Meridian

CHAPTER FIVE

TOBIN

Marina twitches, ready to jump up, but Annie’s hand nails hers to the desk.

“This is how things work,” Annie says.

“How they stay broken, you mean,” Marina mutters, pulling her hand free to tuck it under her arm. Her other hand tightens its grip on the towel, but she doesn’t argue.

She should—and a lot more.

Honoria’s twisted truths nearly forced a war between us and the Fade—one we would have lost.

“This is her first chance to make it right,” Annie says. “I want to know if she takes it.”

“You think she will?” Marina’s hoping for a yes, I can tell, but she should know better.

“This is how we find out.” Annie shrugs. She pushes off the desk to replace the shattered juice bottles with new ones from the room’s snack dispenser.

“You don’t have to stay,” I tell Marina.

“I want to,” she says. “If Honoria’s going to lie, let her do it to my face.”

It wouldn’t be the first time.

I take a seat beside her on the desk, too tired to stand without moving. Every time my eyes relax, they conjure up shapes and shadows in the corners. I shake my head and focus on the front of the room, where the lights are brightest.

The scene’s surreal. Aside from Annie and the juice stains, it looks exactly like it did the day Honoria gave our class this speech—right down to the cookies and the cushions on the floor. The patches on the kids’ sleeves are the ones we wore. Honoria’s holding the same book she read to us. We could be watching a recording of that day, her voice is so similar.

“Sky’s gotten worse since he saw Dad beyond the safety fires. He wanders a lot, talking to himself. He doesn’t eat and doesn’t sleep. I catch him staring out the windows into the darkness, and I know we’re going to lose him, and soon.”

“Are you awake?” Marina asks, and I realize I’m drifting.

I was out of it just enough that the sequence Honoria read played out in my head, as though it was happening in real time.

I blink, and Marina’s hair turns to tarlike sludge dripping down her face. There’s an ocean of it all around, so deep that only the kids’ heads are above it. It’s over my ankles.

I wrench backward to pull my legs free, but they’re clean and dry, and the room is normal again. No one noticed a thing—except Marina.

“Tobin?”

“Sorry,” I say, lowering my feet off the desk. “Dozed off.”

She looks at me weird, but only for a moment before turning back to Honoria. I look for something sharp to hold in my palm. If I can squeeze it, the pain will keep me awake.

I don’t remember Honoria tearing up when she read this to us, but she is now. The light pinging off her eyes turns them shiny. It’s an illusion, but it makes me shiver.

She does the same and has to take a drink of water before she can read more.

“It’s how Tracey acted before she changed,” she says, monotone now. “And how Major Gardener used to stare before he went after his wife. Sky’s not listening to real people anymore. All he hears is Jimmy, and Jimmy’s been gone a week.”

Marina’s enthralled. This all new for her, and she’s probably hoping Honoria will share something worth her attention, but she won’t. Honoria won’t even admit what she is—not here.

Her eyes don’t glow like a Fade’s, but she’s not completely human. She’s a freak of nature. Frozen, like the memory of the people in that book. Too many of our elders use that as an excuse for pity.

Her snapping was understandable, they’d say. It’s remarkable she fared so well for so long .

What a load of crap.

They’re lazy.

They’re so used to her doing the hard things and making the difficult decisions for them, they’ve put her on a no-fault system. Whatever she did, she had a good reason .

They’ve forgotten how to think for themselves.

Even Dad, with his: She was a kid, too, Tobin . She made mistakes . You don’t know what it took for her to become the woman she is .

Like he knows.

How can he buy into it, knowing she was going to let him rot outside the Arc? She hasn’t done a thing to keep people off his back when she’s the one person around here who could.

So his eyes turned silver—So what? Why can they accept her and not him? She’s had Fade in her blood a lot longer than he has.

Her eyes are silver now . Lines spiral out across her face to match the ones creeping down the walls .

I have to shake myself awake again.

Honoria’s rules won’t last. Not once our group ages up enough to have a real say in things. We brought down the Arc; we can bring her down, too.

These kids are already questioning her.

“But we know the Fade aren’t dangerous anymore,” a boy near the front says. No one in my year would have had the nerve when we were his age.

Honoria’s attention goes straight to him, as though he’s spoken some blasphemy. She turns her book in her hands, so that bits of gold and silver catch the room’s overhead lights where metallic lines are embedded in the shape of a bird and a bell. The gilded pages glint along the edge.

“Is this normal?” Marina asks.

“No.”

Usually, Honoria doesn’t stop talking long enough for anyone to pick out the holes in her story. And in a normal year she doesn’t lose their attention, but as Annie paces the room, doling out refills, the whispers start again.

One kid says her older brother is taking her out to the Arc, maybe even across it—Does anyone want to come? Another says he went far enough into the Grey that he couldn’t see the compound. Each claim gets bigger, counting numbers of steps as proof of bravery until the contest is settled by a boy in the back.

“I touched one,” he says. “I went right up to him and shook his hand.”

“Where?”

“When?”

“Which one?”

“A week ago,” the boy says. “And you know—him . The weird one.”

“They’re all weird.”

Marina cringes and says something under her breath I can’t hear. She’s locking down.

“They don’t mean you,” I tell her, squeezing her fingers so I don’t press her hand by mistake and make it bleed again. “You’re human now.”

“I know,” she says, but I think she means something else. She’s watching the boy at the back, like everyone else, including Honoria. The kid doesn’t even realize he’s the center of attention.

“The one with the slashes on his face and arms,” he says.

Schuyler .

Marina calls him Bolt, but his real name is Schuyler. He told me. I’ve never told anyone that I heard him speak because he didn’t say it out loud; it was a one-time thing. It’s not worth spooking anyone. I know, and that’s more than enough.

Honoria’s hands tighten on her book. She clears her throat, and the whispers stop. The kids all look ashamed, caught in the middle of breaking a rule.

“The Fade are being hospitable at the moment; that doesn’t make them less dangerous,” she says. “Appearances of safety often mask unknown dangers.”

She glances at Marina, and Marina’s still grumbling. If Honoria doesn’t stop baiting her, she’s going to regret it. Anyone who can find the guts to hold a burning knife to my skin and save my life can find a way to do worse and save her own.

“You know what—forget this.” Honoria pitches the book onto the floor beside her. “I don’t need my journal to tell you what happened.”

Her journal? That’s a new one.

When Honoria gave us this speech, she told us it had been found in a scrap heap and that we should be grateful there was an account of what had happened. This group gets one less lie.

Annie rejoins us in the back, but she sits cross-legged on the floor, like she’s one of the kids hearing this for the first time. She holds a bowl of cookies on her head so I can take some.

My hands are corpse white, smudged with charcoal lines. Annie’s hair sprouts long tendrils that wrap around her neck—choking her .

“Toby?” she asks.

How can she talk when she’s being strangled?

“Toby! I said, are you done?”

I shake myself again, and my hands are still in their gloves and still in the bowl. Annie’s looking up at me from the floor, like nothing’s wrong, because it isn’t—not for her, anyway. Sykes was right. I’m losing my mind.

Annie puts her bowl in her lap.

“What’s going on?” Marina asks, nibbling on a cookie.

“Two hours of sleep in four days,” I remind her.

“Then go home.”

“Not a chance.” I jam three cookies into my mouth. Maybe the sugar will keep me awake.

“I didn’t live here when I was your age,” Honoria says. “This was the military base where my father worked. He made wondrous things; good things. In the beginning the Fade were a tool meant to help people.”

“He made the Fade?” a girl asks.

“He created machines called nanites that were so small, they could fit inside a cell and unravel disease. Sounds like a good idea, right?”

They all nod.

But they can’t see what I see. Their shadows are pacing the wall, moving without them.

“I thought so, too,” Honoria says. She keeps swallowing, pausing for half beats in the wrong places. “But someone made a mistake, and they malfunctioned. My father tried to fix them, but the machines moved faster than he could. It wasn’t long before they covered everything.”

I remember us being the ones uncomfortable when I was listening to this as a kid, but now she’s the one who’s jumpy.

“No one called them the Fade, then; that came later. We called them the Darkness. The Shroud.”

The whole story comes out a halt, a skip, and a falter at a time. I wonder if she’s ever told it all before. How she was at school when the alarms went off and everyone thought it was drill, until the trucks rolled by and they knew it wasn’t. Her dad came home shaken but telling her everything was fine—then he disappeared.

My head droops toward my chest, and my cookies fall from my hand to the desktop. I know I’m falling asleep, but it’s getting harder to fight.

“Hey!” Marina punches my arm.

“Thanks,” I say. The sting stops the crawling tingles I feel every time my eyes close. Honoria’s still droning in the background.

“Men from the base came to our school. They pulled me and my brother aside to ask us questions. The kind they’d only ask if something had gone so wrong, they couldn’t make it right again.”

“She should have told us this,” Annie says. “It’s better than the book.”

Maybe it is. I don’t know. Everything’s spinning.

“After that, my friends changed and disappeared. It spread. The world fell into a panic, all because my father thought the Fade were harmless. They’re not . This base thought it was secure. Nothing is .”

“So we should still be afraid of them?” No idea which kid said that. They’re all a blob of uniform blue with too many heads smashed together, bobbing in black water.

“Go home,” Marina says to me. “You’re about to drop.”

She looks like a Fade. But if she’s a Fade, she’ll go back to the Dark .

“Tell Rueful it won’t work.”

“What?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

She’s human again. White-blonde hair. Blue eyes. Marina, not Cherish.

“Nothing to worry about,” I say.

Is Honoria still talking?

“Vigilance isn’t fear. Keep your eyes open and be familiar enough with your surroundings to recognize changes if they come. Never forget that it was a single mistake that put us all over the edge. Now get out of here and go home. No classes tonight.”

The kids stand. Some are happy they can skip out on class, but the rest—the majority—aren’t smiling.

“Do you still want to go out?” asks the boy who had met Schuyler.

“No,” the girl beside him shakes her head.

“How about you?” he asks another kid. “I bet he’s there.”

This one says no, too. He shrinks from the braver one. The one he’ll never forget has touched a Fade.

“Tobin!” Marina shouts in my ear. Annie swats my leg.

“Huh? D’you say something?”

“Snap out of it, Toby,” Annie says.

“Can’t.” I shake my head, but I’ve already lost the battle. Sleep’s going to win this round.

“Can you make it home?” Marina asks.

“I’ll be fine once I’m moving. Shouldn’t have sat down.”

“You look like trash,” Annie says.

Yeah, well, you look like one of them. Spun black crystals for hair, glowing eyes, and lines dripping off into the rising dark .

“I’m fine,” I say again, then ask Marina: “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Her mouth doesn’t match the words, but it sounds like her talking.

“Home,” she orders, followed by Annie’s “Now!”

Lights flash in my eyes, and suddenly, I’m down the hall, standing at the mouth of the domicile wing. The lights are out . Then I’m at my door, and there’s something crawling on the wall above it . Now falling onto the couch—I hear them click-clacking all around .

Everything’s heavy and slow. I’m alone in the Dark.

And then they come .

I hate this part.

CHAPTER SIX

MARINA

“Do you think he made it?”

Tobin left the room at a half-drunk lurch, his final words to me and Anne-Marie slurred into gibberish. I think he said something about Rue.

“If he goes facedown between here and his apartment, someone will roll him the rest of the way,” Anne-Marie says.

I hope that’s humor.

She starts grabbing cushions off the floor. Honoria’s picking up discarded bowls, stacking them to put in the wash. I reach for the nearest chair on the wall, ostensibly to put it back in its proper position in the room, but I really just want something physical between us.

As usual, Honoria’s the one to break the silence.

“I was surprised you never came downstairs to find me,” she says. “You’ve seemed confrontational since you came into your . . . shall we call it an inheritance?”

“Might as well. It’s what I got after you killed me.” I slam down the chair and drag a desk over to go with it.

Anne-Marie glances at us, but it’s more warning to behave than concern or curiosity.

“Pouting and angry gestures,” Honoria says. “How very teenage human of you.”

“That was the general idea, wasn’t it? Take a Fade and make it human?”

Anne-Marie drops a bottle into the collection bin hard enough to rattle it, but she doesn’t have to worry. Once I’m done, I’m out of here.

I take more chairs and return them to the room’s center.

“Believe it or not, I understand,” I tell Honoria. She looks at me like she’s never seen me before, a silent nudge to prove I could possibly see things the way she does. “The Fade flipped your life upside down, and you want to reset the balance.” I get that better than anyone, I imagine. “But the world’s changed. People are supposed to change with it.”

“You think it’s that easy?”

We adapt easily, Cherish says.

“I think it’s possible,” I say.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Yes, I do. When Rue and the others crossed the Arc, the human world flipped again. Everything they thought they knew about the Fade, and the dangers they posed, changed in an instant.

“I know you’re the last constant this place has,” I say. “The Arclight needs that. They need to see you adapt, so they can, too.”

I want to say more, but an alarm goes off on Anne-Marie’s wrist, and despite myself, I flinch, though we’ve had fewer drills lately.

“It’s my mom,” she says. “She wants me home.”

The alert sounds again, and I realize the ping is nothing like a Red-Wall signal.

“Leave the rest.” Anne-Marie glances warily between me and Honoria. “I’ll make Dante finish it when he decides to show up.”

“Dante was supposed to be here?” Honoria asks, suspicion in her voice. She presses a button on her wristband. “Blaylock, Dante: locate signal. If he’s in the compound, I can—”

“He is,” Anne-Marie says.

“He snuck off with Silver again,” I add before Honoria can head into full-blown paranoia and send a security team to investigate a midnight hookup. “No big deal.”

Her bracelet beeps and she frowns.

“Auxiliary storage unit nine,” she says.

“Told you so.”

“Happens all the time,” Anne-Marie says. “He really will make it up—he always does, so you don’t have to stay,” she adds, to me.

The alert pings again. Her mother’s not exactly patient.

“Last one,” I promise. “Go on.”

She runs out as I push a desk into position with its chair and then start for the door.

“You were wrong, you know,” Honoria says.

I pause, knowing that’s what she wants, but don’t face her.

“You said I wasn’t human enough to regret what I’d done—you were wrong.”

It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about our confrontation in the White Room two months ago. Tobin and I had found files documenting the torture I went through to transition from Cherish to Marina. It was raw footage of me burning alive under the heat lamps while Honoria watched, dispassionate and unconcerned. She thought there was no cost too high to achieve what she wanted, and for that, I accused her of being the soulless monster she believed the Fade to be.

She acts like that moment just occurred rather than being in the past.

Does she feel time differently because she’s been around so long?

For her, maybe the rise of the Fade wasn’t an eternity ago. It was yesterday and still fresh in her mind.

“I regretted every step I took down the path that led to you,” she says. “You were a last resort. And I am not the only constant this place has. I’m not the only one who remembers the world before. I’m simply the last to give up hope of reclaiming it.”

I turn toward her.

Other people here who were alive in the first days? There can’t be.

“There are others like you?”

“Five, counting myself, who live here now and lived here then.”

“Who?”

“If they wanted you to know, they would have told you.” A small mocking smile creeps into the corners of her mouth. She tosses me something and then walks out of the room.

I catch what she throws without thinking. It’s solid and square, with smooth lines etched into it.

Honoria’s given me her book.

What most people call “my quarters” is the single bedroom I was assigned. My walls are pink now, instead of white, matched to the flower bush my sister’s named for. I put one in my corner so I can see it when I miss her. It’s strange to feel homesick for a place I can’t actually live in.

Anne-Marie used me once as an excuse for an art project when she ran out of ideas, so my bed’s covered with the most tragically jumbled quiltish thing ever made. I like the lack of symmetry and the way one part drags lower than the others, like it’s melting toward the floor.

Tobin’s favorite snow globe sits on my side table. His mother had dozens of them, and this one, a desert beneath a night of falling stars, is the one he re-created for me in the Well. It was a magical idea—a place so full of light and heat that humans would be free of the Fade. Giving it to me couldn’t have been easy.

My secret is that Rue hangs on my wall. No one knows he’s what the cut-out image of the bird I tacked there means. The page came from Tobin’s paper stash—something called a word-of-the-day calendar—and apparently, June seventeenth was a day for ornithology. My space wouldn’t be complete without Rue.

This room is tiny, to hold so much.

It’s where I met myself for the first time, standing as I am now, in front of the mirror. My skin’s still pale, but no longer ashen, now that the Fade no longer block the melanin. Dr. Wolff says my hair is likely to darken, along with my eyes, but I think I may be stuck with white blonde and ice blue. I’ll never know what I should really look like.

Honoria’s book burns against my back, where I stashed it in my waistband.

I sit cross-legged on the floor, in an empty corner where the bed will hide me from view if anyone comes in unannounced, and open the book. This paper is heavier from what filled Tobin’s magazines. It turns slowly, dragging across the facing page. Someone’s sewn a pocket to the inside of the front cover and then stuffed it with folded scraps and pictures. I’m not sure I should risk touching those. The pocket’s aged and is as brittle as the satin covering the book. It might give way.

A card fastened to the first page reads:

Our Wedding

~ Rashid & Trinity ~

May 15th

I turn the page and hit an unexpected obstacle. The words aren’t typed like what we read for class. They’re handwritten in blue ink, so the letters loop and swirl into lines I can barely make out. Everything’s thin and tilted.

Someone—Honoria, I suppose—marked through the word Guest at the top of the page and replaced it with a date.

May 19

Dear Rashid and Trinity, whoever you are.

I’m sorry I took your guestbook, but it was the closest thing I could find to a journal in the salvage pile. We’re past the 15th, anyway, so I guess you didn’t need it. Nothing spoils a wedding like the apocalypse, eh?

Sorry, that was mean.

Wherever you are, I hope you’re together, and still human, and that you found a way to get married, even without the pretty white satin. I’ll take care of it, I promise. And if you somehow end up here, or I end up where you are, I’ll give it back.

Sincerely,

Honoria Jean Whit

I’ve never paid much attention to how something sounds in my head while I read, but it’s Honoria’s voice I hear. She’s younger, unsure of herself, and quick to apologize. I wonder if any of that has survived.

The next entry is on the same page as the first.

Also May 19

Dear Rashid and Trinity,

Sorry to keep bringing you into this, but it’s easier if I can pretend this is one long letter. If I’m writing to people who might still exist, then there’s hope the world’s still working.