much for neutrality.
Mr. Pace starts stacking Trey’s drawings into a pile, as though that’s the problem.
“Am I in trouble?” Trey tries asking Annie.
“Move!” Annie’s mom pushes her to her room and uses her override to lock the door.
“Let me out!” Annie screams from the other side. She’s beating on the door, but she won’t even make a dent. “Mom, please! Let me out! Mom!”
Nique won’t do it. She’d rather have Annie locked in and scared than free to roam and turning Fade like her brother.
“What are you doing?” Trey asks. “What’s wrong with Annie?”
“Nothing,” Mr. Pace says. He grabs Trey’s wrist when Trey tries to leave his room. “You stay here.”
“But what’d I do?”
“Go.” Dad shuffles me and Marina out the door when we don’t leave on our own. “Marina, you’re welcome to stay with Tobin, but I want you both out of here. And I’m checking the entry alert, Tobin. You have two minutes to get to the apartment and ping me, or I’m coming to find you.”
Marina doesn’t say a word, but I know what she’s thinking, and none of it’s good. When we get to my place, she keeps going. I’m not stupid—she’ll go to him to sort this out.
I go inside and then stop the door so it can’t close all the way. Once I’ve tripped the entry sensor, so Dad will get the ping to tell him I’m home, I head back out, allowing the door to close behind me. Hopefully, he’s too busy to notice my tracker heading toward the Arc.
If Trey turns, I’m next.
No, Annie’s next. She was exposed first.
What am I thinking? Everyone is next.
“How did you beat me out here?” Marina catches sight of me halfway across the quad and crosses the rest at a jog. “How’d you even know I’d be here?”
“Closest crossing point. I took a different route.”
She stops beside me, at the edge of the Arc. The lamps are conserving power right now. They give just enough light so people can see where they’re going and find their way back. No one’s panicking yet, but they will. Then the lights will go completely hot.
“Were you put back on duty because of Trey?” Marina asks. “Are they tightening security already?”
“They wouldn’t start with me, and they wouldn’t put me here.” Sykes would be patrolling the short side. Trainees get dumped in low-priority sections. “The lights would be brighter.”
We’ll be at Red-Wall as soon as our elders declare Trey a security breach.
“How long have we got?”
“As long as Dad and Trey’s parents can buy us.” So, not long.
It’ll only take minutes to get Trey to the hospital, so long as he doesn’t flip out and fight them. Mr. Pace and Nique can stall Dr. Wolff for an hour or two before he either alerts Honoria out of habit or she hears about Trey herself. If they’re lucky, no one will see Trey en route and they’ll be able to lock down the hospital without details circulating.
Crap . I’m starting to sound like Honoria. Worse, I’m starting to understand her.
The only choices are to hide what’s happened or to start a riot with full disclosure. They’ve got to get Trey contained.
And then they’ll come for us.
Marina knows that, too. It’s why she’s here.
“You’re going out there, aren’t you?” I ask.
“Like you’re not here for the same reason.”
I’m here because I don’t believe in coincidence. Trey’s bait. The shadow-hugger probably planned this. He left Marina a trail of Fade-crusted bread crumbs, and she’s going to follow it until she loses her way home.
“It’s too dangerous,” I say.
“If Rue or one of the others knows something, then—”
“Then what ?” I snap, harsher than I mean to. Louder, too.
She flinches back, and I tell myself to get a grip before I scare her and she goes looking for him to protect her from me. I’m too jumpy. The nightmares were bad enough, but seeing them on paper, like Trey pulled them out of my head, was too much.
Touching those things changes people, no matter what they say.
“What if they expected this to happen, Marina? What if Trey’s just the first?”
“I don’t believe that.”
Of course she doesn’t. All she can see is the tragic hero who risked his life to save his lost love. Rueful’s a fairy tale. How do I compete with that?
“We should wait and see what Doctor Wolff says,” I suggest.
“I don’t trust Doctor Wolff.”
Right.
“Then we wait here. Honoria’s brother might show. We can—”
“Take a look, Tobin. What do you see?” she says.
I turn back to the Grey, but there’s nothing there.
Nothing. No one, and no Fade. There hasn’t been a night without at least a handful of them hovering in the Grey until sunrise drives them back. Tonight, there’s only the fog, coming too close and making my skin crawl. I can almost hear the click-clack of tiny feet marching up my arm.
I reach down for a rock and throw it, but it drops out of the air on its own without hitting anything.
“Bolt’s not coming,” she says. “No one is.”
Our night started with an invisible Fade on the front line. Now they’re at full retreat, and Trey’s jacked into my nightmares. What’s next?
“I can stop you from going,” I tell Marina.
“You’re not going to hit me.”
“No, but I can hit my wristband and send us straight to Red-Wall.” She might hate me now, but she’ll thank me later. “For all we know, Trey had a bad reaction, like an allergy. If it was serious—”
“Your eyes were silver.”
Her answer’s ice water to my face, knocking the air out of me.
She’s lying. She has to be. Marina picked a sore spot because she knew it would get a reaction.
“You don’t have to make up—”
“Your eyes were silver in the Arbor, when you saw the blood on my hand. Look at my hands.”
She removes her gloves and holds her hands out, palms up. She turns them over to let me see both sides, and the perfect, unscarred skin that’s replaced the cut I cleaned and the one from the broken bottle.
“What happened?”
“I fell asleep after Honoria’s presentation, and had a nightmare—your nightmare. The cuts were gone when I woke up. Your eyes were silver, and I’m healing like someone’s reknitting my skin from the inside out. We shared a dream, Tobin. Whatever’s happening to Trey, he’s not the only one. I’m not waiting. I’m going to find Rue. I’m not giving him a choice but to help—the end.”
“Wait.” I grab her by the shoulder as she steps forward. “What if it’s not a dream? What if it’s a premonition?” My voice sounds strange.
“It’s not.”
“What if the Fade are spreading again and we caused it by bringing down the