Arclight. Josin L McQuein
biting a hole in it so he can rip the material. Within minutes, he’s got a pile of long khaki strips.
“Bandages,” he says. “You okay, Annie?”
“No. And I do not want to talk to you right now.” After downing the first bottle in one long gulp, she takes a handful of strips, pours some juice on one, and starts cleaning the dried blood away from Jove’s mouth.
He’s a mess. His bumps and bruises have gained definition, changing the lines of his face and darkening his skin in places. He barely looks human.
“At least he’s not awake to feel it,” I say as I wash off his knuckles.
“Careful,” Tobin warns. “Only clean his skin, not the wounds. The sugar could give him an infection.”
“Don’t you tell her to be careful, Toby,” Anne-Marie snaps, but she listens well enough to skirt the split on Jove’s eyebrow. “You should thank her for stopping you.”
She takes a long swipe down Jove’s cheek, accidentally snagging one of the cuts. Tobin presses a clean bandage against it to stop the bleeding.
“You know you didn’t have to hit him, or you could have just hit him once, but you didn’t. If Marina hadn’t made you stop, you could have killed him.”
Apple juice sloshes out of the bottle as she shakes it at another bandage to clean off Jove’s cracked lips.
“He’s burning hot, Toby. Feel his face.” Anne-Marie grabs Tobin’s hand, not giving him a choice. “When he wakes up you’re going to apologize or . . . well, I don’t know what I’ll do, but you’re not going to like it!”
Her voice dies down to half-mumbled threats. If Jove weren’t already unconscious, she’d talk him into a coma.
Tobin and I ease away once most of Jove’s injuries are checked, leaving Anne-Marie to take care of him.
“We need a clock in here,” Tobin says.
Or windows. Or a radio. Anything to tell us how close it is to dawn, and what might be happening outside.
I check my personal alarm, hoping I can figure out a way to coax information from it, but the face is still flooded with blinking red light. It’s a shock to see the burn from where I’d hit the wall during the run. I hadn’t really registered the pain until now.
That claustrophobic feeling that had Anne-Marie so keyed up settles in. It really is a small room once it’s packed full, and yet I somehow end up picking a spot close to Tobin rather than one where I’m alone. He doesn’t flinch away from me like the others would.
“You know what it is, don’t you?” Tobin’s voice is distant.
“What?”
“Why they’re afraid of you?” He nods to the room. Every once in a while, someone will glance my way, but they divert their attention as soon as they realize I can see them.
“They blame me,” I say.
He shakes his head. “It’s your ears.”
“My ears?” I grasp at them, confused. They feel normal.
“I don’t know what the stories are like where you came from, but here people who can hear the Fade and those who can see in the dark are bad omens. They’re the ones we lost first. You know, before.”
“But I can’t see in the Dark anymore.”
“You can still hear,” he says. “You try to hide it, but I’ve seen you with your head cocked to the side, like you’re counting off a rhythm that doesn’t exist. Honoria tells us stories, and . . . never mind. It’s not a time for stories.”
“No. I want to know. Her stories are about people who could hear?”
“Some of them.” He nods again without looking at me. “They walked into the Dark on their own. They said they heard voices calling them out . . . people they knew. . . . The next time they were seen, if they were ever seen, they were Fade. It hasn’t happened in years, but Honoria’s brother was one of the last. They grabbed him on a forage run or something. He was just a kid.”
“But I don’t hear voices,” I argue. “I hear real sounds.”
“It still scares them. My dad trained himself to do the same thing, but he doesn’t tell people. You have to hide it better.”
I don’t mean to stare at Tobin, and really I’m not, but he’s been so many different people in such a short time. He’s gone from the boy slinking into rooms after everyone else was in place, to my protector, to the hurt son defending his father’s memory with feral determination, to . . . whatever he is now. His posture changes, followed by his expression, but not quickly enough to spare me the expectation there, as though I hold all his answers.
“How much longer do you think we have to wait?” I ask, because I can’t figure out how to ask him anything else. “Will they turn the alert back to normal so we know it’s over?”
“Maybe.” He scratches at the bloodstains on his fingers. The bandages he’d worn earlier are gone, lost either in the run or the fight, exposing purplish-black bruises on his knuckles. “Or maybe we died and nobody bothered to tell us.”
“That’s not funny,” I say.
“I didn’t mean it to be,” he says. “We have no idea what dead feels like. Maybe we’re there. Death would be simpler. No more mourning, no more waiting.”
“You don’t really think that, do you?”
“I guess not.” He shrugs. “If we were dead, someone would have let us out by now.”
“You think that’s how it works?” I ask. “Easy as opening the door?”
“That’s what Dad told me when my mom died.” Another shrug, like his brain’s linked the motion to ending a sentence.
“I don’t even know how my mom died . . . if she’s dead . . . nothing.”
We’ve become not friends, exactly, but tolerable allies through the bond of common loss and lack of options.
Tobin shifts again, fixating on Anne-Marie and Jove in the middle of the room.
“I didn’t mean to hurt him.” He slides to the floor, resting his hands on his knees.
“I know.” I slide down beside him, using the wall as an anchor for more than my posture.
“Do you ever wonder why Honoria and the others separate us like this?” he asks. “Why they stick us in a hole while they stand guard?”
“To protect us.” Obviously. The elders protect the young, like my parents did with me. I have to believe they drew off the Fade so I could reach the light. They did not throw me away; I refuse to be an outcast to two worlds.
“They didn’t think it through,” Tobin says. “What happens if they fall?”
“The locks open at dawn and we do the best we can,” I say.
“But if the Fade take them, we’re next. They’re gone, the defenses are shot, the ammo’s spent, and we get twelve hours to tick off what’s left of our lives before they come back to kill us. We’re penned in.”
He stops, like he hadn’t realized he was speaking out loud.
“Sorry, I’ve been around Annie too long,” he says. “I’m starting to babble.”
Anne-Marie’s oblivious to our staring, still sitting cross-legged with her mouth going ninety miles a minute, and using her teeth to even her fingernails in the pauses between words. She takes a marker from her pocket and starts coloring them in.
“Almost makes things feel normal, doesn’t she?” Tobin asks.
Absurd and normal, a perfect