Arclight (22 page)

“Yes,” Rue answers, closer than he should have been.

“Great. Now what?”

“Climb.” He takes hold of the still-wobbling ladder with one hand and tugs at my sleeve with the other.

“I am
not
climbing the rickety ladder of death. It already tried to take my head off. You go first.”

Rue swings his weight onto a rung with inhuman grace. He’s at the top in no time. From high above, a metal wheel groans, shaking itself loose from rust that falls with clumps of the cement that had been used to seal it from the inside. One last, shrill whine and an opening appears at the top of a narrow chute.

There’s no alarm on the hatch. I was hoping for an alarm.

“Climb.” Rue holds his hand down as though he expects me to jump and catch it. Behind his head, smallish fireballs continue the show I was supposed to share with Tobin.

An enormous meteor drops into the atmosphere. It’s bright enough to not only draw Rue’s attention, but it illuminates the hallway, giving me an idea of how far I’ll have to run before it bends, and I make another instant decision that cancels out my last. I can’t leave the Arclight, not with only Rue’s word to protect the people here. If he’s lying, or if the other Fade decide not to honor the deal we’ve made, there’s nothing to keep them out now that the seal’s been broken.

I bolt back the way we came, relying on the snapshot provided by the meteor’s burn trail. Twenty steps down, one of the green lights turns on, giving me the next step of my escape. Another meteor trail extends the corridor thirty feet, but also casts a fast-moving Fade-shadow over my own.

My brilliant escape plan lasts mere seconds before Rue catapults in front of me, and I collide full body with him. He drags me up by my jacket.

“Do not run,” he scolds. “Cherish was lost when she ran.”

He pops me up over his shoulder and stalks back toward the exit ladder. The earthy scent of his skin I’d found such a pleasant surprise before only acts as an irritant now.

“Put me down!” Forget being quiet and not drawing attention; I’m screaming. Kicking, beating him as hard as I can anywhere I can land a punch. Let someone hear.

Rue starts up the ladder and I wrap my arms around the side, holding on to the closest rung with both hands and doing what I can to pull us down. Even a Fade can’t balance two bodies on tiny rungs when the ladder is ready to shake loose from its bindings. If we fall, I’ll land on Rue, and that means he’ll take the brunt of it while I get another chance to run.

I shake the ladder until its ancient bolts wriggle in their slots, clanging to the ground, and the ladder tilts away from the wall.

Rue pries me loose and keeps climbing, even when I jam my hands and feet against the walls. For someone who’s supposed to be able to make the Fade cower in their tracks, I’m doing a lousy job of slowing one down.

Near the top, Rue rolls me off his shoulder and we both clear the lip of the opening. My last hope of escape dissolves into the murky disquiet of the Grey and the shallow fog I inhale with every breath. We’re deep within its borders, too far from anything else to be of any use.

Rue pauses only long enough to close the cap on the chute behind us and kick some debris back over the edges. The cold color of the metal and the broken cement seal around it blend perfectly with that of the terrain.

He checks the horizon, picks his direction, and marches off into desolation.

“They’re going to come looking for me,” I say, hurrying to keep up with him.

“They watch where they burn,” he says. “They don’t watch here.”

“So it’s safe for you to go in and out.”

“Not safe, unwatched.”

The black bands on his skin go back into motion, forming a tight web that darkens his complexion. Even the low light here in the space between our worlds causes him distress.

“Does it hurt?” I ask. “When they go in and out of your skin like that?”

“They are me,” he says. “I don’t hurt me. And I don’t hurt you.”

He’s right. They stung, but didn’t hurt; if any seeped into my pores, I didn’t notice.

I have no idea how many of those things were on me. They were so small, I couldn’t have kept track if I’d been calm enough to try. There’s no way to know if any stayed behind.

“I don’t have any of those things left in me, do I?”

Rue stops, watching my discomfort as the overwhelming need to scratch nonexistent nerve impulses hits hard. I swat the tingling crawlies in my leg and claw the back of my hands.

“They’re not still floating around, are they?” Panic raises my voice an octave when he doesn’t answer. Now I’m sure there’s a whole colony of the disgusting things multiplying somewhere out of sight. Probably behind my spleen. I’m not sure what a spleen is exactly, but it has a sinister sound to it, and seems like the perfect place for something malevolent to trench in.

“No,” he says. His eyes brighten so the silver chases the blue to its farthest edge. I stop fidgeting, angry that he finds this so amusing.

“Would you tell me if there were?” I ask.

“You will doubt if I did,” he says, passing me to start our long trek toward the Dark. “You don’t trust me.”

Of course I don’t trust him, he’s a Fade. Specifically the Fade who threatened the one person I’d rather not have threatened.

Timed perfectly to thoughts of Tobin, the shrill sound of an alarm cuts the silence behind us, and the lights intensify so that even the Grey brightens. The blue rings in Rue’s eyes shrink back to their centers.

“They know you’re gone,” I say.

“They won’t come to home. They’re afraid—like you.”

“I am
not
afraid of you,” I say. If I say it enough, maybe I’ll start to believe it.

“You’re afraid of not knowing,” he says. “You don’t know me. You hope I know you.”

It’s not fair that he’s able to pick out information he wants while I’m stuck with whatever flood of upended nonsense he decides to share.

“Move faster.” Rue picks up his pace, and I stumble after him, finding it more difficult to maneuver through the rocks and broken remnants of trees in my shoes than he does barefoot.

“
Do
you know me?” I ask.

“I know what you know.”

“Then what good am I to you? I don’t have any idea what happened to your mate.”

“You have an idea,” he says.

“So what? I’m supposed to follow you until my memory comes back?”

“Yes.”

I agreed to come with him to give Tobin a chance to survive our trip to the Well. Either I’d escape from Rue, or the Fade would kill me. It wasn’t supposed to be an open-ended stay in the Dark.

“What if I refuse to go anywhere, plant myself on the ground, and sit here until the sun rises?”

He reaches for my arm, a warning that I’m about to be manhandled again, or worse, have him take over my body.

“I don’t hurt you,” he reminds me when I shrink back.

“Good. You cannot hurt me from an arm’s length away.”

Another blast of the alarm trumpets through the Grey. As it dies, search beams stretch beyond our position, but they never slow down the way they would if someone had spotted us.

The wind grows strong in the Grey, where it’s free to build without trees or brush to break its reign. Sand and silt and smooth-worn pebbles flow in rivers around our feet, ankle-deep in places, creating a perversion of the paradise Tobin built in the Well.

“Go faster.” Rue speeds up again, leaping from one piece of windblown debris to another with no regard for whether they’re moving or still. “This is a bad place.”

“Rue, I can’t keep up. Wait . . . Rue!” But my voice can’t compete with the sound of air through the empty places.

At its crest, a pair of dervishes forms, made of dust and untethered things. Dueling jets of air catch my hair and send it flying in all directions.

Rue realizes too late that I’m beyond his reach, and I realize too late that I need his protection whether I want it or not. He makes a vain swipe for my hand that falls short; the next is cut off by a tumbling mass of tangled weeds that strikes him in the chest, knocking him into a roll he can’t stop, until colliding with a barely rooted stump does it for him. He wipes a dark trickle from his mouth and forces himself back into the flow of the windstorm toward me.

The stinging pelt of dead leaves and branches steals my breath. My jacket peels up, coming loose from my arms everywhere but the strapped wrists, so the air streams over my skin. One of the buttons catches me in the face, slicing my cheek near my eye.

“Help me,” I scream, as my heels leave the ground. In the distance, trees that scrape the sky bend beneath the wind’s rage. I don’t stand a chance. I lose the ground completely. When I try to scream again, my mouth fills with grit and ash.

I strain for the concentration to locate Rue somewhere in the wilderness beyond my closed eyes.

Help me!

His answer bounces back as a picture of myself with arms outstretched. I do as he says, and fling my arms wide.

Something slaps against my hand, hard enough to make it burn. I try to pull it back against my body, but what I assume to be debris are fingers that draw me closer until Rue can fold his body over mine, bearing the greater share of the storm’s wrath. That same strange veil that protected him from the White Room’s lamps covers us both. A black rope extends in a braid from the markings on his arm to anchor around a nearby stump so we can’t be blown away.

Outside our cocoon, the wind beats against the veil, but the weave proves unbreakable.

We’re safe, and a few long minutes later, we’re free.

“Thanks,” I say quickly, looking down and trying to smooth my uniform back to regulation. This is the second time my enemy’s become my hero.

Rue saved me, and injured himself to get it done, but knowing that only heightens the unnaturalness of his being. Already the gashes and scrapes along his skin are knitting back together as though patched by an invisible hand. Where there had been blood, it disappears—called back into his body through the wounds before they vanish, too.

“Go,” he says. “The storms will return.”

With the light at our backs, and the Dark before us, the descriptions of the Grey as a middle ground fall apart. What most call a buffer zone is no kind of protection to anyone. There’s nowhere for a human to hide and no way for a Fade to avoid the light. Everything here is held suspended in a bare limbo. Pools of stagnant water form where rain has filled holes in the ground. Bugs and stinging gnats thrive, unopposed, as the dominant species. Below the water’s surface, shining red eyes catch the lights as they rake past, and whatever silent creature they belong to blinks, swimming off. Here, the water’s no safer than the air.

Rue no longer tries to speak to me, by voice or otherwise. He crouches against the long exposure to the light, a posture I take up myself. When he turns his head to one side, I do the same, awaiting the discovery of some new and terrible thing that even this Fade shrinks from. I put my feet where he’s walked to make sure I don’t blunder my way into some other hidden danger.

And then we’re there—the edge of the Dark.

It blooms out of the ground as a wall of trees and vines and twisted branches that seem unbreachable to my human eyes. My body locks down, every muscle frozen and refusing to work.

Light is safety; light is life
.

I can feel the sun rising in my blood, beckoning me home. But Rue’s waiting. The predawn glow catches the outline of his skin as he grasps a curtain of foliage and pulls it aside, revealing an unobstructed passageway.

“Inside,” he says. “Where it’s safe.”

“Maybe for you,” I mumble. But even as I argue, I know he’s right. There’s no way I could cross the Grey here on my own. My only hope is to find the short side, where the Dark bulges so close to the Arclight it’s nearly at our gates. And to make it that far, there’s nothing else to do but follow.

I gulp to keep the bile from rising, exhale the breath that’s started to burn my lungs, and step off the edge into the unknown.

T
HE
amorphous swath of no-man’s-land called the Dark is literally the stuff of nightmares. When the Arclight’s citizens put heads to pillows at dawn and close their eyes, it’s the Dark that lies behind them. Phantoms and ghosts of fears that have compounded on top of each other for generations churn in a new primordial soup that gives birth to the end of the world. It creeps like the misty fog beyond our boundaries, and it’s into that void I’ve now traveled.

Trees with narrow, soaring trunks swallow the sky. There’s no up or down or left or right. No depth.

High and interlocking branches steal even the barest light, so I have to bunch closer to Rue in order to follow him. His hand reaches for mine, but I can’t tell if the thrumming pulse I feel is a beating heart or the flow of those
things
below the surface. And I refuse to tolerate the touch of hands that may have killed my family. Saving my life doesn’t make up for taking it from me in the first place.

I cross my arms around myself and clench my fists into my clothes so he has nothing to hold on to, offering “I’m cold” as an excuse.