Arclight (36 page)

Authors: Josin L. McQuein

Tags: #Speculative Fiction

BOOK: Arclight

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“Rue did it . . .” My arm drifts up, incredibly light for as heavy as I feel everywhere else, and I reach for what had been the point of impact on his chest. Even though it’s buried beneath crisp white hospital pajamas, I know the wound is gone.

“Yeah, he did,” Tobin says.

“You said he, not it.”

“It’s hard to think of someone as an ‘it’ once they’ve saved your life. Even if the only reason he did it was to make you happy.”

“He did it because it was the right thing to do.”

“If you say so.”

It takes a couple of tries to get my momentum going, but I manage to prop myself up so Tobin and I can truly face each other.

“What are you staring at?” he asks.

“No eye shine.”

I’d worried that Tobin’s injuries were too severe or complex. The nanites Rue lent him could have left him marked in a way he’d think worse than the bullet.

“There was at first,” he says. “I wasn’t a fun guy to be around when I woke up with them in my head. They’re too cheerful—like Annie on too much sugar, and twice as loud.”

“The voices?”

“Everything started to dissolve after Fade-boy took his crawlies back. They’ve backed off to static now, and Dad says they’ll stop altogether after a while. Look.” Tobin leans closer and pulls the collar of his shirt aside; the nanite lines that had appeared while he was healing have vanished, leaving a neat circle of shiny pink tissue. “They even fixed my shoulder while they were in there.”

“Rue’s gone, isn’t he?”

It’s not a surprise. Even if he never physically suffers at the hands of our elders again, he’d be trapped away from the hive and forced to endure the constant reminder that I didn’t—couldn’t—choose him. For Rue the Arclight means only torture.

“He left after I woke up,” Tobin says.

I tell myself it’s okay, Rue is where he belongs, and I’m as close to that place as I can get for now—sitting in a hospital bed, shaking fake stars from a water-logged sky. A yearning echo comes from the backmost recesses of my mind, where Cherish’s memories—her essence, maybe—have settled. She’s still there, separate, but hopefully that will change.

“How are you awake before me?” I ask. “I had like three cuts on my hand. Honoria shot you point-blank in the chest.”

“Doctor Wolff sedated all of us . . . just to make sure, you know? Mr. Pace says we were down for a week, but you’ve been out days longer. I think he double-dosed you. Supposedly tomorrow’s the day they turn us loose.”

I’ve been so focused on me, Tobin, and the immediate space around us, that I completely overlooked how packed the hospital ward is.

Col. Lutrell and the others who had been left to die in the Dark occupy most of the beds, some sitting up, some lying down. A group of three are playing cards on a table pulled between them. They’ve lost the chalky pallor from being in the Dark, but Tobin’s father, Elaine Crowder, and one other still have the distinct eye shine that came from having the Fade in their systems.

There will never be another night without Fade inside the Arclight.

Anne-Marie sits cross-legged on the foot of Jove’s bed while he’s in the same position at the head. He must have said something to annoy her, because she throws a handful of whatever she’s eating at him and he responds in kind. From there, it’s all-out war with bits of snack food flying in barely aimed lobs. They’re both laughing by the time their mothers try to break it up, but Anne-Marie and Jove join forces, turning it into a two-on-two fight no one wants to stop. The presence of relief in the room makes me feel like I’ll float to the ceiling at any moment.

“I guess we missed the fallout,” I say, curious about what happened when our year-mates came out of hiding.

“Silver and Dante said things were pretty crazy for a couple of days when people started coming back. Dante’s parents wouldn’t let him in the house or around his little sister. Honestly, I’m kind of glad I slept through it. I’ve had enough crises for a while.”

“Yeah.” I reach for the inhaler no longer around my neck, out of habit rather than need. Heartache has replaced headaches. I can still feel the hive out there, as close as my own breath.

Honoria was right about the connection being for life, no matter what. Thanks to Rue, it’s a life that’s mine to define for the first time. There’s no way to reciprocate for that.

Wait . . .

“What happened with Honoria? Did they do anything to her?”

“There’s not much they
can
do. The White Room’s trashed, and there’s no other holding area besides the hospital. Mr. Pace and Doctor Wolff have pretty much stepped up to replace her, but unless they turn her out, they’ve done all they can.”

Tobin looks suddenly uncomfortable. He takes the snow globe from my hands and pitches it back and forth between his own.

“She wants to know when you’re awake,” he says.

“Why?”

If there’s another apology coming my way, it’s too soon. She might regret hurting Tobin because he’s human, but I refuse to believe she regrets shooting him. I’ve heard it out of her own mouth—making a mistake doesn’t deter her from trying again. The others may think she’s not dangerous, but I know better.

“I don’t know,” Tobin says. “She doesn’t say much to anyone. She just comes to the door and watches. Usually, she’s got that old white ball of hers. I think she’s living in that office underground, Marina.” He rolls his shoulder as though it gave him a twinge, even without the injury. “She really thought I was a Fade.”

“I know.”

“No one knows what to do about her. No one remembers the Arclight without her . . . they all knew. My dad, Mr. Pace, all the adults knew she’d been around that long, but they weren’t supposed to tell us until we aged out.”

She’s my inverse. I had too few memories; Honoria has too many. Centuries’ worth of fear and hiding so strong she still can’t cross the Arc herself. It’s no wonder she’s nearly lost her mind. Who wouldn’t?

“Those scars she showed us were nothing,” Tobin says. “She’s been trying to kill off the Fade in her own body since she was a kid in the first days. She experimented on herself with light and heat and chemicals, but nothing worked for long. She’s been aging at a crawl. Dad says they’re not sure if she can even die.”

She’s been torturing herself as much as anyone else.

“Her brother, the one with the wicked-looking marks on his face, keeps coming back. I think he wants to help her understand, make peace . . . something. I’m not sure he can; I’m not even sure we should try after everything she’s done.”

“Of course we should,” I say. “If we don’t we’re no better.”

The bandages, the IVs , they’re all useless, so I unwrap them, wincing as I pull the needle out. Rue’s nanites have repaired the damage I did to myself; it’s like it never happened. Only my memories tell me different.

Thanks to Rue, I’m getting those back, too.

I miss him . . . not just Cherish, but me, and in the space between heartbeats, I hear him say the same:
I miss your voice
.

“So what do we do when we get out of here?” I ask, wondering if the blush I feel on my skin is actually visible.

“Probably go back to class.” Tobin sighs, but “back” isn’t possible. Nothing’s the way it was before. “Mr. Pace and some of the other teachers tried to get permission to have lessons in here, since we’ve been out so long, but Dr. Wolff refused. They say everything outside’s normal again . . . well, almost.”

He raises his wrist alarm from his lap and holds it in front of my face. It’s dead. I twist so I can see the light above the door, but it’s not blinking either. It’s glowing green.

“Half the Arc’s been down since Annie and the others broke the lamps. After the first few nights, when the Fade didn’t attack or even appear, people started to wonder if there’s a need to keep hiding. The ones that work are still on, so it’s not pitch-black, but they say you can see the stars now. I think I want to see for myself.”

“Me, too,” I say. Maybe next year, when the stars fall like they did in the Well, the Arclight will look like that picture on the front of Tobin’s magazine, with everyone outside sharing the experience. The stars won’t be our secret anymore, but we can still keep the Well.

Tobin goes back to absently tumbling the snow globe.

“How’d that get here?” I ask.

“Mr. Pace brought it to me. I thought you might like see it when you woke up.”

He tosses it over, and I give it a shake, watching the little stars swirl while the hospital lights shine through the glass. We used to live like that—stuck inside, where nothing was quite real.

Nature’s righting itself. Light and dark can exist in their own spaces, side-by-side, and so my world still consists of three.

Cherish, the me-I-was, who knew only darkness, and refused to succumb to the void, even after she’d been buried. Marina, the me-I-became, who knew only light, and found that it hid viler things than even shadows dared. And the me-I’ve-yet-to-be, bought with the blood and sorrow of strangers, and friends, and those can’t be called either because neither is sufficient to explain them.

I’ve become the Grey, suspended at the point between two worlds, touching both and being neither.

Through Rue, the me-I-was still exists somewhere undiluted by a vessel too small to contain it. Surely in that great and vast expanse, there’s room for him to find someone else. My world is so much smaller, and I did. Tobin may not know the name I can no longer speak for its complexity, but the meaning of it is there in the way he looks at me. The concern mixed with joy; hope spread over worry, all swirling around like stars in water.

Or maybe I’m looking at it wrong. The world’s no longer stuck in a jar, or contained to places deemed safe. It’s as vast as a night sky, and as big as I need to be.

There are no boundaries anymore, only the promise of something new over the horizon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JOSIN L. MCQUEIN
was born and raised in Texas. Now she and her three crazy dogs live in a town so small the buffalo outnumber the people, and things like subways or consistent Internet access are fictional creations of a faraway fantasyland known as civilization.
Arclight
is her first book.

www.josinlmcquein.blogspot.com

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CREDITS

COVER ART © 2013 AND COVER DESIGN
BY CHRISTIAN FUENFHAUSEN

COPYRIGHT

This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used to advance the fictional narrative. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

Epigraph excerpted from “Darkness,” by Lord Byron

A
RCLIGHT
. Copyright © 2013 by Josin L. McQuein. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McQuein, Josin L.
Arclight / Josin L. McQuein.
pages cm
“Greenwillow Books.”

Summary: The first person to cross the barrier that protects Arclight from the Fade, teenaged Marina has no memory when she is rescued but when one of the Fade infiltrates Arclight, she recognizes it and begins to unlock secrets she never knew she had.

ISBN 978-0-06-213014-3 (hardback)
EPub Edition March 2013 ISBN 9780062130167
[1. Amnesia—Fiction. 2. Identity—Fiction. 3. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M478829Arc 2013

[Fic]—dc23 2013002929

13 14 15 16 17
LP/RRDH
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

FIRST EDITION