Meridian (21 page)

T
HE
door opens easily. I expected a barricade or guards, but it’s not even locked. I wish I could convince myself that’s a good thing.

I shift my pack as we cross the threshold.

“Tighten the straps,” Tobin whispers.

He grasps my pack at one shoulder and pulls the slide so the strap shrinks down.

“Thanks.”

I hadn’t needed to adjust the straps. Moving the pack was just something I could control.

Suddenly the other strap shrinks to match the first, making Tobin scowl.

“That isn’t invisible,” he snaps, then goes ahead to inspect one of the piles of debris scattered around the room.

“You can’t do that, Rue,” I say.

“Talking to him isn’t invisible, either,” Honoria says without looking down. She turns sideways, cutting between Rue and me.

Repentant,
Rue says.
Tibby’s solution was incomplete
.

Be more careful. Maybe they’ll forget you’re here.

Maybe you’ll forget, too.

Never happen.

It already did.

He stops talking, and at first I mistake his silence for a reminder that there was a time when I
did
forget him. But he’s only doing what I asked—he’s being invisible.

I never forgot,
Cherish insists.

“Marina,” Anne-Marie calls. “Get over here.”

She’s keeping to the space between her brother and father, still bunched up and shaking like she’s got a sour stomach.

Compromise?
I ask Rue before I move, sending him the image of a hand grasping my pack strap the way students hold on to one another’s uniforms during class drills.

For now
. He tugs on the strap, and we join the others.

The Ice Cube’s entry is a central junction where all of the building’s passages meet. The off-shoot halls are straight, turning around corners in the distance. A cement wall brackets off a set of stairs leading to the upper levels. Each side of the entry is flanked by a glass wall that’s caked with grime and age. There are rooms on the other side, visible through the broken frames.

There’s light here, but not bright. Col. Lutrell and the others ignite the point lamps on their rifles to add a few feet to what we can see. Everything’s the color of dust.

The Arclight’s a palace compared to this. I can’t imagine feeling safe here.

Trey’s light lands on something reflective in a swept-aside pile of debris. I lean closer, until I can make out the shape of a dented cup. Tobin bends down, poking at a child’s shoe. It’s as dirty as everything else, but the same pink as my walls and Blanca’s flowers, so I put it in my pocket. I need all the good thoughts I can find.

“There’s nothing here,” he says.

“Don’t be so sure.” While the rest of us are focused on the ground and the walls of this level, Honoria’s looking up, scanning the ledges of the rusted safety rails above. Something’s caught her attention.

Thankfully, she’s refrained from shooting at it.

I nudge Cherish, hoping she’ll oblige in the use of her senses, but all she says is:
The sound is not ours.

Does that mean we’re alone, or is she telling me there’s something lurking in the shadows? If there’s anything worse than the wild ones out there, I don’t want to know.

“You kids stay put and stay together,” Col. Lutrell says, following Honoria’s line of sight. “We’re—”

“You’re leaving us?” Anne-Marie cuts him off.

“We need to check the rooms,” Mr. Pace says. “But we don’t know how stable this place is.”

“And we don’t know how stable
Annie
is,” Tobin whispers low enough that only I can hear him.

“The fewer bodies in motion, the better. Stay with your brother. We need to see where we stand.”

Mr. Pace starts down one of the hallways while Col. Lutrell eases his way around the broken glass to enter one of the rooms here in the entry. Honoria takes the stairs, treading gingerly until she’s over our heads, boots clicking across what I hope is a sound floor. Her weight could bring the whole thing down on top of us.

“I don’t like this,” Trey says, once they’re gone.

“Me, either,” Anne-Marie echoes. “I feel like we’re being watched.”

“We are,” Tobin says. “By the transparent tagalong.” He grimaces at an empty spot in the room, reconsiders, and aims his disdain somewhere closer to me, trying to hone in on Rue. “This place is dead, Annie. Not even cockroaches.”

And yet, at the first unexpected noise, we move closer to one another, backs to the center, so someone’s looking in every direction. Tobin takes my hand on one side, and while I’m not going to hold on to someone who can’t be seen, and risk exposing him, I don’t object when Rue tugs my pack again.

I also don’t object when I feel his hand on my back. I tell myself it’s a concession to keep Cherish quiet, but that’s a lie I’m finding harder to believe.
I
want Rue with us—I didn’t realize how much until I thought he’d gone. It’s not just Cherish he makes feel safe, and knowing Rue’s got my back can only help in the long run.

“I can’t breathe in here,” Anne-Marie says. “It’s too hot. The air smells weird.”

Vile would be more accurate. It’s definitely not the ultrapurified air from the Arclight, where the only thing that smells are the animal pens, and we both avoid those.

But the air quality isn’t half as disorienting as the lack of running commentary. Normally, Anne-Marie would be chattering nonstop to use her own voice as a distraction. It’s too quiet here.

“Hot’s a good thing, right?” I prompt her, so some of the weirdness will evaporate. “It means they’re keeping the heat on.”

“It’s hot because we’re not in the Dark, anymore,” Tobin says. “That’s all.”

The light is weaker here,
Rue tells me, disagreeing with Tobin’s assessment.
It doesn’t burn
.

For the strangest moment, Rue is both visible and invisible to me, as if each of my eyes is seeing things slightly different. I can’t see him, but Cherish can. She’s trying to show me something, and she’s trying to make me understand his point.

“What’d he say?” Tobin asks, tugging on my hand to get my attention.

“Huh?”

“You’re doing the blank stare into nothing, which means Nanobot has something to say. And you can tell him that I know exactly where he’s standing.”

Tobin scowls in Rue’s general direction—so general, it’s probably a guess.

This light won’t repel the Darkness,
Cherish says, to make sure I understand.
But the Darkness hasn’t followed.

“The lights are too dim to hurt Rue,” I say. They aren’t sunlamps like the Arclight’s perimeter or Red-Wall blinders. “The wild-Fade haven’t come inside, but it’s not the light keeping them back. This place isn’t abandoned, and they know it. I can feel it.”

“Me, too,” Anne-Marie says. She’s biting her nails, clicking at her teeth with her thumb.

“You feel your nerves, Annie,” Tobin insists. “And you’re making the rest of us jumpy.”

“It’s a safe bet that if this section’s sound, some of the other overhead lamps should work,” Trey says. More of Mr. Pace comes through in his voice and mannerisms. He’s been methodically inspecting our corner of the entry, shining his light up into the ceiling and tracing cracks along the walls. “Spread out, but keep in sight. Test whatever switches you find. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

He reaches for one mounted on the stairwell, only to have his hand seized by black-gloved fingers before he can flip it. Honoria’s leaned over the side to grab him.

“Careful,” she says, releasing his hand. “I wouldn’t trust the wiring around here.”

She comes the rest of the way down the stairs, then stops to inspect the switch panel. It’s nothing but a dummy that comes away easily when she slides her finger under the wires hanging out beneath it. She tugs gently and the wires pull loose, exposing a painted-over knot of more wires, with leads that run up and around the door frame to continue on down the hall.

“Someone set a trap?” Trey asks.

“Or rigged an alarm.” She nods. “There’s no way to tell without following the lead lines. For now, we’ll stick with the ‘don’t touch’ approach.”

“Still think the place is empty?” Anne-Marie asks Tobin.

“We don’t know how long that’s been here,” he says. “It could be ancient—from the first days.”

“That’s not ancient,” Honoria growls.

Something I’ve learned from the way Cherish, and even Rue, consider the world is that the longer someone lives, the less time means to them. Perceptions of a day in relation to a week or a year warp until the words lose meaning. It’s easy to pretend they don’t exist at all, but here, the clock never stopped. No one’s kept it clean enough to foster the illusion.

A piece of glass snaps on the wall opposite us as Col. Lutrell climbs back through the broken window. Mr. Pace returns on steps so light he’s practically tiptoeing.

“The office is nothing but old furniture and trash, but there are disturbances in the dust that look like shoe prints, so not likely Fade,” Col. Lutrell says.

Rue agrees; Fade hate the restrictive nature of shoes.

“They’ve got the door wired.” He looks around. “I’d say the place is staged—a few things left in plain sight, meant to draw people through where they can be contained. But the display hasn’t been kept up for a while.”

“Nonexplosive, then?” Honoria asks.

“Contact magnets set against the door frame, possibly a hot wire to stun whoever activates it—fairly rudimentary. It’s similar to the setup we had on the supplies for the first few years back home. When you’re not sure who’s friendly or how long your goods will hold out, it’s best to take new faces and grabby hands out of the equation.”

Honoria nods. For this conversation, no one exists other than our elders. We’re just the dumb kids in the background who nearly tripped the alarm.

We don’t use alarms,
Rue muses.
Everyone is welcome to home.

There are no locked doors to his Fade. They live a shared existence where there’s always enough to go around. All it takes is teaching one a fact or a skill for all of them to learn it.

You watch for the Darkness,
I tell him.
You don’t let the wild ones pass unannounced. Alarms announce for us.

“We’ve got what used to be the science labs down that hall.” Mr. Pace twitches his head back the way he came. “The gas lines are hot. There’s no way the municipal systems are still active, not with downtown and most of the outskirts under the canopy. Someone’s got their own sources, and they’re keeping them online.”

“So someone’s here,” Col. Lutrell says.

“Someone’s here.”

“Then where are they?” Tobin asks.

“Hiding,” I say. “It’s what we’d do. If a group of people walked into the Arclight, we’d be in the bunkers.”

“A group this large would never make it into the Arclight,” Honoria insists.

I don’t bother to pass along Rue’s rebuttal. He shows me Fade who’ve been inside the Arclight’s boundaries more than once since the lights went down. It was the only way they could be sure the wild ones hadn’t breached the perimeter.

Now I know why the cats down there were so fond of me and mistrustful of Tobin—they were carrying nanites.

I also know that Rue came with them. He was there almost every night while I was on duty in the Arbor. How could he come that close and not tell me? Cherish mourned for weeks, thinking he’d left her behind. How could he not tell
her
?

“As long as they think we’re a threat, we won’t see anyone,” Trey says.

Anne-Marie breaks from the group and plants herself in the middle of the entry, where she can look up to the other floors.

“Hey! Is anyone up there? We’re friends! We—”

Trey dashes over and covers her mouth. She shoves him off.

“What?” she demands. “No one else had any ideas.”

“Shut it, Annie.”

“Make me.”

Honoria’s already sour mood gets worse. She glares at Trey and Anne-Marie, then Mr. Pace.

“Fix that before we can’t,” she says.

Mr. Pace nods, somewhere between exasperation and embarrassment. I’ve seen their mother shut down a full-scale temper tantrum with one look and zero words from across a room, but they don’t even register his presence. Maybe this is the first time he’s ever had to referee them.

“You’re a blink older than me,” Anne-Marie snaps at Trey. “You can’t tell me to shut up just because the color of your sleeve patch changes.”

“
I
can, and
I
am,” Mr. Pace says. “Quiet—both of you—or the next time either of you sets foot in a nursery class, you’ll be there as a student—naptime, diaper and all.”

Sibling discord turns into a block of solidarity. Anne-Marie and Trey stop shouting at each other and direct their mutual scorn at their father. It’s another of those weird displays where they look so different and so much alike at the same time—feet planted and eyes narrowed, as if to dare Mr. Pace to act on his threat.

“Nice try,” he says. “But I’ve been dealing with teenagers longer than both your ages combined, not to mention dealing with your mother. I’m immune to the hate face. Get back to the group before I decide to tell her about this when we get home.”

Both of them snap to attention, and Anne-Marie’s back with me and Tobin without any further argument.

“You didn’t really think that would work?” I ask her.

“It could have.” I can hear the desperation in her voice, and fear. “If they’re worried that we’re some kind of invasion force, shouldn’t we at least try to tell them differently?”

“They won’t believe you. Not when the Fade can take any face they want.”

Assuming the hosts’ faces have survived all these years beneath the nanite shell.

“Oh. I didn’t think of that.”

“We need to move,” Honoria says. “We can set up in the lunchroom, if it’s still here.”

With Col. Lutrell and Mr. Pace in agreement, we wander off as a group down one of the halls at the far side of the building. Unlike the others, this one doesn’t have doors along the wall. There’s only one room, at the end.