Josin L McQuein - Meridian

“Huh? D’you say something?”

“Snap out of it, Toby,” Annie says.

“Can’t.” I shake my head, but I’ve already lost the battle. Sleep’s going to win this round.

“Can you make it home?” Marina asks.

“I’ll be fine once I’m moving. Shouldn’t have sat down.”

“You look like trash,” Annie says.

Yeah, well, you look like one of them. Spun black crystals for hair, glowing eyes, and lines dripping off into the rising dark .

“I’m fine,” I say again, then ask Marina: “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know what I am.”

Her mouth doesn’t match the words, but it sounds like her talking.

“Home,” she orders, followed by Annie’s “Now!”

Lights flash in my eyes, and suddenly, I’m down the hall, standing at the mouth of the domicile wing. The lights are out . Then I’m at my door, and there’s something crawling on the wall above it . Now falling onto the couch— I hear them click-clacking all around .

Everything’s heavy and slow. I’m alone in the Dark.

And then they come .

I hate this part.

“Do you think he made it?”

Tobin left the room at a half-drunk lurch, his final words to me and Anne-Marie slurred into gibberish. I think he said something about Rue.

“If he goes facedown between here and his apartment, someone will roll him the rest of the way,” Anne-Marie says.

I hope that’s humor.

She starts grabbing cushions off the floor. Honoria’s picking up discarded bowls, stacking them to put in the wash. I reach for the nearest chair on the wall, ostensibly to put it back in its proper position in the room, but I really just want something physical between us.

As usual, Honoria’s the one to break the silence.

“I was surprised you never came downstairs to find me,” she says. “You’ve seemed confrontational since you came into your . . . shall we call it an inheritance?”

“Might as well. It’s what I got after you killed me.” I slam down the chair and drag a desk over to go with it.

Anne-Marie glances at us, but it’s more warning to behave than concern or curiosity.

“Pouting and angry gestures,” Honoria says. “How very teenage human of you.”

“That was the general idea, wasn’t it? Take a Fade and make it human?”

Anne-Marie drops a bottle into the collection bin hard enough to rattle it, but she doesn’t have to worry. Once I’m done, I’m out of here.

I take more chairs and return them to the room’s center.

“Believe it or not, I understand,” I tell Honoria. She looks at me like she’s never seen me before, a silent nudge to prove I could possibly see things the way she does. “The Fade flipped your life upside down, and you want to reset the balance.” I get that better than anyone, I imagine. “But the world’s changed. People are supposed to change with it.”

“You think it’s that easy?”

We adapt easily , Cherish says.

“I think it’s possible ,” I say.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Yes, I do. When Rue and the others crossed the Arc, the human world flipped again. Everything they thought they knew about the Fade, and the dangers they posed, changed in an instant.

“I know you’re the last constant this place has,” I say. “The Arclight needs that. They need to see you adapt, so they can, too.”

I want to say more, but an alarm goes off on Anne-Marie’s wrist, and despite myself, I flinch, though we’ve had fewer drills lately.

“It’s my mom,” she says. “She wants me home.”

The alert sounds again, and I realize the ping is nothing like a Red-Wall signal.

“Leave the rest.” Anne-Marie glances warily between me and Honoria. “I’ll make Dante finish it when he decides to show up.”

“Dante was supposed to be here?” Honoria asks, suspicion in her voice. She presses a button on her wristband. “Blaylock, Dante: locate signal. If he’s in the compound, I can—”

“He is,” Anne-Marie says.

“He snuck off with Silver again,” I add before Honoria can head into full-blown paranoia and send a security team to investigate a midnight hookup. “No big deal.”

Her bracelet beeps and she frowns.

“Auxiliary storage unit nine,” she says.

“Told you so.”

“Happens all the time,” Anne-Marie says. “He really will make it up—he always does, so you don’t have to stay,” she adds, to me.

The alert pings again. Her mother’s not exactly patient.

“Last one,” I promise. “Go on.”

She runs out as I push a desk into position with its chair and then start for the door.

“You were wrong, you know,” Honoria says.

I pause, knowing that’s what she wants, but don’t face her.

“You said I wasn’t human enough to regret what I’d done—you were wrong.”

It takes me a moment to realize she’s talking about our confrontation in the White Room two months ago. Tobin and I had found files documenting the torture I went through to transition from Cherish to Marina. It was raw footage of me burning alive under the heat lamps while Honoria watched, dispassionate and unconcerned. She thought there was no cost too high to achieve what she wanted, and for that, I accused her of being the soulless monster she believed the Fade to be.

She acts like that moment just occurred rather than being in the past.

Does she feel time differently because she’s been around so long?

For her, maybe the rise of the Fade wasn’t an eternity ago. It was yesterday and still fresh in her mind.

“I regretted every step I took down the path that led to you,” she says. “You were a last resort. And I am not the only constant this place has. I’m not the only one who remembers the world before. I’m simply the last to give up hope of reclaiming it.”

I turn toward her.

Other people here who were alive in the first days? There can’t be.

“There are others like you?”

“Five, counting myself, who live here now and lived here then.”

“Who?”

“If they wanted you to know, they would have told you.” A small mocking smile creeps into the corners of her mouth. She tosses me something and then walks out of the room.

I catch what she throws without thinking. It’s solid and square, with smooth lines etched into it.

Honoria’s given me her book.

What most people call “my quarters” is the single bedroom I was assigned. My walls are pink now, instead of white, matched to the flower bush my sister’s named for. I put one in my corner so I can see it when I miss her. It’s strange to feel homesick for a place I can’t actually live in.

Anne-Marie used me once as an excuse for an art project when she ran out of ideas, so my bed’s covered with the most tragically jumbled quiltish thing ever made. I like the lack of symmetry and the way one part drags lower than the others, like it’s melting toward the floor.

Tobin’s favorite snow globe sits on my side table. His mother had dozens of them, and this one, a desert beneath a night of falling stars, is the one he re-created for me in the Well. It was a magical idea—a place so full of light and heat that humans would be free of the Fade. Giving it to me couldn’t have been easy.

My secret is that Rue hangs on my wall. No one knows he’s what the cut-out image of the bird I tacked there means. The page came from Tobin’s paper stash—something called a word-of-the-day calendar—and apparently, June seventeenth was a day for ornithology. My space wouldn’t be complete without Rue.

This room is tiny, to hold so much.