Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  My fists clenched at my sides. One of the loading docks of the warehouse was open and waiting. With a steadiness I didn’t expect, the raft floated the rest of the way to the curled silver door and the dark room inside.

  The loading platform was raised enough that the rafts were no longer necessary. I was lifted up by the waist and deposited into the arms of another kid waiting there. The girl who caught me was a skinny, pale thing, her green eyes jutting out of the blunt bones of her face. She let out a wet, rumbling cough that came up from deep within her chest, but she didn’t say anything as she took my arm and forced me inside.

  The walls and floors were cement, cracked and tagged within an inch of their lives with old, faded graffiti. The warehouse was roughly the size of a high school gymnasium, and it still held a few clues about its past life—signs marking where cables and wires could be left. The back wall, the one we were walking toward, had been painted a light robin’s-egg blue, and though someone had tried to cover them with a layer of white paint, I could still read the black letters spelling out JOHNSON ELECTRIC beneath it.

  Chubs fell in step beside me, nodding toward the brown line that ran along all of the walls, about halfway up toward the ceiling. So the water from the river had been that high?

  Every single step I took, every voice around us, every drip of water from the cracks in the vaulted ceilings seemed to echo. The sounds played off the bare walls and boarded-up windows around us. Despite the fact that we were out of the snow and wind, the building wasn’t insulated to keep out the persistent chill. Old metal trash cans had been repurposed to hold bonfires, but most of these were located toward the other end of the warehouse, not near the patches of kids scattered by the entrance we had come through.

  This…wasn’t anything like East River had been.

  And the teenage boy sitting on the raised platform in the back, disappearing in and out of a haze of cigarette and fire smoke, was not Clancy Gray.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  There had been a low murmur of interest as we were hauled in, but at my words, it dropped off to silence. My eyes had gone straight to the kid’s face, snapping over to it so quickly that I hadn’t even noticed the other teens around him until they stepped forward for a better look. There were girls shivering in T-shirts and shorts, leaning against the base of the stage or draped along the crates stacked behind him with only a few blankets between them. Clusters of boys stood around them laughing, some feeding the cloud of putrid gray smoke with their own cigarettes.

  This kid had to be closer to his twenties than the others. His face was fringed with the beginning of a reddish beard, which he was busy rubbing against the cheek of a girl with long, dirty blond hair perched on his lap. She was shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or cold. When she turned to look at me, I realized the bruise at the edge of her mouth extended all the way to her jaw.

  The kid’s blond hair was long but slicked back neatly behind his ears. His standard-issue combat boots and PSF’s black uniform jacket were spotted with mud but otherwise looked pristine—a little too pristine to have ever been in real use.

  “Excuse me?” A Southern accent.

  “Who,” I repeated, “the hell are you?”

  All of the teens who sat on his platform turned to look at him in perfect time with one another, but he was only staring at me. I felt the warm tug in my stomach again, and, despite Chubs’s attempt to grab me, my feet slid across the dusty floor toward him. I barely managed to catch myself before I crashed against the side of the platform. Old, stacked crates with water-warped plywood nailed over them—that was all that stage was. His chair was little more than a metal folding one with a fuzzy blanket draped over it, most likely for effect.

  The teen stood, throwing the girl off him. When she cried out in surprise, he thrust the bowl of whatever he had been eating toward her to shut her up. I fought the urge to search for Vida and Jude in the shadows crawling up around us.

  “Where did you find them?” He crouched down at the edge of the platform to peer at my face. His eyes were green, for the most part—a large blotch of brown covered the upper half of his right eye.

  “Up by the creek,” Michael answered.

  “You,” the leader said, turning to one of the girls on the stage, “give him that blanket before he freezes. This guy is a king tonight. Look at the haul he brought in.”

  The girl didn’t seem to understand why or how he could ask her to do something like that. She stared, dumb and mute at his back, until one of the boys grabbed a fistful of her short chestnut hair and shoved her forward to the edge of the raised platform. Underneath the warm brown wool sheet, she was wearing a stained yellow T-shirt and a pair of someone’s old boxers. No shoes, no socks.

  Michael ripped the blanket from her fingers, clucking his tongue at her resistance. One of the other kids, a small boy, gave him the water bottle he had been holding, watching with hooded eyes as the bigger kid polished off the rest of it before tossing the crushed bottle back to him. Then, he fell into place at the leader’s right. How it was even possible for someone to look so smug and proud cocooned in a blanket with dried blood all over his face was beyond me.

  The leader tossed his cigarette onto the ground at our feet, one end still glowing a pulsing red. I kept my eyes at the sliver of exposed skin above the collar of the PSF jacket.

  An unworn jacket. I had worked on enough of them in the Factory to recognize one at first glance. There were no patches, not even the standard American flag. Unless he had ripped all of the stitching out, which was unlikely given that the material wasn’t frayed, he had probably plucked the jacket out of a shipment, rather than off a soldier.

  He broke his gaze long enough to glance at Michael. A tight shark’s smile stretched across his lips.

  “He did that?” A nod toward Chubs.

  The other teen used his new blanket to wipe at the crusted blood covering his top lip. He opened his mouth, but then clearly thought better about admitting a girl half his size had given his face an adjustment.

  The first let out a low laugh as he turned back to me. “Elbow, fist, or foot?”

  “Elbow,” I said. “I’m happy to perform a demonstration on you if you need one.”

  The muttering was back, a few wolfish chuckles rising around me. I set my jaw to keep from saying something else equally stupid. Curb it, I told myself. Feel him out.

  “A fighter?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “What’s your color, baby?”

  I didn’t realize Chubs had moved at all until he was standing beside me. “She’s Green. I’m Blue. And you are?”

  “They call me Knox,” he said. “The name Slip Kid mean anything to you?”

  “If you’re the Slip Kid,” Chubs said, “I am the goddamn Easter Bunny. This is supposed to be East River?”

  Knox stood suddenly at that, his amused smile tightening into a much harsher one. “Not what you thought it’d be?”

  “We caught them the same place we grabbed the other two, just off the highway,” Michael supplied oh-so-helpfully. “That girl was a Blue, too. We could have an initiation tonight—”

  Knox silenced him with a look. Overhead, the snow had apparently warmed to rain. It slanted down over the metal roof, the only sound aside from the eager whisperings of the kids crowding in around us.

  “What do you know about East River?” he demanded.

  “Well, to begin with—” Chubs began, crossing his arms over his chest.

  “We heard it was in Virginia.” I cut him off. “We were heading that way when your friends picked us up.”

  Here was the thing—this smug kid, whoever he was, wherever he had come from, was clearly not the real Slip Kid. We knew that. Knox knew that. But if he knew that we knew, I didn’t doubt for a second that Knox would dispose of us before we could let everyone else in on the secret, too. The name was legendary; anyone who could gather this many kids, set up this kind of shop—why wouldn’t they believe he was the S
lip Kid?

  “This is some operation you have,” I continued, straining my neck to look behind me. No Jude. No Vida. But this was clearly the tribe of Blues Cate had tried to warn us about. “A nice little place. Is this everyone?”

  Knox snorted, motioning to one of the younger teens next to him. The boy, twelve or maybe thirteen, went fire-red at the attention. Knox muttered something in his ear and the boy nodded once, then took a running leap off the platform. The last I saw of him was the back of his navy jacket, stained with soot, disappearing out one of the side doors.

  “I’m Ruby,” I said, then thrust a thumb toward Chubs. “This is Charles. Like I said, we’re just making our way through, heading east.”

  Knox returned to his seat and, without any sort of prompt, the same girl as before scurried back to him, handing him the bowl of food. Soup, judging by the splatters that hit his jacket. I didn’t miss the way the teens around him seemed to lean in, watching as the broth vanished spoonful by spoonful.

  Do not look at Chubs, I ordered myself. I wouldn’t have been able to hold back. The girl, in her threadbare outfit, was skin hanging off birdlike bones.

  Knox waved Michael forward, and he and another teen dumped our backpacks on the platform. Two other girls, younger than the first, sprang to action. Piece by piece, they disassembled the packs of supplies we had so carefully stowed. Good-bye, food bars; good-bye, first-aid kits; good-bye, water bottles and blankets and matches…

  Each item they took out was enough to break the thin control I had on my anger. I shifted my eyes up toward where Knox was watching this process, wondering how good it would feel to take his mind apart in the same way. It would be easy, if I could just get close to him.

  When Knox glanced up at us, it was with a completely new expression on his face. One that was…hungry. Excited. “Where did you get this stuff?”

  “We picked over an old gas station,” I said, taking a small step closer. “It’s ours. We found it.”

  “What’s yours is mine, baby,” he said. “Everyone here has to earn his or her things.”

  Chubs grumbled something under his breath.

  “Take this all to storage,” Knox told Michael. “Then you and your guys can eat. As much as you want.”

  Michael grinned, gathering the blanket more firmly around his coat. His team was jumping all over themselves with excitement, pushing past one another to go out the same side door the boy had earlier, except for one teen, the one who hung at the back of the pack. He was average height, wearing an army green coat that was a size too small and had to be worn open. His hair was as long and wild as the others in his group, but he kept his out of his face with a fleece hunter’s hat. Just before the door shut, something must have caught his eye, because he turned back, leaning up against the wall there.

  “Are you with the kids my guys picked up earlier?” Knox asked, drawing my attention back to him. A heavy gold chain slipped out from beneath his undershirt and jacket as he leaned forward. “The hot piece and the scarecrow?”

  Well…that was one way to describe them.

  “No,” I said. Another step closer. Another. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

  “Roo!”

  Every head in the warehouse swiveled toward that side door. A river of relief broke through me—Vida and Jude stood there, looking slightly worse for wear but whole. Both of them were without jackets. Jude had given up any sort of pretense of pretending he wasn’t freezing, but Vida’s jaw was clenched tight, her arms pressed hard against her sides. I saw something flicker in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. I wish the same could have been said for Jude.

  “See?” he was saying as he poked her arm. “I told you they’d come!”

  I sighed, turning back to Knox and the platform.

  “Want to try that answer again, sweetness?” he asked coldly.

  I shrugged and said nothing. Dammit.

  “So a Green, a Yellow, and two Blues walk into my woods.…” Knox began. He stood and hopped down over the edge of the platform. Vida and Jude were shoved toward us.

  He was pacing in front of us, to the amusement of the other kids. Just out of my reach. “Now, the two Blues—you’re mighty welcome here, but, of course, we’ll have to figure out which of you is actually strong enough to join the hunting parties in initiation.”

  Initiation?

  “I have to duke it out with him?” Vida asked petulantly. “I thought you said it was going to be a fight?”

  Knox laughed—and once Knox laughed, everyone was laughing, too.

  “Honestly,” Vida said, whipping her mass of blue hair back over her shoulder, “you might as well let him go. He’s totally worthless—I’ll have him laid out on the ground in three seconds. Just sayin’.”

  Jude wore his confusion plainly, not understanding that this was her warped way of trying to protect Chubs from a fight he’d never win. I was surprised she cared enough to try.

  “She’s not lying,” I said. “If you want the better fighter, it’s her, hands down. But he’s trained in first-aid. He’s patched me up more than once. Look.” I lifted my hair away from the scar on my forehead.

  Knox didn’t take the bait to examine it closer. He wove his fingers together and rested them on the back of his neck as he seemed to mull this over. “The question is more what we’re going to do with you and the Yellow.”

  I did not like the direction this conversation was heading. And neither did Jude. I felt him start to shake, just a little bit, and I closed one hand over his wrist.

  “We don’t take on weak ones,” Knox said. “This isn’t a pity parade or a homeless shelter. I’m not about to waste food on a Green or a Yellow. No one here can vouch for you, which means you’ll have to prove yourself in…other ways.”

  Chubs turned on him, his fists clenched at his sides, but another voice rose up before his had the chance to. It was small, more timid than I remembered, but I recognized it.

  “I can vouch for them.”

  At East River, Clancy had relied on two different kids to run security for the camp—Hayes, the ogre-sized brute who ran hits for supplies, and Olivia, who coordinated watch at the perimeters of the camp. To say I was relieved to see a head of long, honey-blond hair push its way through the crowd was an understatement, but her face—I recognized the pieces of her, but it was like they had been torn apart and reassembled with a careless hand. She limped, badly, as she moved closer to us.

  Yes. This was Olivia. But at the same time, it wasn’t.

  Her round cheeks, always flushed with the run she had taken or the orders she had barked out, had sunk in so deeply that it made her eyes look owlish. The golden tan that had kissed her skin was faded to dull ash—and as she turned to look at me, a bolt of horror raced from my heart to the pit of my stomach. Almost the entire right side of her face was puckered with pink scar tissue; it dragged down the corner of that eye, ran down her jawline. It looked as though she’d been mauled by a wild animal or slapped with a fistful of flames.

  “Olivia,” I gasped. “Oh my God!”

  How—No, I knew that she had escaped. Liam had told us as much. When the fires and PSFs came to East River, a few of the Watch kids had been lucky enough to get away in time, Olivia included. Liam was the only one who had come back to look for us.

  “Christ,” Chubs said, automatically taking a step toward her. “You—”

  “The four of them were with me when we escaped the PSF van that had rounded us up,” Olivia said, ignoring the hand Chubs raised in her direction. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the boy in the green coat push himself off the door and through the crowd, stopping near Knox’s side. “We got separated in the escape through the woods.”

  The Olivia I had known had been so full of fire, she could have brought the entire warehouse down to a pile of simpering ash. Now, she merely bobbed her head with a meekness that didn’t suit her at all. “Ruby is the one who planned the escape, sir.”

  “Oh yeah,”
said the boy in the green coat. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. “I thought they looked familiar. A couple kids gave us the slip that day.”

  Olivia’s gaze flickered toward his, her brows creased in what was either surprise or confusion. It certainly wasn’t gratitude on her face.

  “Really.” Knox’s voice was still flat, but I felt his eyes drift back over to me. “And you spent the last few months just wandering around my fine state?”

  “Laying low, gathering supplies, looking for Olivia,” I said quickly, risking a glance to the boy. What was he playing at?

  “Why didn’t you mention this to Michael, Brett?” Knox asked. “Or speak up before.”

  The boy—Brett—shrugged. “Didn’t make the connection till now, I guess. Her hair was shorter”—he nodded toward me—“and the other one was dressed different.”

  “They can help me,” Olivia continued, her eyes still on the ground. “At least until they prove themselves to you.”

  Knox blew out an exasperated sigh. He began to pace again, each step falling like thunder in the silence of the warehouse. There was almost a little skip to his step as he walked. “Fine,” he said, looking up. “Take the Yellow and Green. Charles, too.”

  And just like that, he was out of my reach. I was useless to get us out of there.

  “The hot piece will stay and keep us entertained,” Knox said, smoothing his hair behind his ears with a grin. He nodded to the boys at his left. “Strip their jackets, take anything valuable they might still have on them, and keep them outside—where the trash belongs.”

  FOURTEEN

  THE SIDE DOOR OF THE WAREHOUSE led into an extensive parking lot. The sea of black was broken up by a few sullen-looking tents, all near to collapsing under the pockets of water collecting on them. Wood pallets formed a kind of floating platform for each one and connected them in a crooked loop. I saw right away why they were needed—they lifted us those few precious inches out of the murky water that swamped the whole lot.