Читать книгу Meridian - Josin L McQuein - Страница 7

I chose to work in the Arbor, I remind myself. It makes me happy .

But right now, it makes me annoyed. Someone took my stepladder—again . Every time I have to track it down, I end up off schedule, so I thought using an upturned bucket made sense. But it was stupid. Really, really stupid and wobbly.

I still have to stand on my toes and stretch to reach the branch I need to sample, but if I can tip myself just a little bit more, my shears should be long enough to—

“Ow!”

The bucket topples out from under me, and the falls sends the points of my shears into my hand. But I got my trimming. Ha! Take that, ladder thief !

I can’t stop myself from checking the blood.

It’s red. Nearly two months from my last breath off my old inhaler, I still bleed human red.

I hold my hand down, watching the drops run and collect on my finger, ready to drip onto the potting soil below. A million billion bits of genetic code that could tell me what the color my eyes and hair would be had I been born human rather than turned into one.

Blood remembers everything. It could tell me the name of the father I still don’t know, but it just hangs there, turning tacky in the Arbor’s humid air.

You should be more careful, a snide inner voice taunts. Humans are imprecise .

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the day while the rest of the Arclight’s still sleeping. My dream-fogged brain tries to convince me that my skin’s the color of ash and that what thrums in my veins is thick and black, teeming with the tiny machines that used to fill and form my cells.

On those early mornings, it all comes back. I smell flowers and know my little sister’s close. The sting of pine needles tells me my mother’s there. All the layers stemming from the Fade’s connection to one another wrap me up in a whirlwind of comfort.

I remember my real name. I’m the warmth of a new day filtering past the Dark’s canopy, and the promise of adventure on an errant wind. Cherish, and cherished. I belong.

Then the hive’s voices dull, falling away until only Rue’s remains.

Never alone, he said, but his final words to me were a promise he couldn’t keep. I’ll always be alone. No one else has ever been Fade, then human.

In the end the moment passes, and I’ve lost everything.

I always lose.

“Stop it,” I say out loud, bracing myself against the workstation. The s comes out as a hard hiss. “Go away!”

I plunge my hands into a bucket of irrigation water, watching the blood sink to the bottom among the falling silt.

You go is the answer I get.

Weeks ago, when I was released from the hospital, I told Dr. Wolff and Tobin and everyone else that I had control of myself after the suppressant was out of my system. I didn’t know it was a lie. My memories were trickling back, but they brought something else with them—Cherish .

I thought she was an echo. I’d say or do something routine but feel a twinge or hesitate because it didn’t actually seem normal. Something as insignificant as sitting down with a tray at meals or opening my mouth to speak to Anne-Marie felt alien and uncomfortable.

That’s not how we eat, I’d think. That’s not how we speak .

As my memories returned, they were the memories of a Fade. I thought my brain was just having trouble filtering, but it escalated. I’d reach for a fork at my next meal, and my fingers wouldn’t move. I could see the fork, and I’d want to pick it up, only something interrupted the brain signal required to do it.

That’s not how we eat, my inner voice insisted, until I finally realized it wasn’t a memory. Something inside me was trying to control my movements. Something that still thought of me as part of a hive—the voice never said I, it always said we .

The Fade are dual creatures. They can exist as an individual or as part of a hive mind, and the residue of the life I left in the Dark was still trying to make me act like a Fade. Cherish was trying to send me back to the shadows.

Things would be so much simpler if I could talk myself into taking the suppressant again. One puff off my old inhaler, and Cherish would drift back into stark-white nothing; I’d forget she ever existed. But if I let go of her, I lose my family and Rue.

I don’t know what to do.

I can deal with Cherish for another day. Just one. Just today. If I keep telling myself that, I may string enough days together to last me the rest of my life.

I dry my hands, reaching for the bulky gloves I’m supposed to wear.

Cherish doesn’t comment, but I know she hates them. Fade prefer to feel the soil, and it’s usually easier to humor her, but today she’s being difficult. She doesn’t get her way.

“Good children of the Arclight don’t search for ways around the rules,” I tell her. “We do our jobs and move forward.”

We are not the Arclight’s good child .

“I will be,” I say. I can’t be a Fade, but I can be the best human girl I can be. I have human responsibilities to the Arbor; she won’t distract 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 to touch—but she didn’t bring my sister, and she was only interested in getting me to follow her into the Grey. I wanted to—I really did—but I was afraid of what would happen if I returned 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 .