Meridian. Josin L McQuein
with her.” I make a desperate grab for Anne-Marie’s arm, and the box nearly topples to the floor when she steps out of reach.
“You don’t have to forgive her; you don’t have to like her, but you need to find a way to live with her so things can get back to normal.”
Normal for the Arclight means sleeping all day and hiding under lamps at night, jumping at shadows that never meant us any harm. That’s not normal, nor is it an existence I want to return to.
“I don’t care if you have to draw a line down the middle of the building and pick sides, just do something. Please try,” Anne-Marie says, rushing back to hug me for some, inexplicable reason. She lets go and turns very serious, scolding me with a pointed finger. “If either of you are dead when I get back, I’ll be really irritated.”
Then she walks out of the room, leaving me to face the one real enemy I have in the world.
MARINA
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.