Arclight. Josin L McQuein
href="#ud3d89389-fe69-59a5-b4f3-9ab0d5a6ced3">Coming Soon
Someone’s attention shouldn’t have physical weight, but it does. Hate’s a heavy burden; hope is worse. It’s a mix of the two that beats against my skin as my classmates condemn me, and I do what I always do—pretend not to notice the burn gathering at the base of my neck that says I’m being watched.
I focus on the front of the room, where Dr. Wolff’s wrapping up his presentation. Like the nine who spoke before him, he extols the virtues of his occupation in hope that someone listening will choose to follow his path.
“There’s no rush,” he says. “But please consider how few take up the caduceus. I fear that one day we’ll see a generation without healers, and regardless of what else comes, that will be our true end.”
I know he’s speaking to me, but I don’t want to hear him, or indulge his belief that I show promise. I don’t want to be a doctor.
By my less-than-scientific calculations, sixty percent of my memory is framed by white hospital walls and backed by an antiseptic sting so strong it lingers for days. Pain and injury are my past; they can’t be my future, too.
Besides, it’s hard to heal someone when everyone who comes near you cringes if you touch them.
Dr. Wolff steps aside to allow Mr. Pace his spot at the front, and an uncomfortable shift ripples through the room. Instead of his regular clothes, Mr. Pace wears fatigues and a dark green field vest with stitched stars on the pocket marking him as our acting security chief. Tonight, he’s speaking not as our teacher but as one of the Arclight’s protectors, standing in the place of the man I killed. This presentation should belong to Tobin’s father.
Somewhere behind me, I know Tobin’s there, being forced to bear another reminder of what he’s lost, but I don’t turn. This time, I leave him the peace of not having to see my face, and give myself respite from the rancor I’ve come to expect on his.
I keep staring straight ahead, past Mr. Pace to the patched crack in the writing board bolted to the front wall. Mr. Pace speaks of guard details and patrols, honor and responsibility, but none of those are for me either. Even if I wanted to join our security team, no one would allow it, so I let his words break around me and continue on to those more suited for them.
When he’s finished, the other presenters go back to their assignments, leaving me with a quandary. No offered trade or task feels right. Is it my destiny to always be the burden I became when Mr. Pace and the others dragged me, bleeding and unconscious, through the front gate? When I became proof that the Arclight isn’t the only human enclave left in the world?
Or at least that it hadn’t been.
Mr. Pace picks up his stylus and fills the board with a series of problems, as though this is any other night and he isn’t dressed for armed combat. His voice settles into its familiar drone, tempting me to close my eyes for a nap and claim a rare few minutes without pain. Five or four or even three without having to adjust my leg to stop its throbbing, or patting my inhaler on the end of its chain to make sure it’s there. I’d be grateful for anything.
But then the green light on the wall starts blinking blue.
I hate the color blue.
Everyone sits straighter in their seats. The stylus’s tip crushes against the board when Mr. Pace stops writing to check the alarm over the window. He takes a breath, erases his work, and starts over with something new as the glow from his bracelet lights up his skin.
This time everyone listens because his voice gives us something to think about other than the alarm reflecting off our desks a half-beat out of time with the pulse in my ears. It doesn’t matter that his words are artificially slow, or that our lesson no longer involves numbers or equations but reminders of the escape routes we’re supposed to know by heart.
“M-Mr. Pace?” Dante’s one of the bigger guys in class, someone others turn to when they’re scared, but there’s nothing sure about his voice now. “Shouldn’t you close the shutters?”
“If they need to close, they’ll close,” Mr. Pace says. He sketches a rough map of the halls, marks our room, and calls for a volunteer to join him at the board. “Dante?”
Dante shakes his head and presses himself deeper into his chair.
“Becca?”
But Becca, too, refuses to move.
Jove bites out a pointed “no way,” and anchors his feet. The caution light’s blinking; of course they’re cautious.
“Marina?”
I push back from my desk, using the short walk to shake the stiffness from my leg. I grasp at my inhaler to make sure it’s there, even though I never take it off. I could die without it.
I could die anyway.
“Primary route,” Mr. Pace says, and I draw a line representing our fastest way to safety.
He sets his stylus to another color and strikes through one of the halls, creating a blockade in the path I made.
“Alter the route,” he instructs.
I draw a new line, and count it a personal victory that I can remember where I’m supposed to go. Anything I can remember is a personal victory.
“Again,” he says, making another change.
Then the blue light turns violet and shatters the room’s strained calm.
I also hate the color purple.
Chairs scrape across the floor as people scoot toward their neighbors so they don’t have to face the moment alone. Someone tries to cover a whimper with a cough.
I turn to see my best, and only, friend, Anne-Marie, sitting at attention with her knuckles clenched around the edges of her desk. Sweat and tears roll down her nose, to where her bobbed curls stop on either side, while the personal alarm on her wrist blips in rhythm to her knee bouncing off the underside of her desk with a tiny thwack.
The sirens come a minute later, followed by the rattle of security shutters dropping into place. A hiss of air expels from the room as the door seals shut, and the ventilation system kicks over to a self-contained unit.
I jam my hands over my ears, ducking to the floor beside Mr. Pace and counting the seconds until the seal’s set. It’s an awful sound, too much like being shoved into a cage and having the door slam shut. Sure, the Fade can’t get in, but we can’t get out, either. The line between protected and entombed is much too thin.
In the far corner of the room, Tobin sits alone, choosing fury over fear. Hard, brown eyes narrow toward the door, as his hands bend his stylus nearly in half. His rage is no less terrifying when it isn’t directed at me.
The alarm changes one last time, reaching its peak color. The blinking bulbs above our door and window stop, and instead each side of the room begins to glow. Backlit panels pulse red, painting us all the color of fear. And when the others run for the safety point on the back wall, Tobin still doesn’t move.
We’re at Red-Wall; hiding under a table isn’t going to help anything.
In the weeks since I’ve been here, I’ve never seen an alarm go Red-Wall. It always stops on blue caution when the Fade are at the outer perimeter, or purple warning when they come close enough to test our defenses. Before now, the light’s always driven them back. Tonight something’s changed.
They’re inside.