Arclight. Josin L McQuein
we entered the bunker, all I wanted was a way out and fresh air. But now my leg’s heavy and uncoordinated; it drags with an ache I thought I’d healed past having to feel again. One side of me wants to run, the other can hardly walk.
By the time I’m back to the domicile halls, following the green line on the floor toward my room, I’m pulling myself along the rails. I pass people at intervals, but most pretend they can’t see me. They certainly don’t offer to help.
I pause to rest against the sign listing the procedure for finding a broken light, and spare a quick glance to the station at the middle of the hall to make sure the emergency call’s still in one piece. It’s weird not to have my alarm on my wrist. The band isn’t heavy, but it’s always there. The steady bump of the bracelet in my pocket with each step becomes a talisman to keep me focused until I reach my door and lock myself inside.
I dispose of my blood-soaked clothes and wash off before digging out the blue pajama shirt and pants assigned to kids in my year. I fall into bed and close my eyes, but the individual generators are louder than the main power supply, causing slight vibrations through the wall.
My brain refuses to calm, jumping from one frantic thought to another. If the Fade can make it through the Arc at high power, what’s to stop them from coming in during the day while we’re all asleep? In the place I came from, did we live our lives at night the way we do here? Was I odd there, too? Did I have friends?
I lie awake counting holes in ceiling tiles, and wonder how old I am. Fifteen to seventeen is Dr. Wolff’s best guess. Two years isn’t a wide spread, but it seems wrong to not know.
Everything seems wrong.
I pull my blankets over my head and try to shut the world out, but it blocks the thrum of machinery within the walls, and I can’t stand the silence, so I kick the covers loose and climb out of bed in the dark.
The Arclight trains its children to fear the dark, but I can’t fear the familiar. Darkness is all I know, and the passing weeks don’t change that. I don’t remember a world before the fluke of my survival was deemed a miracle.
I don’t feel like a miracle. I feel like a scared and lost little girl who doesn’t remember how to find her way home.
It has to be a mistake—the Fade are too powerful. They rip down walls with their bare hands. I can’t be stronger than that. No one can.
I stare at myself in the mirror and don’t know what I’m looking at. A face, of course. Eyes for seeing, a mouth for talking, and nose and ears for all the rest. The parts I get, but not the whole. I’m a puzzle with the pieces still jumbled.
Everyone looks like someone here. Anne-Marie has dark skin like her mother and brother, with the same eyes and mouth. My yearmates share features common among themselves, but no one looks like me. Silver’s hair is blonde, but not the white of sun-bleached stone. Dante’s eyes are blue, but his are dark and wide; mine aren’t. Honoria and Lt. Sykes are fair, but at least they have freckles. A paleness clings to my skin, no matter how long I stay in the sun.
How far did I run to be so different?
I don’t know, and that’s terrifying.
My first memory is throwing up. Retching over the bed rail in what they later told me was the hospital. I sat up and looked around a room I didn’t know, saw the backs of people I couldn’t name. I couldn’t even name myself.
“Where was she found?” Honoria’s voice was the first sound I heard other than my own sickness.
“Klick and a half into the Grey, on the short side. She was hiding in the water.”
Honoria talked with others in a huddle off to the side. A fog around my brain made it impossible to think straight or understand what they were saying. It was only later that I was able to sort the words into real sentences.
Putrid water and black bile hemorrhaged out of my mouth, clearing the Dark from my body, and by the time the spasms calmed, I barely had the strength to wipe my face, so someone else did it for me. That was my introduction to Dr. Wolff.
“Easy there.” He peeled me off the bed rail, laying me back against a pillow, but I was convulsing too hard to lie still. “It’s the medicine, but it’ll get better. I promise.”
All I could see clearly was white clothes and a man with brown skin and no hair. Everything else was a blur of flat walls and the intrusion of shapes in front of them.
Where am I?
The words sounded right in my head, but when I tried to speak, it didn’t work. I knew what I wanted to say, but my tongue was too heavy to twist around the syllables.
Why am I here?
“Don’t try to talk, yet,” Dr. Wolff said. “Your vocal cords are raw.”
I didn’t know what that meant, and couldn’t ask, but I still tried.
Where are the others?
There had to be others. I couldn’t be the only one left.
A glass came close to my mouth, resting on my lips to give me a drink. Fresh water was a foreign thing after what I’d thrown up. I couldn’t get the bitter taste of the Dark out of my mouth, or the smell out of my nose.
Why am I alone?
My questions came with tears that did nothing to cool my cheeks. My leg burned where it was bandaged, my throat was seared from screaming questions, and my skin flared every time someone touched me. I was on fire.
“Calm down, sweetheart, no one wants to hurt you.”
Please . . . let me go . . .
“Do you remember me?” another voice asked. Now I know it was Mr. Pace, but then it was just more noise.
Someone took the glass away, and I was back on the pillow.
“You had us worried, kid. But you’re home now.” Lt. Sykes’s voice wasn’t as comforting as Dr. Wolff’s, and he lied. I wasn’t home. Home wasn’t that bed and that pain. Home didn’t hurt. There were no strangers who hid their faces or their voices from me. Home held no secrets.
I tried to scream what I wanted, but there was only volume and no words. I cried, stretching toward my wound as well as I could manage.
“I’ll give you something for the pain. It’ll help you sleep,” Dr. Wolff said.
Something jabbed into my arm before I could make them understand I wanted to stay awake and aware.
“You’re safe here, Marina. There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
My whole body stopped, and my last thought before I lost consciousness was: Who’s Marina?
I’m still trying to answer that question.
The face in my mirror feels smooth and cold, without the contours my fingers find on my flesh. Stray thoughts and half-pictures fill my head, memories maybe, and I smack the glass, as if it’s my reflection’s fault for keeping secrets.
And then I scream.
It isn’t intentional, but I can’t stop it once the pain starts. I dig the fingers of one hand into my scalp, as I puff another breath from my inhaler to kill the sudden headache. Something hot stings my leg, and my calf snaps like an overstretched rubber band. Sharp, shooting fiery pains rage through the muscle even after I’m on the ground.
I reach for my inhaler again and resign myself to needing the hospital after all. I just don’t know how I’ll get there.
One . . . two . . . three . . . I count off the dosage as I breathe the medication in.
During a pause, low and softer than the machine hum in the walls, comes a click-clack—a sound that doesn’t belong in my room, or anywhere else within the Arclight. I turn my head from side to