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.
MARINA
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.
“Mom!” Anne-Marie’s still shouting, even though her mother’s in sight. “Marina’s here.”
“Hi, Marina,” her mother says.
“Hello, Ms. Johnston.”
“None of that, now. My name’s Dominique. You two go sit down. We’ll eat in a few minutes.” Anne-Marie’s mother smiles at me before turning her head away with a scowl. “Trey! I want you out of that room in five minutes!”
She swirls past us with bowls in each hand, only stopping long enough to deposit them on a clear glass table.
“She’s, er . . . different.”
“She’s got help in the kitchen,” Anne-Marie says, tugging me over for a look.
Mr. Pace is here, but I’m not sure I’d call what he’s doing “help.” He’s picking at the food from a large bowl on the counter. When Anne-Marie’s mother warns him off, he flicks part of what he’s eating at her. She stomps across the room to take the bowl, but he hides it behind his back until she makes a grab for it, and then he pins her into a hug that quickly turns into a kiss.
Dante and Silver are bad enough, but parents? Ew .
“He’s over a lot more since the lights went down. Mom’s been floating.”
Arc Fall seems an odd reason to visit family, but what do I know?
“Trey, five minutes! I’m serious!” Anne-Marie’s mother pokes her head out the door of the kitchen, not smiling for the moment it takes to yell her son’s name down the hall.
“That’s his fourth five-minute call,” Anne-Marie says, rolling her eyes.
“Is he in trouble?”
“Nah. Just Trey back to his normal, antisocial self. The record’s six days, but he was sneaking out during the day to snag food, so it doesn’t really count.”
It seems like siblings should be alike, but Anne-Marie and her brother don’t even look all that similar. They’re both tall, and both dark, but while Trey turns more into a Mr. Pace clone by the day, Anne-Marie looks like her mom.
Connections are so confusing.
Not at home, Cherish offers. I have to bite down on the response I want to give.
Thankfully, a knock on the door interrupts her at the same time loud laughter comes from the kitchen.
“Get that, will you?” Anne-Marie asks. “If I don’t set the table, those two will forget we need plates. Honestly, you’d think they were the teenagers.”
She heads for the kitchen with a hand over her eyes, declaring, “I’m coming in! Act parental!” while I go back to the door. So this is what it’s like to have a home that people want to visit.
We can return to home, Cherish says. Remaining is selfish . Stupid. Inferior .
She doesn’t usually go for insults.
“Hey,” Tobin says when I open the door. His eyes are brown—I check. Col. Lutrell’s are still silver.
“Hey.”
I want to say more, but I can’t decide what should come next. Maybe it’s Cherish sabotaging things from the inside, but every time I see Tobin now, it’s like a wall goes up between us. I swear sometimes he actually looks blurry, and when I try to talk to him, like I did in the Well, I can barely string a sentence together. I want to hold his hand, but mine won’t move.
He doesn’t move, either, so maybe he doesn’t want me to.
“Are we late?” Col. Lutrell asks.
“Not really. Anne-Marie’s mother’s sort of caught up in something.”
There’s another snort of laughter from the kitchen, followed by Anne-Marie’s frustrated groan.
“Daughter still in the room!” she shouts.
“I can imagine.” Col. Lutrell grins, winking at us as he excuses himself to go back her up. I wonder if he can tell something might be wrong with Tobin. Could he have seen Tobin’s eyes? Can sense my suspicions the way I sense emotion? I know his hearing’s sharp, but I don’t know what other Fade traits remain with those exposed yet not included in the hive.
Maybe that’s why he led the not-rescue mission when I was taken. If he’s the colonel from Honoria’s book, it would have been safer for him to risk the Fade. He’d already lived through contact.
“I thought I’d slept through dinner,” Tobin says, but he doesn’t look like he got much rest. “Dad said I was screaming so loud, he thought I was in pain.”
“Nightmares?” I ask.
He nods, face paler than I’ve ever seen.
“What’d you tell him?”
“That I dreamed I got caught on the Arc when it was turned on, so I was burning up. I don’t know if he believed it or not.”
I wish I could get him to say more without telling him I had a nightmare