Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  With the size and shape of the door’s window, I couldn’t see much more than Alban’s dark face when it appeared there, flanked by a half dozen other men. His voice filtered in through a crackling intercom. “Are we ready to proceed?”

  Cate nodded, then stepped back, murmuring, “Just do as you’re asked, Ruby.”

  That’s all I’ve ever done.

  The door opened and three figures appeared. Two male agents, beyond fit in their green fatigues, and a small woman between them, who had to be dragged in and bound to the other chair with plastic ties. There was some kind of burlap hood over her head, and judging by the grunts and moans of protest, her mouth was gagged beneath it.

  A prick of dread started at the base of my neck and slowly zigzagged its way down my spine.

  “Hello, my dear.” Alban’s voice filtered through again. “I hope you’re well this evening.”

  John Alban had been an adviser in President Gray’s cabinet until his own child, Alyssa, had been killed by IAAN. The way Cate explained it to me was that the guilt of it became too much for him; when he tried to take the truth—not the glossy, sugarcoated version of the camps—to the major newspapers, no one had been willing to run the story. Not when President Gray had wrangled an iron-fisted control over them. That was the legacy of the DC bombings: good men gone unheard and bad men taking every advantage.

  His dark skin looked weathered by middle age, and the heavy bags beneath his wide eyes made his whole face sag. “It is a pleasure to have you here, of course. My advisers and I would very much like to see the extent of your abilities and how they might benefit our organization.”

  I nodded, my tongue fixed to the top of my mouth.

  “We believe this woman has been passing information to Gray’s men, sabotaging the operations we sent her out for his benefit. I would like you to explore her recent memories and tell me if this is true.”

  He thought it was that easy, did he? A peek inside, and there are the answers. I squared my shoulders and gazed at him through the glass. I wanted him to know that I knew—that I was well aware of the fact he was standing behind that door for protection not from this woman but from me.

  All I had to do was earn his trust, gain a tiny bit of freedom. And when the time was right, he’d regret ever giving me someone to practice my abilities on; he’d wake up one morning to find me gone, every trace of me erased from this hole in the ground. This was a waiting game for me. Once I confirmed the others were safe, I’d get myself out. Break the deal.

  “You’ll have to give me a specific operation to look for,” I said, wondering if he could even hear me. “Otherwise we might be here all night.”

  “I understand.” His voice crackled through. “It should go without saying that what you hear and see when you are on this hall is privileged information your peers will never have access to. Should we find that any of this intel is being shared, there will be…repercussions.”

  I nodded.

  “Excellent. This agent recently went to meet a contact to pick up a packet of information from him.”

  “Where?”

  “Outside of San Francisco. That is as precise as I’m able to get.”

  “Did the contact have a name?”

  There was a long pause. I didn’t need to look up from the woman’s hooded face to know the advisers were conferring with one another. Finally, his voice filtered back through. “Ambrose.”

  The two soldiers who brought the woman in retreated back outside. She heard the door lock, but it wasn’t until I reached across the way to touch her bound wrist that she tried to jerk away from me.

  “Ambrose,” I said. “San Francisco. Ambrose. San Francisco…” Those words, over and over again, as I sank into her mind. The pressure that had been steadily building from the moment I boarded the plane in Maryland released with a soft sigh. I felt myself lean closer to her, a rushing stream of thoughts filtering through her mind. They were blindingly bright—there was a painfully intense sheen to them, as if each memory had been dipped in pure sunlight.

  “Ambrose, San Francisco, the intel, Ambrose, San Francisco…”

  It was a trick Clancy had taught me—that mentioning a specific word or phrase or name to someone was often enough to draw it straight into that person’s forethoughts.

  The woman relaxed under my fingers. Mine.

  “Ambrose,” I repeated quietly.

  It was noon or near to; I was the agent and she was me, and we shot a quick glance up toward the sun directly above us. The scene shimmered as I ran through a deserted park, black tennis shoes gliding through the overgrown grass. There was a building up ahead—a public restroom.

  It didn’t surprise me, then, that a gun suddenly appeared in my right hand. The better I got at this, the more senses came to me with the images—a smell here, a sound there, a touch. I’d felt the cold metal tucked into the band of my running shorts from the moment I stepped into the memory.

  The man waiting at the back of the building didn’t even have time to turn before he was on the ground, a hole the size of a dollar coin in the back of his skull. I recoiled, dropping the woman’s wrist. The last sight I had before I cut the connection was a blue folder and its contents scattering in the wind, drifting down into a nearby pond.

  I opened my eyes, though the light from the hanging bulb made the throbbing behind my eyes that much worse. At least it wasn’t a migraine—the pain might have been lessening every time I did this, but the disorientation was still just as bad. It took me two seconds to remember where I was, and another two to find my voice.

  “She met a man in a park, behind the public restrooms. She shot him in the back of the head after approaching him from behind. The intel he carried was in a blue folder.”

  “Did you see what happened to it?” Alban’s tone was tinged with excitement.

  “It’s at the bottom of the pond,” I said. “Why did she shoot him? If he was her contact—”

  “Enough, Ruby,” Cate cut in. “Send them in, please.”

  The woman was limp, still half dazed with my influence over her. She didn’t fight them off as they snapped her restraints and picked her up out of the chair. But I thought—I thought I heard her crying.

  “What’s going to happen to her?” I pressed, turning back toward Cate.

  “Enough,” she said again. I flinched at her tone. “May we have your permission to be excused? Are you satisfied with her results?”

  This time Alban met us at the door, but he never crossed that last bit of space between us. Never even looked me once in the eye. “Oh yes,” he said softly. “We are more than satisfied. This is a special thing you can do, my dear, and you have no idea the difference you can make for us.”

  But I did.

  Liam hadn’t told me a great deal about his time with the League; it had been short, and brutal, and so damaging that he had taken his chance and escaped at the first opportunity that presented itself. But without either of us realizing it, he had prepared me for the new reality of my life. Warning me once, twice, three times that the League would control every move I made, that they would expect me to take someone else’s life, just because it suited their needs and was what they wanted. He had told me about his brother, Cole, and what he had become under the coaxing of the League’s guiding hands.

  Cole. I knew from League gossip that he was a hotshot—a deep-cover agent with terrifying efficiency. I knew from Liam that he thrived on the pulse of power that came from firing a gun.

  But what no one, not even Liam, had thought to mention was how very, very much alike they looked.

  THREE

  FOR WHATEVER REASON, Jude had nominated himself to serve as the team’s one-man welcoming committee. When I arrived back at HQ after my first Op with the League, it had been his lanky, pacing shape waiting for me at the end of the entry hall, torpedoing toward me, burying me under an avalanche of questions. Six months later, he was still the only one who waited there for us, rewarding our safe return with
a smile that split his face.

  I braced myself for impact as Vida tapped her ID against the door. Rob and the remaining members of the tact team had escorted Cole Stewart in a few minutes before, but I’d forced us to hang back, take our time going down the tunnel. It was important to make sure Rob got the full credit for this one, to let him roll around in the glory like a dog in the grass. We’d heard the cheers go up as they strolled through the entry, and watched them pump their fists as they strode into HQ, almost leaving Cole behind in his wheelchair.

  Now there was no one left in the long white entry hall. The agents left a trail of celebratory noise behind them. It shrank with every step they took, until the only thing I could hear was my own breathing, and the only thing I could see was the empty space at the end of the hallway where Jude should have been.

  “Oh, thank you, Jesus,” Vida said, stretching her arms over her head. “One day I won’t have to get my back realigned from his death grip. Adios, boo.”

  I think some people used the nickname “boo” as a term of endearment. Vida used it to make you feel like one of those little dogs that have brains the size of thumbs, and piddle all over themselves when they get too excited.

  I let her go without a word, heading left toward Cate and the other senior agent quarters to check in. Five minutes of fruitless knocking later, I ducked my head into the atrium to see if she was there. She’s probably with the others, I thought, scanning the near-empty space. And while I didn’t glimpse her white-blond hair at one of the tables, I did recognize the mop of reddish-brown curls parked in front of one of the TVs.

  I wasn’t lucky enough to pull off a clean getaway—those two seconds of staring had been enough for him to register my gaze. Jude glanced down at his old plastic wristwatch and then back up at me again in horror.

  “Roo!” he called, waving me over. “I’m so sorry! So sorry! I totally lost track of time. Did everything go okay? Did you just get back now? Where’s Vida? Is she—?”

  I wasn’t a good enough person to say that no part of me wanted to turn and run out before he could come up and loop my arm through his, dragging me across the room with him.

  It was only when I crossed the room that I noticed Nico was there, sitting at the opposite end of the table. One of the cement pillars had blocked the sight of him from the door, but it also didn’t help that the kid didn’t seem to be moving. At all. I followed his stony gaze down to the little device on the table. A Chatter.

  It was the size of a phone and could easily have doubled for one if you weren’t casting too careful of an eye on it. They’d salvaged an older generation of phones—the kind with an actual keypad, rather than a sleek touchscreen. The new shells they’d created for them were oval and thin enough to slide into a back pocket or up a sleeve during a lesson.

  A couple of the Greens had developed this little gem with the idea that agents could relay digital messages, photos, and short videos back home without needing to ditch burner phone after burner phone. The tech behind them was mostly a mystery to me, but I understood they communicated on some un-hackable network the Greens had developed. They could only be used to contact other Chatters on the network, and only then if you had the other Chatter’s secret PIN number. They were useless if you needed to send large images or video files longer than thirty seconds; Alban had rejected sending them out in the field for that reason, dismissing them as some bored kid’s project. As far as I knew, the Greens usually just used them now to chat with one another in HQ when they were in different training sessions or at night after lights out.

  “—really come back? Did you get to meet the agent? Was he as badass as everyone says? Can we—?”

  “What’s going on?” I asked, looking between Nico and the TV screen. They’d picked the one showing only local California weather and news.

  It was like I’d sucked the words straight out of him. Jude tensed in that wide-eyed way of his before flashing the kind of smile that was trying too hard.

  “What’s going on?” I repeated.

  Jude swallowed, glancing at Nico before leaning down to my ear. His eyes were scanning the atrium like they were looking for dark corners that didn’t exist.

  “They sent Blake Howard out on an Op,” he said. “We’re just…”

  “Blake Howard? The Green kid from Team One?” The one who looked like you could take him out with one well-aimed sneeze?

  Jude nodded, giving another nervous glance behind me. “I’m just…worried, you know? Nico is, too.”

  Shocker. Nico was never one to pass up a good conspiracy theory, especially when it came to the League. Every agent was a double agent. Alban was actually working with Gray to bring down the Federal Coalition. Someone was poisoning our water supply with lead. I don’t know where he got it from or if it was just the way his brain was processing all of the information he was absorbing and he didn’t know how to shut it off.

  “They must be trading him for something,” Nico said, gripping the Chatter. “For information? To get another agent back? That’s not so crazy, right? There are so many Greens here already. They hate having so many of us. They hate us.”

  I tried not to roll my eyes. “Did the Op involve tech?” I asked.

  “Well, yeah, but,” Jude said, “when have they ever sent out a Team One kid? They’re supposed to be for HQ use only.”

  He wasn’t wrong. Vida called them the Squeakers, and the name had stuck with everyone. All Greens with supercharged logic and reasoning skills that the League put to use in deciphering codes and building computer viruses, creating these insane devices. They all had the same stumbling walk; Nico too. A weird half step where they dragged their feet against the tile, causing their sneakers to make these little squeaking noises. I’m sure they had picked it up from one another subconsciously; they were always moving in sync, just like the parts of a working machine should.

  “He’s of age and he has the right skill set to help them,” I said. “I know for a fact the other Green teams are occupied this week. He might have been a last resort.”

  “No,” Jude said. “We think they picked him on purpose. They wanted him.”

  It was a while before Jude built up the nerve to look at me again. When he did, his expression was so obviously ashamed and terrified that I felt myself soften just enough to ask, “Is there something you’re not telling me? What am I missing here?”

  Jude twisted the stretched-out hem of his shirt into a knot. Nico only stared straight ahead, eyes unblinking as they fixed on the Chatter.

  “Me, Nico, and…Blake,” Jude began, “the three of us were messing around a few days ago down here. We’ve been trying to build one of those remote-control cars from leftover computer parts.”

  “Okay…”

  “Nico had to go up and talk to Cate, but me and Blake took the car on a test drive around this floor. It was around two in the afternoon, and no one was down here. So we thought it would be fine and that we wouldn’t bother anyone. But…you know those rooms that we use to store things for Ops? Like, the vests, extra ammo, that stuff?”

  I nodded.

  “We heard voices coming from one of them. I thought maybe the guys were just playing a card game or something—sometimes they do it down here so they can bad-mouth Alban or one of the advisers,” Jude said, visibly shaking now. “But when I heard them, what they were actually saying—they weren’t playing a game, Roo, they were talking about us. It was Rob, and Jarvin, and a couple of their friends. They kept saying things like Reducing the freak population and Getting Alban back on track and how they were going to prove what a waste of time and—and resources we were.”

  It was a chill that sank straight to the bone. I pulled out the nearest chair and dragged it closer to Nico. Jude did the same, his hands twisting around each other.

  “And they caught you listening?”

  “I know it’s stupid, but when I heard that, I freaked out—I didn’t mean to, but I dropped the car. We ran before the door opened, but I’
m positive they saw us. I heard Rob call my name.”

  “Then what?” I pressed. My mind was making connections now, dangerous ones.

  “Then Blake got assigned to that Op even though he’s on Team One. Jarvin said that they needed a Green to hack into the company’s server room, and he didn’t have a choice.”

  I leaned back slowly. Reduce the freak population. My ear, the one that had taken the brunt of the grenade’s blast, seemed to have a pulse of its own.

  That was an accident, I told myself. Rob was just being reckless. But the second lie sounded less convincing than the first. Reduce the freak population. How? By putting them in deadly situations on Ops that could be waved off as accidents? Rob had killed kids before—I only knew of those two I’d glimpsed in his memory, but what’s to say there weren’t more?

  Jesus. A blinding wave of nausea blasted up from my stomach. Did he kill them to keep the number of kids here down?

  No—no, I needed to stop. My thoughts were spiraling and getting out of hand. This was Nico and Jude—two boys with too much free time to sit around and trade nightmares. They were constantly poking at trouble, then acted all shocked when it turned around and bit them in their asses.

  “It’s just a coincidence,” I said. I had another point to make, I’m sure, but it unhooked from my chain of thoughts when I heard someone call my name from across the room. One of Alban’s advisers, good old Raccoon Face, stood in the atrium’s doorway.

  “He’d like to speak to you in his office an hour from now.”

  Then he turned on his heel and was gone, clearly angry he’d been tasked to play messenger.

  “What does he want?” Jude asked, visibly confused.

  You almost never saw the walking suits more than a few feet away from Alban; I wouldn’t have been surprised if they broke into his quarters every night and took turns whispering plans and sweet nothings in his ear while he slept.