Arclight (27 page)

“And your solution was to send the Fade in as a raiding party?”

“Not my idea. When your friend, Rue—”

“He’s
not
my friend!”

“When Rue,” he corrects himself, “found my knowledge of the Arc and the layout of the compound in my memory, he came up with the plan on his own.”

“Do you know what happened to his mate?”

Col. Lutrell doesn’t answer right away, and that is its own, terrifying admission. Maybe Cherish isn’t in any shape to be found after her time in the White Room. If she’s permanently beyond Rue’s reach, I don’t know what he’ll do.

“What I know of Cherish, they’ve already gleaned,” Tobin’s father says.

“Why should I believe you?” I ask. “You bleed red, so what? Until a few days ago, we were rock-solid sure that Fade couldn’t pass through the Arc, but they found a way.”

“If I were standing where you are, I’d want to know the same thing. I wouldn’t want to be alone with me either. But you
can
trust me.”

Nowhere does he give me an actual reason, but there’s too much of Tobin in him for me to truly fear him.

“What happened to the little girl?” I ask. “How’d she slip through the floor like that?”

“The ones who are born as Fade—” He scrubs his face with his hands, swipes across the back of his neck. “I have to figure out how to say it so it makes sense to a human mind.”

A cold chill pimples the skin on my arms and neck.

“Your mind isn’t human?” I ask.

“It is, but when they were doing their repair work, it was . . . indescribable.”

“That’s what it was like when Blanca was trying to talk,” I say. “Rue I can manage, but with her it’s like we were incompatible systems.”

“Most of the included have no concept of human speech or how their way of all speaking and thinking everything at once sounds to us. Their bodies aren’t static; their natural state is in flux, so they’re used to it.”

“You mean Blanca slipped between the floorboards like turning over a glass of water?”

“A human can’t pass through solid matter because our body exists as a whole; a born-Fade can break apart into its component pieces and return to the whole at will.” He traces through the air along the dark lines that decorate the ceiling and walls. “Her body isn’t made of cells and tissues the way we think of them.”

“Are you saying her whole body is nanites? No host?”

“The nanites evolved. Human DNA is the basis of their life, but each of her cells is a single entity that can exist apart or in the colony that is her body. She left here, followed the trail, and most likely went back to the place she shares with her family.”

“She did not,” a voice says from the shadows where Blanca had fled.

“Rue!”

He steps out of the darkness, holding the goggle-eyed Fade-girl, who’s now wearing the uniform jacket I abandoned on the trek here. I check to see if Anne-Marie gave hers up, but “Marina” is stitched on the name bar.

“M’winna me,” she says, brushing the jacket’s collar under her nose.

“She came to me,” Rue says. He’s ditched the scrubs he’d worn inside the Arclight, exchanging them for clothes like the ones from Tobin’s magazines. Blue denim pants and a shirt made from blocks of color, but these have that same sheen to them as the flowers in the Dark. They aren’t cloth, like what he wore to cross the Arc—they’re nanites. “She thought she had injured you.”

“I’m okay,” I say, holding my hand out toward Blanca.

“M’winna fw-en-duh?” she asks sheepishly.

Friend? Not really, but if this Fade-child was truly born this way, and not taken, then there’s no reason we should be enemies.

“Speak with words,” I tell her. “The other way hurts.” I pinch my hand and make a face to get the point across.

She pops her thumb out of her mouth and reaches for my hand, curling her tiny fingers around mine and leaning in an unmistakable request to be held.

“She can cause you no more pain,” Rue says. “Her voice won’t reach you.”

“Emp-ty,” she says as she picks at my fingers, then shows me her own hand with its circular loops.

“Human,” I correct.

“M’winna silent?” She turns to Rue, face scrunched up in consternation, and a moment of communication passes between them.

“What’d she say?” I ask. I’ve begun swaying, like Anne-Marie does to comfort the babies when they’re upset. Blanca lays her head over on my shoulder without letting go of my hand.

“She wants to know why she can’t hear you,” Rue explains. “I told her your voice has been lost, so she’s keeping your hand until it comes back.”

I don’t bother to point out that I don’t want it to come back. The only voice I want in my head is my own.

“She hopes it will return with your finding Cherish.”

“How am I supposed to find her if I’m here and she’s not?” I ask.

He glances at Blanca again, then back to me.

“She saw Cherish. You spoke of her here.” Rue lays two fingers against my head.

“No, I didn’t.”

“She saw.” He tilts his head toward Blanca. “She saw; you saw.”

“She’s a kid, they make mistakes.”

“She did not mistake Cherish. Cherish is her other.”

“Her other what?”

His expression disappears in a swirl of loops and lines as they rearrange on his skin.

“Her next to,” he tries again.

“I still don’t—”

Rue turns sharply to Tobin’s father. “Correct the word,” he demands in a clipped voice.

Tobin’s father shivers as Rue says things to him I can’t hear.

“Ah . . . sibling . . . sister,” Tobin’s father says.

“She is my Cherish’s sister. There was no mistake.”

“Then she understood more than I did,” I say. “Colonel, is there somewhere other than the White Room where Honoria might hide something or someone?”

Thinking of the White Room brings back flashes of the light that seared the backs of my eyes a few moments ago, and the echoed pain of all that heat bubbles up, racing along my nerves to spread through my body. Blanca pats my cheek, clinging tighter when the dull throb turns sharp, so that my hand goes automatically to my eyes, trying to force it back.

“Do you have your inhaler?” Tobin’s father asks.

“Rue thought it was dangerous. He broke it.”

“Poison,” Rue says behind him.

“It was medicine!” I insist. “Medicine I could really use.”

Blanca wriggles at my side, trying to get away. She takes the less-than-pleasant ideas of what I’d like to do to Rue for breaking my inhaler in the literal, and scurries off to hide behind his legs.

“You haven’t had it since yesterday?” Tobin’s father asks.

I shake my head furiously, but it does nothing to throw off the stinging zaps.

“Pain?” Rue asks, stepping closer. “Heal?”

“No! I mean . . . no . . . it’s not broken, not like my leg. There’s nothing to mend.” I’ve never had an episode last like this. As a dull ache, sure, but not this endless feeling of a white-hot poker trying to split my skull.

“What do you remember?” Tobin’s father kneels in front of me. “If the suppressant’s been out of your system for hours, then—”

“Suppressant?”

The look on Tobin’s father’s face is one I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. He’s nervous and apologetic and even a bit fearful.

“Let’s try something else. Tell me about my son; replace the pain with what you know of him.”

“Tobin took me into the tunnels. He was trying to put space between me and”—I glance up at Rue—“what I was afraid of.”

Rue snatches Blanca off the floor and turns away.

“He’d made me a desert.” It’s actually helping. Talking through the memories is pushing out the pain. “I still don’t know how he managed with his arm. . . . Wait, why didn’t they fix his arm?”

I look back at Rue, who refuses to face me.

“Rue?”

He scoffs at me, but offers no other answer.

“Tobin refused,” his father says. “I wasn’t able to refuse when they entered my system the first time. Tobin was, and he did.”

“But I told Rue not to put his blood in me.”

“It’s complicated,” he says.

That seems to be the qualifier for everything concerning the Fade.

“How’s your head?”

“Better. Thanks.”

“My wife, Cass, had seizures. There was a lot of pain involved, and sometimes all she could do was talk through it until it passed. She’d focus on something and tell Tobin a story—usually about one of her snow globes.”

“What does it mean?” Rue asks, appearing so suddenly at my side that I have to wonder if he actually walked across the room or did that floor-slide thing.

“A snow globe’s a ball of water with a little sculpture inside,” I say, and offer him the image of the dancing couple in Paris; I don’t think he’d appreciate the desert the way I did.

“This marking,” he says, and points to the name bar on the jacket draped around Blanca’s shoulders. “She asked what it means. I’m not certain why you wear it.”

“It’s my name,” I say. “Me. That’s my uniform jacket. That way people know who it belongs to. Those are letters, if you want something more specific.” Specific always seems the way to go with Fade. “Different letters make up different words. Look at Colonel Lutrell’s.
J
is his first initial, for James, and Lutrell is the family he comes from. Mine just says ‘Marina,’ because I can’t remember my last name.”

“I have seen this,” Rue says. “This isn’t you.”

“You’ve seen my name written somewhere?”

“You are still difficult.”

Rue trains his eyes on Tobin’s father, and for a while, it appears that they’re just staring at each other, but then I realize Col. Lutrell’s eyes aren’t still. They move side to side, in an overloaded spasm.

“What?” I ask, but they don’t answer.

Tobin’s father shakes his head and says, “No. You could make it worse.” His body begins to tremble. “If you go too fast, it’ll increase the chance of trauma.”

Rue looks furious, more so than I’ve seen him since the Well when he threatened Tobin. A trickle of red blood drips from Col. Lutrell’s nose.

“Rue, stop! You’re hurting him!”

Blanca puts her hands on either side of Rue’s face and pats his cheeks, finally drawing his attention away. He puts his back to me and Tobin’s father, who’s stumbling toward the floor.

“What was that?” I ask him.

“We had a disagreement,” he says. When he opens his eyes, they’re not silver but a milky, muted green.

“You’re blind?”

“Only for a few minutes. They’ve gone to repair the capillaries that burst in my nose.”

“The nanites from your eyes?”

He nods.

“I kept them off my hand for your sake, but now they’re becoming impatient with my injuries.” The slash he made in his palm closes over with new skin, so the only marks left are the burns I’d seen in Tobin’s photo.

“What did Rue say to you?” I ask.

Tobin’s father slumps forward on his palms, catching his breath. I storm across the room to where Rue’s stewing. Blanca reaches for me.

“What did you say to him?” I demand, picking her up. “You were talking about me—what did you say?”

“He promised to help find Cherish. He hasn’t helped,” Rue mutters.

“You’ve got to stop doing this. I understand you want her back, but Cherish wouldn’t want you to hurt people for her. I know—”

“You do
not
know,” he snaps. The bands around his irises widen and constrict wildly so his eyes seem to pulse. “You do
not
understand. If you understood, you would find Cherish. You can’t even find this.” He jabs a finger toward Blanca’s chest, and my name bar. “You’ve gone silent,” he snarls. My arms tighten protectively around Blanca.

“You’re right,” I say carefully. “I
don’t
understand what my name has to do with anything.”

“You are not . . .” He pauses, assembling the words he needs into something I can comprehend. “This is dead water,” he says finally, and shows me his view of a vast body of water meeting a greyed horizon. “This tried to end you.”

“Are you talking about the uniform?” I ask, still confused. “The Arclight?” How could my name mean “water” in the Grey?

“You are not dead water.”

Rue’s impression of the Grey and its still, stagnant water, comes again, but changed. It churns with the bits of memory I’ve reclaimed from my rescue. Tobin’s father, Mr. Pace . . . they said
sweetheart
, they said
kid
, but they never asked me my name.

I set Blanca on her feet and stare at my jacket hanging to her knees, reading that one slim line of stitching over and over and over:
Marina . . . Marina . . . Marina . . .
I have to be Marina. I don’t know how to be anyone else.

“Marina, please let me try to explain,” Col. Lutrell says behind me.

I stumble away from him, but that takes me closer to Rue. I back toward the door, overcome with the sudden, undeniable need to run away from this place and these people—human and Fade. My own mind, the self buried beneath that wall of white, is screaming for me to finally hear her.

“M’winna see?” Blanca touches my hand. She’s followed me, and the light pressure of her fingers is enough to spur me into motion. I charge out through the barely there door.

There’s no hesitation, I just let my legs take over and run.

W
HEN
Rue put his blood in me, it did more than heal my skin and reknit the muscle. I’m faster, more sure-footed, stronger; I no longer feel like I might pitch off my feet at any moment. It hardly registers that the house I’m fleeing is part of a community, which is now full of Fade mimicking the human lives that flourished here before they came.

The Arclight’s survivors sit among them, as though in conversation. If Honoria saw this, there’d be no way to convince her that Jove’s mother and the others hadn’t turned. They’re too comfortable here.

Sharing your body and brain with another being can knock down your personal barriers pretty quick. That’s the only reason I don’t yelp when Rue steps out of the shadows in front of me.

Tobin runs over, with Anne-Marie right beside him. Behind me, I hear Col. Lutrell; Blanca snaps into view, like a fast-growing flower, reaching for Anne-Marie’s hand as soon as she’s fully formed. She is still wearing my jacket, but the hem of her dress now rests below the mangled edge of my uniform.