Читать книгу Meridian - Josin L McQuein - Страница 11

“Do you think he made it?”

Tobin left the room at a half-drunk lurch, his final words to me and Anne-Marie slurred into gibberish. I think he said something about Rue.

“If he goes facedown between here and his apartment, someone will roll him the rest of the way,” Anne-Marie says.

I hope that’s humor.

She starts grabbing cushions off the floor. Honoria’s picking up discarded bowls, stacking them to put in the wash. I reach for the nearest chair on the wall, ostensibly to put it back in its proper position in the room, but I really just want something physical between us.

As usual, Honoria’s the one to break the silence.

“I was surprised you never came downstairs to find me,” she says. “You’ve seemed confrontational since you came into your . . . shall we call it an inheritance?”

“Might as well. It’s what I got after you killed me.” I slam down the chair and drag a desk over to go with it.

Anne-Marie glances at us, but it’s more warning to behave than concern or curiosity.

“Pouting and angry gestures,” Honoria says. “How very teenage human of you.”

“That was the general idea, wasn’t it? Take a Fade and make it human?”

Anne-Marie drops a bottle into the collection bin hard enough to rattle it, but she doesn’t have to worry. Once I’m done, I’m out of here.

I take more chairs and return them to the room’s center.

“Believe it or not, I understand,” I tell Honoria. She looks at me like she’s never seen me before, a silent nudge to prove I could possibly see things the way she does. “The Fade flipped your life upside down, and you want to reset the balance.” I get that better than anyone, I imagine. “But the world’s changed. People are supposed to change with it.”

“You think it’s that easy?”

We adapt easily, Cherish says.

“I think it’s possible,” I say.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Yes, I do. When Rue and the others crossed the Arc, the human world flipped again. Everything they thought they knew about the Fade, and the dangers they posed, changed in an instant.

“I know you’re the last constant this place has,” I say. “The Arclight needs 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.

Sincerely,

Honoria Jean Whit

I’ve never paid much attention to how something sounds in my head while I read, but it’s Honoria’s voice I hear. She’s younger, unsure of herself, and quick to apologize. I wonder if any of that has survived.

The next entry is on the same page as the first.

Also May 19

Dear Rashid and Trinity,

Sorry to keep bringing you into this, but it’s easier if I can pretend this is one long letter. If I’m writing to people who might still exist, then there’s hope the world’s still working.

I am such a head case.

I’m holed up in the corner, bunched up in a sleeping bag, and writing letters to strangers with their feather wedding pen. This is stupid.

The entry stops there. There are a couple of drawings in the margins of a woman in a long dress and a man in a suit, but no more words for several days.

Loose pages are stuck between the bound ones, where she scribbled things down and pressed them in. These are sheets of lined paper with holes in them, not guestbook pages.

The entire chronicle of how mankind fell to the Fade is here. She filled in the gaps by memory, adding details of the run from her house to the Arclight and how they almost didn’t make it. She focuses on her family—especially her little brother. He was sure the army would fix things, and then they could go home.

We burned our house today—begins one page dated before Honoria started writing in her book. It’s sandwiched into a stack containing details of her father’s disappearance and worry over a friend whose dog had wandered to Honoria’s house half starved and filthy.

One of my teachers is here, isn’t that weird? I don’t think school exists anymore, but I can only think of him that way.

There’s an entire list of entries like that—short sentences about people she noticed at random. They’re scribbled on squares of colored paper and glued into the book.

• The kids are getting quieter at night. They’ve figured out crying doesn’t fix things. It doesn’t bring back parents or stop friends from leaving.

• One of the base officers is kind of cute. He’s nice, too. He gave me an extra apple at dinner because he thinks I’m getting too skinny.

This one’s stuck to a whole page with Kevin written in different ways.

• The colonel’s watching us. He thinks we’re dangerous because of Dad, but he’s the greater threat. I saw him burn his hands. He’d only do that if one of them touched him. It won’t do me any good to tell, no one listens to me. I’m just a kid.

The colonel.

The colonel. It’s not a name; it’s a title. Col. Lutrell’s name is James. Lt. Sykes’s first initial is K, according to his name bar. For Kevin, maybe?

Colonel and lieutenant are designations from the world before the Fade, so why do both have them when no one else does?

Could Tobin’s father be as old as Honoria? Older?

Tobin’s good luck charm is that photo from the world before. A boy on a beach who became his father’s namesake, but what if it’s a picture of the colonel himself. Did he lie to his own son?

That would mean Honoria didn’t lie to me.

Now it’s more than curiosity; I need to read on.

The entries become sporadic, jumping dates.

July 6

This morning I realized the 4th had passed with no fireworks. A couple of hours later, it sunk in why—there’s no country anymore.

No one’s celebrating anything after the rain last night, anyway. It cost us the bonfires. We hadn’t had darkness in weeks, besides that black shroud that’s swallowed everything we left behind.

People were screaming and crying, scrambling to find candles and flashlights. They tried to get all the doors and windows shut, but there was so much howling and scratching and noise . . .

There was Spacey Tracey, sitting by the exit, in the dark. She laid her hand against the door, and said, “I know, I will” to nobody. Mom says she’s talking to her family, that she can’t deal with what’s happened to them, but Mom’s wrong. If Tracey was talking to her family, she’d use their names. She doesn’t.

And her eyes were not that blue last week. They’re nearly silver. No one notices things like that, but they should. I saw Dad’s eyes. I remember them.

That nuthatch is going to break and run one of these nights, and I wish . . . I wish they’d get rid of her. There—I said it. I know it’s horrible, and I know it makes me a bad person, but I don’t care. I don’t want her around.

I heard the adults talking. These old ventilation pipes catch everything and broadcast it like stereo. They don’t know what to do, and that scares them.

No . . . I think what really scares them is that they do know, and no one wants to do it. Not to pretty Tracey, who used to be so sweet and so smart, but they don’t get it. Tracey’s gone.

I hate this place.

I want to go home.

Things change after Tracey. People Honoria mentions on one page are lost within the next three. She kept a list, tracking who left on what day, through several sheets held together with metal clips. I bet she didn’t miss a single name.

Pages and pages are doodles of trees without leaves. Their branches are spindly and gruesome—ominous . The first few are practice for one that takes up an entire page of meticulous detail. I start to trace the outline with my finger, but draw back at the feel of the paper along the lines. They’re rigid and sharp, as though she was caught up in a frenzy while making them. Discolored patches on the page look like dried blood that’s deteriorated over time.

Here, in the middle of the book, are the sections Honoria’s marked to be read in class.

She’s scribbled over her original entries, rewording them. She’s marked things out and replaced them, adding notes on yellow squares. She’s highlighted and underlined obsessively. Her changes support the assumptions she’s made over the last decades when the original text may not have.

I don’t know why she kept the original words. Why not rip the pages out and replace them altogether?

The last entry about Tracey mentions how the girl stole a box of pens and used them to draw lines all over her skin. I check the list and find that Tracey Malone walked into the night a few hours later. Honoria was very matter-of-fact about it—in the rewrite. She’d struck through the response she had in the moment so fiercely that it cut the page, and she replaced it with a clinical observation that Tracey’s fate was inevitable.

She’s tried to change the past, and in a way, I guess that’s what she hoped she could accomplish with me. If her attempt to uninclude someone from the Fade’s hive had worked, then it might have been possible to reclaim the world for humans and undo the damage of the last several decades. Too bad it’s harder to mark through time than ink.

The thought causes a chill I can’t shake. It gets into my blood and down to my bones. The only time I’ve felt anything close to this was when I stepped into the Dark as Marina for the first time and believed I’d walked into my own execution.

“Cherish?” I ask out loud; my voice is a victory. I was afraid she was the chill. That she’d figured out how to take me over. “Cherish?” I call again, but still there’s no answer.

Shadows grow from the ceiling, gathering like cobwebs in the corners and trailing toward the floor. I reach for my lamp, to raise the shade and make the room brighter, but the bulb shatters in its socket.

The shadows turn to vines, slithering over everything. They reach my beloved sister-bush. I lunge forward to save it, but my feet are ankle deep in sludge so thick, it holds me fast, forcing me to watch as the bush is ripped to shreds. The vines strip the leaves and choke the bush, filling the room with the scent of ruined roses, and then it’s gone. Nothing but leaves drifting down with the sound of my sister’s broken laughter in the background.

My pink walls scorch black. The paint blisters up and boils away. When the shadows reach the cut-out bird, it comes squawking to life and flapping for all it’s worth, but there’s nowhere for it to go beyond its page. The shadows flow over it like poured tar, leaving it struggling beneath the weight until it goes still.

And the sludge around my feet grows deeper, up to my knees.

Half the room has crumbled to nothing. The shadows become snatching fingers, ripping and tearing by the handful. Anne-Marie’s quilt goes next, soaking up the darkness to become a sodden abyss. I try to save Tobin’s snow globe, but my arms are tethered, pulled flush to the wall. Darkness descends upon the globe like settling smoke. It passes through the glass to mingle with the water, churning and spinning until it goes so fast, the glass bursts, leaving the stars to ooze over the sides and into the sludge where they sink out of sight.

The darkness is to my waist now.

Something drips onto my head, and in the mirror across my room, I watch it slide through my hair, staining it black.

There’s a flash of movement. I turn my head to check the last standing corner of my room; empty, but when I focus on it in the mirror, what I had taken for my shadow separates itself from the wall. Just a shimmer at first, slowly defining itself as the edges become clear and take on a human shape.

No—Fade-shape . It’s a Fade coming into view, clinging to my wall, but still only in my mirror. Pale skin appears against the black background. Feathered wisps on her cheeks and short stripes wrapping toward her mouth. My eyes, only shining silver instead of flat blue.

Cherish .

“Help,” I try to say, but cords of shadow wrap around my mouth.

This can’t happen—Rue promised. The hive only accepts the willing.

I glance to the corner where Cherish should be, but she’s not there. In my mirror she crawls down the wall, reaches out with clawed hands and breaks the vines around my mouth. She holds her finger to her lips, warning me not to make a sound, and then tears at the restraints around my arms, dropping into the sludge beside me.

She’s fighting for me. She wouldn’t fight the hive.

Once my hands are free, she dives for my feet, still unnoticed by the shadows as they destroy everything else, but they’re closing in on my mirror.

What is this?

My hive celebrates someone coming home. It doesn’t drown them. Where are the voices? Where’s the harmony? Where’re the warmth and welcome?

This isn’t right. This isn’t my Fade.

The sludge is up to my chest.

Do Fade need to come up for air? Cherish is still below the surface, picking at the bindings around my feet to free me. I can’t do anything but stand helpless. I scream as sludge pours in from all sides, quickly rising to my neck and chin and higher.

Cherish reappears. For a second, I’m staring at myself. And I’m absolutely terrified.

My own reflection appears in Cherish’s eyes, our expressions identical. As the sludge comes up, covering my mouth so that I have to struggle to keep my nose above the tide, she wraps her arms around my neck and literally goes to pieces. Her entire body becomes a shield made of nanites, trying to cocoon me away from danger, and so save herself, too.

But it’s not enough. She shatters, and we’re both washed away.

That’s when I wake screaming into the light of my bedside lamp, still clutching Honoria’s book where I fell asleep reading it, but it wasn’t Honoria’s dream I had—it was Tobin’s nightmare.

Humans don’t share dreams.

We share, Cherish says.

“No, we don’t!”

Tobin is not a Fade. I’m no longer in the hive. I can’t share what others see and hear. It was just a nightmare. A run-of-the-mill creepy nightmare that leaves me with the feeling that something terrible is coming .

I lay the book aside and head for my sink to splash water on my face, careful not to look up, in case the dream’s still there in my mirror.

I reach for a towel, but while drying my hands, I realize something’s missing—the sting. Between the cut from the arbor and the broken bottle, my hands should be burning. I glance down and find them impossibly perfect. The skin’s healed over, without so much as a scratch.

Humans don’t share dreams, and they don’t heal in the course of a catnap.

“Cherish?” I ask, turning my attention to my reflection. “Did you—”

My voice chokes off, startled silent by the sight of myself in the glass. I’m still human, with blue eyes and white-blonde hair, but I’d swear—just for a second—my shadow moves without me.

“Cherish?” I call again, turning to check the empty room behind me. When I face the mirror again, all is as it should be, only now I can’t lose the feeling of being watched.