Meridian (5 page)

Here, in the middle of the book, are the sections Honoria’s marked to be read in class.

She’s scribbled over her original entries, rewording them. She’s marked things out and replaced them, adding notes on yellow squares. She’s highlighted and underlined obsessively. Her changes support the assumptions she’s made over the last decades when the original text may not have.

I don’t know why she kept the original words. Why not rip the pages out and replace them altogether?

The last entry about Tracey mentions how the girl stole a box of pens and used them to draw lines all over her skin. I check the list and find that Tracey Malone walked into the night a few hours later. Honoria was very matter-of-fact about it—in the rewrite. She’d struck through the response she had in the moment so fiercely that it cut the page, and she replaced it with a clinical observation that Tracey’s fate was inevitable.

She’s tried to change the past, and in a way, I guess that’s what she hoped she could accomplish with me. If her attempt to uninclude someone from the Fade’s hive had worked, then it might have been possible to reclaim the world for humans and undo the damage of the last several decades. Too bad it’s harder to mark through time than ink.

The thought causes a chill I can’t shake. It gets into my blood and down to my bones. The only time I’ve felt anything close to this was when I stepped into the Dark as Marina for the first time and believed I’d walked into my own execution.

“Cherish?” I ask out loud; my voice is a victory. I was afraid
she
was the chill. That she’d figured out how to take me over. “Cherish?” I call again, but still there’s no answer.

Shadows grow from the ceiling, gathering like cobwebs in the corners and trailing toward the floor. I reach for my lamp, to raise the shade and make the room brighter, but the bulb shatters in its socket.

The shadows turn to vines, slithering over everything. They reach my beloved sister-bush. I lunge forward to save it, but my feet are ankle deep in sludge so thick, it holds me fast, forcing me to watch as the bush is ripped to shreds. The vines strip the leaves and choke the bush, filling the room with the scent of ruined roses, and then it’s gone. Nothing but leaves drifting down with the sound of my sister’s broken laughter in the background.

My pink walls scorch black. The paint blisters up and boils away. When the shadows reach the cut-out bird, it comes squawking to life and flapping for all it’s worth, but there’s nowhere for it to go beyond its page. The shadows flow over it like poured tar, leaving it struggling beneath the weight until it goes still.

And the sludge around my feet grows deeper, up to my knees.

Half the room has crumbled to nothing. The shadows become snatching fingers, ripping and tearing by the handful. Anne-Marie’s quilt goes next, soaking up the darkness to become a sodden abyss. I try to save Tobin’s snow globe, but my arms are tethered, pulled flush to the wall. Darkness descends upon the globe like settling smoke. It passes through the glass to mingle with the water, churning and spinning until it goes so fast, the glass bursts, leaving the stars to ooze over the sides and into the sludge where they sink out of sight.

The darkness is to my waist now.

Something drips onto my head, and in the mirror across my room, I watch it slide through my hair, staining it black.

There’s a flash of movement. I turn my head to check the last standing corner of my room; empty, but when I focus on it in the mirror, what I had taken for my shadow separates itself from the wall. Just a shimmer at first, slowly defining itself as the edges become clear and take on a human shape.

No—Fade-shape
. It’s a Fade coming into view, clinging to my wall, but still only in my mirror. Pale skin appears against the black background. Feathered wisps on her cheeks and short stripes wrapping toward her mouth. My eyes, only shining silver instead of flat blue.

Cherish
.

“Help,” I try to say, but cords of shadow wrap around my mouth.

This can’t happen—Rue promised. The hive only accepts the willing.

I glance to the corner where Cherish should be, but she’s not there. In my mirror she crawls down the wall, reaches out with clawed hands and breaks the vines around my mouth. She holds her finger to her lips, warning me not to make a sound, and then tears at the restraints around my arms, dropping into the sludge beside me.

She’s fighting for me. She wouldn’t fight the hive.

Once my hands are free, she dives for my feet, still unnoticed by the shadows as they destroy everything else, but they’re closing in on my mirror.

What is this?

My hive celebrates someone coming home. It doesn’t drown them. Where are the voices? Where’s the harmony? Where’re the warmth and welcome?

This isn’t right. This isn’t my Fade.

The sludge is up to my chest.

Do Fade need to come up for air? Cherish is still below the surface, picking at the bindings around my feet to free me. I can’t do anything but stand helpless. I scream as sludge pours in from all sides, quickly rising to my neck and chin and higher.

Cherish reappears. For a second, I’m staring at myself. And I’m absolutely terrified.

My own reflection appears in Cherish’s eyes, our expressions identical. As the sludge comes up, covering my mouth so that I have to struggle to keep my nose above the tide, she wraps her arms around my neck and literally goes to pieces. Her entire body becomes a shield made of nanites, trying to cocoon me away from danger, and so save herself, too.

But it’s not enough. She shatters, and we’re both washed away.

That’s when I wake screaming into the light of my bedside lamp, still clutching Honoria’s book where I fell asleep reading it, but it wasn’t Honoria’s dream I had—it was Tobin’s nightmare.

Humans don’t share dreams.

We share,
Cherish says.

“No,
we
don’t!”

Tobin is
not
a Fade. I’m no longer in the hive. I can’t share what others see and hear. It was just a nightmare.
A run-of-the-mill creepy nightmare that leaves me with the feeling that something terrible is coming.

I lay the book aside and head for my sink to splash water on my face, careful not to look up, in case the dream’s still there in my mirror.

I reach for a towel, but while drying my hands, I realize something’s missing—the sting. Between the cut from the arbor and the broken bottle, my hands should be burning. I glance down and find them impossibly perfect. The skin’s healed over, without so much as a scratch.

Humans don’t share dreams, and they don’t heal in the course of a catnap.

“Cherish?” I ask, turning my attention to my reflection. “Did you—”

My voice chokes off, startled silent by the sight of myself in the glass. I’m still human, with blue eyes and white-blonde hair, but I’d swear—just for a second—my shadow moves without me.

“Cherish?” I call again, turning to check the empty room behind me. When I face the mirror again, all is as it should be, only now I can’t lose the feeling of being watched.

I
T’S
impossible to tell time in a dream. I’ve been out so long, I nearly missed Anne-Marie’s birthday dinner.

Unlike the hinged door Tobin’s dad installed at their apartment, Anne-Marie’s is a standard sliding panel. I knock, and her smiling face appears as it moves into its pocket, leaving a clear path inside.

“She’s here,” she yells over her shoulder, and I’m yanked inside.

I was expecting something like Tobin’s house, but this one’s mostly metal and ceramic—inorganic materials considered safe from the Fade. There aren’t any rugs, and the lights are stark white. Pictures of Anne-Marie and her brother cover the walls, and while I see a few of their mother, there aren’t any of Mr. Pace.

“Mom!” Anne-Marie’s still shouting, even though her mother’s in sight. “Marina’s here.”

“Hi, Marina,” her mother says.

“Hello, Ms. Johnston.”

“None of that, now. My name’s Dominique. You two go sit down. We’ll eat in a few minutes.” Anne-Marie’s mother smiles at me before turning her head away with a scowl. “Trey! I want you out of that room in five minutes!”

She swirls past us with bowls in each hand, only stopping long enough to deposit them on a clear glass table.

“She’s, er . . . different.”

“She’s got help in the kitchen,” Anne-Marie says, tugging me over for a look.

Mr. Pace is here, but I’m not sure I’d call what he’s doing “help.” He’s picking at the food from a large bowl on the counter. When Anne-Marie’s mother warns him off, he flicks part of what he’s eating at her. She stomps across the room to take the bowl, but he hides it behind his back until she makes a grab for it, and then he pins her into a hug that quickly turns into a kiss.

Dante and Silver are bad enough, but parents?
Ew
.

“He’s over a lot more since the lights went down. Mom’s been floating.”

Arc Fall seems an odd reason to visit family, but what do I know?

“Trey, five minutes! I’m serious!” Anne-Marie’s mother pokes her head out the door of the kitchen, not smiling for the moment it takes to yell her son’s name down the hall.

“That’s his fourth five-minute call,” Anne-Marie says, rolling her eyes.

“Is he in trouble?”

“Nah. Just Trey back to his normal, antisocial self. The record’s six days, but he was sneaking out during the day to snag food, so it doesn’t really count.”

It seems like siblings should be alike, but Anne-Marie and her brother don’t even look all that similar. They’re both tall, and both dark, but while Trey turns more into a Mr. Pace clone by the day, Anne-Marie looks like her mom.

Connections are so confusing.

Not at home,
Cherish offers. I have to bite down on the response I want to give.

Thankfully, a knock on the door interrupts her at the same time loud laughter comes from the kitchen.

“Get that, will you?” Anne-Marie asks. “If I don’t set the table, those two will forget we need plates. Honestly, you’d think
they
were the teenagers.”

She heads for the kitchen with a hand over her eyes, declaring, “I’m coming in! Act parental!” while I go back to the door. So this is what it’s like to have a home that people want to visit.

We can return to home,
Cherish says.
Remaining is selfish. Stupid. Inferior.

She doesn’t usually go for insults.

“Hey,” Tobin says when I open the door. His eyes are brown—I check. Col. Lutrell’s are still silver.

“Hey.”

I want to say more, but I can’t decide what should come next. Maybe it’s Cherish sabotaging things from the inside, but every time I see Tobin now, it’s like a wall goes up between us. I swear sometimes he actually looks blurry, and when I try to talk to him, like I did in the Well, I can barely string a sentence together. I want to hold his hand, but mine won’t move.

He doesn’t move, either, so maybe he doesn’t want me to.

“Are we late?” Col. Lutrell asks.

“Not really. Anne-Marie’s mother’s sort of caught up in something.”

There’s another snort of laughter from the kitchen, followed by Anne-Marie’s frustrated groan.

“Daughter still in the room!” she shouts.

“I can imagine.” Col. Lutrell grins, winking at us as he excuses himself to go back her up. I wonder if he can tell something might be wrong with Tobin. Could he have seen Tobin’s eyes? Can he sense my suspicions the way I sense emotion? I know his hearing’s sharp, but I don’t know what other Fade traits remain with those exposed yet not included in the hive.

Maybe that’s why he led the not-rescue mission when I was taken. If he’s the colonel from Honoria’s book, it would have been safer for him to risk the Fade. He’d already lived through contact.

“I thought I’d slept through dinner,” Tobin says, but he doesn’t look like he got much rest. “Dad said I was screaming so loud, he thought I was in pain.”

“Nightmares?” I ask.

He nods, face paler than I’ve ever seen.

“What’d you tell him?”

“That I dreamed I got caught on the Arc when it was turned on, so I was burning up. I don’t know if he believed it or not.”

I wish I could get him to say more without telling him I had a nightmare myself. Maybe mine wasn’t an exact copy.

“Trey, get your butt out of that room and into this chair
now
!”

Anne-Marie’s mother sweeps back into the room with another set of steaming bowls.

Cherish leaks through, assigning Ms. Johnston a Fade-name that encompasses steam for her temper, mixed with something diamond hard and bright.

“Trouble?” Tobin asks, to shift the conversation off dreams.

“Anne-Marie claims it’s normal, but it started with a countdown and progressed to an ultimatum, so I’m not sure I believe her.”

“No, that’s pretty much normal,” he says. Everyone’s moving toward the table, so we join them.

Anne-Marie’s mother and Mr. Pace—
her father
—tote the last of the food out with Col. Lutrell bringing a large tray to set in the center.

This doesn’t smell like dinner in the Common Hall. It’s not wilted or reeking of vitamin supplements, and the plates aren’t flat squares broken into sections. They’re round and made of glass with blue flowers at the edges to match the blue glasses beside them. The plates sit on plastic mats with the silverware set out on each side instead of rolled into a napkin that smells like bleach.

“Nique’s stuff is great,” Tobin says when he realizes I’m staring at the food.

He’s said before that if it wasn’t for Anne-Marie and her mother, he’d have starved the first few days after his dad went missing. They even tried to make him move in with them, but he wouldn’t leave his apartment, or the Well it conceals. It seems a silly secret now that the stars are there for everyone to see, but neither we nor Tobin’s father have shared the knowledge of the door in their closet that leads to the Arclight’s tunnel system.

Another shiver goes down my arms, acknowledging another clue. If the colonel’s been here since before, it would explain why his room has access to the tunnels that others never knew about.

“Why isn’t Jove here?” I ask Anne-Marie. “I thought you invited him.”

“
Un
invited,” she snarls. “I only eat with people I like.”

Oops
. . . I missed another fight.

“And I
don’t
like people who tell me I look like a dandelion stalk with the fluff blown off now that I’ve cut my hair.” She stabs her table mat with her fork.

I would have thought getting his jaw broken for running his mouth once would have made Jove more careful.

“Trey!” Anne-Marie’s mother leans back in her chair to shout down the hall. This time, the scowl doesn’t ease when she turns her attention to the rest of us. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with him. Do you know he wanted me to invite the Fade who healed him to dinner? I mean I’m grateful for what it did for him, but dinner? Do they even eat?”

I cringe at the
it
and find myself mumbling an answer to her question, though I wish I’d remained silent. Cherish is fuming.

“They’re vegetarians,” I say. At least the ones who began as humans; it’s a little more complicated for the ones who are born Fade. Either way, their bodies need fuel.

“Oh . . . Marina, honey. I’m sorry. I don’t mean it like that. Trey’s just been so odd since, well, you know.”

“I know.” I nod.

“It’s driving me crazy—and it’s only getting worse,” she says. “Maybe I
should
invite that Fade over and see if it knows what’s going on in his head—
Trey!
That’s it.”

“Uh-oh,” Anne-Marie says as her mother runs out of patience. The countdowns are done.

Mr. Pace leans over and whispers something, but it doesn’t help.

“No, what I’m going to do is drag him out of that room and down the hall by his collar. I’ve warned that child. . . .”

She throws her napkin onto her empty plate, storming off down the hall, still demanding her son come out. The shouts stop, replaced by a beep loud enough that we can hear it at the table. Tobin glances down, embarrassed, and the two men snicker.

“Parental override,” Anne-Marie says. “Trey’s too old, but his door hasn’t been rewired, yet. She can still open it.”

Just as I’m debating whether or not to crane my neck and see if Anne-Marie’s mother makes good on her threat to haul Trey to dinner despite her diminutive size, a shriek from the hall stops the laughter around the table. It’s the same sound Anne-Marie’s mother made the night she thought the Fade had taken her children.

“Stay—” Mr. Pace starts.

“Here,” adds Tobin’s father.

They’re on their feet and running in nearly perfect sync, the way the Fade do, and I’m the only one who notices. None of us obey. We rise as though we all have the same disobedient thought at once and race after them, in time to catch the last of what Anne-Marie’s mother tells them.

“His eyes . . . his face . . .”

She’s got her back to the wall, outside Trey’s room, and then slides down so her weight’s on the balls of her feet. Her hands are to her mouth, holding in another scream. She doesn’t move until we try to pass her. One of her hands shoots out to grab Anne-Marie’s.

“Don’t, baby. Don’t go inside.”

Anne-Marie’s the picture of silent terror, probably as sure as I am that her brother’s dead. Dead eyes and a corpse’s face, what else would make her mother act this way? She gives me a panicked look that’s very clear: find out what’s going on.

Listen,
Cherish says suddenly.
Hear
.

But what good is it to listen if no one’s speaking?

They are speaking,
she says.
You haven’t heard. He hears.

I enter Trey’s room slowly. Mr. Pace, Col. Lutrell, and Tobin stand on the other side of the threshold, with a wide gap between them and Trey’s bed. He looks fine.

Trey’s sitting cross-legged on his bed with a pad of paper in his lap. His room’s full of discarded pages—on the walls and floor, haphazard piles of them on the desk and chair.

He drew home,
Cherish says.
He sees home. Sick.

She doesn’t mean homesick. Trey’s pictures are all sickened versions of the Dark, even though he’s never seen it. The buildings are strange and unfamiliar, the animals menacing. Fade I don’t recognize with distorted bodies, and horror-stricken people I don’t know. Trey’s still drawing in a frenzy when his mother finally collects herself enough to come inside, holding Anne-Marie behind her.

“Trey, honey, can you look at me?” she asks. “It—it’s dinnertime. Please stop.”

“Almost done, Mom, I swear.” He sounds normal enough. It’s like he doesn’t know he has an audience, and he didn’t hear her scream.

“Trey, are you okay?” Anne-Marie asks.

I’ve crept closer to Tobin, leaning my cheek against his arm; his fingers twine between mine as the air compresses from the weight of worry flowing off so many people. I could choke from the stench of it.

“And . . .
done
!”

Trey’s answer is the final flourish of whatever he’s working on. He turns to face us, beaming and displaying the image of a ferocious tusked pig surrounded by ominous shadows.

“Any idea what this is?” he asks. “Wait, what are you all doing in here?”

No one answers. No one even breathes.

Trey’s face is swirled with Fade-marks, and his eyes are gleaming metallic gold.