to the Dark. Cherish would have the advantage there. What if she’s stronger than me?
We are stronger than you, she says, making me certain that I had made the right decision.
I can still see the mix of anger and sadness in my mother’s expression, and taste the way the air turned, like it was suddenly infused with bitter lemon. Even now, the memory makes my eyes sting.
Tobin leans forward and grabs my hands as I do. “You’re bleeding.”
Once, those words were enough to make my heart falter, but now they’re just a reminder that I pulled my gloves off fast enough to break open the cut from my clippers.
“I got careless taking samples,” I say. “It’s nothing.”
“Nothing doesn’t leave bloodstains.” He wipes my palms with a towel dipped in irrigation water and then bends down to pick up the gloves I dropped. “Here,” he says with a lopsided grin. Usually, that’s enough to foil my attempts to stay annoyed, but this time it’s not his lips that have my attention, it’s his eyes and the metallic, silver shine in them.
“Tobin?”
The effect lasts a blink and a skipped heartbeat, and then his eyes are back to brown, and I’m back to remembering how to breathe.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Did you really come here looking for Silver?” The question’s a toss-away to help me collect my thoughts.
“Mostly, but Annie also wants me to remind you that you promised to help with her rotation. I think I was even threatened with food poisoning if you don’t comply . . .No, wait. That wasn’t a threat. That was Annie reminding me about dinner. She really does want your help, though.”
“I guess I’d better get going, then.”
“And I’ll get back to not finding Silver or Dante,” he says. “Why can’t they just use her room? I know Dante’s folks don’t want him home much, but Silver can come and go. They’d be a lot easier to avoid if I knew where not to look.”
I nod, washing my hands mechanically at the spout on the wall without sparing another look at Tobin’s face. When I pass the incinerator meant for burning rotten plants and refuse, I throw in my gloves and the towel he touched.
Just in case .
MARINA
Events that change the world seem like they should come with a herald or harbinger, but that’s not how it happens. The moments that mean the most happen in the pauses between breaths—easy to miss if no one knows they should be looking.
What did I miss with Tobin?
I should have noticed something before now. Tobin’s eye shine is more than a whisper of warning. It’s a plunge into an icy stream so cold, the surface grows solid over my head. It’s the pull of water away from shore before the waves crash down to drown us all in his nightmare.
“Tell me this is you,” I hiss to Cherish while in an empty hallway. Hardly anyone comes near the Arbor at this time of night, and I’m grateful for their avoidance. No one can see me talking to myself. “Tell me you’re playing with my head, or thinking about Rue, and somehow that made Tobin look different to me.”
But Cherish stays stubbornly silent.
If I call it stubbornness, then I can believe she’s really the cause—not Tobin.
The halls of the Arclight-below pass in a blur; routine by now, so I don’t think about where I’m going until I reach a door and need my wristband for access. Down here, you don’t need permission just to enter; you need it to leave, too. Every time I have to wait for the red light to turn green and let me through, my breath hitches and I wonder if this will be the day they change their minds. The point they turn on me and lock me away again.
Those fears have grown weaker the last few weeks, but if Tobin’s eyes are really silver . . .
The door snaps open, and I shoulder through as soon as I’m able, holding my breath when I pass the alcove that houses both Honoria’s office and the White Room, where Cherish died and I was born. This is nothing but a routine shift change, I tell myself.
I pass the familiar scrawl of USAF that someone stenciled on the wall between embossed stars; streaks into a line at the corner of my eye. One of these days, I’ll ask someone what it means. By the time I reach the final panel that allows me into the Arclight-above, I’ve denounced and defended Tobin a dozen times.
I should tell Dr . Wolff, insists the part of me indoctrinated by the Arclight’s rules. Nightmares, plus voices, plus eye shine, equals Fade.
Rue swore to me that the Fade don’t take unwilling hosts anymore. Tobin loathes the Fade; he’s terrified of them. No way would he agree to let them stay inside him by choice.
Did Rue lie to me?
Negative! The suggestion makes Cherish angry. Deceit is not a possibility .
“Okay, maybe it was an accident or an oversight.”
Nanites are tiny. Rue could have missed some when he took his back. Cherish has lasted this long, there’s no reason Rue’s contact with Tobin couldn’t do the same.
But where are the marks ? Tobin’s skin is clean.
Where’s the sensitivity to light? The arbor’s full of sunlamps. Tobin works on the perimeter with the high beams every day—no Fade could stand that.
And his father would have noticed. Wouldn’t he?
Turning Tobin in would bring suspicion to our whole class, and at least half the upper-years. Anne-Marie and her brother Trey, Silver and Dante—they all put themselves at risk. I can’t tell them they might have been wrong. And I can’t lose another life. The Arclight’s all I have left.
If something happens to Tobin, it’s my fault. I brought the Fade. I begged Rue to heal him.
“Were his eyes really shining?” I ask, but Cherish only answers with a reminder that Tobin left the Arclight for me. She nudges me to do the same for him. Rue’s in the Dark, and he’ll answer my questions.
She’s baiting me, not helping. Her strength is in the Dark.
What I need is a cooperative Fade who’s willing to come here. One who might understand what’s going on, but who also knows why I can’t mention it to anyone else.
I need Honoria’s baby brother.
Schuyler Whit turned Fade in the first days, more than a century ago, and has lived as one ever since. I named him Bolt, for his appearance, with its sharp, slashing lines, and a presence that invokes the violent nature of a thunderstorm. I’ve watched people approach other Fade with curiosity when they venture out of the Grey toward the darkened sections of the Arc, but few bother with him. He looks menacing, but he isn’t, and his connection to Honoria
