Meridian (25 page)

It can’t be . . .

I’m shocked straight out of our connection.

“Well?” Tobin asks. Anne-Marie and Trey crowd closer.

“Is it real?” I ask. “As in actually happening and not an image you’re using to get your point across?”

“We should evacuate,” he answers solemnly.

I run to the window wall, hoping he’s wrong, but a swarm of nanites is growing in the distance. This is the wave rising up to drown us, a monster shadow blocking the sun.

“What is that?” Tobin squints toward the horizon.

“We need to get out of here,” I say. “The Dark is coming.”

“T
HE
Dark is coming.”

This is the swarm Dad said we didn’t want to provoke. He was right.

“But it’s still daylight,” Annie says.

“I don’t think they care,” Trey says. “Not if they’re like the ones we saw before. They’ll sacrifice the first wave to cover the ones behind.”

Dr. Wolff’s theory that the nanites are part virus makes more sense after seeing the wild hive in action. There’s no room for reason or mercy. They compute, but they don’t think.

I take another look out the window.

Loose nanites, which usually cover the ground and trees, are creating a mobile canopy to cover the ones with hosts.

“I don’t know how long it will take for them to push forward, but I’d bet on sooner rather than later,” I say; I do not want to be here when they arrive.

“But we don’t have the truck anymore,” Trey says.

“Ours have come,” Rueful says. “Ours are faster than the truck. Ours are faster than theirs. You accompany us.”

He looks at me.

There’s only one way Rueful’s bunch can outpace the wild ones with us along for the ride—Fade capsules.

“I can’t. I—I just can’t.”

“It’ll be okay,” Marina tells me, but she wasn’t inside one. Those things basically swallow us whole.

“You are even with me,” Rueful says. He holds out his hand, like he wants to shake on it, but instead, he grabs my wrist and won’t let go.

“Get off!” I shout. Marina tries to pull him away, but he hangs on tight. “What are you—”

The sting from the handcuff stops; my wrist doesn’t hurt anymore.

“What did you do?” I ask him.

Rueful removes his hand, and I pull mine away.

“You healed him,” Marina says.

“Even,” he says again. “Trust us.”

How he makes those two words sound like “You saved my ass, we’ll save yours,” in my head, I’ve got no idea.

“Anything involving the word
home
is okay with me.” Annie bumps past us, for the door. But when she opens it, she stops and closes it again. “Slight problem. All those people who weren’t out there when we left our cell are back. They brought friends.”

How could I have forgotten we’re still in the middle of an escape attempt? The wild-Fade aren’t the only ones we have to get past.

I take a peek through the door.

Michael sits on the floor, leaned against the wall and holding his head, while Mr. Pace checks him over.

“My fault,” Marina says, biting her lip.

He’s got at least a broken nose and a busted lip. He’s holding his ribs. “If we live through this, I want details.”

Honoria’s backing away from the room Michael’s outside of. She walks deliberately slow, despite the person trying to move her out of the way.

“Steel doesn’t fall apart for no reason,” Rami snaps, waving his rifle and oblivious to the way Honoria’s actually controlling his movements rather than the other way around. “I locked her in myself.”

“Then you should have guarded them, too,” Honoria says. “She was in that room for hours. Were she what you believe, she wouldn’t have walked out of it under her own power.” What happened? She sounds different, and she looks nearly fifteen years younger than she did when we were captured.

“Then why not wait until sunset for us to let her out?” Rami demands.

“Ask her yourself.”

“You think she’s still here?”

“Putting that girl in one room and the two troublemakers in another guarantees that there’s only one place she went once she was free.” She glances our way. “And, oh look, she left the door open.”

The nonchalant way she alerts Rami and his people to our room startles them. He swings around full-body, so we’re face-to-face.

Honoria steps forward and into his turn, using her height and momentum to throw him off center. He tries to compensate, locking his grip on the rifle, but she clips him in the jaw with her elbow, knocking him down. The rest of his people, few as they are, are easily overwhelmed by Dad and Mr. Pace before the shock wears off.

Honoria tosses Dad the rifle, preferring to keep her pistol once she takes it back from the woman who had it.

It’s still hard not to flinch when I see it in her hands.

“You have a lot to learn,” Honoria growls, advancing on us. “Even the troublemaker knew to knock out the guards and lock the door behind him when breaking out.”

She nods to Rueful.

“I knocked him down!” Marina protests. “I just forgot the lock. If I’d waited until sundown, Rue could have been killed.”

“He looks fine to me.”

“We must leave here. Hastily. Immediately.” Rueful takes her mention of him as his cue to speak. “Here is danger.”

“As much as I hate to agree with the nanobot,” I say, “he’s right. We need to bug out before the bugs get here.”

“Bugs?” Dad asks.

“The wild ones are swarming,” Marina says. “Look for yourself.”

Honoria reaches for Mr. Pace’s sleeve and pulls him closer, whispering about a roof-access door.

“Get a visual,” she tells him. “Every approach line to the building.”

“Trey—with me,” he says, and they tromp off down the hall together, though Trey gives Annie an uncertain look at the idea of leaving her behind.

“I know what I saw,” Marina says.

“Me, too,” I agree.

“I saw clouds,” Rueful says. He thinks he’s helping.

“Clouds?” Rami stands slowly, edging around Dad and Mr. Pace. “That’s it?”

Marina shoves her way out from behind Rueful and me. “Rue sees it as thunderclouds breaking overhead, but it’s not rain and lightning that’s headed this way—it’s them.”

“Killers don’t move like that.”

“They tried to take us out using their host bodies, but we used the serum,” Marina argues. “They tried using the terrain, and we burned it. They tried a direct assault—Rue’s hive proved to them that they’re inferior, hand to hand. They think we’re a threat. This time, they’ll bury us.”

“How long?” Dad asks.

“I don’t know, but with the sun going down; they’ll only go faster.”

“Then we’re safer inside,” Rami insists. “With the lights on, the doors locked, and
them
out there.” He throws Rueful a disgusted look. “I’m just supposed to believe that you’re not luring us into an ambush?”

“Yours may choose to remain. Mine return to home.” Rueful takes Marina’s hand and starts for the stairs. She tightens her grip on me, so I’m pulled along.

“Yeah, I vote we leave, too,” Annie says, hurrying after. She whispers, “This is a bluff, right?”

But Dad and Honoria come with us.

“I’ve got people to protect,” Rami argues, following us. “I can’t ignore that because you—”

“Gina’s dead,” Marina blurts. He stops talking, and we stop walking. “We offered you a way to save her, but you wouldn’t listen, and so she’s dead. You killed her as soon as you locked her in that room. Now you’re still not listening, and that’s going to kill the rest of them.”

Rami races into the room where Rueful and I were chained up. I don’t need any weird Fade sixth sense to know what he’s feeling. I wonder if Gina was his kid.

“She’s silent,” Rueful says, approaching Rami cautiously. “Untormented. Other voices can be preserved, if you flee.” He’s trying to show compassion and get the man moving at the same time. “Ours will assist yours.”

“You honestly want us to go with
you
?”

Rami’s kneeling beside Gina, one hand hovering above hers but afraid to touch. With his other hand, he wipes his eyes. I feel sorry for her, but she’s dead. The rest of us still have a chance.

“Yours are welcome. Ours will inflict no damage,” Rueful finishes as Mr. Pace runs back in.

“We’ve got incoming.”

“I
NCOMING?
”
Trey scoffs. “The Dark’s on a march straight for us. They’ve all but ripped the sun down out there.”

It’s a good thing Anne-Marie didn’t go to the roof, too. Being boxed into a safe room causes her enough trouble; witnessing the wild ones close in would probably send her over the edge.

“Is there an escape route?” Honoria asks.

“None that I could see,” Mr. Pace says. “But your brother and his buddies are headed this way. Maybe they know something we don’t.”

“You’ve got more people out there?” Rami asks as he drapes a dusty cloth over Gina’s face. “How?”

“They aren’t
our
people,” Honoria says, just as a woman’s voice screams for Rami outside our door.

“Maya?” Rami yells back, shooting to his feet as the woman appears at the door, frantic and still screaming.

“Killers.” She leans on her knees, breathing hard. “Four of them, at the front door. More beyond, closing fast.”

“Like the ones who razed your Homestead?” Col. Lutrell asks.

“No—like him,” Maya spits at Rue. “They look like him.”

“Our way to home,” Rue argues.

They ignore him.

“The ones behind,” Honoria says. “Do they look like him, too?”

“They’re dragging Death with them,” Maya says. “You can’t see anything but darkness.”

Rami must not be used to making decisions in the moment. His last twenty hours have been a condensed version of our last months. He doesn’t know what to do, so he hesitates, but Honoria’s in her element.

“Elias, Trey, go down the halls and open the gas lines in the science rooms. I’ll head for the basement and see if there’s anything useful there. James, rig me a switch.”

“Localized or remote?” Col. Lutrell asks.

“I’ll take whatever you can give me.”

“We’ve got these.” He pats his pockets, locating the ones where he’s stashed flares. “I can use my alert bracelet for a timer, if nothing else.”

He tosses one flare to Tobin, one to me, and one to Anne-Marie.

“Just in case,” he says, and I drop mine into the long pocket on my pants.

“Did we salvage any phosphorus rounds?” Honoria asks.

“With our gear.”

“Good. Now, the rest of you—”

She turns on me and Tobin, Anne-Marie and Rue, glaring down with the icy stare she’s had so long to perfect. Anne-Marie and Tobin automatically snap to attention.

“I need you to—”

Rami steps between us and her.

“This is
our
facility, not yours.”

Honoria levels that horrible stare at Rami. I’ve got to give him credit, he doesn’t back down, but battles of will against Honoria rarely end in the challenger’s favor.

“Unless you’ve got a viable means of defending this location, it’s about to be
their
facility,” she says. “If we blow the gas lines, we can take enough of them down to cripple their advance. It should buy us a window to get out of here.”

We balance a half second on his pause, waiting to see which way things will fall.

“Do it,” he says.

Honoria nods to Mr. Pace again, adding, “Go. Radios on channel six. Meet up in the lunchroom.”

Mr. Pace, Trey, and Col. Lutrell leave. Rue pulls away, toward the door.

“Rue?” I ask along with Cherish’s:
Leaving?

“I must speak to ours,” he says. “We must prepare our retreat.”

“You go, she stays.” Honoria clamps a hand onto my shoulder.

She really is a gifted strategist. If I stay with her, and the rest of the humans, Rue will wait no matter what happens.

“Mine will hold the Darkness back as long as we are able. Make certain yours are ready when we return,” Rue says, and then he leaves. Maya flinches when he passes her.

“Our facility isn’t overlarge,” Honoria says to Rami. “But it’s sufficient to incorporate those of you here.”

“Our secondary Homestead is out there,” Rami says resolutely. “Maya, get the kids.”

“You’re not seriously considering this?” Her eyes flick to Gina’s covered corpse on the floor.

“We couldn’t hold the Homestead with everyone fighting. What chance do we have with one building, one rifle, no ammo, and a bunch of kids barely old enough to understand that their parents are gone for good? Get them to the stairs and tell them we’re going home.”

There’s a pause after Maya leaves. Rami remains standing beside Gina’s body, refusing to look at it. He still doesn’t want to leave her.

“Can your kids handle this?” Honoria asks. “They’re going to have to get close to the creatures like the boy who was here with us.”

This is the first time she’s referred to Rue as an actual boy, the creature part notwithstanding.

“They can do what they have to,” he says.

She nods, but it’s not so much acceptance of his answer as an indication that she’s moving on. I can almost see her thoughts as they spin in different directions behind her eyes. Each possibility shines like a silver thread. She weaves them together until they form a cohesive reality. The Fade in her body have become a tool she can access, like I do with Cherish. They’re helping her, and she’s letting them.

Dark auburn lines thread through the orange-tinted strands of her hair. Her posture straightens like someone suddenly relieved of a heavy burden. Her voice becomes stronger. I swear five more years just fell off her face.

“You three stay with their children,” she tells us. “You’re the closest thing to a liaison with the Fade that we have, and I have a feeling we may need you to get through this.”

“High ground is safe ground for us,” Rami says. “My kids will be calmer if—”

He’s interrupted by a distant rumble that turns into something much closer. The room shakes, throwing us all to the floor and toppling the remnants of Rue’s chair cocoon so that the window’s no longer obscured. I pull up as far as my knees.

Honoria, Rami, Tobin, and Anne-Marie are all in almost identical positions, staring at the now unmistakable cumulous mass of Death headed in our direction. It rolls forward, shunting more nanites to the top to bolster the outer layer destroyed by the sun. And beneath it all, hosted Fade approach at a slow march in time with the covering protecting them.

The building shudders again; a jet-black geyser bursts through the ground beyond the parking area outside the building. It streaks upward to join the cloud. The wild ones are calling on the dormant nanites we saw through cracks in the ground; they’re waking up.

“We really need to get out of here,” Tobin says.

“I agree,” Honoria says.

Her words start a scramble for the door. It feels wrong to leave Gina’s body behind in an empty room, but at the same time, it’s inevitable.

Such is the nature of Death.

The Ice Cube’s children are already at the stairs, waiting with Maya and another woman. They hold themselves together better than I expect—until they see Rami. Half of them come running to meet him.

“Rami!”

“Why is the building shaking? Is it Killers?”

“Are we going to die?”

The ones who rush him are panicked, with wide-open eyes that never blink; the rest, like Javier, share the stoic calm of those who’ve accepted their fate. They have no questions, because they know the answers.

“The Killers aren’t here yet, but they’re coming,” Rami tells them.

Michael separates himself from the silent ones, with Noor following along, her hand gripping the back of his shirt.

“What do we do?” he asks.

“Keep everyone together,” Rami says.

He dispatches the two women, but he’s cautious. The words he uses aren’t only softly spoken, but make no sense. Like their whistled cues, these are secret things he doesn’t trust us to hear.

“What shook the building?” Michael asks again.

“When you hear the signal, get them moving,” Rami says, leaving the question unanswered.

“You three stay with them,” Honoria says. She drops her voice, knowing I can hear it, but Rami likely can’t. “Our priority is our own people. Keep yourselves safe, even if it means keeping
only
yourselves safe.” She cocks her head, acting like she never said that last bit. “Understood?”

“I understand,” I say.

But that doesn’t mean I’ll do it.

She heads down with Rami, leaving the rest of us with nothing to do but wait and worry. Tobin, Anne-Marie, and I stand closer together while the others shy away from us. I close my eyes to see if I can hear what’s happening outside.

When I did this in our bunkers, it was easier. My other perceptions were mostly human then, and didn’t interfere with my concentration, but now, a toxic swirl of danger and emotion has created a vapor that’s spread to every corner. It makes it hard to concentrate.

“I wish they’d let us wait downstairs,” Anne-Marie says.

“So do I,” I say. Cherish echoes me. Downstairs, we’d be closer to Rue and the rest of the hive. We’d be closer to home and freedom.

“Why do they keep staring at us like that?” Tobin asks, but he shouldn’t have to. The Ice Cube’s children use the same expressions he used to give me. “It’s like they’re waiting for us to attack them.”

And why wouldn’t they? The last they saw of us, Rami was having them lock us up.

“Do something, Michael,” a girl in the crowd whispers. “She’ll bring the others, and it’ll be just like the Homestead.”

We are not destroyers,
Cherish says, stung.
We restore.

I thought I was done with feeling regret for others’ actions, but the guilt comes back exactly as strong as in my early days inside the Arclight. The whispers come next. I heard the same from Jove and Dante and other members of our year at school. They think if they sacrifice me, then somehow everything will become better for them.

I can’t take the blame for anything else; it’s too heavy.

“Are you really that stupid?” I storm across the short distance left between us and the Ice Cube’s children and jerk the mouthy girl’s arm so hard, she falls to the floor. That was an accident, but I’m not helping her up, and neither is anyone else. They leave her to her fate as easily as they’d toss me out the front door. “Do you really think a wild-Fade could be in here with you, and you still be human?”

“Javier said—”

“Javier doesn’t know me, and neither do you,” I tell her, letting my frustration boil over. “I’m trying to
help
you, and you’re making me not want to do that anymore. Stop it!”

I’m shaking.

“Help how?” Javier steps forward into the space between our group and his. Tobin and Anne-Marie join me, so one of them’s on each side. Three against thirty. “How are you going to get us out of here if the Killers are coming?”

“The same way we came in.”

“Through Death?” he asks, and another wave of that noxious fog rolls through me as the others whimper.

“It’s not Death,” Anne-Marie says.

“Prove it,” Javier challenges. “I bleed red, how about you?”

Tobin shifts his weight forward, onto his toes, curling his fingers into fists. “Even think about trying to draw blood on my friends, and the first drop that falls is going to be yours.”

Michael steps between them, facing Javier.

“You’re making things worse,” he said. “People are going to panic.”

“What do we know about these people? They show up out of nowhere. They
say
they’re human. They
say
they survived. They
say
we can trust them. And we’re just supposed to
believe
them?”

“Rami does.”

“Maya told us what she did to Gina.”

“I wasn’t even in the room when Gina died,” I snap.

“He was.” Javier jerks his head at Tobin. “And so was your freak friend. Where is he?”

“What do you care how we get out of here, so long as no one’s left behind?” Anne-Marie asks. Her arms are crossed, and she’s got the same tilt to her mouth that her mother uses when someone’s in serious trouble. “The sooner we leave, the sooner we all get back to where we belong.”

“Shorter trip for you, isn’t it? All you and your Killer-brother have to do is step outside and you’re there.”

Javier has just accomplished the impossible: He’s put a taste for blood in Anne-Marie’s mouth. Her aura turns to blue flames that burn darkest around her body. Even the hive reaches out to ask me what’s wrong. They can feel it, too.

“Anne-Marie, don’t.” I snatch the back of her jacket, pulling her back a step as she advances.

Vengeance.
The word weaves into the other pieces of a name the Fade have attached to Anne-Marie. Now when they speak of her, they call her
Fury
.

“Why not?” she asks.

“Yeah,” Tobin says. “Why not?”

One, we’re outnumbered. Two, knocking someone’s teeth down their throat is counterproductive. Three—

“Rue’s back,” I say.

Cherish trills, but Tobin’s breathing faster in anticipation of going back into one of those capsules to escape. He makes another fist, driving his fingernails into his palm.

“We’ll go together,” I tell him. “They’ll have to carry pairs to get everyone out, anyway.”

“I’m fine,” he whispers. “Can’t expect them to go if I won’t.”

The pulse is jumping in his neck.

“It’s no different than the Well or the spot we made in the back of the truck,” I tell him, forcing him to look me in the eye. His pupils are dilated.

“I hope it’s a
little
different than the truck.” His forced laugh is too harsh.

“Close your eyes and it’s you and me in the Well on a night without stars.”

“What are you talking about?” Michael asks.

“Our ride.”

I nod to the stairs. The youngest scream at the sight of Rue and Bolt coming up, and I knew they would—Rue and Bolt knew they would; it doesn’t faze them in the least. It’s nothing but common, even understandable, panic. It should burn itself out when the people involved realize there’s nowhere to go.

The problem is
Javier
. He’s moving against the flow,
toward
the stairs. Selfishly, even morbidly, I hope he gives them an excuse to defend themselves, and so I let him go—all the way to the wall, where he reaches for another of those hidden switch plates like the one downstairs. The one Honoria warned us not to touch.