.”

“They warned her a dozen times, but they bled red, so she didn’t care; having a cat around made things better for her. She’d have these fits where her whole body would shake and she wouldn’t be able to speak. Afterward, it would take days before she could even get out of bed; her cats stuck with her.”

“I didn’t see any cats in your apartment,” I say, and hand the dog tags back.

“They never liked me. After Mom died, they refused to stay inside. I figured they moved into the tunnels where they could catch mice.”

I thought pets were supposed to be loyal, not disappear when a kid needs company the most.

“Does any of this look familiar?” he asks. “I was kind of hoping that if you came from the desert, and I made one, you’d remember something.”

“Not really,” I say, and his entire body sags. “It was a good idea though.”

We sit in silence for a while, with me shaking the jar near my ear to listen to the sand tinkle and fall. There’s something about the sound that I recognize the same way I know my flower bush, but the details are frustratingly out of my reach.

“You’ve been here months . . . can’t you remember anything?” Tobin looks through me into the space beyond the Well. “If you can remember it, I’ll help you find it.”

“It wasn’t like it is here,” I say. “It was easier to breathe. No one was afraid I’d bring death to our door. Maybe that was their mistake.”

“You’re not a mistake, Marina. You’re the success.”

I feel like I should be glowing from the heat in my cheeks. Jokes I can handle, mocking doesn’t faze me, but I don’t know what to do or say when Tobin is serious and the words are still nice. So I shrug and try to shrink out of his sight.

“I remember small things, but the faces are all a blur.” Dr. Wolff says it’s my mind’s way of protecting itself. That’s the polite version of saying I probably watched my family die, then decided to think about something else. “There was lots of sound—music and chatter, that kind of thing. Now it’s all quiet.”

“You don’t have to be the only one who survived. The others could be in another place.”

If I go by Mr. Pace’s dirt drawing, there is no other place. If I go by the sand in the jar, it’s possible.

“Do you think it was a good place?” he asks “One you’d want to go back to if you could?”

“Tired of me already?”

It’s a joke, sort of, but with some truth thrown in. The fear that he might return to the person I knew before the Red-Wall.

“Never,” he says, too quickly to salvage his pride. “I mean . . . forget it.”

A brilliant streak blazes across the night, and saves him from the grin spreading across my face. Behind the first star comes another, smaller, but no less beautiful. The one after that ignites the whole sky.

“You’re supposed to make a wish when you see one,” Tobin says. The sadness leaves his expression, burned away a layer at a time by each tiny fire.

He settles back on the blanket, with his good hand behind his head as a pillow, then crosses his feet at the ankles. The blipping light from his personal alarm disappears beneath his hair, and I cover mine with my hand just to see what it’s like without the constant intrusion. For this moment there’s no danger and we don’t need the panic button.

“You’ll never get a good view like that,” he says. “Lie down and look straight up.”

I slide closer and lean my head back, but it’s no use. Every time I find a star to track, I miss a more spectacular one at the corner of my eye.

“Look there.” Tobin points off to one side. “You see those three stars in a line? If you watch those, you won’t miss the rest.”

Another streak cuts the night in half.

I slip my arm with its alarm under my cheek and turn sideways so my face is just below his.

“I know one thing about the place I came from,” I say. “We didn’t eat dessert.”

“Then you came from a horrible and backward place and must stay here out of self-preservation.”

The last bit of sand still stuck to my skin rolls in my fingers while we lay here, and if I close my eyes, I can convince myself that this is real. We’re inside that glass dome with the cactus and falling silver stars where nothing bad can touch us.

“I’m not going anywhere,” I say.

We stay still for what could be hours, eternity, or a breath in time. No machines or alarms. No blinking light to remind us that danger could descend at any moment, and in the void, I find a point of focus where his arm wraps tight around my shoulders like a tether to keep me from spiraling into the abyss.

I turn farther so I can hear the beat of his heart and feel it against my own. Shoulder against shoulder. Hip against hip. Ankle against ankle. I refuse to curl up and break the line. It’s too perfect.

I can’t see his eyes, and that’s a good thing. Human eyes don’t glow in the dark with a vile metallic sheen. They’re soft and brown and crinkle around the edges. They grow dark with anger and intense in concentration. They’re a reflection of all Tobin is, and they’re the evidence of the soul no Fade possesses.

I feel his breath against my hair. Our clothes rustle against the fabric of the blanket. The faint smell of home—something I still can’t put into words—mixes with the scent of Tobin’s skin and mine.

The only sense left is taste.

I lick my lips, tilt my head up, and kiss him.

It’s not at all like that first kiss in the bunker. Tobin doesn’t jerk to a stop when our lips touch or hold his hands stiff away from his body. He doesn’t find words to excuse himself from the moment. It’s the opposite. He pulls me in close, until he’s all I can see.

When we break apart, I’m unsure how to face him, so we settle back into our quiet synchronization, with my head on his chest, watching the sky burn.

He breathes in. My head rises with his chest.

I breathe out. His arm around my waist sinks down.

This is more than close; it’s connected.

“There was joy where I came from,” I say. Speaking is the only way I know to prove to myself that I’m not dreaming, and that I’m not going to wake from this alone in my cold, plain room. “I think I was loved there.”

At some point I had to be.

“I’d be surprised if you weren’t.”

His voice is dreamy, far away. Tobin is half asleep, and I have to wonder if he’ll even remember saying that later. The hand clutching me slackens. His breathing turns even and shallow, blowing into my hair.

“Tobin?” I elbow him in the ribs, but it only spurs him to shift position.

I know he’s probably exhausted from dragging everything out here, and contending with his arm, but would it have killed him to stay awake longer than one little kiss?

I pick up his hand and knit our fingers together, fit my head more firmly under his chin, and watch the stars until they grow dim in the half-step between awake and asleep.

With every one that comes, the wish is the same.

S
OMEONE’S
watching me.

Tobin’s still asleep beside me, his arm around my waist so I’m rolled into his side. The steady thump of his heart beats under my ear. When I try to pull away, he tightens his grip for a second, mumbles something, then lets go so I can sit up.

There’s something out there, but I can’t see it no matter how hard I strain at the shadows in the curve of the Well.

Another streak flies overhead and I glance up to watch it. When I lower my eyes, he’s there.
The Fade
.

No . . .

He
can’t
have found me out here, and yet he’s standing right in front of me. Bare feet, bare chest, still dressed in the medical scrubs from the White Room. The monitor on my wrist isn’t blinking violet or red, so the guards can’t know he’s gone. I can’t make my hand press the button to alert them; something stops me every time I try.

The imaginary bubble of protection Tobin and I found in the Well disintegrates. I push up to my knees so I have at least a chance of facing him on even ground. The Fade closes the space between us, and my throat tightens. He stops like he felt it himself.

Sorry. Regret. Apology
.

Is he asking for an apology or making one?

“How did you get here?” I keep my voice low, thankful that Tobin doesn’t make another sound.

The Fade replays his journey from the White Room, leaving out the particulars of how he managed to escape the containment cell. There were no guide lines when Tobin and I were down there, but the Fade sees a blaze of pinkish fire along the floor. I watch him enter Tobin’s apartment from the tunnels, heading straight for Col. Lutrell’s room. At the box of snow globes, the trail reappears, pooling around my favorite one.

Instead of shaking it to watch the glitter swirl, the Fade focuses on the outside, and the shine glows brighter, leading him to the Well, and ending at my feet. Through his eyes, I shimmer. Light rises off my skin like steam; he doesn’t see Tobin at all.

“You were following
me
?” I raise myself up a little farther.

He nods.

Assist. Aid. Help
.

“I don’t know how to get you out of here,” I say.

His mental map appears again, with a bold line zipping through the tunnels below the Arclight. He already knows the way out.

“Then what do you want?” I ask, fighting the urge to scream and maybe goad him into an attack. If he can cross the tunnels, he can bring other Fade back through them. There could be hundreds down there already.

Remember Cherish. Locate Cherish. Return Cherish
.

“I keep telling you I don’t know her. Why won’t you believe me?”

Forgotten
.

The female appears in my mind, dissolving into a pool of light.

“Yeah, well, I’ve forgotten a lot thanks to you.”

Negative. False
.

“I’m not lying!”

Angry?

“No, not angry. Furious. Enraged. I
hate
you for what you’ve done to me.”

Tobin rolls behind me, shifting to his wounded side, and the Fade makes a strange noise. A strangled howl that sticks in his throat as he recalls Tobin in the White Room.

Hate. Anger. Kill. Kill. Kill
.

“No!” I jump up too fast and have to grab my leg when it won’t hold my weight. “Don’t hurt him, please.”

I’m stuck trying to balance on one knee while my injured leg splays out to the side—not the biggest barricade, but I’m all Tobin has. A creeping suspicion edges into my thoughts, raising the hair on my arms. Tobin should have woken by now.

“I didn’t know about the White Room, I swear.”

The Fade’s eyes darken. He narrows them, with another tilt of his head, like a curious bird.

“I swear,” I say again, though I’m not sure he knows what it means. “I didn’t know they’d hurt you. Tobin, tell him.”

But Tobin doesn’t answer, even when I shake him. That chill moves further up my neck.

“Did you do something to him?”

Sequestered. Put aside
.

“Tobin, wake up!”

I slap his arm, but there’s no change.

Converse. Speak
.

“After you wake him up.”

Sadness. Pain. Torment
.

A melancholy confusion overtakes the Fade, and the radiant nature of his emotions seeps into my chest, causing his pain to crystalize there as something cold and hard. He walks away, closer to the shadows cast by the building, and farther from Tobin, so I follow, trying to convince myself that if I keep him calm this can still end in our favor.

“How can I feel what you feel?” I ask. “Is that how Fade communicate?”

The Fade responds by pressing the information into my head in a frustrated rush that makes my body lock. Every joint lights up in sequence from my skull to my foot, with pain receptors firing one after the other.

My own knowledge, faces and names and the few facts I’m certain of, skew and mix with the too many things the Fade sends out in waves. The current’s so strong, it pushes me back along the dew-slicked grass. I clutch at the ground with one hand, and my inhaler with the other, but the Fade tears it away before I can use it.

“Give it back!”

He pulls harder to bring the ring closer to his face, dragging me with it.

“Let go!” I grab the cord with both hands, using my weight as a countermeasure.

The Fade gives me a split-second warning where the image of the cord breaking against my neck materializes in my mind before he actually does it. And I’m still surprised by the sting when it happens for real.

He shakes the inhaler by his ear, breathes in close to the mouthpiece.

“You could have asked for it,” I say.

His attention shifts back to my face; the moment he snapped the cord replays in my mind.

Anticipated. Warned
.

“Warning is
not
the same as asking.” Getting angry pushes the fear back. It makes it easier to function.

Apology. Repentance
.

“Can I have it back now?” I ask. “That’s how questions work, by the way. Your voice goes up on the end so the person you’re speaking to knows it’s a question. Then they say yes or no.”

“No,” he says out loud, then adds
Alteration
in his usual non-speech.