“I told you I’d paint if you want to sort files,” I say.
Three huge filing cabinets stand broken open and mostly empty against the wall, while I sort scattered stacks of everything from family information to art projects out of the giant mess that formed when they toppled.
“Right, then
you’ll
fall off a ladder and break your Fade-proof neck, and everyone else will drown
me
in my paint bucket.”
“If it’ll stop the whining,” Tobin grumbles.
He’s not so much cleaning the tables as he is pouring water on them and sailing his sponge across the surface before declaring each one “done.”
“I just don’t see why
we
have to suffer. We caught one of them, make
it
do the repairs!” Anne-Marie’s tirade continues in the form of angry, paint-coated jabs to the ceiling. “It can disappear into walls, tell it to disappear the damage!”
I’m no happier than she is. I already did my four-day rotation in the babies’ classes, and have no desire to return. I’d much rather be back outside with my flower bush. Plants don’t leave snot on everything.
“We’re halfway done,” I say.
“And all the way out of paint.”
Anne-Marie stomps down the ladder, banging the can behind her. She holds her arms out, scowling as though she hadn’t noticed the paint dripping. Her skin and clothes are covered in splotches.
“I look like I have pasty chicken pox!”
I’m not exactly sure how someone can catch spots from chickens, but the disease is listed in the hospital as something to report should we see the signs. It’s a condition from before, like measles and other things with “pox” on the end that now exist only as a distant threat we’re forced to memorize.
“I’m going for a refill, and don’t you dare leave Marina by herself! If that Fade gets loose and kills her, it’ll be your fault!” Anne-Marie’s still grumbling when she slams the door.
“So that’s what quiet sounds like,” Tobin quips. “I’d forgotten.”
“Don’t let Anne-Marie hear you say that.” I tug on one of the few drawers that didn’t pop open when the cabinets fell, but it’s stuck tight.
“You want to switch? I can handle the paper stuff for a while.”
“I’ll manage.” I’ve been through the Dark and faced down a Fade. I refuse to concede supremacy to a file cabinet full of finger paintings. “Open up, you stupid hunk of metal.”
“If it answers, you’re my new excuse to stop working. I’ll drag you back to the hospital instead.”
I stick my tongue out at him. Talking furniture isn’t among my complaints; those are a Fade bent on using my brain as his personal PA system, and Honoria’s glare following me around for the foreseeable future.
“You sure you don’t want a hand?” he asks.
“Only if that hand is going to lock the door.”
“And what could you possibly have in mind that requires a locked door?”
Tobin grins. He’s got that spark in his eyes, like the night we went out to watch the star shower, without a hint of the discouragement from the hall.
I can feel myself blushing.
“I want a barricade between me and Anne-Marie before she gets back here and accuses me of ‘ruining her system’ again.” She was the last one to work on these files before the attack, as part of her work-study to become an instructor in the nursery classes.
“I make a great barricade.”
“She’s on her third coffee of the hour. One more and she’ll be moving fast enough to walk through you.”
I don’t know what’s wrong with me; my mood keeps shifting. I’m constantly peeved by things that never really bothered me before, like Anne-Marie’s habits. Ten seconds later, I feel horrible for talking about her. Twenty seconds after that, I’m back to wanting to flirt with Tobin.
“I’ll take the top ones,” he says, sliding past me to start on an open drawer. “You do the bottom.”
I drop down, crouching to reach the lowest drawer, when an odd smell escapes from something that has no place in a file cabinet. With one sharp tug, a half-eaten sandwich with three gooey files attached to it fly out, sending a rain of pages fluttering around us. It’s Anne-Marie’s handwriting on the folder.
“Do you think it fell in, or did she actually file a sandwich under
G
?” I ask.
“Well, it
is
green.” Tobin braves a sniff before dropping the sandwich into an empty file jacket.
“You know what . . . new tactic.” I shovel the mess of pages, plus the six-inch stack of paperwork on the teacher’s desk, into the open drawer and slam it shut. It takes both of us to latch it. “I say we torch it and claim it all got lost in the chaos.”
“Deal.”
I face Tobin, and that same jolt goes off like a shock in my chest. I have the sudden desire to look away, but I can’t seem to remember how to make my head turn.
Tobin licks his lips. I watch the muscles in his throat as he swallows.
My heels lift off the ground until my weight is on my toes, expectant and strangely hesitant. It’s not fear . . . not exactly, but I’m not quite comfortable with my body remembering how to do something my conscious mind’s forgotten.
Every breath draws the scent of him in like oxygen, and then . . .
“I . . . I saw my dad. . . .”
Tobin’s eyes slam shut. I don’t need to hear him say the words to know he’s cursing himself. Whatever traction had us locked in to each other breaks, and I drop back down off my toes.
“When?” I ask.
“The reason I went to the Arc that day . . .”
“You saw your dad in the Grey?”
“Once, about a week after you came in. He just stood there, with the sun setting behind him so there was no light on his face, but it had to be him. He was the right shape, and still wearing his uniform. I waved at him.”
“Maybe you only
wanted
it to be him.”
“Marina . . . after that day, my dad never came back to the Arc, but I
did
see him again.” Tobin gives the room a quick check to make sure the door’s still closed. He leans against the teacher’s desk, picking at the edge of his sling. “In the White Room, you said that thing tried to talk to me first, but that I couldn’t hear it. That’s not
exactly
true.”
“He spoke to you?”
“Why do you call it that? It’s a Fade, not a person!”
“I know, but it’s harder to be scared of a real person. What did he . . .
it
. . . show you?”
“All I could make out was my dad’s face, and even that wasn’t completely clear. He was in pain, and scared.”
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” I ask, assuming the Fade pulled images from Tobin’s mind like he did mine. With me, memories are what I want more than anything; with Tobin, it’s his father. Maybe that’s the hook. The Fade can latch on to strong emotion.
“It felt real,” he says. “It felt like that thing loaned me its eyes and made me see my dad as something weak and small, when he’s not.”
I want to tell him I understand, but I don’t. I know what it’s like to have no family, but not to have their memory tarnished or twisted. And I want to ask him how he managed to block the Fade so easily. If all he saw were blurred suggestions, he did a lot better than me. But our moment of solitude has run out.
The door bumps open, struck by Anne-Marie’s hip as she lugs two paint buckets back inside. This time she’s not alone. Dante, Silver, and two others trail in behind her. The two boys I’ve never met, but they have patches marking them as three years younger than us.
“I told you we should have locked it.”
That free-range feeling of anger starts again, spreading from my feet all the way up to my throat. I’m furious. Not just at Anne-Marie and her timing, but at everything.
“Next time we shove a chair under the handle,” Tobin says through a sigh.
“I brought help,” Anne-Marie announces.
One of the boys paints a couple of strokes, but doesn’t maintain his cover for long. The other pretends to wash down tables, but doesn’t bother to soak his sponge first.
“They’re staring,” I say.
“They think if you’re in here, and they’re in here, then there’s less of a chance that either of them will get eaten if that Fade goes on a rampage.”
“Anne-Marie!”
“What?” she asks innocently. “Less work for us, so what’s it hurt?”
“Let’s just get this over with, and then none of us have to be here anymore, okay?” Tobin says.
He’s itching to get back outside; I can see it in the way he watches the door. He wants to be in the open air of the Well, not cooped up in here with too many reminders that there’s a Fade on the premises that may or may not have seen his father die in agony and terror. He takes the brush Anne-Marie left behind, reaching for one of the paint buckets with his good arm.
“No way,” she says. “Give it back.”
“I can help, Annie.”
“You’re on scrub detail for a reason, Picasso.” Anne-Marie dances foot-to-foot in front of the wall to block his access. “Give me back my brush.”
“Your name’s not on it.”
“My teeth marks are,” she says. “I chewed the end . . . look.”
“Maybe those are
my
teeth marks.”
Tobin sticks the end of the brush in his mouth.
“Uh-oh,” Dante says. He and Silver back away.
“Prepare to defend yourself against a temper tantrum of epic proportions,” Silver adds.
“Toby. Give. Me. Back. My. Paintbrush,” Anne-Marie bites out.
Instead, he reaches for an open can of black paint.
“Don’t you dare!”
There are five more brushes within easy reach, so I don’t get why they’re fighting over one.
“Too slow.” Tobin gives the now dripping brush a dramatic wave high in the air.
“Toby!” Anne-Marie’s voice comes out as a furious shriek. Black spatter peppers the still wet surface she’d spent so much time whitewashing; gravity draws the spots into lines that splinter along the texture as they flow downward.
“Oops?”
“Oops” is not a smart choice of words. In fact, from the look on Anne-Marie’s face, “oops” may qualify as the single worst thing that’s ever come out of Tobin’s mouth.
“Wait a minute, Annie. Calm down.”
“Duck and cover?” I ask.
“Quickly,” Dante says, right before Anne-Marie picks up the can of black paint and tips it over Tobin’s head.
Tobin jabs at her with his paintbrush, leaving a large splotch on her uniform, and she reaches for the closest thing she can get her hands on. She sloshes orange chair paint in Tobin’s direction, but misses wide, hitting one of the younger boys instead.
“Hey!” The boy whose face is now half orange flings the blue paint he’s still got in his hand.
From there, it’s pandemonium. All the stress and nerves from the last few days boil over. Paint flies in all directions at once. Red bounces off white in midair to land in a half-mixed puddle of pink. Black swirls with purple on the floor. Tables and chairs get coated with flecks of every color.
“Cover me,” Tobin says, ducking behind the table where I’m hiding.
He runs from table to table, half an inch ahead of bursting color bombs. At the end of the row, he sneaks up behind Silver, who’s too busy trading volleys with Anne-Marie to realize he’s there. Soon she looks like a giant egg has burst on her head, with yellow running down her ponytail and onto her back.
This is so much better when it’s paint instead of bullets.
Everyone’s laughing.
I examine the patterns created by the paint on my skin, and what’s landed around me. A swirl here, a dot there, smudge the colors together . . . if I relax the muscles in my eyes, my hand blends with the floor and the edges of the chair overturned beside me.
I make myself Fade.
The effect only lasts a second before I recognize that familiar buzz at the corner of my mind for what it is. Even with all the space and floors between us, the Fade’s trying to get my attention.
No wonder I’ve been on edge; the Fade’s been messing with my head. I muddy the colors with my other hand so they’re an incoherent mess.
“Go away,” I snarl, but I already know there’s little chance of him listening to me. I rush out of my hiding place, barely feeling the impact of four different colors against my skin and clothes.
“Not the most effective strategy,” Tobin says, joining me in the hot zone. He draws me down to the floor, and I’m grateful for his closeness. It’s harder for the Fade to find space to play in my mind while Tobin’s with me. “Are you okay?”
I turn to answer, maybe even to confess that the connection I had with the Fade hasn’t died outside the White Room, but Tobin’s face shocks the words right out of me.
“Your face . . .”
“What?”
He raises to catch his reflection in the metal side of a file cabinet. There’s no clear detail, but that only makes it worse. His face is a mess of black lines and dots, and as panic makes his skin paler underneath, the similarity between Tobin and the Fade becomes more pronounced.
“Get it off. Get it off me. Now!” Tobin claws at his face. I try to pull his arm away, but panic makes him unstoppable.
“What’s wrong?” Anne-Marie asks. She’s in the open now; the others have sensed the change in the room’s energy and quit the game completely.
“He looks like a Fade,” I say.
She doesn’t question how I know, but runs to the bucket of soapy water Tobin had been using to clean the tables and floor. When she comes back, it’s with a loaded sponge to clean his face, the same way we’d cleaned the remnants of Tobin’s beating off Jove.
The others go back to painting and cleaning, as though they’d never stopped. The airy tone that had left us free to play disintegrates. Even the light looks different. It twists splashes of color into a cruel pantomime of blood and gore as though we’d taken part in some real conflict.
I grab a sponge and eradicate what remains of the lines on the door and trim, but it’s going to take a lot longer to rid myself of the memories of my faded self, and Tobin with a face like that thing in the White Room.
The end of our work detail comes as a relief to everyone but me. For them, it’s an excuse to escape our mock battleground. For me, it’s the loss of anything I can use to keep the Fade out of my head.
He knew.
He knew the exact moment I left the hospital, and the precise instant my eyes no longer opened into the extra bright lights that always shine there. That means he wasn’t just in my head when I could feel him; he’s been monitoring me somehow, and despite all of the countermeasures of the White Room—this was something even Honoria didn’t see coming.