Arclight

The passageway begins to vibrate, growing hotter as the redirected power collecting behind the walls reaches capacity. Generators snap on with a hum, flooding the complex with lights as intense as a second sun. In their wake come the screams and howls missing from the battle, and I know we’ve finally hurt them.

Panels that blinked red only minutes earlier burn hot enough to turn my alarm into a branding iron when it knocks against the wall as we flee.

Our shades protect us, but the Fade recoil, burned by light their pale eyes can’t handle. Some crumple like they’ve hit a solid barrier, but Honoria stays put, ready for the next wave.

The people who are close enough pick up the smallest children and run with them. I focus on the sound of boots and voices because it’s easier to make out than the obscure outlines my shades provide, but the noise leaves me dizzy, disoriented by fractured memories dredged up with the sounds of screaming Fade. I tuck my head into Tobin’s shoulder as he sprints to the only refuge we have left. I don’t even realize we’ve reached the bunker until the door slams behind us. My feet find their way back to the floor as I slip my shades back into their pocket.

I turn to say thank you, but Tobin wanders off to a corner by himself.

He’s the ghost again, and it’s with a pang I’m reminded he has more reason to hate me than most. So why is he the one who saved me?

CHAPTER THREE

I’ve lived a short life, most of which I can’t remember, and it doesn’t take long for the rest to flash through my mind while I wonder if it’s already over.

The wait reminds me of stories we’ve read in class. Our teachers claim things like art and literature are as important to survival as food and water, and they’ve preserved all they could of things written in the world before the Fade, including those of a place called Purgatory. There’s no sense of time, and no beginning or end, only the torment of an uncertain outcome over which you have no control. I didn’t believe it was real, but now I know we’re there.

I try counting off seconds in my head, but lose track around six thousand, at the point people thaw out enough to risk talking. Most everyone’s in motion; nerves make settling down impossible.

“We should just give her to them.”

Hearing Jove make the suggestion isn’t as surprising as having him wait nearly two hours to do it.

“Shh!” Anne-Marie, feeling guilty for choosing a seat with the crowd, no doubt. She shouldn’t. Safety in numbers is the first rule of self-defense. “You’re scaring the babies.”

Jove has the sense to look ashamed when he realizes that several pairs of very small ears are listening, but it only lasts until his attention strays back to me.

“We were doing fine until she got here.”

His argument’s always the same. It was my scent the Fade caught when I ran through the Dark, and it was me they followed through the Grey to the Arclight’s boundary, so the attacks are my fault. I can’t even say he’s wrong. There hadn’t been a Red-Wall for years before I came.

“Shove it, Jove,” Anne-Marie snaps. The last time he went off on this tangent, she dunked him in the ice bin from the Common Hall. Twice.

She reaches for a terrified bundle of curls and tears, and totes the girl to a quieter part of the room. A small troop of others follows her.

“Sorry,” she mouths when they pass me.

Anne-Marie busies herself with soothing the babies by having them sing lesson songs from class. Other, older voices drift in, thankful for the distraction, and soon the danger of the night is set to verses about numbers and silly sounds.

Tobin finds a seat under a table full of supply boxes. He draws his knees up to his chest and buries his face against them, rocking to the tempo of the children’s voices, while matching their cadence with a bump against the wall.

“Hey, Fade-bait.” Jove’s boot toes the side of my bad leg.

I tell myself I will not answer.

Anne-Marie’s voice notches louder, attempting to drown out Jove’s with the days of the week.

“If we toss you out a window, would the Fade really choke on your blood?”

I will not answer . . . I will not. . . .

“That’s what happens, right? You’re poison to them?”

I will not . . . I will not. . . .

He drops to his haunches directly in front of me. Have his eyes always been this cold? Was he a different person before I came?

“What’s the matter, freak?” he asks. “Forget how to talk?”

I cut my eyes sideways, not seeking permission so much as encouragement. Anne-Marie nods; I snatch Jove’s hand, and lick the back of his wrist.

“You’re still breathing, so I can’t be that toxic,” I say when he sputters backward, tripping over his own feet and landing hard.

A round of snickers runs through the room. Jove spits on his hand to wash it off, and climbs back to his feet.

“How’s it feel to know so many of us died because of you ?” He shoves my shoulders, knocking me back when I try to stand and face him. “You do know it’s your fault, right? If you’re Fade-proof, they died for nothing.”

No, they died for the hope that a human coming through the Dark alive meant . . . something. I just wish I knew what. Then they’d stop asking me.

Jove grabs my inhaler, using the cord to hoist me off the ground.

“Do they really eat the bodies they can’t use? Keep them as pets? What? What’d they do with your bunch?”

I’d bite him if I wasn’t sure he’d leave a sour taste in my mouth.

“Jove, let her go.” Anne-Marie’s on her feet now, too.

“Did you watch it happen?” Our faces are barely an inch apart. “Did you hear them scream? Did they beg for mercy?”

I pull back, but so does he, digging the cord into my skin.

He’s not worth it, I tell myself.

“Jove! Knock it off.”

“Shut up, Annie.” Every emotion from anguish to hate to terror shows on his face. But his eyes are pure misery, locked on mine, as though staring will somehow transfer his pain to me so he can be rid of it. “How many of those things out there used to be our people? You think William Bryce is out there? Or Elaine Crowder? Colonel Lutrell?”

Jove’s mouth just outran his brain.

He could have antagonized me all night, and no one but Anne-Marie would have said a word, but he should have left Tobin’s father out of it. Jove slams sideways, hit full force by someone a lot bigger.

“Get off me,” Jove yells. Tobin pins him to the floor, sitting on his legs. “I didn’t mean it. Get off!”

I assume the broken nose means his apology isn’t accepted.

One punch comes, then another, until they blur so fast the impact sounds like perverse applause. Jove gets out one good scream before his mouth floods with blood, sending flecks of crimson to pepper the front of Tobin’s face and clothes.

“Stop it!” Anne-Marie cries, but her feet are still stuck to the ground. Dante and Silver hurry the babies away from the fight.

This is something else the drills never prepared us for. We’ve never been locked in long enough for friends to become enemies.

“Toby, don’t!” Anne-Marie tries again, but he doesn’t hear her.

I don’t think Tobin even sees Jove anymore. He’s hitting his own agony, exorcising his own mourning.

He’s crying.

“Tobin, stop.”

I grab his arm on a backswing and go along for the ride when he pushes forward.

“Tobin!” I splay both of my hands on his shoulders as I duck my head into the space between his arms so we’re face-to-face. “He said he didn’t mean it,” I say, knowing Jove meant every hateful word. “Enough, he gets the point.”

Because of me, Jove lost his mother the same way Tobin lost his father, and he’s just as much an orphan. He doesn’t need a beating to understand that hurt.

So many here only have one parent; they’re not forgotten so much as never mentioned. Anne-Marie won’t discuss her father even when I ask. She says it’s not the sort of thing people talk about, but she can’t tell me why. If I had a family, I wouldn’t keep quiet about it.

Jove moans, unable to get away. Tobin’s still on his legs; I’m bent over his head, keeping myself in the line of fire.

“Get out of my way, Marina,” Tobin snarls, fist frozen at midswing.

“Look at him, Tobin. You’ll kill him. You cannot murder someone in the Safe Room, okay?”

It’s weird what arguments your brain comes up with at the worst possible moments.

“Move, or I’ll move you.” Tobin shifts his position for better leverage.

Desperation and lack of ideas make me stupid. I grab Tobin’s face with both hands, close my eyes, and kiss him on the mouth.

Anne-Marie says guys don’t think straight if you kiss them out of the blue; I guess she knows what she’s talking about. Tobin drops his fist. His body goes rigid; he even stops breathing. When I open my eyes, his are wide and bewildered.

That’s a good word for the whole room, because there’s nothing but silence until the babies start to sniffle and someone drags Jove out from under us.

In total, the kiss buys about ten seconds before Tobin snaps back to reality and pushes me away; we sit there for another five on our knees. He stands, wipes his mouth, and goes back to his corner without even glancing in Jove’s direction.

But he looks at me.

His eyes are clear and focused, without anger now, only loss and confusion. He collapses in on himself, so we’re back where we started. Me on my side, Tobin on his, both isolated in a crowd. This isn’t Purgatory. It’s Hell.

CHAPTER FOUR

It’s too hot in here, too close.

Anne-Marie sits with Jove’s unconscious body, trying to clean him off as best she can with her bare hands and shirttail. I unbutton my jacket and bunch it up under his head to help him breathe while she strokes his hand.

“Someone’s going to have to set his nose,” she says. “I don’t know how.”

“Doctor Wolff will fix it,” I answer. Besides the nose, Jove’s lost a couple of teeth. The rest of his face is swollen; he winces when I touch his side.

“But what if they lose Doctor Wolff?”

“They won’t.”

“I think I should get help,” she says. “Don’t you think I should get help? Someone needs to know what happened—or is happening—or could happen. I don’t think Toby meant it. Oh . . . how did this happen?”

She ends up gasping. Anne-Marie always seems to forget that she needs air.

“And how do you plan on getting out of here? The door’s locked.”

It’s the wrong question to ask.

She starts in on the horror of being locked in a small space—which she never thought was small until now—straying from one extreme to the other until she comes to the conclusion that we’re all going to run out of oxygen and collapse.

She’s abandoned her gloves, and the only two of her fingernails that managed to survive the run brush over Jove’s swollen eyes. She pats his hair down over his forehead, but all that does is leave it tacky against the drying blood.

“I should have made him stop,” she says. “Jove’s really not this bad . . . at least he didn’t used to be, but he lost his dad three years ago, and now his mom . . . I didn’t know he’d gotten so—I’m sorry.”

“It’s the Fade’s fault, not yours,” I say quietly, but her attention’s still on Jove.

“He’s bleeding on the floor.”

Untold years have left the cement surface cracked, and each spidered line acts as a thin channel for Jove’s blood to travel. Anne-Marie shakes her shoe to clear what’s pooled by her toe.

“I never thought he’d do something like this—Toby, I mean. He only ever hits walls, and I thought he’d stop that when the last one wrecked his knuckles.” She worries the edge of her sleeve with her teeth, leaving it with tiny holes along the cuff. “I should have stepped between them, not you. But I—”

“Anne-Marie, stop!” I cup my hand over her mouth. “Help me get Jove’s jacket off. He’s too big for me to maneuver on my own.”

Keeping her busy is the only way to stop her from talking, or at least change the subject.

“Are you sure?” she asks nervously. “We could make him worse. Marina, I don’t want to kill anybody. Please don’t make me.” Her hands are ice-cold and sweating over mine, trying to keep me from working his buttons.

“I want to make sure the blood’s only coming from his face. Otherwise, we need to stop it.”

“Yeah . . . okay. That makes sense.” Anne-Marie bites her cheeks to cut off whatever automatic protest she wants to make. I’d laugh at the effect if we were anywhere else.

“I can do this,” she chants as we roll Jove to one side and free his arm from his jacket. “I can— I can— I can’t— I can’t do this.”

Anne-Marie rocks back on her heels as soon as we lay him back down. It’s not fair that Jove caused the problem, Tobin did the damage, and we’re the ones with blood on our hands.

“Is he all right?” she asks, chewing on her sleeve again.

“We got lucky. Jove doesn’t know how to do laundry.”

It’s a black shirt day, but Jove’s wearing his khaki one. If he was hurt, the whole thing would be caked as red as his face. How can a person bleed so much from just his face?

“We should keep him still until Doctor Wolff can take him in the morning.”

Anne-Marie nods, shrugging her jacket off to drape over Jove’s body.

“We need to wash him off, and he needs water. See how much the dispenser will let you have.”

Anne-Marie hugs her arms around herself, grumbling about the lack of plumbing as she picks her way over to a tall black box in the corner. She holds her bracelet out to the sensor on the front, prompting a single canister to roll into her hand. No matter how many times she shakes her bracelet, that’s all the box gives her, and kicking it doesn’t change its mind.

Our bunkers aren’t meant to be lived in. They were storerooms initially, then converted to short-term shelters when the need arose. They’re nothing but a dash-away hole where we can hide until the Fade retreat into the Dark at dawn.

Cinder block and steel dampen our scents and voices, but if pipes ran through here, or power lines, the Fade could follow the sound of flowing water and humming cables. We have to make do with a night’s rations and a twelve-hour generator.

“It’s all I could get.” Anne-Marie returns with the one slim can of water, huffing from her assault on the dispenser. “Maybe we can use the babies’ bracelets for more.”

“Did you ask it for bandages?” I ask.

“I want a shower,” she sniffles. “And my own room. And my mom. And I really, really, really want Jove to not have so much gunk on his face I can’t see his skin. I can’t believe my stupid brother hasn’t even offered to help! I’m telling Mom exactly what he—” Her voice hitches as she scans the room. “Marina, have you seen Trey?”

“Maybe he fell behind and had to go in with the adults. Did you see him in the hall?”

“I don’t know,” she cries, searching for anyone the right shape or size to be Trey.

“He doubled back.”

I peer up at Tobin, smoothing away the white hair that falls in my eyes when I turn my head. I’m not sure if I should be angry with him for what he’s put us through or grateful for his help during the run.

“I saw him as we were coming in. Trey turned around as soon as you were inside, Annie.”

“Why didn’t you stop him?” Anne-Marie’s voice barely makes it out of her throat.

The only reason Trey would have gone back is to help on the line. That means he’s out there—with them. Anne-Marie heaves on the floor, but there’s nothing in her stomach to come up.

“Drink this,” Tobin says. “The adrenaline’s wiped out your blood sugar.”

He holds out two bottles of pale amber liquid, but she refuses them. She sets her jaw and glares like she wants to replay the fight with him in Jove’s place and her in Tobin’s.

“It’s apple juice,” he says, showing off three more in his other hand. “It’ll dry sticky, but you can wash your hands and face with it. The acid should help loosen the blood. Save the water for if Jove wakes up.”

“You’d better not be lying about this, Tobin Lutrell.” Anne-Marie snatches one of the bottles out of his hand.

“It’s just juice, Annie. I gave half of it to the ankle-biters.”

In their corner, the youngest children sit in a circle slurping drinks and wiping their noses with their sleeves. Somehow, in the last ten minutes, Dante’s been elected jungle gym and a couple try to climb on his back, bottles and all.

“Where’d you get it?” I ask. Glass bottles are used for the younger kids because they’re easy to sanitize and the tops screw on and off without needing a can opener, but they’re stored in the kitchen coolers, not down here.

“This place has a lot of secrets, you just have to know where to look.” Tobin sets the last bottles on the floor, taking a seat on Jove’s other side. “It’s the same kind of dispenser they use for snack time in the lower-year classes. Juice is provided in bulk, in response to whatever number of students the teacher puts in, but water’s rationed to one bottle per person. They switch out the machines for maintenance, but always overlook the juice bottles and cookies.”

He pulls off his jacket, biting a hole in it so he can rip the material. Within minutes, he’s got a pile of long khaki strips.

“Bandages,” he says. “You okay, Annie?”

“No. And I do not want to talk to you right now.” After downing the first bottle in one long gulp, she takes a handful of strips, pours some juice on one, and starts cleaning the dried blood away from Jove’s mouth.

He’s a mess. His bumps and bruises have gained definition, changing the lines of his face and darkening his skin in places. He barely looks human.

“At least he’s not awake to feel it,” I say as I wash off his knuckles.

“Careful,” Tobin warns. “Only clean his skin, not the wounds. The sugar could give him an infection.”

“Don’t you tell her to be careful, Toby,” Anne-Marie snaps, but she listens well enough to skirt the split on Jove’s eyebrow. “You should thank her for stopping you.”

She takes a long swipe down Jove’s cheek, accidentally snagging one of the cuts. Tobin presses a clean bandage against it to stop the bleeding.

“You know you didn’t have to hit him, or you could have just hit him once, but you didn’t. If Marina hadn’t made you stop, you could have killed him.”

Apple juice sloshes out of the bottle as she shakes it at another bandage to clean off Jove’s cracked lips.

“He’s burning hot, Toby. Feel his face.” Anne-Marie grabs Tobin’s hand, not giving him a choice. “When he wakes up you’re going to apologize or . . . well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but you’re not going to like it!”

Her voice dies down to half-mumbled threats. If Jove weren’t already unconscious, she’d talk him into a coma.

Tobin and I ease away once most of Jove’s injuries are checked, leaving Anne-Marie to take care of him.

“We need a clock in here,” Tobin says.

Or windows. Or a radio. Anything to tell us how close it is to dawn, and what might be happening outside.

I check my personal alarm, hoping I can figure out a way to coax information from it, but the face is still flooded with blinking red light. It’s a shock to see the burn from where I’d hit the wall during the run. I hadn’t really registered the pain until now.

That claustrophobic feeling that had Anne-Marie so keyed up settles in. It really is a small room once it’s packed full, and yet I somehow end up picking a spot close to Tobin rather than one where I’m alone. He doesn’t flinch away from me like the others would.

“You know what it is, don’t you?” Tobin’s voice is distant.

“What?”

“Why they’re afraid of you?” He nods to the room. Every once in a while, someone will glance my way, but they divert their attention as soon as they realize I can see them.

“They blame me,” I say.

He shakes his head. “It’s your ears.”

“My ears?” I grasp at them, confused. They feel normal.

“I don’t know what the stories are like where you came from, but here people who can hear the Fade and those who can see in the dark are bad omens. They’re the ones we lost first. You know, before.”

“But I can’t see in the Dark anymore.”

“You can still hear,” he says. “You try to hide it, but I’ve seen you with your head cocked to the side, like you’re counting off a rhythm that doesn’t exist. Honoria tells us stories, and . . . never mind. It’s not a time for stories.”

“No. I want to know. Her stories are about people who could hear?”

“Some of them.” He nods again without looking at me. “They walked into the Dark on their own. They said they heard voices calling them out . . . people they knew. . . . The next time they were seen, if they were ever seen, they were Fade. It hasn’t happened in years, but Honoria’s brother was one of the last. They grabbed him on a forage run or something. He was just a kid.”

“But I don’t hear voices,” I argue. “I hear real sounds.”

“It still scares them. My dad trained himself to do the same thing, but he doesn’t tell people. You have to hide it better.”

I don’t mean to stare at Tobin, and really I’m not, but he’s been so many different people in such a short time. He’s gone from the boy slinking into rooms after everyone else was in place, to my protector, to the hurt son defending his father’s memory with feral determination, to . . . whatever he is now. His posture changes, followed by his expression, but not quickly enough to spare me the expectation there, as though I hold all his answers.

“How much longer do you think we have to wait?” I ask, because I can’t figure out how to ask him anything else. “Will they turn the alert back to normal so we know it’s over?”

“Maybe.” He scratches at the bloodstains on his fingers. The bandages he’d worn earlier are gone, lost either in the run or the fight, exposing purplish-black bruises on his knuckles. “Or maybe we died and nobody bothered to tell us.”

“That’s not funny,” I say.

“I didn’t mean it to be,” he says. “We have no idea what dead feels like. Maybe we’re there. Death would be simpler. No more mourning, no more waiting.”

“You don’t really think that, do you?”

“I guess not.” He shrugs. “If we were dead, someone would have let us out by now.”

“You think that’s how it works?” I ask. “Easy as opening the door?”

“That’s what Dad told me when my mom died.” Another shrug, like his brain’s linked the motion to ending a sentence.

“I don’t even know how my mom died . . . if she’s dead . . . nothing.”

We’ve become not friends, exactly, but tolerable allies through the bond of common loss and lack of options.

Tobin shifts again, fixating on Anne-Marie and Jove in the middle of the room.

“I didn’t mean to hurt him.” He slides to the floor, resting his hands on his knees.

“I know.” I slide down beside him, using the wall as an anchor for more than my posture.

“Do you ever wonder why Honoria and the others separate us like this?” he asks. “Why they stick us in a hole while they stand guard?”

“To protect us.” Obviously. The elders protect the young, like my parents did with me. I have to believe they drew off the Fade so I could reach the light. They did not throw me away; I refuse to be an outcast to two worlds.

“They didn’t think it through,” Tobin says. “What happens if they fall?”

“The locks open at dawn and we do the best we can,” I say.

“But if the Fade take them, we’re next. They’re gone, the defenses are shot, the ammo’s spent, and we get twelve hours to tick off what’s left of our lives before they come back to kill us. We’re penned in.”

He stops, like he hadn’t realized he was speaking out loud.