Josin L McQuein - Meridian

Here, in the middle of the book, are the sections Honoria’s marked to be read in class.

She’s scribbled over her original entries, rewording them. She’s marked things out and replaced them, adding notes on yellow squares. She’s highlighted and underlined obsessively. Her changes support the assumptions she’s made over the last decades when the original text may not have.

I don’t know why she kept the original words. Why not rip the pages out and replace them altogether?

The last entry about Tracey mentions how the girl stole a box of pens and used them to draw lines all over her skin. I check the list and find that Tracey Malone walked into the night a few hours later. Honoria was very matter-of-fact about it—in the rewrite. She’d struck through the response she had in the moment so fiercely that it cut the page, and she replaced it with a clinical observation that Tracey’s fate was inevitable.

She’s tried to change the past, and in a way, I guess that’s what she hoped she could accomplish with me. If her attempt to uninclude someone from the Fade’s hive had worked, then it might have been possible to reclaim the world for humans and undo the damage of the last several decades. Too bad it’s harder to mark through time than ink.

The thought causes a chill I can’t shake. It gets into my blood and down to my bones. The only time I’ve felt anything close to this was when I stepped into the Dark as Marina for the first time and believed I’d walked into my own execution.

“Cherish?” I ask out loud; my voice is a victory. I was afraid she was the chill. That she’d figured out how to take me over. “Cherish?” I call again, but still there’s no answer.

Shadows grow from the ceiling, gathering like cobwebs in the corners and trailing toward the floor. I reach for my lamp, to raise the shade and make the room brighter, but the bulb shatters in its socket.

The shadows turn to vines, slithering over everything. They reach my beloved sister-bush. I lunge forward to save it, but my feet are ankle deep in sludge so thick, it holds me fast, forcing me to watch as the bush is ripped to shreds. The vines strip the leaves and choke the bush, filling the room with the scent of ruined roses, and then it’s gone. Nothing but leaves drifting down with the sound of my sister’s broken laughter in the background.

My pink walls scorch black. The paint blisters up and boils away. When the shadows reach the cut-out bird, it comes squawking to life and flapping for all it’s worth, but there’s nowhere for it to go beyond its page. The shadows flow over it like poured tar, leaving it struggling beneath the weight until it goes still.

And the sludge around my feet grows deeper, up to my knees.

Half the room has crumbled to nothing. The shadows become snatching fingers, ripping and tearing by the handful. Anne-Marie’s quilt goes next, soaking up the darkness to become a sodden abyss. I try to save Tobin’s snow globe, but my arms are tethered, pulled flush to the wall. Darkness descends upon the globe like settling smoke. It passes through the glass to mingle with the water, churning and spinning until it goes so fast, the glass bursts, leaving the stars to ooze over the sides and into the sludge where they sink out of sight.

The darkness is to my waist now.

Something drips onto my head, and in the mirror across my room, I watch it slide through my hair, staining it black.

There’s a flash of movement. I turn my head to check the last standing corner of my room; empty, but when I focus on it in the mirror, what I had taken for my shadow separates itself from the wall. Just a shimmer at first, slowly defining itself as the edges become clear and take on a human shape.

No—Fade-shape . It’s a Fade coming into view, clinging to my wall, but still only in my mirror. Pale skin appears against the black background. Feathered wisps on her cheeks and short stripes wrapping toward her mouth. My eyes, only shining silver instead of flat blue.

Cherish .

“Help,” I try to say, but cords of shadow wrap around my mouth.

This can’t happen—Rue promised. The hive only accepts the willing.

I glance to the corner where Cherish should be, but she’s not there. In my mirror she crawls down the wall, reaches out with clawed hands and breaks the vines around my mouth. She holds her finger to her lips, warning me not to make a sound, and then tears at the restraints around my arms, dropping into the sludge beside me.

She’s fighting for me. She wouldn’t fight the hive.

Once my hands are free, she dives for my feet, still unnoticed by the shadows as they destroy everything else, but they’re closing in on my mirror.

What is this?

My hive celebrates someone coming home. It doesn’t drown them. Where are the voices? Where’s the harmony? Where’re the warmth and welcome?

This isn’t right. This isn’t my Fade.

The sludge is up to my chest.

Do Fade need to come up for air? Cherish is still below the surface, picking at the bindings around my feet to free me. I can’t do anything but stand helpless. I scream as sludge pours in from all sides, quickly rising to my neck and chin and higher.

Cherish reappears. For a second, I’m staring at myself. And I’m absolutely terrified.

My own reflection appears in Cherish’s eyes, our expressions identical. As the sludge comes up, covering my mouth so that I have to struggle to keep my nose above the tide, she wraps her arms around my neck and literally goes to pieces. Her entire body becomes a shield made of nanites, trying to cocoon me away from danger, and so save herself, too.

But it’s not enough. She shatters, and we’re both washed away.

That’s when I wake screaming into the light of my bedside lamp, still clutching Honoria’s book where I fell asleep reading it, but it wasn’t Honoria’s dream I had—it was Tobin’s nightmare.

Humans don’t share dreams.

We share , Cherish says.

“No, we don’t!”

Tobin is not a Fade. I’m no longer in the hive. I can’t share what others see and hear. It was just a nightmare. A run-of-the-mill creepy nightmare that leaves me with the feeling that something terrible is coming .

I lay the book aside and head for my sink to splash water on my face, careful not to look up, in case the dream’s still there in my mirror.

I reach for a towel, but while drying my hands, I realize something’s missing—the sting. Between the cut from the arbor and the broken bottle, my hands should be burning. I glance down and find them impossibly perfect. The skin’s healed over, without so much as a scratch.

Humans don’t share dreams, and they don’t heal in the course of a catnap.

“Cherish?” I ask, turning my attention to my reflection. “Did you—”

My voice chokes off, startled silent by the sight of myself in the glass. I’m still human, with blue eyes and white-blonde hair, but I’d swear—just for a second—my shadow moves without me.

“Cherish?” I call again, turning to check the empty room behind me. When I face the mirror again, all is as it should be, only now I can’t lose the feeling of being watched.

It’s impossible to tell time in a dream. I’ve been out so long, I nearly missed Anne-Marie’s birthday dinner.

Unlike the hinged door Tobin’s dad installed at their apartment, Anne-Marie’s is a standard sliding panel. I knock, and her smiling face appears as it moves into its pocket, leaving a clear path inside.

“She’s here,” she yells over her shoulder, and I’m yanked inside.

I was expecting something like Tobin’s house, but this one’s mostly metal and ceramic—inorganic materials considered safe from the Fade. There aren’t any rugs, and the lights are stark white. Pictures of Anne-Marie and her brother cover the walls, and while I see a few of their mother, there aren’t any of Mr. Pace.