Читать книгу Meridian - Josin L McQuein - Страница 9

Honoria’s expression holds no emotion; there’s no hint of the decades she’s seen hidden in the colorless gray of her eyes. We don’t need to paint lines to divvy up space; this classroom might as well have the White Room’s safety pane running down its center. She stays on her side; I stay on mine.

“Do I need to tell you this wasn’t my idea?” she asks. For once, I’m sure she’s not lying. Her shock’s palpable.

Tobin says Mr. Pace took away the silver pistol she always kept tucked in her waistband, but I’d feel better if I could see her back to know for sure.

“Door’s open,” I say. “Feel free to leave.”

But no one’s going anywhere.

I step sideways and set out a bowl of cookies from the tub Anne-Marie left, but I never take my eyes off her. Honoria slides into the room, just as guarded.

I place another bowl; she moves another step. Bowl, step, bowl, step, until we settle into predatory symmetry, like the films we’ve seen in science class of long-gone animals fighting over territory.

With my focus on Honoria, it’s easy to forget the cushions on the floor that have replaced the chairs I moved. On my next step, I hit padded cotton rather than floor, and I drop the entire tub off my hip. Cookies go flying. Bottles of juice shatter, soaking into the napkins that land on top of them. And I blurt the first curse I’ve ever used in my life as I bend down to clean it up.

“Tobin’s rubbing off on you,” Honoria says, right beside me. Someone her size shouldn’t be able to move that quietly. “I wonder if you’ve had the same effect on him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” I snap. Hopefully, the look on my face is closer to a glare than “you terrify me.” How does Tobin flip the switch from fear to rage with barely a thought?

My hands are trembling now, so I cover by scrubbing at the spill. It’s grape juice, the purple color close enough to red that I’m having flashbacks of trying to stop the blood from Tobin’s chest.

“You realize those napkins are useless?” she asks rather than answer me. “You’ll go through the stack and only push the mess around. There should be towels in the cabinet.”

I crawl backward as she moves forward, furious that I let myself lose my footing with her, and end up sitting when I run into the cushions behind me.

“I don’t need your help,” I say.

All I need is to make sure that she never finds out what I saw in the arbor. I refuse to have Tobin’s screams haunt me every time I close my eyes because she decides to turn him into an experiment.

For once, Cherish seems in total agreement, echoing my fears with protect and conceal . It’s the way of the Fade—if you don’t want it stolen, keep it hidden from human eyes.

Conceal, Cherish repeats, following the order with a burst of flaring light across a darkened sky. She’s named Tobin after the star shower we shared the night I followed Rue into the Dark. She doesn’t want me to go through the agony she felt when Honoria separated her from Rue; she’d have to feel it again. Honoria won’t touch Tobin—not if we can help it.

Cherish names her “Destroyer,” a raging flame that lays waste to the Dark and everything in it.

My attention drifts back to the lake of juice that looks more like blood the more it dries.

“Being stubborn only leads to a bigger mess,” Honoria says, still tracking me.

“Speaking from experience, are you?” The napkins have turned to a ball of soggy glop in my hands. I stop trying to sop up the juice, and reach for the broken bottles to put them back in the tub. “I said I don’t need your—Ahh!”

I pull my hand back with a hiss. A long shard of glass has imbedded itself into my hand, in nearly the same place I cut it earlier.

Honoria’s on me in an instant, as though the smell of blood draws her close. She tows me up with a gloved hand around my wrist, bringing the wound close enough for inspection. I glance at the blood to prove to myself it’s red, even as Cherish goes feral in my mind.

“Let go!” I order, bracing myself so Honoria no longer has control over where I stand or fall.

“Annie?” a voice calls from the hall. “Has Dante come back this way? Because I really can’t find him.”

Tobin .

A meteor shower goes off inside my head as Cherish calls his name over and over.

Translation: He’s not Rue, but he’ll do .

“Tobin!” I call when he reaches the door.

“Marina?”

He’s stunned for a second, and I can only imagine how we look to him. Me bleeding. Honoria standing over me. Broken glass.

“What happened?” he asks, entering cautiously. “Where’s Annie?”

“She left,” I say.

“Marina’s hurt,” Honoria says at the same time. She jostles my hand to show off the glass. “And she’s acting like a child.”

“I broke a bottle,” I argue. “That’s hardly hurt.”

Getting shot is hurt. Being burned by lights until the lines that used to run my arms and legs melt off—that’s hurt. This is a scratch.

“Let her go.”

“You’re both acting like children,” Honoria says, digging at the piece of glass. Either her gloves are too thick or my blood’s too slippery because she can’t get a decent grip on the shard without driving it deeper.

“Ow!” I do the only thing I can think of—kick her in the shin.

Honoria glowers at me, but she lets go.

Two months ago, I wouldn’t have challenged her outright. I didn’t understand why I feared her until I saw the recordings of my torture in the White Room. I still feel that threat with her this close, but I’m stronger than I was then.

We are stronger than you, Cherish intones.

Honoria grabs one of the fingers on her glove with her teeth and tugs until it comes free, then holds her bare hand out to me. Her skin’s nothing but crisscrossing lines of scar tissue from her fingernails up past her wrists, where they disappear beneath her sleeves.

She gives me an annoyed scowl and zero warning before yanking the glass out of my palm.

“Ow!”

“Keep pressure on it,” she says, pressing another towel and Tobin’s hand down over the free-flowing blood when she’s done. “It shouldn’t bleed long.”

“Ow!” I’m too shocked to say more.

“And close your mouth, you look like a fish.”

“You touched her—bare-handed,” Tobin says.

Of all the people inside the Arclight, Honoria is least likely to break the rules of contact with someone Fade-touched, and she’s always seen me as contaminated. What gives?

“I don’t wear these to protect myself; I wear them to protect everyone else. With you, there’s no need.”

She fixes the glove back in place and drags a chair across the room to the front.

“Are those burns?” I ask.

“Collateral damage,” she says in a weary voice. “I made a choice many, many years ago, and that was to not be like those who live outside this compound. I’m not like you. The suppressants help, but I can’t be cured with a dart and an inhaler. If I want to stay free of the Fade, it costs me.”

She can’t honestly think going from Cherish to Marina cost me nothing.

“The nanites have never stopped replicating in my system; when they start to spike, I do the only thing that works: I cut myself, drawing them to the wound, and burn them out again.”

“You kill them for trying to help you!”

“Help is a subjective concept.”

The only things keeping me in my skin and in this room are Tobin and the sound of laughter and feet. Anne-Marie returns with a line of students who go silent when they see Honoria waiting at the front.

“Everyone, stand to the side and mind the glass,” Honoria says. “Once it’s clear, you can take a seat.”

The children all file into a line against the wall, as though this were a Red-Wall drill. Anne-Marie joins me and Tobin as we lean against the teacher’s desk at the back while Honoria quickly clears as much of the mess as she can.

“What happened?” Anne-Marie asks, looking at my hand and at the towel wrapped into my fist.

“You abandoned her,” Tobin says, but she doesn’t take the bait.

“Marina?” she asks instead.

I can’t really explain beyond saying, “It was an accident.”

She scowls at me, as though dropping bottles of juice was a violation of her order not to try and kill Honoria.

“Uh-huh.” She crosses her arms and sets her sights on the front of the room, where the children have started to chatter nervously in line.

“I thought she left,” one boy whispers.

“She didn’t leave, she went nuts,” another beside him answers.

“Why’s she here?” a girl asks nervously.

“No one’s told you?” Honoria asks, silencing them. Her hearing’s as keen as mine—she caught every whisper. “Usually, those with older siblings get clued in early.”

She shoves the bottle bin under her chair and takes a seat. A reverent hush falls over the faces watching her with absolute attention.

“I’m here to tell you what lies beyond our borders, lurking out of the light.”

She raises her head, looking me straight in the eye.

“Today, I tell you the truth about the Fade.”