Arclight (11 page)

“Don’t make it mad,” Silver begs.

“It recognized me,” I say. “It knows me from before.”

“Answer her!” Tobin torques its arm higher over its head. “What happened to the people you took in the Grey?”

Do not injure
. I hear again.
No pain
.

The Fade’s eyes close. Its fists uncurl, and even the rise and fall of its chest goes to nothing as the sound of running boots flies around the corner and we’re left at the center of a fast-forming circle of our elders.

The world’s gone upside down.

This Fade knows me. It remembers me from when I was lost in the Dark, and because it remembers, it’s surrendered and asked me not to hurt it.

It’s afraid of me.

“O
H
my God.” Lt. Sykes stops cold at the sight of us on the floor. For once, his high whine of a voice is welcome.

“Get them out of there,” Honoria shouts.

Silver lets go as soon as Mr. Pace touches her shoulder. Dante and Anne-Marie hold on until they’re sure there’s another pair of hands ready to replace their own, but it takes two men to pull Tobin off.

That just leaves me, shivering on the Fade’s chest and unable to let go of its robes.

“It wouldn’t tell me anything. I tried to make it tell me, but it wouldn’t.”

“She’s in shock.” Honoria starts prying my fingers open one at a time. “Take her.”

Mr. Pace grasps me about the waist, lifting me backward.

“No. It knows me!” I refuse to unlock my knees.

“Ease up,” he says. “This is one of those things you need to let us handle.”

“But—”

Honoria takes my face in one hand. “Marina, I promise you that if there’s a way to make it communicate, we will. You’ve done more than enough.”

I nod, letting Mr. Pace pull me away.

He deposits me with the others at the far end of the hall, a mix of anger and panic clouding his face. I’m sure the last thing any of them expected to find when Anne-Marie tripped the alarm was a bunch of kids soaked through and sitting on a Fade in the middle of the Arclight.

I chance looking at the others, expecting the usual disdain and suspicion to have amplified in the wake of this disaster, but there’s a spark there instead.

Hope
.

Silver rests a hand against my shoulder, squeezes it quickly, then pulls back. Anne-Marie hauls me closer, and this time, no one flinches away. They move me to the middle, so I’ve got a guard on all sides. I’m not the enemy anymore.

“Is it . . . is it dead?” Silver asks.

“You killed it.” Dante says, staring at me. “You really did.”

“But I didn’t do anything.”

The Fade
chose
to shut itself down; all I did was try to retain my sanity while it made me see and feel things that weren’t happening.

We all stand clinging to one another, our hair dripping as our elders take possession of the Fade. Though the careful way they handle it speaks to how little confidence they have in their ability to hold it should the Fade decide it doesn’t want to be dead anymore. But it stays inert, even when Lt. Sykes nudges it with his boot.

Honoria stops him from removing the Fade’s loosened facial covering. “Not here,” she says. “Get that thing down to the White Room. And somebody get this water turned off!”

He nods, not at all happy that he’s going to have to lift the Fade with his own hands. He takes a deep breath, and signals for help.

“Did you draw blood on it?” Honoria asks me harshly. She slips the silvered pistol she’d been using as a pointer back into her waistband.

“I hit it with the door,” I blurt. “But it didn’t bleed.”

“Show me your hands.”

I hold them out to her without hesitation, turning them so she can see both sides. Honoria examines them closely, checking my fingernails to make sure I didn’t take any of the Fade’s skin away beneath them. After another inspection of my branded wrist, she seems satisfied, and lets go.

She turns to the other woman, whose name tag reads
M. OLIVET.
“Where do we stand?”

“All the living areas locked down,” M. Olivet says. “The kids headed back to the check point in the Common Hall.”

“Take Tran and Miller and get a head count. If anyone’s missing, find them.”

“Should we move people to the bunkers as we clear them?”

“Not so long as there’s a chance we’ll be locking our kids in with another one of those things. Take them to their parents. Pair the singles off with upper-years.”

“Got it.”

“And I want to know how that thing got into my compound. It should have tripped ten sensors before getting this deep.”

M. Olivet hurries out, giving her a curt nod.

“Get them back to their rooms,” Honoria orders Mr. Pace. The furious red tint that had overtaken her face recedes. “Annie can go to the hospital. Dominique’s already there with Trey.”

“What’s wrong with Trey?” Anne-Marie asks.

“He had an accident,” Honoria says.

Anne-Marie darts forward, but the adults won’t let her pass.

“You are not roaming these halls alone, Anne-Marie Johnston,” Honoria says. Her voice never softens, and her posture never relaxes; I’m not sure she’s capable of anything short of harsh.

“Trey’s asleep,” Mr. Pace says. “He won’t know if you’re there, yet.”

Anne-Marie starts in on her fingernails, ripping them with her teeth.

“Is anyone hurt?” Mr. Pace asks “Cuts, scratches, anything?”

I shudder at the thought of Trey and Portman, and the only way to “treat” someone poisoned by contact with the Fade.

“We’re okay,” Dante says through chattering teeth. “Marina killed it.”

“I didn’t—”

Oh, never mind. No one’s listening to me.

“Tobin, what happened to your head?” Mr. Pace reaches for the rising welt on Tobin’s forehead; Tobin knocks his hand away.

“It threw me into the wall.” He points to the slight dent where he hit.

“I don’t think it made contact with anyone,” Silver says. “It was all covered up so the light couldn’t get to its skin . . . it has skin, right?” She turns a strange shade of sickly pale at the prospect of the robes and bindings holding together a loosely packed mass of organs and arteries.

“They’re clear,” Mr. Pace says to Honoria Whit.

“Everyone get to where you’re supposed to be. We’re on alert until we get this sorted.”

She tromps off down the corridor, back the way she came.

“You’d think she’d be happy we won,” Anne-Marie whispers.

“I don’t think she’s ever happy about anything,” Silver says.

Personally, I think “won” is overstating things. We lived through the confrontation, and the Fade gave up. That’s not the same as winning. If we’d won, we wouldn’t be at Red-Wall.

Lt. Sykes glances at me as he and the other guards prepare to take the Fade away. “The girl shouldn’t be by herself,” he says to Mr. Pace. “If there’s one, there could be more.”

Not something I want to hear.

“Tobin,” Mr. Pace says. “Keep her with you until I come back.”

Also
not something I want to hear.

“Why me?” Tobin asks.

“Because if you’re doing this, you won’t be doing anything else—including trying to get another crack at that thing.”

“You don’t have to—” I start to argue, but Tobin runs over me.

“Fine.”

No, not fine. I am not fine with this.

“Mr. Pace—”

“You’re both alone, and frankly, I don’t trust either one of you with anyone else. Get inside, and stay inside. That was most likely a scout, so it was probably alone.”

I’m not so sure.

The idea that another one could be lurking on a wall or over a random door makes me shiver.

“You should be back in your own space in a couple of hours,” Mr. Pace says. “Do
not
kill each other before I get back. Silver, Dante, stay together and set the locks. Annie, let’s go.”

Silver and Dante go deeper into the domicile wing, while Mr. Pace leads a subdued Anne-Marie toward the hospital.

“Come on.” Tobin takes my sleeve, guiding me back to the door I used to bash the Fade’s face. He grimaces as he pulls it open, struggling to make it stay on its hinges. His eyes shift downward, scanning the bottom, where it hit the Fade’s body, to make sure it’s clean.

We force the door into place and slide the locking bolt to secure it, leaving me with whichever version of Tobin decides to keep me company, and the knowledge that somewhere there’s a Fade inside the Arclight.

“This is where you live?” I ask.

Unlike most of the residential areas, Tobin’s is more home than barracks. The floor’s laid with mismatched and uneven pieces of carpet, the walls covered with wooden planks from floor to ceiling. This isn’t the plastic-and-steel monotony I’m used to. It’s real furniture, uniquely beautiful and arranged in a semicircle of chairs and a worn-out couch.

“My dad didn’t like the industrial look the place had when it was assigned,” Tobin says. “So he copied a page out of a picture book. It took him years.”

No wonder Tobin doesn’t want to give this place up.

“He even switched out the door so it’s got hinges instead of a slider like the rest of them. He put it in backward, though. It’s supposed to open into the apartment, not the hall.”

“Lucky us.”

Without the door, I’d have been defenseless out there. Tobin’s father saved us all. Again.

“Yeah . . . lucky,” he mumbles.

Considering what’s just happened, and everything that came before, we should have plenty to talk about, but words don’t come. I fidget with my inhaler, grateful for the excuse to use my hands for something. Tobin favors his right leg as he drops into a cushioned chair.

I don’t talk to him. He doesn’t talk to me. Together, we don’t speak, until he leans forward to pick at his bootlaces, and an all-too-convenient topic of conversation presents itself.

“You’re bleeding.”

A
patch of dark red spreads along the base of Tobin’s neck, stemming from his shoulder; it wasn’t there when Mr. Pace checked us over. The split in his jacket’s so neat, I couldn’t see it until he moved, bunching the material, but blood’s soaking through the khaki green of his uniform.

“Get your jacket off,” I say.

He’s on his feet, snatching at it to get a better look, and ends up turning in a tight circle. A thin red line runs from under his sleeve before dripping off.

That’s no simple scratch or scrape.

“It bit you.” Those three words take my breath away.

“No it didn’t,” Tobin says. He’s not giving me an opinion; he’s begging. “Its mouth was covered.”

“Then it slashed you.”

“Maybe it’s not mine.” He tries to get the jacket over his head without unfastening it. All the awkwardness falls away as I pop the clasps one flick at a time.

“Toss it,” I order.

The jacket lands several feet away, and for a moment all we do is watch it, as though it could hop up and run away on freshly sprouted legs, but we don’t have time to waste.

I reach for his shirt, shaking. What bled through his uniform was only the tiniest indication of what lay beneath, where the material’s clinging to his skin. His blood’s warm and slick, slipping through my fingers while I use the torn shirt to clean his shoulder. All I can do is keep wiping and hope I live up to my Fade-proof reputation.

“It’s bad, isn’t it?” he asks, swallowing at the sight of the mess in my hands. He recoils from his own blood, caught by the conditioning that tells him what’s been touched by the Fade is tainted. “Can you see anything?”

Yes. I see blue carpet stained with red blood. There should be more left of a person than a splotch on the floor, but if this goes bad, that may be all Tobin leaves behind.

“It’s not a bite.” I throw his ruined shirt into the pile with his jacket and prod the wound with my fingers, brushing aside the chain for a set of dog tags he had tucked inside his clothes. “No jagged edges. It actually looks pretty clean.”

Except for that same halo Portman had on his hand. I glance at the bandage over my burn and find it soaked with black encroaching on it, too. I rip it off, relieved there’s nothing but clear skin beneath.

“There’s a callbox in my dad’s room,” Tobin says. “The yellow button’s for the hospital.”

“You can’t go anywhere.” Something horrible lies down that road; I’m certain of it. Mr. Pace wouldn’t have been so panicked over Honoria seeing Trey if there wasn’t. “You’re still bleeding.”

“Can you fix it?”

There’s too much hope in Tobin’s expression to believe he only means the cut.

“Do you have any matches?”

“What for?” The suspicion is back in his voice. That’s the Tobin I know and lo—

Well, that’s the Tobin I know, anyway.

He listens, numb, as I recount what happened with the brush fire, Trey and Portman, and what it takes to purge the Fade.

“You want to set me on fire? I don’t like that plan, Marina.”

“The Fade poison burns up and flakes off as black ash. Black like what’s on your back.”

“You’re sure?”

“Would you rather wait until Mr. Pace comes back and ask him yourself?”

There’s an edge in his eyes, a challenge on his tongue for the sharp tone he’s not used to, but he snaps his mouth shut and heads into the kitchen. I hear him slamming cabinets and banging drawers. When he returns, it’s with a large knife, an oil-fueled lantern, dishtowels, and a first-aid kit.

“Show me.” Tobin taps his foot near where his blood’s spotted the carpet. “If you’re right, we have to torch it anyway.”

The carpet’s haloing; I get what that means now. The patches of blood on fabric are no longer red, they’re dark as ink. And the stain . . . the poison . . .
the Fade
is spreading. It branches from each spot, creeping across the carpet like rings of charcoal frost on water.

I strike one of the matches and let it drop. A flash of green sparks on contact, and Tobin stumbles back, repulsed by his own blood.

“That came out of me?” he asks.

When the flame dies to a weaker yellow, I stomp it out under my shoe, leaving clumped ash behind. The stink of Fade rot hangs heavy in the air.