Arclight (5 page)

I pause to rest against the sign listing the procedure for finding a broken light, and spare a quick glance to the station at the middle of the hall to make sure the emergency call’s still in one piece. It’s weird not to have my alarm on my wrist. The band isn’t heavy, but it’s always there. The steady bump of the bracelet in my pocket with each step becomes a talisman to keep me focused until I reach my door and lock myself inside.

I dispose of my blood-soaked clothes and wash off before digging out the blue pajama shirt and pants assigned to kids in my year. I fall into bed and close my eyes, but the individual generators are louder than the main power supply, causing slight vibrations through the wall.

My brain refuses to calm, jumping from one frantic thought to another. If the Fade can make it through the Arc at high power, what’s to stop them from coming in during the day while we’re all asleep? In the place I came from, did we live our lives at night the way we do here? Was I odd there, too? Did I have friends?

I lie awake counting holes in ceiling tiles, and wonder how old I am. Fifteen to seventeen is Dr. Wolff’s best guess. Two years isn’t a wide spread, but it seems wrong to not know.

Everything
seems wrong.

I pull my blankets over my head and try to shut the world out, but it blocks the thrum of machinery within the walls, and I can’t stand the silence, so I kick the covers loose and climb out of bed in the dark.

The Arclight trains its children to fear the dark, but I can’t fear the familiar. Darkness is all I know, and the passing weeks don’t change that. I don’t remember a world before the fluke of my survival was deemed a miracle.

I don’t
feel
like a miracle. I feel like a scared and lost little girl who doesn’t remember how to find her way home.

It has to be a mistake—the Fade are too powerful. They rip down walls with their bare hands. I can’t be stronger than that. No one can.

I stare at myself in the mirror and don’t know what I’m looking at. A face, of course. Eyes for seeing, a mouth for talking, and nose and ears for all the rest. The parts I get, but not the whole. I’m a puzzle with the pieces still jumbled.

Everyone looks like someone here. Anne-Marie has dark skin like her mother and brother, with the same eyes and mouth. My yearmates share features common among themselves, but no one looks like me. Silver’s hair is blonde, but not the white of sun-bleached stone. Dante’s eyes are blue, but his are dark and wide; mine aren’t. Honoria and Lt. Sykes are fair, but at least they have freckles. A paleness clings to my skin, no matter how long I stay in the sun.

How far did I run to be so different?

I don’t know, and that’s terrifying.

My first memory is throwing up. Retching over the bed rail in what they later told me was the hospital. I sat up and looked around a room I didn’t know, saw the backs of people I couldn’t name. I couldn’t even name myself.

“Where was she found?” Honoria’s voice was the first sound I heard other than my own sickness.

“Klick and a half into the Grey, on the short side. She was hiding in the water.”

Honoria talked with others in a huddle off to the side. A fog around my brain made it impossible to think straight or understand what they were saying. It was only later that I was able to sort the words into real sentences.

Putrid water and black bile hemorrhaged out of my mouth, clearing the Dark from my body, and by the time the spasms calmed, I barely had the strength to wipe my face, so someone else did it for me. That was my introduction to Dr. Wolff.

“Easy there.” He peeled me off the bed rail, laying me back against a pillow, but I was convulsing too hard to lie still. “It’s the medicine, but it’ll get better. I promise.”

All I could see clearly was white clothes and a man with brown skin and no hair. Everything else was a blur of flat walls and the intrusion of shapes in front of them.

Where am I?

The words sounded right in my head, but when I tried to speak, it didn’t work. I knew what I wanted to say, but my tongue was too heavy to twist around the syllables.

Why am I here?

“Don’t try to talk, yet,” Dr. Wolff said. “Your vocal cords are raw.”

I didn’t know what that meant, and couldn’t ask, but I still tried.

Where are the others?

There had to be others. I couldn’t be the only one left.

A glass came close to my mouth, resting on my lips to give me a drink. Fresh water was a foreign thing after what I’d thrown up. I couldn’t get the bitter taste of the Dark out of my mouth, or the smell out of my nose.

Why am I alone?

My questions came with tears that did nothing to cool my cheeks. My leg burned where it was bandaged, my throat was seared from screaming questions, and my skin flared every time someone touched me. I was on fire.

“Calm down, sweetheart, no one wants to hurt you.”

Please . . . let me go. . . .

“Do you remember me?” another voice asked. Now I know it was Mr. Pace, but then it was just more noise.

Someone took the glass away, and I was back on the pillow.

“You had us worried, kid. But you’re home now.” Lt. Sykes’s voice wasn’t as comforting as Dr. Wolff’s, and he lied. I wasn’t home. Home wasn’t that bed and that pain. Home didn’t hurt. There were no strangers who hid their faces or their voices from me. Home held no secrets.

I tried to scream what I wanted, but there was only volume and no words. I cried, stretching toward my wound as well as I could manage.

“I’ll give you something for the pain. It’ll help you sleep,” Dr. Wolff said.

Something jabbed into my arm before I could make them understand I wanted to stay awake and aware.

“You’re safe here, Marina. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”

My whole body stopped, and my last thought before I lost consciousness was:
Who’s Marina?

I’m still trying to answer that question.

The face in my mirror feels smooth and cold, without the contours my fingers find on my flesh. Stray thoughts and half-pictures fill my head, memories maybe, and I smack the glass, as if it’s my reflection’s fault for keeping secrets.

And then I scream.

It isn’t intentional, but I can’t stop it once the pain starts. I dig the fingers of one hand into my scalp, as I puff another breath from my inhaler to kill the sudden headache. Something hot stings my leg, and my calf snaps like an overstretched rubber band. Sharp, shooting fiery pains rage through the muscle even after I’m on the ground.

I reach for my inhaler again and resign myself to needing the hospital after all. I just don’t know how I’ll get there.

One . . . two . . . three
. . . I count off the dosage as I breathe the medication in.

During a pause, low and softer than the machine hum in the walls, comes a
click-clack
—a sound that doesn’t belong in my room, or anywhere else within the Arclight. I turn my head from side to side, but I don’t see anything.

Click-clack. Click-clack
.

When I stop, it stops.

Three
. . . no, I already did that one . . .
four
. . .

Click-clack. Click-clack
.

It’s a real sound, slithering its way through the echo of the security system, and filling the gaps between generator hums. I open my mouth to call for help, but all that comes out is a cloud of white vapor that leaves me hacking.

I slam my hand down to hit the alarm on my wrist, only to remember too late that I’m not wearing it; it’s still by my bed. Slapping raw skin is almost as painful as the original burn, but I swallow the scream.

“Thanks, Mr. Pace. Thanks a lot,” I whisper.

Sanity breaks through and tells me I’m imagining things. I’m exhausted and overloaded with adrenaline, like what Tobin told Anne-Marie. My blood sugar’s crashed, that’s all. . . .

Then my wall begins to move.

I see it first from the corner of my eye, just a hint of motion like a flickering candle. The wall’s surface melts to form an outline of something hanging between the wall and ceiling, clutching at it with clawed hands that clack against the surface when it moves.

There’s a Fade in my room.

It drops to the floor in a whoosh of flared robes, still wearing the wall’s texture. Boiling smoke churns around its legs as it advances through my space. The pattern on its skin and clothes transitions to match whatever it passes, and unless I catch it just right, the creature’s as invisible as our lessons say. My lamp takes a step, then turns into my bed; back into the wall as it reaches the middle of the room.

The only sounds are my skipping heart and hitching breath. Fear and life . . . I’m still alive, and it’s still moving.

Its hands, wrapped in tight cloth, turn dark. Its face is the same, covered so only a pair of burning eyes peek out—silver rimmed in red.

I want to shout that this can’t be real and drive the monster back to the shadows, but the dull ache in the back of my head says I’m wrong. My shaking hand raises my inhaler from habit, but the Fade takes hold of my wrist before I can reach my mouth.

“Do you understand?”
There’s no volume or voice to the question, but I hear it in my head.

“L-l-let go.”

An odd, pervasive chill coats my arms everywhere but the one patch of skin on my wrist that sears like it’s being burned again.

“You’re hurting me,” I say, as though a monster can be moved by words.

“Do you understand?”

Each time it speaks, my wrist burns hotter. Much more and I’ll black out.

“Do you—”

“No, I don’t understand! What do you want from me?”

Stupid question. Stupid, stupid, stupid question.

Instinct takes over, and I’m wheeling, jerking, punching—anything to loosen the creature’s grip. I kick through it, hitting air where there should be a solid body. I scream, and don’t stop, raising my pitch until my voice threatens to mangle the inside of my throat, hoping to drive the monster away.

The red rims of its eyes bleed toward a silver center while what I assume are its eyebrows pull closer together. I throw all my weight behind one, hard kick, setting my aim for the very solid arm holding mine. But it lifts me off the ground by my wrist before I make contact.

“Let go,” I order through clenched teeth. My life won’t end like this. I didn’t survive the Dark to die in the Light. “What do you want?”

“Help,”
the Fade says finally, releasing me so I fall to the ground, where the world shatters into a thousand shards of light as I sit up in bed and pull my blankets from my face.

There’s no Fade. The room’s as bright as ever, with sunlight streaming through the sheer curtains, and my alarm’s right there on the side table. Under the covers, my leg’s fine, if a little sore from last night’s escape; my wrist is the only thing that really hurts.

I let my body crash back against the pillows, wondering when the nightmares will finally end.

T
HE
world consists of three things: the Arclight, the Grey, and the Dark.

The Arclight is human territory, existing under the protection of perpetual day. A solid wall would create shade and shadows, so we have a barrier of light. Massive lamps embedded in the ground and mounted on posts and buildings shine through the night to keep us safe. We’re packed inside with buildings and gardens, a few pens for dwindling animal stock, and stories of the world that was. They say it takes more than a day to walk the perimeter, but I’ve never tested the theory.

The Grey is a wide expanse where our lights blend with the darkness beyond, a buffer zone created when those who came before set a ring of fire to clear the brush and flatten anything that could be used for cover. That was before we knew the Fade could fade, and we thought we’d see them coming.

The Dark is lost to us, filling the gaps on the map between areas of light. To get from one to another, you must first believe there’s somewhere to go. And should you be so stupid as to believe that, you still have to cross the Dark and pray the Fade can’t see you any better than you can see them. That was the mistake my people made, and now there’s nowhere left to run. Only the Arclight remains, and I’m its only immigrant.

A dozen men and women risked the Grey the night I ran out of the Dark. Nine of them never made it back, including Tobin’s father and Jove’s mother. They were all volunteers who had no way of knowing if the anomaly on the perimeter sensors was human or not. All they had was hope, and all they found was me. One stupid teenager who didn’t know where she was going, or why she was alone. I just saw light and ran toward it.

Light is safety; light is life
.

The first rule of the Arclight.

The second rule is that things taken into the Dark don’t return. It’s not an official rule, and our elders have tried to make me an exception, but it’s not easy overriding programming that’s been in force for generations. Maybe if I knew what happened out there, I could make them understand that I’m no different than they are.

Mr. Pace said once that I should count my amnesia as a blessing, like the truth could be worse than what I imagine piecing together the fragments, but any past is better than the void, no matter how horrible the details.

After hours of attempting to force myself back to sleep, I give up. Inside doesn’t feel safe anymore, so I break the third rule and go outside alone.

Outside is beautiful. It’s alive and green in a way that doesn’t mean mold or mildew like it does inside. It’s warmer, without the taint of recycled chemicals in the air to make me choke, and sunlight replaces the stark fluorescent glare from the halls, giving my skin a healthier glow.

I toe my shoes off and toss my socks with them, not wanting anything between me and the ground.

Trees, kept manicured in narrow shapes and planted far enough apart that they can’t make true shade, make up the Arclight’s orchard. It’s definitely meant for necessity rather than beauty, but here and there, something breaks ranks: a stray branch cuts out at a sharp angle or drags low enough that I can pull myself up for a better view.