so used to her doing the hard things and making the difficult decisions for them, they’ve put her on a no-fault system. Whatever she did, she had a good reason .
They’ve forgotten how to think for themselves.
Even Dad, with his: She was a kid, too, Tobin . She made mistakes . You don’t know what it took for her to become the woman she is .
Like he knows.
How can he buy into it, knowing she was going to let him rot outside the Arc? She hasn’t done a thing to keep people off his back when she’s the one person around here who could.
So his eyes turned silver—So what? Why can they accept her and not him? She’s had Fade in her blood a lot longer than he has.
Her eyes are silver now . Lines spiral out across her face to match the ones creeping down the walls .
I have to shake myself awake again.
Honoria’s rules won’t last. Not once our group ages up enough to have a real say in things. We brought down the Arc; we can bring her down, too.
These kids are already questioning her.
“But we know the Fade aren’t dangerous anymore,” a boy near the front says. No one in my year would have had the nerve when we were his age.
Honoria’s attention goes straight to him, as though he’s spoken some blasphemy. She turns her book in her hands, so that bits of gold and silver catch the room’s overhead lights where metallic lines are embedded in the shape of a bird and a bell. The gilded pages glint along the edge.
“Is this normal?” Marina asks.
“No.”
Usually, Honoria doesn’t stop talking long enough for anyone to pick out the holes in her story. And in a normal year she doesn’t lose their attention, but as Annie paces the room, doling out refills, the whispers start again.
One kid says her older brother is taking her out to the Arc, maybe even across it—Does anyone want to come? Another says he went far enough into the Grey that he couldn’t see the compound. Each claim gets bigger, counting numbers of steps as proof of bravery until the contest is settled by a boy in the back.
“I touched one,” he says. “I went right up to him and shook his hand.”
“Where?”
“When?”
“Which one?”
“A week ago,” the boy says. “And you know—him . The weird one.”
“They’re all weird.”
Marina cringes and says something under her breath I can’t hear. She’s locking down.
“They don’t mean you,” I tell her, squeezing her fingers so I don’t press her hand by mistake and make it bleed again. “You’re human now.”
“I know,” she says, but I think she means something else. She’s watching the boy at the back, like everyone else, including Honoria. The kid doesn’t even realize he’s the center of attention.
“The one with the slashes on his face and arms,” he says.
Schuyler .
Marina calls him Bolt, but his real name is Schuyler. He told me. I’ve never told anyone that I heard him speak because he didn’t say it out loud; it was a one-time thing. It’s not worth spooking anyone. I know, and that’s more than enough.
Honoria’s hands tighten on her book. She clears her throat, and the whispers stop. The kids all look ashamed, caught in the middle of breaking a rule.
“The Fade are being hospitable at the moment; that doesn’t make them less dangerous,” she says. “Appearances of safety often mask unknown dangers.”
She glances at Marina, and Marina’s still grumbling. If Honoria doesn’t stop baiting her, she’s going to regret it. Anyone who can find the guts to hold a burning knife to my skin and save my life can find a way to do worse and save her own.
“You know what—forget this.” Honoria pitches the book onto the floor beside her. “I don’t need my journal to tell you what happened.”
Her journal? That’s a new one.
When Honoria gave us this speech, she told us it had been found in a scrap heap and that we should be grateful there was an account of what had happened. This group gets one less lie.
Annie rejoins us in the back, but she sits cross-legged on the floor, like she’s one of the kids hearing this for the first time. She holds a bowl of cookies on her head so I can take some.
My hands are corpse white, smudged with charcoal lines. Annie’s hair sprouts long tendrils that wrap around her neck—choking her .
“Toby?” she asks.
How can she talk when she’s being strangled?
“Toby! I said, are you done?”
I shake myself again, and my hands are still in their gloves and still in the bowl. Annie’s looking up at me from the floor, like nothing’s wrong, because it isn’t—not for her, anyway. Sykes was right. I’m losing my mind.
Annie puts her bowl in her lap.
“What’s going on?” Marina asks, nibbling on a cookie.
“Two hours of sleep in four days,” I remind her.
“Then go home.”
“Not a chance.” I jam three cookies into my mouth. Maybe the sugar will keep me awake.
“I didn’t live here when I was your age,” Honoria says. “This was the military base where my father worked. He made wondrous things; good things. In the beginning the Fade were a tool meant to help people.”
“He made the Fade?” a girl asks.
“He created machines called nanites that were so small, they could fit inside a cell and unravel disease. Sounds like a good idea, right?”
They all nod.
But they can’t see what I see. Their shadows are pacing the wall, moving without them.
“I thought so, too,” Honoria says. She keeps swallowing, pausing for half beats in the wrong places. “But someone made a mistake, and they malfunctioned. My father tried to fix them, but the machines moved faster than he could. It wasn’t long before they covered everything.”
I remember us being the ones uncomfortable when I was listening to this as a kid, but now she’s the one who’s jumpy.
“No one called them the Fade, then; that came later. We called them the Darkness. The Shroud.”
The
