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.

Stay safe online. Any website addresses listed in this book are correct at the time of going to print. However, Egmont is not responsible for content hosted by third parties.

Please be aware that online content can be subject to change and websites can contain content that is unsuitable for children. We advise that all children are supervised when using the internet.

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.

Contents

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.

“You look terrible,” I say, ignoring her.

He’s shaking, scanning the room over and over. Something’s rattled him—bad.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. Just insomnia.” Tobin picks at the clods of dirt around him, crumbling them into powder. He shakes my collection jars. He never looks at me when he’s lying. “I’ve slept about two hours in the last four days.”

He grimaces, grinding at his eyes with his palms.

“Tobin! You didn’t tell me it was that bad!” I sling my gloves off to take his hand and pull him to his feet. “I’m taking you to Doctor Wolff.”

This is a switch; usually, he’s the one threatening me with the hospital.

“I don’t need a doctor,” he insists.

“He’ll give you something.”

“Like he did you?”

“Low blow, Tobin.” Dr. Wolff giving him a sedative is nothing compared to my being perma-drugged to kill my memories. But if Tobin’s using that against me, this is serious. “It’s Doctor Wolff or your father. Pick one.”

“Marina, stop . . . please,” he begs. He’s got his feet planted, leaning back as hard as he can. If I were still Fade, I could move him, but plain old human Marina? Not a chance—and Cherish doesn’t miss the opportunity to point that out.

“You’re scaring me,” I say, letting go. “What’s so bad you’d rather dance around it than tell me?”

“I don’t want to sleep.”

The hairs on the back of my neck shoot up, tingling from an electric current straight off my nerves.

“You said the nightmares stopped,” I say.

After Rue healed Tobin, and we were released from the hospital, Tobin started having dreams where he was consumed by the Dark, drowning under a wave of black water. He claimed it was post-traumatic stress, but their voices remained in his head for way too long.

“They did stop for a while,” he says, mumbling the last part. “But they’re back—sort of. They’re different. It’s weird.”

Weird and Fade are two things that do not need to occupy the same space as nightmares. Bad things happen when they do.

“Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. I hear—”

“You hear the Fade?”

A long absent dread uncurls inside my throat, spiraling toward my stomach, where it turns cold and sharp. Only this time, I’m not scared for me. Tobin shouldn’t be able to hear the hive.

“Not like that,” he says quickly. “And not always. It just drifts in sometimes, like a nightmare. I just don’t want to explain that to anyone else. You understand; they won’t.”

“You’re sure?”

“Yeah. I haven’t heard or seen your boyfriend since it happened.”

Calling Rue my boyfriend is like using “it” to encompass everything that happened to us. Tobin’s still dodging.

“They’re just your average, creepy-feeling, shadow-filled, something-awful’s-going-to-happen-if-I-fall-asleep nightmares,” he says again, with a half-choked laugh. “Though if you want to double-check and ask your ex, I won’t object.”

“I can’t hear Rue anymore,” I say. He hasn’t so much as come into view since the night we brought Tobin’s father and the others back.

My mother was here once—close enough to touch—but she didn’t bring my sister, and she was only interested in getting me to follow her into the Grey. I wanted to—I really did—but I was afraid of what would happen if I returned to the Dark. Cherish would have the advantage there. What if she’s stronger than me?

We are stronger than you, she says, making me certain that I had made the right decision.

I can still see the mix of anger and sadness in my mother’s expression, and taste the way the air turned, like it was suddenly infused with bitter lemon. Even now, the memory makes my eyes sting.

Tobin leans forward and grabs my hands as I do. “You’re bleeding.”

Once, those words were enough to make my heart falter, but now they’re just a reminder that I pulled my gloves off fast enough to break open the cut from my clippers.

“I got careless taking samples,” I say. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing doesn’t leave bloodstains.” He wipes my palms with a towel dipped in irrigation water and then bends down to pick up the gloves I dropped. “Here,” he says with a lopsided grin. Usually, that’s enough to foil my attempts to stay annoyed, but this time it’s not his lips that have my attention, it’s his eyes and the metallic, silver shine in them.

“Tobin?”

The effect lasts a blink and a skipped heartbeat, and then his eyes are back to brown, and I’m back to remembering how to breathe.

“What’s wrong?” he asks.

“Did you really come here looking for Silver?” The question’s a toss-away to help me collect my thoughts.

“Mostly, but Annie also wants me to remind you that you promised to help with her rotation. I think I was even threatened with food poisoning if you don’t comply . . .No, wait. That wasn’t a threat. That was Annie reminding me about dinner. She really does want your help, though.”

“I guess I’d better get going, then.”

“And I’ll get back to not finding Silver or Dante,” he says. “Why can’t they just use her room? I know Dante’s folks don’t want him home much, but Silver can come and go. They’d be a lot easier to avoid if I knew where not to look.”

I nod, washing my hands mechanically at the spout on the wall without sparing another look at Tobin’s face. When I pass the incinerator meant for burning rotten plants and refuse, I throw in my gloves and the towel he touched.

Just in case .

CHAPTER THREE
MARINA

Events that change the world seem like they should come with a herald or harbinger, but that’s not how it happens. The moments that mean the most happen in the pauses between breaths—easy to miss if no one knows they should be looking.

What did I miss with Tobin?

I should have noticed something before now. Tobin’s eye shine is more than a whisper of warning. It’s a plunge into an icy stream so cold, the surface grows solid over my head. It’s the pull of water away from shore before the waves crash down to drown us all in his nightmare.

“Tell me this is you,” I hiss to Cherish while in an empty hallway. Hardly anyone comes near the Arbor at this time of night, and I’m grateful for their avoidance. No one can see me talking to myself. “Tell me you’re playing with my head, or thinking about Rue, and somehow that made Tobin look different to me.”

But Cherish stays stubbornly silent.

If I call it stubbornness, then I can believe she’s really the cause—not Tobin.

The halls of the Arclight-below pass in a blur; routine by now, so I don’t think about where I’m going until I reach a door and need my wristband for access. Down here, you don’t need permission just to enter; you need it to leave, too. Every time I have to wait for the red light to turn green and let me through, my breath hitches and I wonder if this will be the day they change their minds. The point they turn on me and lock me away again.

Those fears have grown weaker the last few weeks, but if Tobin’s eyes are really silver . . .

The door snaps open, and I shoulder through as soon as I’m able, holding my breath when I pass the alcove that houses both Honoria’s office and the White Room, where Cherish died and I was born. This is nothing but a routine shift change, I tell myself.

I pass the familiar scrawl of USAF that someone stenciled on the wall between embossed stars; streaks into a line at the corner of my eye. One of these days, I’ll ask someone what it means. By the time I reach the final panel that allows me into the Arclight-above, I’ve denounced and defended Tobin a dozen times.

I should tell Dr . Wolff, insists the part of me indoctrinated by the Arclight’s rules. Nightmares, plus voices, plus eye shine, equals Fade.

Rue swore to me that the Fade don’t take unwilling hosts anymore. Tobin loathes the Fade; he’s terrified of them. No way would he agree to let them stay inside him by choice.

Did Rue lie to me?

Negative! The suggestion makes Cherish angry. Deceit is not a possibility .

“Okay, maybe it was an accident or an oversight.”

Nanites are tiny. Rue could have missed some when he took his back. Cherish has lasted this long, there’s no reason Rue’s contact with Tobin couldn’t do the same.

But where are the marks ? Tobin’s skin is clean.

Where’s the sensitivity to light? The arbor’s full of sunlamps. Tobin works on the perimeter with the high beams every day—no Fade could stand that.

And his father would have noticed. Wouldn’t he?

Turning Tobin in would bring suspicion to our whole class, and at least half the upper-years. Anne-Marie and her brother Trey, Silver and Dante—they all put themselves at risk. I can’t tell them they might have been wrong. And I can’t lose another life. The Arclight’s all I have left.

If something happens to Tobin, it’s my fault. I brought the Fade. I begged Rue to heal him.

“Were his eyes really shining?” I ask, but Cherish only answers with a reminder that Tobin left the Arclight for me. She nudges me to do the same for him. Rue’s in the Dark, and he’ll answer my questions.

She’s baiting me, not helping. Her strength is in the Dark.

What I need is a cooperative Fade who’s willing to come here. One who might understand what’s going on, but who also knows why I can’t mention it to anyone else.

I need Honoria’s baby brother.

Schuyler Whit turned Fade in the first days, more than a century ago, and has lived as one ever since. I named him Bolt, for his appearance, with its sharp, slashing lines, and a presence that invokes the violent nature of a thunderstorm. I’ve watched people approach other Fade with curiosity when they venture out of the Grey toward the darkened sections of the Arc, but few bother with him. He looks menacing, but he isn’t, and his connection to Honoria makes him taboo. It’s a shame, considering he has a knack for defusing people’s tempers.

My panicked heart begins to calm. Bolt comes at least three times a week. Once I make it through my promise to Anne-Marie, I’ll find him at the Arc, and everything will be okay.

“Yay!” Anne-Marie cheers when I enter the midyear classroom she’s been assigned for the night. “One of you showed up, at least.”

It was no surprise when she declared her intention to follow a teacher’s path the moment we were allowed to choose. Anne-Marie and her brother are a perfect split of their father’s personality. Trey got Mr. Pace’s desire for a security position, and she got the teaching bug.

“I don’t suppose you’ve seen Dante?” she asks.

I’m still getting used to how different she looks with her hair cut so short that it barely rises above her scalp. It seems an odd choice of celebration, but she said the change was for her birthday.

I should figure out if I have one of those.

“Silver’s gone missing, and you know if they’re together—”

“No details in the kiddie classroom.” She holds up a hand to cut me off. She’d probably cover her ears if her other hand wasn’t balancing an oversize tub on her hip. “Actually, no details on those two, period. Neither of them understands the concept of oversharing. Or locks.”

Poor Anne-Marie swears she didn’t sleep for days after walking in on the two of them in a closet; something about Dante having a really big, really weird birthmark.

There’s a bluish aura around her, glowing brighter and bolder with her increased agitation. It’s the way Cherish sees people who have touched the Fade but who aren’t part of the hive. I’ve seen Anne-Marie’s since I got my memories back, but it’s especially vibrant today.

“Besides,” she says. “I doubt Silver’s with him, unless he’s finally convinced her to go out on the short side with him. Every day, he skips out on rotation early and makes himself go a little farther into the Grey. You’d think he was hunting for buried treasure out there.”

That’s a conversation I have no intention of continuing. One person having Dark dreams is enough; I don’t want to think about it spreading. Thankfully, it’s only a passing comment, and Anne-Marie moves on.

“Could you get the chairs out of the way while I set out the cups and stuff ?” she asks. “That was Dante’s job, but he’s useless.”

Easy enough, and if I’m both lucky and quick, I’ll make it out of here in time to beat Bolt to the Arc, so there’s no chance of missing him.

“Why are you setting out snacks like for a baby class?” I ask offhandedly, as I stack chairs against the wall.

“Mid-years get snacks.” She stumbles but catches the cup she drops before it hits the floor.

“They do?”

The air between us hardens, developing the sharper edge of a knife drawn to keep me back. It’s been a few days since I’ve experienced an emotion so strong I can taste it, and it takes a steadying breath to reacquaint myself with the phenomenon.

“Sure. On special occasions,” she says.

“Today’s special?”

Did I miss another holiday? There are so many days on the calendar, I can’t keep them straight.

“Birthdays are special,” she says stiffly.

Anne-Marie won’t look at me. The scent of oranges, which usually hovers around her, turns as acidic as the toner used to strip down tables in the clean rooms of the Arclight-below. It burns my throat when I breathe.

She’s hiding something, Cherish warns. Danger . Flee .

But I’m not the one who looks like she’s about to dart out of here.

“Anne-Marie?”

“Do the last row, would you? I have to pick up the kids from orientation.”

She swings the box off her hip, toward me, so I can either catch it or let it fall as she rushes for the exit.

“Anne-Marie!”

She stops, shoulders rising with a sigh, without turning.

“You have to face her sooner or later, and the longer it goes, the harder it will be,” she says. “You’re my friend, Marina. I hate what she did to you, but we need her. So long as she’s avoiding you, she’s no good to us. This place will fall apart.”

“What are you—”

I don’t have to finish the question, and Anne-Marie doesn’t have to answer it. The room changes in a way she can’t sense, with explosive rings spreading through the air from the door. Into the void behind them, steps a person who sets my every nerve alight with panic. Cherish becomes a wild animal running amok inside my skull.

Honoria hasn’t made many appearances since she shot Tobin while trying to prove he was no longer human. She’s avoided me altogether, which suits me fine, but to my continued annoyance, most everyone has fallen onto the same side of the argument as Anne-Marie. They think Honoria’s countless years here are an asset—no matter the mistakes she’s made or crimes committed. Even Tobin’s father has tried to get me to talk to her.

They don’t understand that when I look at Honoria, I lose myself.

To me, she’s the woman who almost murdered Tobin for the sake of her misconceptions. She’s the one who ordered me kidnapped and altered. She’s the one who tried to exile Tobin’s father and those who went with him into the Grey. She’s the one who tortured Rue.

Honoria’s a monster, and she’s staring at me like I’m the one who doesn’t belong in a room meant for human children.

I don’t, and that’s her fault, too.

“You can’t leave me alone with her.” I make a desperate grab for Anne-Marie’s arm, and the box nearly topples to the floor when she steps out of reach.

“You don’t have to forgive her; you don’t have to like her, but you need to find a way to live with her so things can get back to normal.”

Normal for the Arclight means sleeping all day and hiding under lamps at night, jumping at shadows that never meant us any harm. That’s not normal, nor is it an existence I want to return to.

“I don’t care if you have to draw a line down the middle of the building and pick sides, just do something. Please try,” Anne-Marie says, rushing back to hug me for some, inexplicable reason. She lets go and turns very serious, scolding me with a pointed finger. “If either of you are dead when I get back, I’ll be really irritated.”

Then she walks out of the room, leaving me to face the one real enemy I have in the world.

CHAPTER FOUR
MARINA

Honoria’s expression holds no emotion; there’s no hint of the decades she’s seen hidden in the colorless gray of her eyes. We don’t need to paint lines to divvy up space; this classroom might as well have the White Room’s safety pane running down its center. She stays on her side; I stay on mine.

“Do I need to tell you this wasn’t my idea?” she asks. For once, I’m sure she’s not lying. Her shock’s palpable.

Tobin says Mr. Pace took away the silver pistol she always kept tucked in her waistband, but I’d feel better if I could see her back to know for sure.

“Door’s open,” I say. “Feel free to leave.”

But no one’s going anywhere.

I step sideways and set out a bowl of cookies from the tub Anne-Marie left, but I never take my eyes off her. Honoria slides into the room, just as guarded.

I place another bowl; she moves another step. Bowl, step, bowl, step, until we settle into predatory symmetry, like the films we’ve seen in science class of long-gone animals fighting over territory.

With my focus on Honoria, it’s easy to forget the cushions on the floor that have replaced the chairs I moved. On my next step, I hit padded cotton rather than floor, and I drop the entire tub off my hip. Cookies go flying. Bottles of juice shatter, soaking into the napkins that land on top of them. And I blurt the first curse I’ve ever used in my life as I bend down to clean it up.

“Tobin’s rubbing off on you,” Honoria says, right beside me. Someone her size shouldn’t be able to move that quietly. “I wonder if you’ve had the same effect on him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snap. Hopefully, the look on my face is closer to a glare than “you terrify me.” How does Tobin flip the switch from fear to rage with barely a thought?

My hands are trembling now, so I cover by scrubbing at the spill. It’s grape juice, the purple color close enough to red that I’m having flashbacks of trying to stop the blood from Tobin’s chest.

“You realize those napkins are useless?” she asks rather than answer me. “You’ll go through the stack and only push the mess around. There should be towels in the cabinet.”

I crawl backward as she moves forward, furious that I let myself lose my footing with her, and end up sitting when I run into the cushions behind me.

“I don’t need your help,” I say.

All I need is to make sure that she never finds out what I saw in the arbor. I refuse to have Tobin’s screams haunt me every time I close my eyes because she decides to turn him into an experiment.

For once, Cherish seems in total agreement, echoing my fears with protect and conceal . It’s the way of the Fade—if you don’t want it stolen, keep it hidden from human eyes.

Conceal, Cherish repeats, following the order with a burst of flaring light across a darkened sky. She’s named Tobin after the star shower we shared the night I followed Rue into the Dark. She doesn’t want me to go through the agony she felt when Honoria separated her from Rue; she’d have to feel it again. Honoria won’t touch Tobin—not if we can help it.

Cherish names her “Destroyer,” a raging flame that lays waste to the Dark and everything in it.

My attention drifts back to the lake of juice that looks more like blood the more it dries.

“Being stubborn only leads to a bigger mess,” Honoria says, still tracking me.

“Speaking from experience, are you?” The napkins have turned to a ball of soggy glop in my hands. I stop trying to sop up the juice, and reach for the broken bottles to put them back in the tub. “I said I don’t need your—Ahh!”

I pull my hand back with a hiss. A long shard of glass has imbedded itself into my hand, in nearly the same place I cut it earlier.

Honoria’s on me in an instant, as though the smell of blood draws her close. She tows me up with a gloved hand around my wrist, bringing the wound close enough for inspection. I glance at the blood to prove to myself it’s red, even as Cherish goes feral in my mind.

“Let go!” I order, bracing myself so Honoria no longer has control over where I stand or fall.

“Annie?” a voice calls from the hall. “Has Dante come back this way? Because I really can’t find him.”

Tobin .

A meteor shower goes off inside my head as Cherish calls his name over and over.

Translation: He’s not Rue, but he’ll do .

“Tobin!” I call when he reaches the door.

“Marina?”

He’s stunned for a second, and I can only imagine how we look to him. Me bleeding. Honoria standing over me. Broken glass.

“What happened?” he asks, entering cautiously. “Where’s Annie?”

“She left,” I say.

“Marina’s hurt,” Honoria says at the same time. She jostles my hand to show off the glass. “And she’s acting like a child.”

“I broke a bottle,” I argue. “That’s hardly hurt.”

Getting shot is hurt. Being burned by lights until the lines that used to run my arms and legs melt off—that’s hurt. This is a scratch.

“Let her go.”

“You’re both acting like children,” Honoria says, digging at the piece of glass. Either her gloves are too thick or my blood’s too slippery because she can’t get a decent grip on the shard without driving it deeper.

“Ow!” I do the only thing I can think of—kick her in the shin.

Honoria glowers at me, but she lets go.

Two months ago, I wouldn’t have challenged her outright. I didn’t understand why I feared her until I saw the recordings of my torture in the White Room. I still feel that threat with her this close, but I’m stronger than I was then.

We are stronger than you, Cherish intones.

Honoria grabs one of the fingers on her glove with her teeth and tugs until it comes free, then holds her bare hand out to me. Her skin’s nothing but crisscrossing lines of scar tissue from her fingernails up past her wrists, where they disappear beneath her sleeves.

She gives me an annoyed scowl and zero warning before yanking the glass out of my palm.

“Ow!”

“Keep pressure on it,” she says, pressing another towel and Tobin’s hand down over the free-flowing blood when she’s done. “It shouldn’t bleed long.”

“Ow!” I’m too shocked to say more.

“And close your mouth, you look like a fish.”

“You touched her—bare-handed,” Tobin says.

Of all the people inside the Arclight, Honoria is least likely to break the rules of contact with someone Fade-touched, and she’s always seen me as contaminated. What gives?

“I don’t wear these to protect myself; I wear them to protect everyone else. With you, there’s no need.”

She fixes the glove back in place and drags a chair across the room to the front.

“Are those burns?” I ask.

“Collateral damage,” she says in a weary voice. “I made a choice many, many years ago, and that was to not be like those who live outside this compound. I’m not like you. The suppressants help, but I can’t be cured with a dart and an inhaler. If I want to stay free of the Fade, it costs me.”

She can’t honestly think going from Cherish to Marina cost me nothing.

“The nanites have never stopped replicating in my system; when they start to spike, I do the only thing that works: I cut myself, drawing them to the wound, and burn them out again.”

“You kill them for trying to help you!”

“Help is a subjective concept.”

The only things keeping me in my skin and in this room are Tobin and the sound of laughter and feet. Anne-Marie returns with a line of students who go silent when they see Honoria waiting at the front.

“Everyone, stand to the side and mind the glass,” Honoria says. “Once it’s clear, you can take a seat.”

The children all file into a line against the wall, as though this were a Red-Wall drill. Anne-Marie joins me and Tobin as we lean against the teacher’s desk at the back while Honoria quickly clears as much of the mess as she can.

“What happened?” Anne-Marie asks, looking at my hand and at the towel wrapped into my fist.

“You abandoned her,” Tobin says, but she doesn’t take the bait.

“Marina?” she asks instead.

I can’t really explain beyond saying, “It was an accident.”

She scowls at me, as though dropping bottles of juice was a violation of her order not to try and kill Honoria.

“Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms and sets her sights on the front of the room, where the children have started to chatter nervously in line.

“I thought she left,” one boy whispers.

“She didn’t leave, she went nuts,” another beside him answers.

“Why’s she here?” a girl asks nervously.

“No one’s told you?” Honoria asks, silencing them. Her hearing’s as keen as mine—she caught every whisper. “Usually, those with older siblings get clued in early.”

She shoves the bottle bin under her chair and takes a seat. A reverent hush falls over the faces watching her with absolute attention.

“I’m here to tell you what lies beyond our borders, lurking out of the light.”

She raises her head, looking me straight in the eye.

“Today, I tell you the truth about the Fade.”

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.

I am such a head case.

I’m holed up in the corner, bunched up in a sleeping bag, and writing letters to strangers with their feather wedding pen. This is stupid.

The entry stops there. There are a couple of drawings in the margins of a woman in a long dress and a man in a suit, but no more words for several days.

Loose pages are stuck between the bound ones, where she scribbled things down and pressed them in. These are sheets of lined paper with holes in them, not guestbook pages.

The entire chronicle of how mankind fell to the Fade is here. She filled in the gaps by memory, adding details of the run from her house to the Arclight and how they almost didn’t make it. She focuses on her family—especially her little brother. He was sure the army would fix things, and then they could go home.

We burned our house today—begins one page dated before Honoria started writing in her book. It’s sandwiched into a stack containing details of her father’s disappearance and worry over a friend whose dog had wandered to Honoria’s house half starved and filthy.

One of my teachers is here, isn’t that weird? I don’t think school exists anymore, but I can only think of him that way.

There’s an entire list of entries like that—short sentences about people she noticed at random. They’re scribbled on squares of colored paper and glued into the book.

• The kids are getting quieter at night. They’ve figured out crying doesn’t fix things. It doesn’t bring back parents or stop friends from leaving.

• One of the base officers is kind of cute. He’s nice, too. He gave me an extra apple at dinner because he thinks I’m getting too skinny.

This one’s stuck to a whole page with Kevin written in different ways.

• The colonel’s watching us. He thinks we’re dangerous because of Dad, but he’s the greater threat. I saw him burn his hands. He’d only do that if one of them touched him. It won’t do me any good to tell, no one listens to me. I’m just a kid.

The colonel.

The colonel. It’s not a name; it’s a title. Col. Lutrell’s name is James. Lt. Sykes’s first initial is K, according to his name bar. For Kevin, maybe?

Colonel and lieutenant are designations from the world before the Fade, so why do both have them when no one else does?

Could Tobin’s father be as old as Honoria? Older?

Tobin’s good luck charm is that photo from the world before. A boy on a beach who became his father’s namesake, but what if it’s a picture of the colonel himself. Did he lie to his own son?

That would mean Honoria didn’t lie to me.

Now it’s more than curiosity; I need to read on.

The entries become sporadic, jumping dates.

July 6

This morning I realized the 4th had passed with no fireworks. A couple of hours later, it sunk in why—there’s no country anymore.

No one’s celebrating anything after the rain last night, anyway. It cost us the bonfires. We hadn’t had darkness in weeks, besides that black shroud that’s swallowed everything we left behind.

People were screaming and crying, scrambling to find candles and flashlights. They tried to get all the doors and windows shut, but there was so much howling and scratching and noise . . .

There was Spacey Tracey, sitting by the exit, in the dark. She laid her hand against the door, and said, “I know, I will” to nobody. Mom says she’s talking to her family, that she can’t deal with what’s happened to them, but Mom’s wrong. If Tracey was talking to her family, she’d use their names. She doesn’t.

And her eyes were not that blue last week. They’re nearly silver. No one notices things like that, but they should. I saw Dad’s eyes. I remember them.

That nuthatch is going to break and run one of these nights, and I wish . . . I wish they’d get rid of her. There—I said it. I know it’s horrible, and I know it makes me a bad person, but I don’t care. I don’t want her around.

I heard the adults talking. These old ventilation pipes catch everything and broadcast it like stereo. They don’t know what to do, and that scares them.

No . . . I think what really scares them is that they do know, and no one wants to do it. Not to pretty Tracey, who used to be so sweet and so smart, but they don’t get it. Tracey’s gone.

I hate this place.

I want to go home.

Things change after Tracey. People Honoria mentions on one page are lost within the next three. She kept a list, tracking who left on what day, through several sheets held together with metal clips. I bet she didn’t miss a single name.

Pages and pages are doodles of trees without leaves. Their branches are spindly and gruesome—ominous . The first few are practice for one that takes up an entire page of meticulous detail. I start to trace the outline with my finger, but draw back at the feel of the paper along the lines. They’re rigid and sharp, as though she was caught up in a frenzy while making them. Discolored patches on the page look like dried blood that’s deteriorated over time.

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.

CHAPTER SEVEN
MARINA

It’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 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.”

“Uninvited,” 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.

CHAPTER EIGHT
TOBIN

“Get out of here,” Dad orders me.

“What’s wrong?” Trey asks. No one’s told him how he looks.

This pretty much blows Rueful’s “only willing hosts” line to bits. Trey has no idea what’s happening to him. How can that be willing?

So much for neutrality.

Mr. Pace starts stacking Trey’s drawings into a pile, as though that’s the problem.

“Am I in trouble?” Trey tries asking Annie.

“Move!” Annie’s mom pushes her to her room and uses her override to lock the door.

“Let me out!” Annie screams from the other side. She’s beating on the door, but she won’t even make a dent. “Mom, please! Let me out! Mom!”

Nique won’t do it. She’d rather have Annie locked in and scared than free to roam and turning Fade like her brother.

“What are you doing?” Trey asks. “What’s wrong with Annie?”

“Nothing,” Mr. Pace says. He grabs Trey’s wrist when Trey tries to leave his room. “You stay here.”

“But what’d I do?”

“Go.” Dad shuffles me and Marina out the door when we don’t leave on our own. “Marina, you’re welcome to stay with Tobin, but I want you both out of here. And I’m checking the entry alert, Tobin. You have two minutes to get to the apartment and ping me, or I’m coming to find you.”

Marina doesn’t say a word, but I know what she’s thinking, and none of it’s good. When we get to my place, she keeps going. I’m not stupid—she’ll go to him to sort this out.

I go inside and then stop the door so it can’t close all the way. Once I’ve tripped the entry sensor, so Dad will get the ping to tell him I’m home, I head back out, allowing the door to close behind me. Hopefully, he’s too busy to notice my tracker heading toward the Arc.

If Trey turns, I’m next.

No, Annie’s next. She was exposed first.

What am I thinking? Everyone is next.

“How did you beat me out here?” Marina catches sight of me halfway across the quad and crosses the rest at a jog. “How’d you even know I’d be here?”

“Closest crossing point. I took a different route.”

She stops beside me, at the edge of the Arc. The lamps are conserving power right now. They give just enough light so people can see where they’re going and find their way back. No one’s panicking yet, but they will. Then the lights will go completely hot.

“Were you put back on duty because of Trey?” Marina asks. “Are they tightening security already?”

“They wouldn’t start with me, and they wouldn’t put me here.” Sykes would be patrolling the short side. Trainees get dumped in low-priority sections. “The lights would be brighter.”

We’ll be at Red-Wall as soon as our elders declare Trey a security breach.

“How long have we got?”

“As long as Dad and Trey’s parents can buy us.” So, not long.

It’ll only take minutes to get Trey to the hospital, so long as he doesn’t flip out and fight them. Mr. Pace and Nique can stall Dr. Wolff for an hour or two before he either alerts Honoria out of habit or she hears about Trey herself. If they’re lucky, no one will see Trey en route and they’ll be able to lock down the hospital without details circulating.

Crap . I’m starting to sound like Honoria. Worse, I’m starting to understand her.

The only choices are to hide what’s happened or to start a riot with full disclosure. They’ve got to get Trey contained.

And then they’ll come for us.

Marina knows that, too. It’s why she’s here.

“You’re going out there, aren’t you?” I ask.

“Like you’re not here for the same reason.”

I’m here because I don’t believe in coincidence. Trey’s bait. The shadow-hugger probably planned this. He left Marina a trail of Fade-crusted bread crumbs, and she’s going to follow it until she loses her way home.

“It’s too dangerous,” I say.

“If Rue or one of the others knows something, then—”

“Then what ?” I snap, harsher than I mean to. Louder, too.

She flinches back, and I tell myself to get a grip before I scare her and she goes looking for him to protect her from me. I’m too jumpy. The nightmares were bad enough, but seeing them on paper, like Trey pulled them out of my head, was too much.

Touching those things changes people, no matter what they say.

“What if they expected this to happen, Marina? What if Trey’s just the first?”

“I don’t believe that.”

Of course she doesn’t. All she can see is the tragic hero who risked his life to save his lost love. Rueful’s a fairy tale. How do I compete with that?

“We should wait and see what Doctor Wolff says,” I suggest.

“I don’t trust Doctor Wolff.”

Right.

“Then we wait here. Honoria’s brother might show. We can—”

“Take a look, Tobin. What do you see?” she says.

I turn back to the Grey, but there’s nothing there.

Nothing. No one, and no Fade. There hasn’t been a night without at least a handful of them hovering in the Grey until sunrise drives them back. Tonight, there’s only the fog, coming too close and making my skin crawl. I can almost hear the click-clack of tiny feet marching up my arm.

I reach down for a rock and throw it, but it drops out of the air on its own without hitting anything.

“Bolt’s not coming,” she says. “No one is.”

Our night started with an invisible Fade on the front line. Now they’re at full retreat, and Trey’s jacked into my nightmares. What’s next?

“I can stop you from going,” I tell Marina.

“You’re not going to hit me.”

“No, but I can hit my wristband and send us straight to Red-Wall.” She might hate me now, but she’ll thank me later. “For all we know, Trey had a bad reaction, like an allergy. If it was serious—”

“Your eyes were silver.”

Her answer’s ice water to my face, knocking the air out of me.

She’s lying. She has to be. Marina picked a sore spot because she knew it would get a reaction.

“You don’t have to make up—”

“Your eyes were silver in the Arbor, when you saw the blood on my hand. Look at my hands.”

She removes her gloves and holds her hands out, palms up. She turns them over to let me see both sides, and the perfect, unscarred skin that’s replaced the cut I cleaned and the one from the broken bottle.

“What happened?”

“I fell asleep after Honoria’s presentation, and had a nightmare—your nightmare. The cuts were gone when I woke up. Your eyes were silver, and I’m healing like someone’s reknitting my skin from the inside out. We shared a dream, Tobin. Whatever’s happening to Trey, he’s not the only one. I’m not waiting. I’m going to find Rue. I’m not giving him a choice but to help—the end.”

“Wait.” I grab her by the shoulder as she steps forward. “What if it’s not a dream? What if it’s a premonition?” My voice sounds strange.

“It’s not.”

“What if the Fade are spreading again and we caused it by bringing down the Arc and letting them in?”

Never forget, Honoria’s voice drones in the back of my mind. It was a single mistake that put us over the edge .

“Tobin, listen to me. Rue will fix this.”

Sure he will. The mighty Fade Charming can fix anything.

I pull my gloves off my shaking hands, searching them for lines on my palms and knuckles. I check between my fingers in case they’re hiding, but it’s just skin. A fading tan from wearing the gloves so long, and fingernails that are clean, except for the one I tore trying to bite off a hangnail.

“You don’t have lines,” she says. “Neither do I. The silver was only a flash, but it was there.”

“Maybe it was trick of the light.”

“That’s what I thought. I thought it was Cherish, and her mind games, but now—”

“You said you couldn’t hear them anymore.” I take a step back. I want to throw up, but my stomach’s got a giant knot in it that hits my throat every time I try.

“Not them,” she says. “Her . She messes with my head sometimes.”

“But she’s you, isn’t she?” And since when is there a distinction? The shadow crawlers are an all-for-one deal. If you hear one, you hear the rest.

“I thought so, too, but I’m not sure about anything tonight,” she says. “Something must have gone wrong when Bolt and Rue healed you and Trey.”

I’m more concerned with the idea that something went right, and this is stage two. She might be convinced that the Fade mean no harm, but their definition of help isn’t the same as ours—that’s why they’ve stuck with Dad. We don’t always speak the same language. This could be their idea of “better.”

“You should have told me,” I say.

“I just did.”

Marina stands on the Arc with her foot hovering above the ground, but she can’t manage to take the first step.

“What if she’s stronger than me?” she says, but more to herself than me. She flinches, slapping at her ears. Did one of them say something back?

“If you’re crossing, I’m going with you, and it has to be now. Leaving after the Arc goes hot will set off an alarm.”

“This is a bad idea,” she says. “But I don’t have a better one.” She takes a breath, closes her eyes, and steps over the boundary into the Grey.

The short side used to be most dangerous place I knew; it’s where we were most vulnerable. Anytime the Fade tried to break in, they did it here, because it’s the only place you can cross and get back in a few hours. Now it’s simply the most convenient. A couple of other people are already out here, barely within sight of the Arclight, but none of them are the kids from Honoria’s speech.

“Tell me your dream again,” Marina says after we’re past them.

“I’m standing on the Arc, when it comes on and fries me where I stand.”

“Now tell me the real one.”

I don’t want to. If I recount it, then I have to think about it, and if I’m thinking about it, then I might as well be living it.

“Why?” I ask.

“Because maybe I’m wrong,” she says. “Maybe mine wasn’t the same and I only convinced myself it was.”

“That’s probably it. I doubt your brain is as twisted as mine.”

“I saw the Dark, Tobin,” she says. “But it wasn’t the place we went before, with the houses and families. It was like Trey’s drawings. The whole thing was one writhing monster, ready to devour the world.”

“I call that variation two,” I say. Number one is worse.

We’ve reached the point where the terrain begins to change. Murky water appears in puddles and then turns the ground to mush that sucks against the bottoms of my boots. That’s the only sound here beyond the wind and the occasional movement of the water.

This is part of the dream, too.

A creature I first mistake for a log makes a whipping motion with its long snout and tail before sliding into the water with barely a ripple. Its eyes shine red beneath the surface, where it lurks, watching.

“So, once we’re in . . . there . . . how do we find the nanobot?” I ask. “Do we call its—”

“His!” Marina snaps.

“Fine. Do we call his name or try to find our way back to the settlement on our own?”

“I think Cherish can call him, but I’m not sure I want—”

“Stop.”

I throw my arm up so she can’t walk any farther. Finding the Fade won’t be a problem; they’re here. She should have heard them before me.

The terrain shimmers and then splits, forming two solid bodies with ash-pale skin marked with nanites. They head straight for us.

One’s female, bigger than Marina, but not by much. She has a broad nose and wide eyes framed by spirals. The male’s a head taller than me, but it’s his hands that stand out. Most of these things come pretty evenly marked, unless they’re hurt and the nanites go to the wound, but this guy’s got nano-doodles all over his hands. He’s scarred, too. A jagged ridge cuts through his scalp, leaving him with a bald spot.

I don’t know about the female, but he was definitely human before he was Fade. They’re both dressed in fatigues similar to the ones our security personnel are assigned.

“What do they want?” I ask Marina as they fall into step on either side of us.

“They didn’t say,” Marina says, cocking her head like she’s listening to something. “I think they’re escorting us in.”

“What’s with the silent treatment?” Maybe the ones born out here have trouble with words, but someone who started off human should be able to speak. Honoria’s brother can.

“They didn’t say that, either.”

They urge us onward and set the pace. If I fall off cadence, one pushes me so I’ll keep up.

Once we’re at the Dark, they show us where to enter through the trees and vines, cringing away from a burst of light that ignites the sky behind us.

The Arc’s back on full power, burning across the short side. A moment later, there’s a siren wailing in the distance, calling everyone to safety while the alarm on my wrist and Marina’s flash red.

She looks at me, and I nod.

Honoria knows .

CHAPTER NINE
MARINA

We’ve moved fully into the Dark, walking shoulder to shoulder with the unnamed Fade on either side.

Are they a good thing or a bad thing? I ask Cherish.

Guard, she says, but is that a warning, or does she mean they’re a guard detail?

Why would we need guards? I ask, but she doesn’t have an answer for that.

Instead she says, Home .

That’s all she cares about—getting home.

She wants to be here. She wants to stay.

The moment I pressed my toes into the Arc, Cherish was pushing me to leave so hard, I could feel hands at my back. Other hands were reaching out for me the way they do in my dreams of belonging, promising to pull me home.

Home, Cherish says again.

Not for me, I say back.

It’s chilly here. The Dark’s always cool because of the shade, but this is more. Tobin’s hand is a block of ice inside mine. The heat flows off my body, siphoned away so I’m left shivering. The leaves and branches rattle, but there’s no wind. They’re shivering, too.

The Dark’s afraid.

“They’re scared,” I whisper back to Tobin, casting a wary glance at the male Fade beside him. Even if they don’t want to answer us, they can still understand us.

“Because the lights came on?”

“I don’t think so.” The Arc has kept the Fade away for decades. Crossing it is painful for them, if not outright lethal, but the lights don’t reach this deep.

What’s wrong? I ask Cherish.

I expect her to answer the way Rue would, by allowing me to touch the hive’s mind, so I brace for the flood of noise and emotions that comes with it, but it never happens. She might as well have plugged her ears.

“She’s locked me out,” I say.

Cherish is doing this on purpose. She’s hiding something.

“You try,” I suggest.

“Try what?” Tobin asks.

“To talk to them. Try to hear.”

If Tobin is turning, he’ll be able to.

“I don’t know—I mean, how?” Tobin asks uncertainly, but he never suggests that he might not be able to hear them. Our shared nightmares, and Trey’s drawings, are coming from somewhere, and the hive is the only source out here.

“Act like you’re trying to get someone’s attention in a crowd. Pick someone you know and then shout.”

Tobin stops, bringing us all to a clumsy halt as he closes his eyes.

“I feel like an idiot,” he says. His face draws up more like someone in pain than attempting communication.

“You look like an idiot,” I say, and he scowls. “Did you hear anything?”

“Does my spiking blood pressure count?”

Sigh. I’ll take that as a no.

“It was worth a shot,” I say.

And, if nothing else, there’s a renewed sense of peace to Tobin’s demeanor. The hive didn’t answer him. They don’t answer humans.

Maybe that’s why they aren’t answering me. I chose a human existence; this is the cost.

Continue .

As if to prove me wrong, the male Fade speaks.

I’m not an outcast, I’m a misbehaving child, only allowed to speak when spoken to. One being told to stay out of the important conversations.

Motion, says the female. Forward .

“We should go,” I tell Tobin, and we head deeper into the Dark, hand in hand.

The Dark’s always moving. Nanites swirl across their hosts’ skin, displaying emotions better than any expression. Lines of black crisscross the ground and snake up trees, altering their appearance in a neverending crawl. If they stop the cycle, the ones on top creating the canopy will die from too much sun exposure. They mourn every voice lost and try to preserve as many as possible. Here, the greater good is distilled for the good of one.

Haunting reminders of the world before the Fade appear without warning. Some are subtle, like the painted lines on the ground that peek through gaps of rolling Fade, only to be covered again a second later. Others, like buildings that stand in various stages of decay, are harsher.

Eyes watch us. Ghostly faces appear and disappear at random; shimmers follow us from high up on the trees. Here and there, fully formed Fade approach from the remnants of houses, and I can’t help but wonder if they’re the ones who were human in the beginning. Were these their homes?

“You think they’d at least tell us their names,” Tobin says after a while. “They have names, right?”

I hear a growl, so close it makes me jump, but Tobin doesn’t move until I do, so the sound has to be for my ears only.

“What now?” he asks, tightening his grip on my hand. His eyes and ears don’t adjust as fast as mine. Here, I’m the one protecting him .

“I think he heard you,” I say. “He growled.”

Negative, says the male Fade, followed by the same fearsome sound.

He lifts the sleeve of his jacket to bare his arm and then points to a shape drawn with colored lines. They’re static, and not crisp, until a rush of nanites darkens them, highlighting the image of a vicious animal lunging off his bicep, mouth open in a snarl.

“Is that your name?” I ask.

He growls again, replacing the sleeve over other pictures, including the obscure outline of a woman’s body on his inner forearm. The Fade have tried to mimic the ink he had tattooed on before they came.

“They call him Dog,” I say.

“Does that make her Cat?” Tobin snorts.

Shh . The impression of a sharp hiss of air comes from the female. Speak softly .

“Speak—Oh! Your name’s Whisper.”

The female gives me a sharp nod, the only truly human gesture I’ve seen from either of them.

“We’re Marina and Tobin,” I say.

Invisible water washes over my legs, just as it did when Rue tried to make me understand that Marina was the place where he lost Cherish. Honoria made it my name, and now Whisper and Dog have, too.

After the water comes the streak of light Cherish attached to Tobin, but it’s only Whisper repeating his name. No one could have told her that name but Cherish.

Somehow Cherish can talk to them without me hearing it. I can’t shake the feeling that my Fade-self is lurking in the secret parts of my memory, using my own brain to plot against me. If I can’t hear her, I can’t anticipate what she’s planning. I can’t protect myself.

This is my body; I should have the advantage, not her.

“This looks familiar,” Tobin says of the deeper parts of the Dark. The relief ’s so thick in his voice, I could pluck it from the air like fruit from the Arbor. “Either it’s all running together, or I recognize this place.”

He’s right. The monotony has broken, giving way to familiar trees with distinct roots and knots that mark the gates of the human-neighborhood-turned-Fade-settlement. The first houses are visible as swaths of white and blue, where metal siding has resisted both Fade and time. Birds a light on the eaves, trilling out a sound that can’t really be called a song, but it’s comforting. They sound like Rue’s real name. Flowers and ornate fungi spring up out of the ground as we pass, creating a path to lead us the final steps.

The color’s a spontaneous display of relief. Tension settles out of the air now that we’ve reached the place the Fade consider safe. They were worried we might not make it.

What could scare a Fade in the Dark?

“I know I was preoccupied the last time we were here, but this is . . . not like it used to be,” Tobin says.

More guards like Whisper and Dog mill the fringes in pairs. Security patrols . The loose nanites, which usually hang from the trees as moss, now form a fence, joining the trees together. The leaves rustle overhead, and Tobin points up. More regimented Fade are folded into the branches, clinging to the trunks with the claws that only appear on their hands when they need to climb. They’re all on alert.

We gain followers, so that by the time we reach the middle of the neighborhood, and the crowd waiting for us there, another has us penned in from behind.

“Bolt!” I cry, recognizing him in the group. I wave him over, but he turns and disappears. “Wait! Come back!”

“I really hope I was wrong about this being a setup,” Tobin says as one of the few Fade we know on sight deserts us.

“Me, too.”

Otherwise, I don’t think we’re going anywhere.

Maybe ever.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.