“What do you mean, ‘alteration’?”
“Changes.” He rattles the disk at me and his eyes shift again so the color leaches into the silver center. He’s angry. “Alt-er-ation,” he sounds out carefully.
“Med-i-cation,” I correct. “All it changes is the pain.”
The Fade sets the inhaler flat in his palm—offering it, I assume, but as soon as I try to take it, his fingers snap shut.
“Wait,” he says. “See.”
The thick line swirled across his palm uncurls, spreading out beneath my inhaler. Once it’s wide enough, tiny particles—nanites, I suppose—rise off his skin and engulf it completely.
They move in fits and starts, smooth at first, then writhing. Soon the second skin around my inhaler is boiling. The nanites fall apart, dropping onto his palm in clumps.
The Fade snarls, throws the inhaler on the ground, and crushes it under his foot.
“Dead,” he says. He shakes his hand like it’s gone to sleep, casting off black ash with every shake.
“I need that!”
Inquiry
. . .
“Which need?” He tests my “higher pitch” instructions.
“I hurt without it.”
The Fade reaches to wrap his hands around my upper arms, and with one swift motion, I’m on my toes looking him straight in the face.
“Will not hurt you,” he says.
My consciousness slips into that place that’s under his control, where he can pull images out of my mind and make them look however he wants. He goes searching for pain and finds it in the moment where I was shot, only he twists the memory so he’s beside me in the Grey. He cuts into his hand until dark blood runs, then holds the cut to my wound. When he pulls it away, we both bleed black.
“I can make you not hurt,” he offers, and I’m back in the Well in the present. “You help. I help.”
It’s not a suggestion. This is his payment for helping him find Cherish.
A rumble starts deep in my stomach, and acid floods into my mouth from the idea that he wants to make me like him. I’m not strong enough to stop him if he tries.
The sky picks this, the worst moment, to throw another fireball across the horizon. An orange streak roars into view, catching the sheen of the Fade’s eyes, and making them burn. Everywhere his skin should be white, it reflects the star’s tail, blazing with the power contained in that deceptively humanoid form.
Demon . . . Monster . . . Abomination . . .
The rhetoric I’ve heard since my first moment plays in a loop, and I cup my hand over the panic button on my wrist. Pressing the button would bring help, but it would also cost Tobin his sanctuary.
“Promise you’ll leave, and I won’t hit the alarm,” I say.
The Fade finally lets me back down onto the grass. Calm wraps around me, and my limbs relax before I realize what he’s doing.
Safe
.
The suggestion imprints over everything else, robbing me of the desire to run. The Fade leans his forehead against mine, close enough now that I can tell the scent of his skin isn’t the stench I’d imagined. I want to be afraid of him, but he won’t let me.
Trust
.
There’s an electric tingle everywhere our skin touches. To my horror, it isn’t some autonomic response to his proximity, but the very literal rush of foreign matter onto my body.
The myriad of swirls and loops that decorate his skin begin to move as individual particles, smaller than sand, all working together and moving toward a common destination—me.
“Stop!” I choke out.
“Listen,” he says instead.
A tiny shock stings my skin for each particle that travels from the Fade to me. Playing the part of conductor, they carry images clearer than those he was able to send on his own, but it’s too much. I can’t keep up.
My field of vision shrinks until all I can see are those two blue-silver eyes and the ash-white skin around them.
“Too fast,” I say.
He’s shaking; each tremor sends another wave of nanites onto my skin, compounding the problem. He’s almost solid white now, and my hands bear the marks he’s surrendered. If fire’s the only way to purify exposed skin, they’ll have to burn my whole body to destroy them.
“Hear,” he grits out.
Desperation. Pleading
.
“I need what you know.”
My mind pries open, wider and wider, stretching to accommodate new input.
“You see it. I see it.” The sound of his voice amplifies in each particle. They shout as one, boring into parts of myself I can’t access on my own.
“Take them back!”
Beauty. Hope. Light. Whole
.
“They’ll kill me!”
He stops. The marks flee my skin, retreating back across our bridge of hands, and I fly backward as sure as if I was thrown by someone ten times my size.
The amount of power contained in his body, those particles . . . nanites . . . whatever . . . is frightening, as much for the magnitude as the revelation that he’s been holding it in check when he didn’t have to. No way did we bring him down on our own. Not five kids.
“You could have left anytime, couldn’t you?”
The Fade turns away, back to hiding in the shadows.
“Look at me,” I say.
Am I actually trying to convince a Fade that I want him to stay when he was going to leave me alone?
Alone
.
He latches onto the word and sends it back. The world rushes away so there’s no sound or sight. Just a starless void with him in the center.
Grief
.
The toxic emotion twists my heart, compressing around it. Loss and desperation on a scale I never knew existed.
“You stayed for her.”
The Fade didn’t come here to kill me, or anyone else. He came for her—
Cherish
. The Red-Wall attack was cover for him to steal inside, a distraction to get him close enough to find her. He never wanted to hurt anyone. This Fade let Honoria Whit lock him up because he was afraid that if he left, he’d never see his Cherish again.
“Start over. I’ll listen,” I assure him. “But go slower. Okay?”
Hope
.
He lays one hand on my cheek, gently, and tilts my head up so we’re eye-to-eye. The markings on his face shift into kinetic interlocking lines, but they stay on him.
There’s a feeling that a circuit’s been broken, but it takes two tries to get up the nerve to lay my hand on his chest. His skin’s smooth under my fingers, without any ridging or rise where the patterns should be. They’re not
on
his skin, they’re
in
it.
That means they were
in
me, too.
It’s so strange to feel what I can’t see, where his marks blend his body into the night.
The Fade moves my hand until I feel the fluttering beat of his heart, and it strikes me that he’s alive. Stories about his kind made them seem like smoke, without body or form, but he’s flesh and blood. A heart can’t pump without blood.
Cherish
.
More than the word drops into my mind. It’s a rush of care and concern, set to the beat of a thumping pulse. The images start over as he tries to make me see everything at once, the whole of his mate’s life in a single breath.
When I pull back this time, he lets me. His hand’s clutched in my hair, rolling the strands between his fingers the way I’d done with the unfamiliar texture of the sand in Tobin’s jar.
“Do you have a name?” I ask.
“Cherish is not found,” he says.
Confused. Defeated. Rueful
.
“Rueful? Can I call you Rue?” I ask.
“Rue,” he repeats with a nod. I suppose that’s a yes.
The turmoil boiling out of him makes me dizzy with an overbearing sense of failure.
“Try something else. Tell me out loud, in human terms. Maybe it’ll trigger something.”
I’ve come too close to give up now. He’s so sure I saw what happened to Cherish. Maybe if I find her, I’ll find me, too.
“We are infinite,” he says. “Words are inadequate.”
“They’re better than nothing.”
“Remember Cherish. Listen to Cherish. Locate Cherish.”
“I don’t know where to look,” I say. “Tobin was born here and even he wouldn’t know. The place you were kept was hidden from us.”
Mentioning Tobin is a bad idea. Rue’s back on the offensive.
Hate. Enemy
.
He paces, looking from me to Tobin on a pause, then returns to his pacing. I’m beginning to think it’s a good thing Tobin doesn’t know what’s going on.
“Leave,” he says finally.
“Yes, leave,” I agree. “Go look for Cherish.”
“You leave. Bring Cherish to home.”
“I don’t have her,” I say, for what feels like the millionth time. “Get out of here before I change my mind and hit the alarm.”
But my fingers still refuse to obey my commands.
“We go to home, or home comes to here.” Apparently “ultimatum” isn’t one of the inadequate words Rue’s familiar with. “Home waits. If I remain, home comes to here.”
“That’s not fair.” I whirl on him, causing my hair to flare wide. It catches the moonlight, nearly glowing against the darkness of the Well.
“He will cease,” Rue says, and nods to Tobin. “He is finite. With an end.”
The sound of that distant heartbeat starts and stops, and the fear that Rue might have somehow killed Tobin even though they’re not touching makes me watch until I’m sure he’s breathing.
“He will cease,” Rue says again, the threat clear.
“If I go with you, you have to promise to leave him alone. All of them—everyone here.”
“Mine will stay to home.”
“And you’ll let Tobin go?”
“He will wake.”
A simple matter of numbers becomes the hardest decision of my life. I can stay here and know the nightly onslaught will resume, or I can leave and make a dent in the debt I owe the Arclight for saving me in the first place. It’s a near certainty that the Fade will find another breach point. There’s a less sure outcome, if I go, but getting Rue out of here will keep Tobin safe.
Actually, it’s not a hard decision at all.
I
leave my alarm behind, near the door to the Well where I’m sure Tobin will see it. If I leave without a clue, he’ll assume I got scared either of the night or of him, and that I’ve gone back to my room. But no one goes anywhere without their alarm.
Where time moved at a crawl during the Red-Wall, it’s flying now. I try not to wonder how long it will take Rue to lose patience with my not being able to answer his questions, or if death will hurt once I’m no longer of use to him.
We’re in the tunnels, beyond the safety of the light. We’ve already passed two collapsed corridors, but Rue picks ways that are clear, finding more pieces of the Arclight that shouldn’t exist. He drags me along, clutching my hands with fingers now devoid of the claws that allow him to climb stone walls, and I don’t dare separate from him for fear of being lost down here forever in the oldest parts of the Arclight’s underground.
It’s clearer than ever that the direct assault on our wall was a diversion and nothing else; otherwise, they would have been in and out and never made a sound. Rue navigates the tunnels like he was born to them, sweeping down turns and switchbacks that seem random.
How many times have the Fade entered the Arclight and we never knew? Is Rue truly the only one here with me? I don’t hear the click of Fade claws against the walls as we pass, or see any shimmer lines to indicate we have company, but it’s possible. All of this whirls through my mind while I try to devise some way to tell Honoria about the hole in the security grid. Once I’m gone, no one will know it’s here.
Rue stops so quickly I bounce off his back.
“A little warning would be nice, next time you plan on turning into a wall.” I rub my nose, flick the tears from the blow out of my eyes. “You’re lost, aren’t you?”
The lights here are rusted and mostly broken, with only the emergency beacons glowing. Three out of ten remain, and one of those is intermittent.
“Searching,” he corrects, patting the wall here and there.
“For what?”
He sends me the image of my mouth opening to speak, and nothing coming out.
“Don’t tell me to shut up,” I say, relieved that I can.
An unflinching hand covers my mouth. “Let go of me” never quite makes it into the open air, dying as a muffled squeak in Rue’s palm.
“Quiet,” he says, then gives me the sense of my voice bouncing from wall to wall down the corridor until it’s heard in the Arclight above. “Stay here. Mouth closed.”
Rue takes his hand away and directs me to the facing wall.
“You could have just asked,” I grouse.
“I did.”
“You could have asked
politely
.”
“Mouth closed. Politely.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
The muscles across his back tense up, annoyed, and the swirls and loops across them draw tighter into dense coils. The green shine from the emergency lights does strange things to Rue’s appearance, making him more out of place in the real world.
“I’m sorry,” I say. The last thing I want is an irritated Fade on my hands. “When I can’t see, I get nervous.”
“Your eyes are damaged?”
“It’s too dark. Humans only see what the light touches.”
A hand yanks me back across the corridor until I’m directly under the defective light. My body appears and disappears with each short burst of power.
Another minute passes with me sitting on the floor in my tiny green circle before it shrinks inward. Its filament bursts with a dramatic pop, creating trails of sparks that die out before they hit the ground—a pale imitation of the star shower I was watching only minutes ago.
“Rue?” I call out for the only familiar thing left to me and stretch my foot out, feeling for any boundary I can find. Using a cold pipe for leverage, I pull myself up and along its path. “Tell me where you are . . . ow!”
I catch my hand on a latch in the wall and slam into something hard. Round rungs and sidebars—from the feel of it I’ve smacked into a ladder that’s bolted to the wall by a less-than-sturdy set of brackets. And I could really use my inhaler about now to deal with the pain of discovery.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” I ask loudly, over the ringing metal and my ringing ears.