me from them anymore.
The creatures are here again, she says smugly.
Sometimes Cherish is more sixth sense than annoyance. She notices things I don’t, by virtue of the enhanced hearing I never lost. I’m busy snipping and cataloging leaf samples in jars, but she’s hearing the swish of a cat’s tail through air.
Something whisper-soft brushes against my legs, weaving around my ankles in a figure eight. I bend down to pet it.
“I wonder if those came from Mom’s monsters.”
A real voice startles me as Tobin’s boots shuffle into sight on the other side of the work-station. Even if Cherish heard him come in, she wouldn’t tell me. She doesn’t like him.
“Hey,” I say, as though it’s not odd to see him down here.
“Hey.”
He smiles, reaching out to stroke the cat’s ruff. It springs free with a hiss at the first touch of his fingers, and he laughs.
“Definitely Mom’s. They always hated me.”
He told me a story once, about how the cats in the Arclight came from his mother’s efforts to save a litter of abandoned kittens she’d found outside the boundary as a girl. He takes the Arbor cat’s disdain as proof that his mother left a mark on this place beyond the research Honoria used for my so-called cure.
“Is the shift over already?” I ask. I could check my alarm band, but I’ve spent weeks breaking myself of the habit of answering to that stupid screen on my wrist. I’d rather get my information elsewhere. Somewhere not controlled by the people who nearly killed me.
“I’ve been sent in search of Silver. She didn’t show up for rounds, so she’s become their latest excuse to get me away from anything interesting or important.”
“That bad?”
He shrugs.
“If you need someone skilled at watching lights flick on and off, I’m your guy.”
I toss my cut branch into an envelope, stick a label on the front, and set it aside with my other samples. Someone else will come to test them again, but they’ll do it after I’m gone. That way, they think I won’t realize they’re watching me.
“Have you seen her?” he asks.
“Silver doesn’t come down here.” Since hiding in the tunnels with Rue, she breaks into hives at even the mention of the Arclight-below. She claims she caught claustrophobia from Anne-Marie.
“Didn’t think so.” Tobin hops up onto the workstation
“Isn’t sitting down the opposite of finding someone?”
“I asked Annie first, and now she’s got me looking for Dante, too.”
“Which means they’re together,” I say.
“And not wanting to be found, so I consider myself on break. I thought I’d see if you wanted to be on break, too.”
Cherish suggests the Arclight’s good children don’t take breaks.
“You look terrible,” I say, ignoring her.
He’s shaking, scanning the room over and over. Something’s rattled him—bad.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just insomnia.” Tobin picks at the clods of dirt around him, crumbling them into powder. He shakes my collection jars. He never looks at me when he’s lying. “I’ve slept about two hours in the last four days.”
He grimaces, grinding at his eyes with his palms.
“Tobin! You didn’t tell me it was that bad!” I sling my gloves off to take his hand and pull him to his feet. “I’m taking you to Doctor Wolff.”
This is a switch; usually, he’s the one threatening me with the hospital.
“I don’t need a doctor,” he insists.
“He’ll give you something.”
“Like he did you?”
“Low blow, Tobin.” Dr. Wolff giving him a sedative is nothing compared to my being perma-drugged to kill my memories. But if Tobin’s using that against me, this is serious. “It’s Doctor Wolff or your father. Pick one.”
“Marina, stop . . . please,” he begs. He’s got his feet planted, leaning back as hard as he can. If I were still Fade, I could move him, but plain old human Marina? Not a chance—and Cherish doesn’t miss the opportunity to point that out.
“You’re scaring me,” I say, letting go. “What’s so bad you’d rather dance around it than tell me?”
“I don’t want to sleep.”
The hairs on the back of my neck shoot up, tingling from an electric current straight off my nerves.
“You said the nightmares stopped,” I say.
After Rue healed Tobin, and we were released from the hospital, Tobin started having dreams where he was consumed by the Dark, drowning under a wave of black water. He claimed it was post-traumatic stress, but their voices remained in his head for way too long.
“They did stop for a while,” he says, mumbling the last part. “But they’re back—sort of. They’re different. It’s weird.”
Weird and Fade are two things that do not need to occupy the same space as nightmares. Bad things happen when they do.
“Sometimes I can’t tell if I’m awake or asleep. I hear—”
“You hear the Fade?”
A long absent dread uncurls inside my throat, spiraling toward my stomach, where it turns cold and sharp. Only this time, I’m not scared for me. Tobin shouldn’t be able to hear the hive.
“Not like that,” he says quickly. “And not always. It just drifts in sometimes, like a nightmare. I just don’t want to explain that to anyone else. You understand; they won’t.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yeah. I haven’t heard or seen your boyfriend since it happened.”
Calling Rue my boyfriend is like using “it” to encompass everything that happened to us. Tobin’s still dodging.
“They’re just your average, creepy-feeling, shadow-filled, something-awful’s-going-to-happen-if-I-fall-asleep nightmares,” he says again, with a half-choked laugh. “Though if you want to double-check and ask your ex, I won’t object.”
“I can’t hear Rue anymore,” I say. He hasn’t so much as come into view since the night we brought Tobin’s father and the others back.
My mother was here once—close enough
