“Please . . . They’ll never let me come home.”
Calm. Trust
.
Rue slaps his palm against my leg, holding his hand still until the blood mingles black and red.
There’s nowhere left to crawl, even if I could drag myself any farther. My body won’t work. The world loses focus by degrees. Sounds and colors cut in half, and my skin goes numb as my mind begins to spin. Is this inclusion? Screaming on the inside while someone else runs your life? Is there a still-human boy somewhere inside Rue, begging to be freed?
Distant whispers grow loud in my ears, trying to get me to see something that’s been invisible until this moment. Layer after layer, they pile on top of each other, agreeing and adding weight to what I’ve already seen and heard. Everything Rue’s tried to show me comes into sharper perspective, clear and close and loud. The Dark isn’t silent at all.
Symbiont, hive, inclusion
—they’re words I understand, but couldn’t comprehend before. It’s more than shared existence and space. They’re one voice, one thought, one will, always in agreement as parts in a single great machine.
One life
.
They are many and one, and somehow they’ve diminished. Those infinite voices mourn the loss of a single note among them. She’s Cherish to them all. They implore me to remember and find her as Rue has:
Locate. Return. Know
.
“Never alone,”
I hear as a chorus and sound of welcome. The warmth of belonging stops me from shaking, but it’s a lie. Morphine to dull the pain and slow my mind, a snare meant to trap me so I won’t fight or question them. Already I feel my inner self yearning to answer back and reach out for all those invisible arms offering to embrace me as their own.
No! I don’t belong to the Fade. I won’t be included.
I won’t.
I won’t.
I won’t.
I want . . .
“Marina?”
I hear my human name spoken by a human voice, but there shouldn’t be any humans here, especially not ones who sound like Anne-Marie. It’s a dream, another trick. It has to be.
“What’d you do to her?” Another familiar voice demands. Tobin shouldn’t be here either.
I’m losing my mind already; I thought it would take longer.
Faces in full color push through the gathered Fade—half a dozen people in khaki green, and two wearing the regulation Arclight blue from last night. Deep brown skin for the face using Anne-Marie’s voice, lighter for Tobin. Eyes like Jove’s without the hateful squint to them appear near my face, but they belong to a woman.
“You’re all right.” She sits, takes one of my hands, and covers it with her own.
“Marina?” the one who sounds like Tobin asks, closer now. He kneels beside me, but I can’t take my eyes off the woman. This is her . . . the mother I cost Jove . . . the reason he hates me.
“The haze will pass,” she says in a clear voice that still sounds so very human. She hasn’t lost the natural cadence of her speech like the Fade who uses Rue’s mouth to speak, and the lines haven’t reached her face. “The nanites are healing your wounds, but they need your nervous system to do it.”
“Marina?” Tobin calls again, and this time he refuses to be ignored. He turns my face toward him.
If he’s here with Jove’s mother, then the Fade have him, too.
And Anne-Marie.
I’ve lost everyone. I’m alone.
Never alone
, the whispers argue, but I don’t want to hear them.
“Just let me die,” I beg them.
“You’re not dying, Marina,” the thing that looks like Tobin says. “I won’t let you.”
He calls back over his shoulder, and another of the khaki-green bodies separates from the group, pushing its way forward from the back to say, “She’s healing.”
I don’t want to heal. If I heal, I’ll have to stay with the Fade.
“I want to go home,” I say weakly.
“Remove!”
The whispers take up the word as a chant until the rhythm falters, interrupted by Rue’s rage. He wrenches Tobin’s hands from my face, shoving Tobin back at the same time, and inserts himself in the space between us.
“Get away from her!”
Tobin’s on his feet, pushing back. He grabs Rue around the waist, the same way he took Jove down in the bunker. Rue could break him in half, but Tobin has more experience in a hand-to-hand struggle; neither of them can find a way to best the other.
“Do something!” Anne-Marie screams.
The khaki-clad man who responded before wraps an arm across Tobin’s chest, using a hold common to the Arclight’s security teams, and walks him backward. The Fade-woman I’d seen with the little girl lays her hand on Rue so lightly that I’m surprised he feels it, and a forced calm spreads through the open link I’ve been drawn into with the Fade. Even I’m not worried anymore.
Rue glances back at me, catches my eye; his face is grim.
He will cease. You will find my Cherish, and he will cease
.
Rue lumbers away and vanishes into the Dark, not stopping when the other Fade reach out to him. The khaki-covered arms restraining Tobin let him go, and he returns to my side, while his captor takes up position at my feet beside Jove’s mother.
“Are you okay?” Gentle fingers prod my leg where Rue cut me. There’s nothing there but numb.
Everything’s
numb. I can’t feel the nanites anywhere but in my leg. They’re not branching out or drawing lines across my skin. There’s no sensation of my humanity draining away.
“I’m . . . I . . . I’m . . .”
There’s no longer a clear path between my mouth and the words I want to speak.
“Stop fighting them, sweetheart,” Jove’s mother says. “Close your eyes and it’ll be over by the time you wake up.”
I won’t let it be over. I fight the suggestion to let the Fade absorb me into their shared self and turn to Tobin.
“You’re supposed to be safe,” is what I want to say, but the words are slurred and mangled.
“I crossed over the boundary on the short side,” Tobin says, taking my other hand. I hadn’t realized I was so cold, but I feel the warmth from his skin more than anything else. “I came to find you . . . and I was right, Marina. My dad’s alive.”
He’s beaming.
My eyelids stop moving, half-open, half-closed, and the last thing I see before the rest of me goes as numb as my mind is the face of the man in khaki smiling beside Jove’s mother.
It’s James Lutrell.
His eyes are silver.
G
REY
light.
My eyes open into the endless dawn of the space between light and dark.
A crumbling pier that’s fallen half into some kind of lake, the remains of boats in various stages of decomposition. One of them looks like it might still float if someone was desperate enough to try it. I’m in the water, up to my neck.
The air smells dull and laced with mildew. I hear a sound from the shore, and at first it looks like a clump of bushes moving, but bushes don’t walk or carry the sound of heavy boots.
When I try to get a better look, my hand slips off the piece of wood I’ve used to brace myself and makes a splash.
Step by step they creep closer to the rotted mess that serves as my hiding place. Lt. Sykes, Mr. Pace, and someone else. . . . I know him. It’s the man in khaki—Tobin’s father. His eyes are still human brown.
Oh . . . this is a dream. Maybe I’ll see my mom and dad.
“Ripples,” Col. Lutrell whispers with a finger to his lips, pointing toward the water under the pier.
I shrink into the shadows; Col. Lutrell steps to the fore and extends his hand from the shore.
“Come on, sweetheart,” he says.
I cling to the post, not daring to trust him.
“James! Look out!” Mr. Pace slams his hand into Col. Lutrell’s back, shoving him face-first into the silt, only barely avoiding the path of flying debris that would have taken his head off.
So Rue’s here, too.
The scene explodes into shouts, terror, and gunfire. My mind is assaulted by images and echoes of feeling from the Fade as they fill in my gaps, mashing our realities together. This is my memory, but from their perspective, too.
Rage. Anger. Fear. Outrage. Guard
.
It comes from all directions at once. I shut my eyes for a moment to block the Fade like I did before, but it doesn’t work. These aren’t my real eyes.
“They’re behind us!” someone shouts; I can’t tell who.
The scenery moves. Trees, ground, and grass, all break into the shimmering outlines of crouched forms that match the terrain. They pop out of nowhere, stepping into existence from open air. Ghostly mentions of Rue’s mate reverberate through the chorus. The humans took a Fade-girl, so the Fade are determined not to let them have me.
“They’re everywhere,” Mr. Pace shouts.
Both sides rush the middle and get hit hard.
“Get her out of here!” Tobin’s father yells above the rest. “Elias, get her inside!”
Lt. Sykes stays at his back; Mr. Pace wades in to get me, but I pull against him. I want to vanish, so the monsters can’t see me. I want to be safe.
“Come on, kid,” he says. “We’ll take you home.”
He drags me out of the water, shivering and confused, dripping so my clothes and hair lie plastered and dark against skin that’s too pale from being out of the light so long. I break his hold at the bank and dash away in the wrong direction—toward the line of Fade.
“She’s running,” he shouts. The rifle at his side swings up.
Having the Fade in my head is twisting things. They’re trying to alter my memory . . . make me see my rescue as something else.
“Stop,” I scream at myself in the dream, but this has already happened. I can’t change it.
My movements are wild and unsteady, driven by terror rather than logic. I head for the ridge above the water; high ground is always safest. Rue breaks away from the other Fade, running to intercept me.
“Colonel?” Lt. Sykes shouts.
“Do it,” Col. Lutrell answers.
Lt. Sykes fires toward the ridge; the explosion from his rifle rattles through every whispered voice in my head, confusing the Fade who weren’t used to a sound so loud outside of thunder.
I fall at the base of the slope. Blood from my leg mingles with the mud under my body, and the Fade scream in outrage and pain as the connection they’ve forged in my mind forces them to endure the agony I felt, too.
“Marina? Marina, can you hear me?” Col. Lutrell’s voice morphs into something more feminine and familiar, jarring me back into the conscious world.
For once, I wake without pain. I can feel the softness of a mattress under my body, and drop my hand from where it’s draped across my stomach to the sheets. If there are sheets, this is a bed. But why is it so dim? I can barely see anything.
Someone please tell me that inclusion doesn’t mean I lose my senses, too. To be locked away inside myself without hearing or seeing. If this is what is what the Fade do to their hosts, then I’m ashamed to ever have pitied Rue in the White Room.
“Marina? Are you awake?”
“Anne-Marie?”
No. No. No. NO! She was a hallucination; she had to be. Unless . . .
“Where’s Doctor Wolff?” I ask. If he’s here, then I’m back where I’m supposed to be. These are hospital sheets.
“Did you go blank again?”
“What?” I blink, hoping maybe I can pick up a few more details of the room.
“You’re not in the hospital, Marina. We’re still—”
“—in the Dark,” I finish. We’re still in the Dark.
We
. Both of us. That means Tobin’s here, too. I didn’t dream them at all. I didn’t dream Tobin’s father or his inhuman silver eyes.
I’ve failed. I let Rue convince me there was a chance the Fade were something other than what I’ve been told, and my misplaced trust has cost me the very ones I came here to save.
“You’re one of them.” I scramble backward in the bed, until I’m scrunched against the panel at the top.
“No, I’m not,” the thing wearing Anne-Marie’s face says.
“Anne-Marie’s not this quiet.”
Her face draws up in a scowl as her fingers begin to drum against her crossed arms. That’s definitely one of Anne-Marie’s habits, but if the Fade included her, they’d know that . . . wouldn’t they?
“Fine. Don’t believe me. Serves me right for volunteering to babysit.” She flops dramatically onto the end of the bed.
As my eyes adjust, more bleak details emerge from the shadows. Furniture, and even a door that wobbles on ancient hinges, makes it clear that this place is formerly a human dwelling. A house, most likely, similar to the ones in the neighborhood Rue and I passed through. There’s a mirror hung on one wall, and a window facing the outside, though it’s overgrown with vegetation bearing the Dark’s markings. There are curtains hung, slightly askew, but still there. Leaves litter the floor, with vines growing in through a holey roof.
Rue?
I call out silently, but he doesn’t answer. It’s just me and Anne-Marie. Phantom bits of soft, indirect light filter through, landing on her skin; there aren’t any marks on her.
“If you’re really who you look like, then where’s Tobin?”
“Outside with his dad.”
“His dad’s dead.”
“He’s not. . . . I swear, Marina.” The frustration leaves her face. “It’s not like what they told us at all.”
“Why would you leave the Arclight?”
“We went Red-Wall. Toby ran in, totally freaked because he couldn’t find you. He had your alarm, so I knew something bad had happened.”
Her voice slips into the familiar rush I’m used to, with one word running over the next.
“He was hoping you’d had another headache and were waiting in the hospital.”
“You were in the hospital?”
“Well, I wasn’t going to leave Jove and my brother alone when the walls were blinking red,” she snaps. Her temper’s definitely still intact. “I tried to convince Toby to go into the shelter with us. . . .
Sorry
. . . but I really did think you’d go there.
Sorry
.”
“Anne-Marie, focus,” I say. “I’m not angry with you for getting yourself to safety . . . assuming you’re actually you.” This is giving me a headache of a different kind. “How did you end up here?”
“Toby took off. He thought our Fade had taken you.” She hunches in on herself. “I didn’t think they’d do that. It didn’t make sense for them to want you . . . er . . .
alive
. . . . Sorry.”