“Stop apologizing.”
“Sorry.” She winces.
“So, what—the two of you decided it was a good idea to go outside in the middle of a Red-Wall?”
“No! We went to find help. Honoria came barreling down the hall at a dead sprint and flattened me. And she wasn’t happy to see your alarm and the crushed inhaler. She turned sheet-white and ordered us into the bunker. But Toby headed out here and I couldn’t let him go alone, so . . . well, we both came.”
I fight the sound of Honoria’s voice warning that the Fade are smart, devious, liars,
killers
.
I
want
this to be my friend, and I
want
there to be a chance that Tobin is still the boy I know. How can I return to the Arclight and tell the people there that two more of their own were lost because of me?
The barely functional hinges on the door creak and pop, and I brace myself for an influx of Fade, but only one, Tobin’s father, enters.
“She’s awake?” Silvered eyes watch me from near the door.
I glance frantically around the room for something to use as a weapon, but the only thing within reach is a moldy pillow.
“Swear to me you’re who you say you are.” I turn to Anne-Marie and look her straight in the eye—something I couldn’t convince myself to do until now. They’re deep and dark, without a hint of shine in them.
“It’s me, Marina,” she says.
“TOBIN!” I scream as loud as I can, then pull in air until my lungs burn, and do it again. “TOBIN!”
Another creak comes from the door’s hinges.
“Marina?” Tobin’s voice asks before I can see his face. I leap off the bed and rush toward the sound. There’s no hitch in my calf when I launch myself at him, wrapping my arms and legs tight.
“Is it you?” I ask, glancing up, and cringing at the possibility that his eyes will shine, but they’re as clear as Anne-Marie’s.
“Of course it’s me,” he says. “We came after you. Didn’t get far, though. A group of four jumped us less than a klick inside their territory.”
I take his face in both my hands, testing the temperature of his skin, the way it feels under my fingertips to see if there’s any movement besides his pulse—anything to prove this is Tobin, and not some Fade-riddled imposter.
“They knew me,” he says.
“What? How?”
“Because of me,” his not-father says. “A side effect of saving my life.”
“It’s not
your
life.” I climb down so I’m a barricade between Tobin and the lie he believes. I wrap my arms backward, linking my hands behind Tobin’s back; his wrap forward around me, turning us into a human infinity symbol. “It was James Lutrell’s life. You stole it.”
With Rue, it’s easier to think of being Fade as his normal, but it’s different when you know who the human was before the Fade.
“Marina, it’s really him,” Tobin says. “Listen to him.”
I am so sick of people telling me to listen! No one listens to me, why should I listen to them?
Tobin shrugs out of our embrace, despite my attempts to hold him back.
“I know you want this to be your father, Tobin, but it can’t be. You know better. You’ve got to go home and tell Honoria to seal up the tunnels.”
“Have the voices stopped?” the Colonel asks when I stop shouting.
“I don’t hear voices,” I say automatically.
“When the Fade used his blood to heal your leg, it would have opened the connection.”
My stomach does another flip.
My head, my arm, my leg . . . everything I know should hurt or ache . . . they’re all perfect. I race for the dirty and cracked mirror on the wall, checking my own eyes this time. I yank my sleeves up and pull at my collar to examine the skin below my neck, to make sure there aren’t any lines there. The only indication that I was ever wounded is the scar on my leg that’s returned to the way it looked before Rue cut it open.
“You’re clear,” the Colonel says. “Once you healed, the Fade reclaimed his nanites. Just like with the rest of us once they’d patched us up.”
“If that’s true, then why do your eyes still shine?”
“They can’t fix what happened to me in the skirmish, so they don’t accept I don’t need them anymore. A small colony of them refuse to leave. I’m not the only one—Elaine Crowder has nanites replacing three major arteries and a heart valve, near as I can tell.”
“He bleeds red, Marina,” Tobin says. “They all do. All the people we thought we lost . . . they’re here.”
“Then why haven’t you gone home?”
“Honoria’s locked us out,” he says. “We’ve checked.”
“That’s what the alerts were,” Tobin says. “After you came in, when we had blue lights every night, it was our people checking the tunnel hatches to see if they could get back in, but they couldn’t breach the seals from outside.”
The tension in the room holds us all suspended. I keep to my place by the mirror, while Anne-Marie stays on the bed. Tobin and his maybe-father take the position in between.
“Didn’t you have your radio?” I ask.
“Standard procedure,” the Colonel says. “The Arclight assumes anyone taken will be turned Fade.”
“Then go in through the front doors. Send someone whose eyes don’t shine to tell everyone what happened.”
“It wouldn’t matter. SOS orders would have been in effect from the second sunset.”
“Isn’t that a distress call?”
“Shoot on Sight, if it comes from Honoria. They’ll drop anyone who approaches the Arc at this point, except maybe one of you kids. You’re still inside the window. Those like Elaine and I were down for four solid days in something I can only describe as hibernation. The others were afraid to leave us behind. Even those who’d had minor injuries could hear the included and weren’t completely convinced they weren’t turning. It was another week before we knew enough to be certain the Fade had no designs on us beyond patching us up.”
“If I ask you to bleed, will you show me?”
The Colonel reaches into the pocket of his uniform and pulls out a field knife.
“Do you want to do it, or should I?” he asks, holding the closed knife out on his flattened palm.
“You can do it,” I say. “But I don’t want your blood anywhere near Tobin.”
Tobin joins me near the wall while his father reaches for a strapped compartment on the leg of his pants, this time pulling away a metal flashlight. He tosses it to Tobin and doesn’t even flinch when Tobin turns it on.
“Watch,” Tobin says.
The Colonel slides the knife into his hand, slicing downward, then angles his palm into the flashlight beam so we can see the bright red,
human
, trickle. Red blood and silver eyes—an impossible combination. While I’m trying to reconcile the two, Anne-Marie glances down.
A diminutive Fade-child with gogglelike markings around her eyes has hold of her hand; it’s the one I saw when Rue healed me. Anne-Marie stands, lifting the girl to her hip like she’s still a real child.
“She’s been following me since they brought us here,” Anne-Marie says when she catches me watching.
“Does it . . . er . . . she have a name?”
“Not one I can repeat,” Anne-Marie says, grinning. “She’s tried to tell me, but all I get is a white wall. I call her Blanca.” She points to me, then turns to the Fade-child and says, “That’s Marina, the friend I was looking for.”
The girl tilts her head and glances back and forth between me and Anne-Marie before Anne-Marie shakes her head.
“You have to say it out loud,” she says. “Otherwise, all I get is a buzzing sound.
Bzzt
.” Anne-Marie pokes Blanca in the stomach with the sound, and she giggles. “Say it here.” She puts the girl’s hand against her own throat so she can feel the vibration when Anne-Marie says
friend
again, as though she were teaching one of Arclight’s babies a new word in class.
“Fw-en-duh?” the Fade-child struggles out. Even her speech reminds me of Rue’s first attempts.
Where
is
Rue? I thought he’d have been the first Fade I’d see here.
“Marina is my friend,” Anne-Marie repeats with a nod, and carries the child closer to me.
“M’winna,” the Blanca says, training her metallic eyes on mine. Her stature and movements, even the way her Fade-coated hair curls into heavy ringlets, are very much like the sniffly little thing who attached herself to Anne-Marie during the Red-Wall.
Simple pictures, the equivalent of nursery school finger paintings with bright colors and shaky lines, flip through my mind until she settles on something that shows a misshapen person with white hair standing in the midst of a ring of malformed Fade.
“M’winna hear?” she asks in her tiny, tinny voice.
“It’s easier if you talk out loud,” I say.
The solemn concentration on her face dissolves into pure child’s delight. Giggles tumble into a fit of laughter as she leans forward in Anne-Marie’s arms toward me.
“What’s she doing?” I ask as her little fingers pat my skin.
“The Fade are fascinated with those of us unconnected to the whole,” Tobin’s father says. “The young ones especially.”
“You should see it, Marina,” Anne-Marie says excitedly. “They’re all over the place. Little ones like this, and a ton of them our age.”
“That’s horrible.” Worse than horrible, it’s unthinkable that they’d infest a child and steal her life before she even had one of her own.
The way Blanca’s wriggled past Anne-Marie’s defenses, getting close enough to be held and cuddled, laying her head against Anne-Marie’s shoulder, like a still-human toddler in need of a nap—Blanca’s a weapon of innocence, with camouflage beyond her markings.
I stare at the girl’s features and wonder if her real human name isn’t buried somewhere in my forgotten past. Maybe I wasn’t alone when I ran through the Dark. Maybe I didn’t lose an older sibling who was trying to protect me, maybe I was eldest and responsible for this baby-Fade in her scruffy dress with red flowers dotted on the front.
“It’s not what you’re thinking,” Tobin’s father says. “She was born this way.”
“Born? As in . . .
born?
As in birth?”
“We were surprised, too.”
I watch Anne-Marie sway to the rhythm of imaginary music to comfort the girl snuggled against her. As she drifts, Blanca takes on Anne-Marie’s features and coloring, disappearing into the curve of her neck and shoulders until only those goggle-eyes are visible when she pops them open to fight sleep. Even her dress shifts to mimic Anne-Marie’s uniform.
She can’t have been born like that.
“It’s complicated,” Tobin says.
“Complicated? You’ve been here less than a day, and already you’re willing to let them rewrite the history you’ve known your whole life.”
I have to put some distance between myself and Blanca, with her half-altered appearance, but I don’t really want to stand near Tobin’s father, either. I wish this room were bigger.
“The history hasn’t changed,” Tobin argues. “We just didn’t know all of it.”
“Look where we’re standing!” I’ve settled near a cabinet full of drawers with old photographs encased in cracked glass stacked on top. I grab one and shake it at him, turning the smiling couple in the image into an accusation. “This was a human house before things like that”—I jab a finger at Blanca—“destroyed it!”
Blanca blinks awake, startled by my flaring temper. More of those finger-paint pictures bore into my brain. Outstretched arms and smiles.
Her innocent attempt to cheer me up triggers some sort of spasm. Tiny fissures open in the wall separating me from everything I’ve forgotten, like a crack in an eggshell. What spills out burns until I think I’ll catch fire right here.
“Make her stop,” I beg, desperate to break past the roar in my ears.
“Marina?” Tobin asks. I feel his hands on me, but they grate like sandpaper over raw blisters.
I open my eyes, and through the haze of agony and light find Anne-Marie angled away now, as though I’m a threat to the tiny monster in her arms. I can see the lines on Blanca’s skin even with the flare behind my eyes, so I focus all my torment and confusion toward the source of my pain, hoping she’ll understand she’s causing it and stop.
Blanca shrieks. Glistening tracks appear on her cheeks, and remorse stronger than anything I felt from Rue slams into me as she shimmies out of Anne-Marie’s grasp. The lights in my mind dim.
“What did you do?” Anne-Marie demands. “She’s a baby!”
“She was hurting me.”
Blanca backs away toward the door, still repeating her silent apology. A hesitant, embarrassed offer of something that looks like a messy pink and white flower from my hidden bush pops into my mind, followed by the scent of roses. A peace offering, but again, it’s too strong. If I ever get back to the Arclight, I’m ripping that bush up by the roots; I’ll never be able to smell another flower without getting sick.
Blanca’s desperation and desire to hide tear through the room, making me shake with her fear.
“You’re too . . .
loud
.” I fumble for the last word, not sure what I can use to get the point across. I try Rue’s way of saying be quiet and show the girl her own face without a mouth, but I’m no better at communication than she is.
Blanca squeaks and shuffles backward.
“Wait,” I try again. “Let me—”
She’s gone.
Not invisible—gone. Her blue dress with the red flowers lies in an empty heap on the floor where she sank into it and vanished. The constant buzz that filled my head from the moment she entered cuts to silence.
“You didn’t have to scare her off!”
Anne-Marie hurries out the door as Tobin helps me off the floor.
“Give us a minute,” Tobin’s father says to him.
“Will you be okay?” Tobin asks me.
“I’m fine now that she’s gone.”
Slowly, Tobin makes his way to the door. The man I hope is his father takes a seat on a broken table near what once was a window. He crosses his legs and adjusts his weight every few seconds. His eyes don’t stay fixed or stare at me. He picks at his fingernails. They’re all human habits.
“Tobin said he saw you, beyond the Arc,” I say, because I can’t stand having to weigh every silent nervous tic against the possibility of it being an act. “But you never came back.”
“Letting him see me was a mistake.” He stands and starts to pace the filthy floor, moving around the vines and debris like he’s memorized their placement.