that. They need to see you adapt, so they can, too.”
I want to say more, but an alarm goes off on Anne-Marie’s wrist, and despite myself, I flinch, though we’ve had fewer drills lately.
“It’s my mom,” she says. “She wants me home.”
The alert sounds again, and I realize the ping is nothing like a Red-Wall signal.
“Leave the rest.” Anne-Marie glances warily between me and Honoria. “I’ll make Dante finish it when he decides to show up.”
“Dante was supposed to be here?” Honoria asks, suspicion in her voice. She presses a button on her wristband. “Blaylock, Dante: locate signal. If he’s in the compound, I can—”
“He is,” Anne-Marie says.
“He snuck off with Silver again,” I add before Honoria can head into full-blown paranoia and send a security team to investigate a midnight hookup. “No big deal.”
Her bracelet beeps and she frowns.
“Auxiliary storage unit nine,” she says.
“Told you so.”
“Happens all the time,” Anne-Marie says. “He really will make it up—he always does, so you don’t have to stay,” she adds, to me.
The alert pings again. Her mother’s not exactly patient.
“Last one,” I promise. “Go on.”
She runs out as I push a desk into position with its chair and then start for the door.
“You were wrong, you know,” Honoria says.
I pause, knowing that’s what she wants, but don’t face her.
“You said I wasn’t human enough to regret what I’d done—you were wrong.”
It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about our confrontation in the White Room two months ago. Tobin and I had found files documenting the torture I went through to transition from Cherish to Marina. It was raw footage of me burning alive under the heat lamps while Honoria watched, dispassionate and unconcerned. She thought there was no cost too high to achieve what she wanted, and for that, I accused her of being the soulless monster she believed the Fade to be.
She acts like that moment just occurred rather than being in the past.
Does she feel time differently because she’s been around so long?
For her, maybe the rise of the Fade wasn’t an eternity ago. It was yesterday and still fresh in her mind.
“I regretted every step I took down the path that led to you,” she says. “You were a last resort. And I am not the only constant this place has. I’m not the only one who remembers the world before. I’m simply the last to give up hope of reclaiming it.”
I turn toward her.
Other people here who were alive in the first days? There can’t be.
“There are others like you?”
“Five, counting myself, who live here now and lived here then.”
“Who?”
“If they wanted you to know, they would have told you.” A small mocking smile creeps into the corners of her mouth. She tosses me something and then walks out of the room.
I catch what she throws without thinking. It’s solid and square, with smooth lines etched into it.
Honoria’s given me her book.
What most people call “my quarters” is the single bedroom I was assigned. My walls are pink now, instead of white, matched to the flower bush my sister’s named for. I put one in my corner so I can see it when I miss her. It’s strange to feel homesick for a place I can’t actually live in.
Anne-Marie used me once as an excuse for an art project when she ran out of ideas, so my bed’s covered with the most tragically jumbled quiltish thing ever made. I like the lack of symmetry and the way one part drags lower than the others, like it’s melting toward the floor.
Tobin’s favorite snow globe sits on my side table. His mother had dozens of them, and this one, a desert beneath a night of falling stars, is the one he re-created for me in the Well. It was a magical idea—a place so full of light and heat that humans would be free of the Fade. Giving it to me couldn’t have been easy.
My secret is that Rue hangs on my wall. No one knows he’s what the cut-out image of the bird I tacked there means. The page came from Tobin’s paper stash—something called a word-of-the-day calendar—and apparently, June seventeenth was a day for ornithology. My space wouldn’t be complete without Rue.
This room is tiny, to hold so much.
It’s where I met myself for the first time, standing as I am now, in front of the mirror. My skin’s still pale, but no longer ashen, now that the Fade no longer block the melanin. Dr. Wolff says my hair is likely to darken, along with my eyes, but I think I may be stuck with white blonde and ice blue. I’ll never know what I should really look like.
Honoria’s book burns against my back, where I stashed it in my waistband.
I sit cross-legged on the floor, in an empty corner where the bed will hide me from view if anyone comes in unannounced, and open the book. This paper is heavier from what filled Tobin’s magazines. It turns slowly, dragging across the facing page. Someone’s sewn a pocket to the inside of the front cover and then stuffed it with folded scraps and pictures. I’m not sure I should risk touching those. The pocket’s aged and is as brittle as the satin covering the book. It might give way.
A card fastened to the first page reads:
Our Wedding
~ Rashid & Trinity ~
May 15th
I turn the page and hit an unexpected obstacle. The words aren’t typed like what we read for class. They’re handwritten in blue ink, so the letters loop and swirl into lines I can barely make out. Everything’s thin and tilted.
Someone—Honoria, I suppose—marked through the word Guest at the top of the page and replaced it with a date.
May 19
Dear Rashid and Trinity, whoever you are.
I’m sorry I took your guestbook, but it was the closest thing I could find to a journal in the salvage pile. We’re past the 15th, anyway, so I guess you didn’t need it. Nothing spoils a wedding like the apocalypse, eh?
Sorry, that was mean.
Wherever you are, I hope you’re together, and still human, and that you found a way to get married, even without the pretty white satin. I’ll take care of it, I promise. And if you somehow end up here, or I end up where you are, I’ll give it back.
