Arclight. Josin L McQuein
to be nocturnal. A soft white glow bounces back from the building’s walls to match the polished shine of poured walkways set with crushed glass and reflective minerals. Somewhere, the night is black, but not here. Bugs from both sides hit the bulbs and incinerate, sparking and popping as they fall.
This is the time the world is divided, with no Grey in between. This is when it’s dangerous. The lines no longer blur and everything I lost is still out there, almost in sight, but beyond my reach. I rest my hand against the smooth metal of the nearest pole as Tobin leans his head against another. Power hums beneath my fingers and feet. The invisible wall between us falls away, and Tobin finally acknowledges that he’s not alone. His eyes, when they meet mine, have that distant look again, as though they’re not focused on the here or now. They grow stormy, then he turns toward the main building without a word.
A persistent plea of “Go” rattles around my brain, but there’s no answer when I ask it where I’m supposed to go to. Nothing lives beyond the Arc but death. There’s no way back to wherever I came from.
“I thought we had a deal.”
I cringe, knowing exactly who that voice belongs to. I’m an idiot. I’m not the one Tobin ran from.
Mr. Pace stands behind me, arms crossed. Trailing him, Honoria approaches with half of her patrolmen from the fire, ready pick up the slack of our weakened perimeter. They’re going back to their assigned places for the night, still wearing the exhaustion that comes from working through the day.
“You were supposed to stay in your room until first meal,” Mr. Pace says. “Not wander out to the boundary and set off the proximity alarms.”
I’m going to kill Tobin for picking up that stone; he must have tripped a sensor.
“I promised I’d stay out of sight, not in my room,” I say weakly.
“What’s she doing out here?” Honoria asks, ignoring me, as though I can’t answer for myself.
Hateful and hard, she snaps her fingers toward Mr. Pace and draws him away, pointing to me and then to the switchbox I’d used to hide from Tobin.
She thinks I was going to run; I can see it in her face.
She’ll turn me out to die in the Dark, or lock me up so the others can forget I ever disturbed their routine. If she’s decided that those lost to the Fade really did die in vain because of me. . . .
I bob from one foot to the other, giving the Arc a long glance and struggling not to give in to the voice telling me to leave and never look back. If I run, no one would follow.
No! Such thoughts are madness. Whatever Honoria decides, it’s not worth venturing into certain death to escape.
Finally, it ends. She jabs the air with an insistent finger, sending Mr. Pace back toward me.
“Sorry,” I whisper to my teacher. “I wasn’t running. I don’t hear voices like the people before.”
Honoria hasn’t taken her eyes off me, so I shift my attention to my feet.
“Is she going to make me leave?”
Mr. Pace steps sideways, turning his body into a blockade. “Marina, even if you did hear voices, that wouldn’t happen. Those who left in the first days weren’t tossed aside; the people here tried to keep them. Why were you at the switchbox?”
“I wanted to see what was burning, but then the sun started to go down and . . . I got scared, so I hid.” It sounds better than the truth.
“The fire’s nothing to worry about,” he says, and tries to smile.
“People only say that when they mean the opposite.”
“Not me.”
“It’s where they broke through, isn’t it?”
Mr. Pace hesitates, checking over his shoulder to see what Honoria’s doing. Once he’s sure she’s occupied with inspecting the switchbox, he answers.
“Yes.”
“How’d they get so close?” If Tobin and I were enough to trigger a sensor, they should have, too.
“Most people think of the Arclight and Dark as rings, with the Grey between them.” He drops to the ground and draws three concentric circles in the dirt. “But there are places where the Dark comes so close that the Grey’s almost gone.”
He nods in the direction my little bird disappeared and wipes the drawing away to make another. A tiny circle in the center, with an amorphous blob surrounding it. The band that separates the two grows wide on one side, and nonexistent on the other.
“Our territory is shrinking, while the Dark is always growing wider, consuming the terrain around it. Another decade, and we may not have the luxury of going outside at all.”
With his finger, he drags the blob’s line closer until it touches the rim of the Arclight’s circle.
“That’s why the boundaries are forbidden for you and the others who are too young to appreciate the danger.”
Danger isn’t something to be appreciated; it’s something to be avoided. And if he thinks I don’t understand that, then he’s not half as smart as I give him credit for.
“So long as the lights are on, the Fade can get close, but not cross over,” he says.
“But last night—”
“We pulled too much power too fast,” he says. “They hit the barrier from three sides, overloading the system by tripping all the main sensors simultaneously. Most of the lights dimmed, but the ones at the fire point shut off completely.”
“You mean they just walked through?”
He nods.
“It was a worst-case scenario. Circuits for the Arc are supposed to be isolated, but if things happen in a certain order, the base grid defaults to its original programming, glitches included. The system couldn’t tell the security lights from the room lights.”
“Do you think—”
I can’t bring myself to ask him if it was someone taken during my rescue who told the Fade how to get past our security.
“I think they got lucky,” he says. Mr. Pace puts a hand on my shoulder, but removes it when I flinch. “They’ve always tested us. It was only a matter of time before they found a way in.”
“That’s the difference between us, Pace.” Honoria invites herself into our conversation. “I don’t expect the Fade to find weakness. What I expect is that the people who live here will stick to their assigned places.” She turns her temper on me. “Keep away from the power boxes, they can kill you.”
“I didn’t touch the box,” I say. “I was only hiding behind it.”
“From what?” she demands. “Did you see something?”
“The lights startled me. It was the closest thing to hide behind.”
“Well at least you kept your head. . . .” She never finishes the halfway compliment. Instead, she snatches my burnt wrist up to eye level. “Where’s your bracelet?”
“She got burned in the run,” Mr. Pace says. “I told her to put it on her other arm until she healed.”
I hold up my left arm so Honoria can see the alarm’s really there. Thankfully, she doesn’t test the latch.
“You should have gone to the hospital.”
“I gave her some salve, and told her to keep an eye on it,” Mr. Pace says. “Doc had his hands full. He’d have done the same thing.”
“Why are you out here?” Honoria’s fingers are rough on my ragged skin as she prods the burn and new scrapes.
“It started to bother me, so I put some