Meridian

First published in the USA 2014 by Greenwillow Books,

a division of HarperCollins Publishers

First published in Great Britain 2014 by Electric Monkey,

an imprint of Egmont UK Limited, The Yellow Building,

1 Nicholas Road, London W11 4AN

Text copyright © 2014 Josin L. McQuein

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First e-book edition 2014

ISBN 978 1 4052 6395 5

eISBN 978 1 7803 1183 8

www.egmont.co.uk

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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EGMONT

Our story began over a century ago, when seventeen-year-old Egmont Harald Petersen found a coin in the street. He was on his way to buy a flyswatter, a small hand-operated printing machine that he then set up in his tiny apartment.

The coin brought him such good luck that today Egmont has offices in over 30 countries around the world. And that lucky coin is still kept at the company’s head offices in Denmark.

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

CHAPTER THIRTY

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

CHAPTER FORTY

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

Egmont Press: Ethical Publishing

CHAPTER ONE

TOBIN

We’re at Day 49 AF—days since the Arc fell.

Almost two months ago, a group of kids with rocks took down the security lights that had guarded this compound for generations, and the Fade walked through. No one died. No one was stolen away to the Dark. In fact, it was the opposite. They brought back the people we’d written off as lost.

Everything changed, but you’d never know it the way things have settled.

Walk the perimeter. See nothing. Report nothing.

Test the lights.

Walk the perimeter. See nothing. Report nothing.

Lock step and follow orders.

Training for a security position should involve more action, but that’s all been past tense since the night my friends and I brought the Arc down.

“Twenty-seven?”

Mr. Pace’s voice crackles through my radio, at the same exact second he calls every night.

“Present, Teacher,” I say, using a voice I know he can’t stand.

“That wasn’t even funny the first time.”

“Present, Elias ?”

“Tobin . . .”

“Sorry.”

“And I’m pretty sure I’ve warned you about lying to a superior, too.”

“So write me up for apologizing. I dare you.”

He’s got no one to report me to. With our former leader, Honoria, hiding in the lower parts of the compound, he’s as high up the chain of command as you can go.

“Keep it up, and I’ll do you one better,” he says sourly. “I’ll tell your father.”

Okay, that would be worse than the write-up.

Things have been weird with my dad since he came back from the Dark. I don’t mean to avoid him, but the Fade are in his eyes, all silver and shiny—everyone sees it, and everyone whispers when they think he can’t hear them. It’s worse being in the same house and wondering if the hive sees what he sees. Thinking about it makes my skin crawl, and that reminds me of them, too.

We’re supposedly in a state of neutrality with the shadow crawlers, but I can’t shake the idea that neutral is a code word for something we haven’t anticipated.

“You have to take this seriously,” Mr. Pace says. “It’s not a drill anymore.”

“Assign me something more interesting than watching the sun set and I’ll take it as seriously as you want.”

“Interesting is overrated. And stop staring at the sun; you’ll go blind.”

“Would that get me another assignment?”

“The system’s about to cycle.” Mr. Pace sighs. “Keep your eyes on the perimeter and off the flaming ball of solar gas.”

“Yes, sir.”

I wish the cameras were online. I’d salute, just to piss him off.

The radio goes quiet, matching the rest of my assigned perimeter stretch, only quiet never makes it all the way to silence anymore. I can’t say for sure that my hearing’s sharper since he did his little magic trick and healed the gunshot wound that should have killed me, but I’m definitely more aware of my surroundings. I listen harder and look deeper. I never take for granted that what I see is all that’s out there. And I never forget that the white nightmare drew blood long before Honoria did. If he hadn’t recognized Marina when we went hand-to-hand outside my door, he wouldn’t have stopped with slashing me across the shoulder. He probably would have taken my head off.

Marina never thinks of him as anything other than “Rue”—short for rueful—“sorry .”

More like sorry-ass.

He’s a walking pile of genetically altered apologies with a broken heart. She swears he never intended to hurt anyone that day he took on five of us, but it’s not that simple. Thanks to the emergency share of his nanites, I know that the Fade don’t hate humans, but I also know that there is one Fade who does hate me . I know exactly how close he came to saying no when she begged him to save my life.

He still wouldn’t have gotten what he wants. Me dead wouldn’t make Marina more Fade or less human.

I stop at the center of my assigned route, something I’ve done often enough to leave footprints.

“Ready,” I say into my radio, and start a mental countdown. The lights in my section go through a prearranged pattern of tests before blazing full bright. In my head, it’s set to music. A billion notes blended into the current.

“How’s it look?” Mr. Pace asks.

“Same as yesterday.”

Things repeat so often around here, I’m surprised I haven’t been hypnotized.

“Good, then the reroutes haven’t done any new damage.”

Most of the damage Annie and the others did to the lamps was superficial, only requiring new bulbs and covers, which would be perfect except that while it was happening, the techs panicked. They thought the problem was more complex than broken bulbs, and they tried to force more power into the lights, causing massive shorts in the system by routing too much voltage. Now all that damage has to be unraveled like a giant, layered knot.

“There’s a pulse headed your way.”

“I’ll be here.”

I step back from the perimeter, and wait for the heat.

A pulse is exactly what it sounds like. Mr. Pace takes each section of the boundary in turn and sends high power bursts through the lamps, so we can highlight any points weak enough to buckle. The bulbs come on so strong and hot that they cook the fog right out of the Grey for several feet around the Arc. There’s something about the uncovered desolation that gives me chills, even though I’m sweating from the burn.

It’s depressing. Lonely .

On the short side of the Grey, where Annie and I had crossed to go after Marina, the Dark’s so close that you can see it, even through the fog. When the lights go bright on that side, the trees shudder from the shock, but here, there’s nothing. The Dark sits below the horizon, dipping out of sight in the extreme distance. It’s easy to pretend there’s nothing out there beyond rocks and tree stumps and trash that’s blown into the Grey as a reminder of the world before.

“What’s the damage?” Mr. Pace asks.

“They’re holding.”

“Good. I’ll give you a heads-up before the full-perimeter burn.”

“I’ll be here,” I say again. The lamps cut off, leaving me with a predusk sky for light.

Time for target practice.

They don’t give trainees guns, but I can improvise. I bend down for a couple of stones that are just big enough to fit my hand. There’s a felled tree with its roots sticking up that I’ve been using the last few days. From my angle, the roots form an almost perfect circle.

The first rock hits the tip of a root about an inch from the center, sending a rain of dry dirt shaking off; the second clips one off the outside ridge. I reach for a third and pitch the rock high, but it must have been cracked. It splits into pieces that drop to the ground, except for one that bounces off something midair. Suspicion creeps up my neck, ticking the back of my ears.

It hit a tiny root, I tell myself. Or a knot on the trunk that’s just out of sight .

I crouch for another stone, then fling it sideways, two feet off the ground. This one hits something, too, but not my stump. The rock bounces off something beside it. Something invisible.

“Bring up the lights,” I whisper into my radio, standing slowly, my eyes skimming the Grey for any hint of shimmer that would tell me a Fade’s using the fallen trees for cover.

“We’re still checking other sectors, Tobin.”

Anyone from Marina’s hive can walk safely up to the boundary now. The curious ones come every night. So why would it hide?

“Is this a drill?” I ask

“These are the same tests we’ve run for the last week. I’m not sure—”

“Not the lights—out in the Grey,” I say.

“Did you see something?”

“I didn’t see anything—that’s the problem.”

Maybe it’s shy, I think, or scared . It could be a kid, like Marina’s little sister, but staying camouflaged is asking for trouble. It’s not even full dark. Why would it be here so early?

What if it’s more than one? We could be surrounded.

I’m going to kill Silver for skipping out on patrol and leaving me alone. Then I’ll have my new invisible friend heal her, and I’ll kill her all over again.

I take another shot at the stump, aiming for the opposite side—nothing but air, so I turn back to where I’d hit before. The rock goes sailing, but at the point I expect an impact, it changes direction. Something’s batted it away.

A stick snaps in two, displacing the dust around it, though I can’t see the foot that must have stepped there.

“If this is you getting back at me for joking around, tell me now,” I say into the radio.

“I’m not doing anything,” Mr. Pace says.

Maybe it’s him, come to keep an eye on me.

“Hey!” I shout. I move forward but don’t cross the Arc. Staying on my side of the line makes me feel better, lights or not. “I know you’re there!”

I pick up another stone.

“We’re the same height, Nanobot. The next one’s coming straight at your head!”

The invisible something moves again, shuffling away so fast that it bumps my target, snapping several of the roots. This isn’t Rueful. If he wanted to screw with my head, he’d have dropped the invisible act right beside me, just to prove he could get close enough to do it.

“Tobin!” Mr. Pace is shouting. I must have tuned him out.

“I’m here.”

“I heard. Can you confirm it’s Marina’s buddy with you?”

The lights come up.

“It’s not him, but there is something,” I tell him.

“Sykes is headed your way. Scope it. Tell me what you see.”

When Rueful came for Marina in the hospital, Mr. Pace was able to track him with the infrared from his rifle, so each trainee was assigned a light to use in situations like this. I forgot, the stupid thing’s been hanging off my wrist the whole time.

I aim the beam at the stump.

“There’s . . . nothing . There’s nothing there.”

I sweep the light side to side, up and down, but I never see more than the targeting dot against rocks and brush. Another dot appears next to mine, and I turn to find Lt. Sykes has joined me.

For a second I think he’s on my side. He’s got his rifle tucked in tight to his shoulder, with serious concentration on his face. He gives the Grey a much more thorough check than I do, turning the search into a grid and covering each section in a square pattern, but ultimately, Sykes drops the rifle to his side and picks up his radio.

“It’s clear,” he says. “If there was anything out there—”

“There was! I swear.” I sound like a kid throwing a fit.

“It’s gone now,” Sykes says, staring at me, but he’s not listening to me anymore. “No trace.”

“The stump has plenty of traces,” I say, pointing to it.

Sykes turns around and walks a few feet off, but my hearing’s a lot better these days.

“He’s exhausted, Elias,” Sykes says. “The kid’s got circles under his eyes dark enough to pass for Fade-marks, and his posture’s shot. Anything he saw, if he saw anything, could have been in his head. I don’t want him on the perimeter. Not like this.”

“Agreed. Send him home.”

When Sykes turns to deliver the message, I’m right behind him.

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop, kid.”

“You’re not old enough to call me kid, and I’m not hallucinating!”

“No one said you are.”

“That’s exactly what you said!”

“I said you’re exhausted, and that’s the truth. You’ve been covering your duty and Silver’s for days—we’ve noticed. It’s burning you out.”

“I can—”

“You can find your friend and tell her to pull her share of the weight, and then you can take a nap. But first show me which stump, so I can scrape for samples. Being exhausted doesn’t make you wrong.”

Maybe not, but the possibility of being right makes me never want to sleep again.

CHAPTER TWO

MARINA

I chose to work in the Arbor, I remind myself. It makes me happy .

But right now, it makes me annoyed. Someone took my stepladder—again . Every time I have to track it down, I end up off schedule, so I thought using an upturned bucket made sense. But it was stupid. Really, really stupid and wobbly.

I still have to stand on my toes and stretch to reach the branch I need to sample, but if I can tip myself just a little bit more, my shears should be long enough to—

“Ow!”

The bucket topples out from under me, and the falls sends the points of my shears into my hand. But I got my trimming. Ha! Take that, ladder thief !

I can’t stop myself from checking the blood.

It’s red. Nearly two months from my last breath off my old inhaler, I still bleed human red.

I hold my hand down, watching the drops run and collect on my finger, ready to drip onto the potting soil below. A million billion bits of genetic code that could tell me what the color my eyes and hair would be had I been born human rather than turned into one.

Blood remembers everything. It could tell me the name of the father I still don’t know, but it just hangs there, turning tacky in the Arbor’s humid air.

You should be more careful, a snide inner voice taunts. Humans are imprecise .

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the day while the rest of the Arclight’s still sleeping. My dream-fogged brain tries to convince me that my skin’s the color of ash and that what thrums in my veins is thick and black, teeming with the tiny machines that used to fill and form my cells.

On those early mornings, it all comes back. I smell flowers and know my little sister’s close. The sting of pine needles tells me my mother’s there. All the layers stemming from the Fade’s connection to one another wrap me up in a whirlwind of comfort.

I remember my real name. I’m the warmth of a new day filtering past the Dark’s canopy, and the promise of adventure on an errant wind. Cherish, and cherished. I belong.

Then the hive’s voices dull, falling away until only Rue’s remains.

Never alone, he said, but his final words to me were a promise he couldn’t keep. I’ll always be alone. No one else has ever been Fade, then human.

In the end the moment passes, and I’ve lost everything.

I always lose.

“Stop it,” I say out loud, bracing myself against the workstation. The s comes out as a hard hiss. “Go away!”

I plunge my hands into a bucket of irrigation water, watching the blood sink to the bottom among the falling silt.

You go is the answer I get.

Weeks ago, when I was released from the hospital, I told Dr. Wolff and Tobin and everyone else that I had control of myself after the suppressant was out of my system. I didn’t know it was a lie. My memories were trickling back, but they brought something else with them—Cherish .

I thought she was an echo. I’d say or do something routine but feel a twinge or hesitate because it didn’t actually seem normal. Something as insignificant as sitting down with a tray at meals or opening my mouth to speak to Anne-Marie felt alien and uncomfortable.

That’s not how we eat, I’d think. That’s not how we speak .

As my memories returned, they were the memories of a Fade. I thought my brain was just having trouble filtering, but it escalated. I’d reach for a fork at my next meal, and my fingers wouldn’t move. I could see the fork, and I’d want to pick it up, only something interrupted the brain signal required to do it.

That’s not how we eat, my inner voice insisted, until I finally realized it wasn’t a memory. Something inside me was trying to control my movements. Something that still thought of me as part of a hive—the voice never said I, it always said we .

The Fade are dual creatures. They can exist as an individual or as part of a hive mind, and the residue of the life I left in the Dark was still trying to make me act like a Fade. Cherish was trying to send me back to the shadows.

Things would be so much simpler if I could talk myself into taking the suppressant again. One puff off my old inhaler, and Cherish would drift back into stark-white nothing; I’d forget she ever existed. But if I let go of her, I lose my family and Rue.

I don’t know what to do.

I can deal with Cherish for another day. Just one. Just today. If I keep telling myself that, I may string enough days together to last me the rest of my life.

I dry my hands, reaching for the bulky gloves I’m supposed to wear.

Cherish doesn’t comment, but I know she hates them. Fade prefer to feel the soil, and it’s usually easier to humor her, but today she’s being difficult. She doesn’t get her way.

“Good children of the Arclight don’t search for ways around the rules,” I tell her. “We do our jobs and move forward.”

We are not the Arclight’s good child .

“I will be,” I say. I can’t be a Fade, but I can be the best human girl I can be. I have human responsibilities to the Arbor; she won’t distract me from them anymore.

The creatures are here again, she says smugly.

Sometimes Cherish is more sixth sense than annoyance. She notices things I don’t, by virtue of the enhanced hearing I never lost. I’m busy snipping and cataloging leaf samples in jars, but she’s hearing the swish of a cat’s tail through air.

Something whisper-soft brushes against my legs, weaving around my ankles in a figure eight. I bend down to pet it.

“I wonder if those came from Mom’s monsters.”

A real voice startles me as Tobin’s boots shuffle into sight on the other side of the work-station. Even if Cherish heard him come in, she wouldn’t tell me. She doesn’t like him.

“Hey,” I say, as though it’s not odd to see him down here.

“Hey.”

He smiles, reaching out to stroke the cat’s ruff. It springs free with a hiss at the first touch of his fingers, and he laughs.

“Definitely Mom’s. They always hated me.”

He told me a story once, about how the cats in the Arclight came from his mother’s efforts to save a litter of abandoned kittens she’d found outside the boundary as a girl. He takes the Arbor cat’s disdain as proof that his mother left a mark on this place beyond the research Honoria used for my so-called cure.

“Is the shift over already?” I ask. I could check my alarm band, but I’ve spent weeks breaking myself of the habit of answering to that stupid screen on my wrist. I’d rather get my information elsewhere. Somewhere not controlled by the people who nearly killed me.

“I’ve been sent in search of Silver. She didn’t show up for rounds, so she’s become their latest excuse to get me away from anything interesting or important.”

“That bad?”

He shrugs.

“If you need someone skilled at watching lights flick on and off, I’m your guy.”

I toss my cut branch into an envelope, stick a label on the front, and set it aside with my other samples. Someone else will come to test them again, but they’ll do it after I’m gone. That way, they think I won’t realize they’re watching me.

“Have you seen her?” he asks.

“Silver doesn’t come down here.” Since hiding in the tunnels with Rue, she breaks into hives at even the mention of the Arclight-below. She claims she caught claustrophobia from Anne-Marie.

“Didn’t think so.” Tobin hops up onto the workstation

“Isn’t sitting down the opposite of finding someone?”

“I asked Annie first, and now she’s got me looking for Dante, too.”

“Which means they’re together,” I say.

“And not wanting to be found, so I consider myself on break. I thought I’d see if you wanted to be on break, too.”

Cherish suggests the Arclight’s good children don’t take breaks.