Arclight (9 page)

I
lay my head against the table, hoping the cool metal will numb my senses, but the twitch at the base of my skull says it’s no use. The voices are too loud, the lights too bright, and it’ll only get worse if I raise my face.

Normally, this would be the time we prepare for our first classes, but we can’t actually reach any of the rooms beneath the rubble. Our elders are understandably preoccupied, and the few adults available for handling night-to-night tasks have their hands full with the babies. The rest of us were told the rec rooms are open and we should stay inside the building. So my choices for the next several hours are either to participate in rec room games I don’t enjoy, or cling to the pain and go back to my room to stew.

“Can I sit down?”

I crack one eye open to get my bearings and have to fight the urge to use my tray as a shield. Anne-Marie stands on the other side of the table, waiting for my answer just like she did the first time we met. No act of kindness, that, just a dare to see if anyone would approach the only outsider any of them had ever known. Anne-Marie was the only one willing—and now I’m supposed to lie to her about her brother.

Memories of Trey mix with those of my first days, when it was me stuck in a bed with my arms and legs tied down so I couldn’t hurt myself. I don’t have any scars to tell me someone had to boil Fade poison out of my blood, but close enough is bad enough. For once I’m happy I can’t remember.

Anne-Marie hooks her leg over the bench and sits with her tray on the seat in front of her. She’s broken dress code and worn a hooded sweatshirt over her uniform. From the size, it has to be Trey’s. The brown’s so close to her skin color, the only real difference is in her fingernails. She’s scribbled them in green, like the flames that burned her brother’s blood.

“Headache?” she asks.

I nod against the table. This way I can’t look her in the eye.

“That bad, huh?”

“Worse.” I can’t get the smell of scorched skin out of my nose.

“Well, suck down some magic air and get it over with. You can’t be sick today.”

Like the inhaler smoke can fix everything. It didn’t do Trey any good.

“Don’t wanna.” The medicine dulls my mind as well as the pain, replacing my brain with something sluggish. I don’t want my perceptions diluted; people who lie to their friends deserve to be in pain.

“Come on, Marina. I want to go back for seconds before the guys inhale everything that’s not oatmeal. Either the freezer’s down, or they feel bad for all the duck and cover yesterday. Someone broke out the
real
sweets today.”

Anne-Marie picks up a plate of baked goo in a flaky crust and shakes it at me so a blob of amber jelly falls out. I grimace at a similar one on my own plate; it doesn’t look appetizing in the least, and it smells like the vomit on the hospital floor.

“Last time we got real sugar, Jove and Toby chomped through half their body weight. They were sick for two days, but it was worth it. There was this thing called coconut cake—it was amazing. You couldn’t even taste the vitamin syrup hidden in it. I’m going back to see if someone made one this time.”

“Coconut? You mean like cocoa?” I ask. They gave me that in the hospital; it’s one of my first good memories.

“You are so weird.” Anne Marie smiles through a mouthful of goo.

Her whole tray’s filled with dessert. Mr. Pace was right, telling her about Trey would spoil this for her, and if she can’t even see him yet, there’s no reason.

“And look . . . coffee! It’s been a year since there was a crop big enough to make coffee, and they said we were too young then. I got three cups just in case someone decides we still are.” She frowns at the taste before dunking a chocolate cookie and shoving the whole thing in her mouth. “Much better.”

Anne-Marie’s enthusiasm crosses the table, chipping through my misery, and I end up picking at the crust of my flaky thing.

“Try it,” she says. “I’d never steer the new girl wrong.”

Food vanishes into the shadows created by her hood as she talks, and only the lightest parts of her eyes and the edges of her hair are visible where her curls reflect the fluorescent lights.

“I’ve been here for almost two months. I’m not that new,” I say. I’ll play along if she wants to pretend nothing’s wrong. If she’s controlling the conversation, there’s no chance for me to mention Trey.

“You’re the first survivor who’s ever reached the Arclight,” Anne-Marie says through another bite. “Trust me, you’re new.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand and picks the stray crumbs off her fingers. “You’ll probably die the new girl.” She realizes what she said too late to stop the words. “I don’t mean you’re going to die. I mean . . .”

A spray of sticky debris flies out of her mouth as she splutters over her mistake, and the next thing I know, I’ve been attacked by a lemonade-soaked napkin as she tries to wipe my face.

I reach for the only thing I know she’ll respond to and pull my inhaler up to my mouth. She jumps back, while I breathe through the ring longer than I should.

“Sorry.” Her natural energy takes a nosedive.

“What are you apologizing for?” Dante’s voice comes from behind us, with no indication of how long he’s been there. I take another breath from my inhaler to give myself a reason not to answer him. “You’re right. She’ll die the new girl, and we’ll all go with her. Right, Fade-bait?”

Dante acts like he might sit, but a loud clang at the far end of our table makes him change his mind. Tobin drops into his seat, with a silent warning to move along written in the way he glares.

“I’d hate to waste a dessert day where the smell turns my stomach anyway,” Dante says, backing down. “Coming with us, Annie?”

“Of course I’m coming. That’s why I sat
here
instead of
there
. Moron.”

“Catch you later, Fade-bait.
Without
the guard dog.”

He turns and heads to a table across the room where his friends are waiting. One scans our table and makes a motion with his hand like he’s clearing the air from something that stinks. The others laugh.

“Idiots,” Anne-Marie says.

“A lot of idiots,” I grumble.

“That’s what happens when too many people share one brain. Dante used to be a nice guy, before—”

She lets the word hang. Apparently a lot of things were different before.
Nice
before.
Good
before.
Still living
before. And every one of those sentences ends with me.

“I didn’t mean it, Marina,” Anne-Marie says. Her lip trembles as she totters on the edge of another meltdown.

“I know.”

“Really . . .”

The only diversion I can find is the odd mass on my plate, so I stab it like I hate it.

“You don’t like cobbler?” she asks, taking the nudge.

“I’ll tell you once I figure out what it is.”

Tobin snorts from his end of the table. He certainly knows what cobbler is; he’s already taken bites off three different pieces.

I poke at the mass of jellied fruit in front of me, peeling back the layers with my fork. Red liquid catches a crack in the plate, tracing it to the edge.

“You want the apple instead? I’ll trade if you don’t like cherry,” she offers.

I shake my head no. Cherry’s interesting. It’s warm and sticky, like running blood without the horror of death attached.

A shrill whine and flickering lights cut my musing short. The alarm on my wrist flashes straight from green to violet, and all the noise I found so confusing stops.

People scan the room to its edges, searching the shadows for darker things.

Only three or four blips pass before it’s over. Silver’s voice carries through the empty air, telling a joke that isn’t funny. Nerves make everyone laugh, but we credit the joke, and everything starts over. The chatter, the tink, tink, tink of fast-moving forks and spoons, the slurping and swallowing just to have something to occupy our time.

At the end of our table, Tobin’s lost interest in his desserts. He’s carving swirls into his tray with a pocketknife.

“They’re just resetting the grid, to make sure it wasn’t damaged yesterday,” Anne-Marie says.

I don’t think anyone believes her.

Fingers drum. Toes tap. Legs shake. The room’s attention keeps drifting back to me—one here, two there, never at the same time. Some glare, like Dante, while others foster a foreign hope in their expression that disappears as quickly as it forms. A few haven’t come out from under their tables. No one told us to get under, but a dozen or so did it anyway.

The lights flicker again, and this time they cut out completely. I clap my hands over my ears, anticipating the scream I know is coming.

“Get down.” Anne-Marie pulls my pant leg from under the table. Now I’m the only one
not
hiding.

Everywhere I turn, people are huddled together in the pale glow of mounted track lights around the edges of each table. They’re lost without orders from an elder, and all looking at me.

What do you expect me to do?
I want to scream.

“Stay in the light,” Anne-Marie pleads.

Light is safety; light is life
.

Tobin’s less civil; he grabs my arm and yanks hard. I tumble down, so close to striking my head on the table that it skims my hair as I fall into his lap. My bad leg takes the brunt of my weight, making me bite my cheek to not cry out.

“Stay down, and stay close,” he orders.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “About the hospital.”

Not the best time to apologize, but it’s what I’ve got.

“And stay quiet,” he says.

“I’m trying to apologize.”

“The rest of us are trying not to die.”

“If I annoy you that much, I’ll go cower elsewhere.”

I lean up to crawl away, but Tobin drags me back down.

“Ow!”

“Sorry,” he says, loosening his fingers. “But it’s not safe.”

He’s right. A violet light isn’t a good thing, or a calm thing. I shouldn’t be in such a hurry to get away from him, not when he’s the one who watched my back last night.

“Why do you even care?” I ask.

“I don’t know.” Barely a whisper.

Tobin scoots back, making a small gap between us. He crosses his arms over his chest, turning sideways to watch the door. That’s how we stay until the alarm stands down to blue, the lights return, and we all take our seats.

Tobin retakes his station at the far end of the table; I slink back into the spot across from Anne-Marie. We chew through our cobbler-things mechanically. Anne-Marie doesn’t say a word.

This is our aboveground evac point if we can’t reach the bunkers, and being here feels like we’re closer to Red-Wall than anyone wants to admit.

“I’m going for a walk . . . maybe to the rec rooms,” Silver says, breaking the stifling silence. It’s an idea the others take up quickly—the rec rooms are closer to the security hub.

She and Dante start the exodus. They clear their trays, scrape the gunk into the trash, stack them on the counter. Always slow, calculated movements that don’t quite succeed at looking normal. They reach the door, and another group stands. Whole tables vacate, but no one walks alone.

“Annie,” one of Trey’s friends calls back just before she escapes. “Come with us.” She checks over her shoulder to make sure the others haven’t left without her.

“Marina, I don’t want to get left behind,” Anne-Marie says, tray in hand.

“Go on.” This is my chance to actually talk to Tobin without all of the extra eyes and ears. I have a hunch he won’t leave the room until I do.

“But—”

“Annie, move it!”

Anne-Marie gives me one last, pleading look, tosses her tray, and runs for the exit.

I switch seats, taking one directly in front of Tobin.

“I’m sorry,” I say again. The annoying throb in my skull returns as my nerves get the best of me, so I suck in a quick breath through my inhaler to stop it before it gets worse. Tobin glances up, watching, but doesn’t say anything. “I’m sorry about the Arc. I didn’t want to interrupt you, or have you think I was following you, so I hid.”

“You didn’t turn me in,” he says.

“Whatever took you out there was personal. It wasn’t Honoria’s business.” We both know I’m talking about his father. “What you said to Jove was personal, too . . . I shouldn’t have listened in. I still don’t know what to say or do most of the time, and I keep choosing the wrong thing.”

He continues staring at his tray, tracing the same lines over and over with his knife. This feels like all those times in class, when there was so much fury in him that it spread across the room, slashing at me without his having to move at all.

“I don’t understand you, Tobin. One minute you act like you hate me, and the next you’re going out of your way to make sure I’m safe. Why?” Normally, I’d have accepted his silence by now and backed down, but I press on, my brain buzzing from my inhaler meds. I really shouldn’t have taken so many hits off of it so fast. “Is it what Mr. Pace said? You think this is what your dad would want?”

“You don’t know anything about my father or what I’d do for him.” He hunches down, tracing faster.

I guess I hit a nerve.

“If you think you can just sit there and ignore me, you should know I’ve been around Anne-Marie long enough to know how to talk someone into submission.”

The knife in Tobin’s hand stops midstroke. He shoves the tray hard enough to send it skidding off the far edge of the table, and he’s gone before it stops bouncing side to side off the floor.

The steady blue blink lights up the tables. The soft vibration of my alarm itches my wrist until I have to pick at it. And I’m suddenly very aware of being alone in a big, empty space where every sound echoes back to the center.

I sail my tray through the air toward the others before going back for the one Tobin abandoned. Red sludge mixed with amber coats the main compartment. Beneath it, four words are etched into the plastic, scratched over and over with his knife.

“I promise”
is cut the deepest, as though that was his first thought. Then below it, in a shallower groove, “
For you.”