“Mom!” Anne-Marie’s still shouting, even though her mother’s in sight. “Marina’s here.”
“Hi, Marina,” her mother says.
“Hello, Ms. Johnston.”
“None of that, now. My name’s Dominique. You two go sit down. We’ll eat in a few minutes.” Anne-Marie’s mother smiles at me before turning her head away with a scowl. “Trey! I want you out of that room in five minutes!”
She swirls past us with bowls in each hand, only stopping long enough to deposit them on a clear glass table.
“She’s, er . . . different.”
“She’s got help in the kitchen,” Anne-Marie says, tugging me over for a look.
Mr. Pace is here, but I’m not sure I’d call what he’s doing “help.” He’s picking at the food from a large bowl on the counter. When Anne-Marie’s mother warns him off, he flicks part of what he’s eating at her. She stomps across the room to take the bowl, but he hides it behind his back until she makes a grab for it, and then he pins her into a hug that quickly turns into a kiss.
Dante and Silver are bad enough, but parents? Ew .
“He’s over a lot more since the lights went down. Mom’s been floating.”
Arc Fall seems an odd reason to visit family, but what do I know?
“Trey, five minutes! I’m serious!” Anne-Marie’s mother pokes her head out the door of the kitchen, not smiling for the moment it takes to yell her son’s name down the hall.
“That’s his fourth five-minute call,” Anne-Marie says, rolling her eyes.
“Is he in trouble?”
“Nah. Just Trey back to his normal, antisocial self. The record’s six days, but he was sneaking out during the day to snag food, so it doesn’t really count.”
It seems like siblings should be alike, but Anne-Marie and her brother don’t even look all that similar. They’re both tall, and both dark, but while Trey turns more into a Mr. Pace clone by the day, Anne-Marie looks like her mom.
Connections are so confusing.
Not at home, Cherish offers. I have to bite down on the response I want to give.
Thankfully, a knock on the door interrupts her at the same time loud laughter comes from the kitchen.
“Get that, will you?” Anne-Marie asks. “If I don’t set the table, those two will forget we need plates. Honestly, you’d think they were the teenagers.”
She heads for the kitchen with a hand over her eyes, declaring, “I’m coming in! Act parental!” while I go back to the door. So this is what it’s like to have a home that people want to visit.
We can return to home, Cherish says. Remaining is selfish . Stupid. Inferior .
She doesn’t usually go for insults.
“Hey,” Tobin says when I open the door. His eyes are brown—I check. Col. Lutrell’s are still silver.
“Hey.”
I want to say more, but I can’t decide what should come next. Maybe it’s Cherish sabotaging things from the inside, but every time I see Tobin now, it’s like a wall goes up between us. I swear sometimes he actually looks blurry, and when I try to talk to him, like I did in the Well, I can barely string a sentence together. I want to hold his hand, but mine won’t move.
He doesn’t move, either, so maybe he doesn’t want me to.
“Are we late?” Col. Lutrell asks.
“Not really. Anne-Marie’s mother’s sort of caught up in something.”
There’s another snort of laughter from the kitchen, followed by Anne-Marie’s frustrated groan.
“Daughter still in the room!” she shouts.
“I can imagine.” Col. Lutrell grins, winking at us as he excuses himself to go back her up. I wonder if he can tell something might be wrong with Tobin. Could he have seen Tobin’s eyes? Can sense my suspicions the way I sense emotion? I know his hearing’s sharp, but I don’t know what other Fade traits remain with those exposed yet not included in the hive.
Maybe that’s why he led the not-rescue mission when I was taken. If he’s the colonel from Honoria’s book, it would have been safer for him to risk the Fade. He’d already lived through contact.
“I thought I’d slept through dinner,” Tobin says, but he doesn’t look like he got much rest. “Dad said I was screaming so loud, he thought I was in pain.”
“Nightmares?” I ask.
He nods, face paler than I’ve ever seen.
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I dreamed I got caught on the Arc when it was turned on, so I was burning up. I don’t know if he believed it or not.”
I wish I could get him to say more without telling him I had a nightmare myself. Maybe mine wasn’t an exact copy.
“Trey, get your butt out of that room and into this chair now !”
Anne-Marie’s mother sweeps back into the room with another set of steaming bowls.
Cherish leaks through, assigning Ms. Johnston a Fade-name that encompasses steam for her temper, mixed with something diamond hard and bright.
“Trouble?” Tobin asks, to shift the conversation off dreams.
“Anne-Marie claims it’s normal, but it started with a countdown and progressed to an ultimatum, so I’m not sure I believe her.”
“No, that’s pretty much normal,” he says. Everyone’s moving toward the table, so we join them.
Anne-Marie’s mother and Mr. Pace—her father—tote the last of the food out with Col. Lutrell bringing a large tray to set in the center.
This doesn’t smell like dinner in the Common Hall. It’s not wilted or reeking of vitamin supplements, and the plates aren’t flat squares broken into sections. They’re round and made of glass with blue flowers at the edges to match the blue glasses beside them. The plates sit on plastic mats with the silverware set out on each side instead of rolled into a napkin that smells like bleach.
“Nique’s stuff is great,” Tobin says when he realizes I’m staring at the food.
He’s said before that if it wasn’t for Anne-Marie and her mother, he’d have starved the first few days after his dad went missing. They even tried to make him move in with them, but he wouldn’t leave his apartment, or the Well it conceals. It seems a silly secret now that the stars are there for everyone to see, but neither we nor Tobin’s father have shared the knowledge of the door in their closet that leads to the Arclight’s tunnel system.
