Josin L McQuein - Meridian

“Agreed. Send him home.”

When Sykes turns to deliver the message, I’m right behind him.

“You shouldn’t eavesdrop, kid.”

“You’re not old enough to call me kid, and I’m not hallucinating!”

“No one said you are.”

“That’s exactly what you said!”

“I said you’re exhausted, and that’s the truth. You’ve been covering your duty and Silver’s for days—we’ve noticed. It’s burning you out.”

“I can—”

“You can find your friend and tell her to pull her share of the weight, and then you can take a nap. But first show me which stump, so I can scrape for samples. Being exhausted doesn’t make you wrong.”

Maybe not, but the possibility of being right makes me never want to sleep again.

I chose to work in the Arbor , I remind myself. It makes me happy .

But right now, it makes me annoyed. Someone took my stepladder— again . Every time I have to track it down, I end up off schedule, so I thought using an upturned bucket made sense. But it was stupid. Really, really stupid and wobbly.

I still have to stand on my toes and stretch to reach the branch I need to sample, but if I can tip myself just a little bit more, my shears should be long enough to—

“Ow!”

The bucket topples out from under me, and the falls sends the points of my shears into my hand. But I got my trimming. Ha! Take that, ladder thief !

I can’t stop myself from checking the blood.

It’s red. Nearly two months from my last breath off my old inhaler, I still bleed human red.

I hold my hand down, watching the drops run and collect on my finger, ready to drip onto the potting soil below. A million billion bits of genetic code that could tell me what the color my eyes and hair would be had I been born human rather than turned into one.

Blood remembers everything. It could tell me the name of the father I still don’t know, but it just hangs there, turning tacky in the Arbor’s humid air.

You should be more careful, a snide inner voice taunts. Humans are imprecise .

Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the day while the rest of the Arclight’s still sleeping. My dream-fogged brain tries to convince me that my skin’s the color of ash and that what thrums in my veins is thick and black, teeming with the tiny machines that used to fill and form my cells.

On those early mornings, it all comes back. I smell flowers and know my little sister’s close. The sting of pine needles tells me my mother’s there. All the layers stemming from the Fade’s connection to one another wrap me up in a whirlwind of comfort.

I remember my real name. I’m the warmth of a new day filtering past the Dark’s canopy, and the promise of adventure on an errant wind. Cherish , and cherished. I belong.

Then the hive’s voices dull, falling away until only Rue’s remains.

Never alone , he said, but his final words to me were a promise he couldn’t keep. I’ll always be alone. No one else has ever been Fade, then human.

In the end the moment passes, and I’ve lost everything.

I always lose.

“Stop it,” I say out loud, bracing myself against the workstation. The s comes out as a hard hiss. “Go away!”

I plunge my hands into a bucket of irrigation water, watching the blood sink to the bottom among the falling silt.

You go is the answer I get.

Weeks ago, when I was released from the hospital, I told Dr. Wolff and Tobin and everyone else that I had control of myself after the suppressant was out of my system. I didn’t know it was a lie. My memories were trickling back, but they brought something else with them— Cherish .

I thought she was an echo. I’d say or do something routine but feel a twinge or hesitate because it didn’t actually seem normal. Something as insignificant as sitting down with a tray at meals or opening my mouth to speak to Anne-Marie felt alien and uncomfortable.

That’s not how we eat, I’d think. That’s not how we speak .

As my memories returned, they were the memories of a Fade. I thought my brain was just having trouble filtering, but it escalated. I’d reach for a fork at my next meal, and my fingers wouldn’t move. I could see the fork, and I’d want to pick it up, only something interrupted the brain signal required to do it.

That’s not how we eat , my inner voice insisted, until I finally realized it wasn’t a memory. Something inside me was trying to control my movements. Something that still thought of me as part of a hive—the voice never said I , it always said we .

The Fade are dual creatures. They can exist as an individual or as part of a hive mind, and the residue of the life I left in the Dark was still trying to make me act like a Fade. Cherish was trying to send me back to the shadows.

Things would be so much simpler if I could talk myself into taking the suppressant again. One puff off my old inhaler, and Cherish would drift back into stark-white nothing; I’d forget she ever existed. But if I let go of her, I lose my family and Rue.

I don’t know what to do.

I can deal with Cherish for another day. Just one. Just today. If I keep telling myself that, I may string enough days together to last me the rest of my life.

I dry my hands, reaching for the bulky gloves I’m supposed to wear.

Cherish doesn’t comment, but I know she hates them. Fade prefer to feel the soil, and it’s usually easier to humor her, but today she’s being difficult. She doesn’t get her way.

“Good children of the Arclight don’t search for ways around the rules,” I tell her. “We do our jobs and move forward.”

We are not the Arclight’s good child .

“I will be,” I say. I can’t be a Fade, but I can be the best human girl I can be. I have human responsibilities to the Arbor; she won’t distract me from them anymore.

The creatures are here again , she says smugly.

Sometimes Cherish is more sixth sense than annoyance. She notices things I don’t, by virtue of the enhanced hearing I never lost. I’m busy snipping and cataloging leaf samples in jars, but she’s hearing the swish of a cat’s tail through air.

Something whisper-soft brushes against my legs, weaving around my ankles in a figure eight. I bend down to pet it.

“I wonder if those came from Mom’s monsters.”

A real voice startles me as Tobin’s boots shuffle into sight on the other side of the work-station. Even if Cherish heard him come in, she wouldn’t tell me. She doesn’t like him.

“Hey,” I say, as though it’s not odd to see him down here.

“Hey.”

He smiles, reaching out to stroke the cat’s ruff. It springs free with a hiss at the first touch of his fingers, and he laughs.

“Definitely Mom’s. They always hated me.”

He told me a story once, about how the cats in the Arclight came from his mother’s efforts to save a litter of abandoned kittens she’d found outside the boundary as a girl. He takes the Arbor cat’s disdain as proof that his mother left a mark on this place beyond the research Honoria used for my so-called cure.

“Is the shift over already?” I ask. I could check my alarm band, but I’ve spent weeks breaking myself of the habit of answering to that stupid screen on my wrist. I’d rather get my information elsewhere. Somewhere not controlled by the people who nearly killed me.

“I’ve been sent in search of Silver. She didn’t show up for rounds, so she’s become their latest excuse to get me away from anything interesting or important.”