Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Later, gator,” he said.

  “In an hour, sunflower,” I murmured.

  I could feel Chubs’s eyes on my back, but I didn’t turn around; I couldn’t, not without the fear that I’d be forever frozen in this exact spot, watching Liam waste away into nothing in front of me.

  I am here, I thought as I stepped out into the rain. He is here. We are all here.

  And we would be leaving together. Today.

  FIFTEEN

  THE BOY GUARDING THE DOOR into the warehouse couldn’t have been older than me, but he did stand a good deal taller and wider. A few months ago, that would have been a real obstacle.

  “Stay where you are,” he called out, watching me stalk toward him. “You’re not allowed inside no more, not until Knox says so.”

  They had given him a gun, but I could tell by his grip he either didn’t know how to use it or he didn’t want to. I reached out and brushed my fingers against his outstretched hand. I stopped the memories before they could bubble up; anger made my abilities sharper somehow, more efficient.

  “Sit down and stay down,” I snapped, and I shoved the door open.

  Our combat instructor had once told us that, when you were trying to settle a dispute without violence, the least “productive” emotion you could give in to was anger. No one can reason with another person so furious she can barely see straight. Well. I thought it was pretty productive to getting my way. I let the wind slam the door shut behind me.

  I stood in the dark, blinking to adjust my eyes to the light. I felt a movement at my side—a solid, thick shoulder appeared directly in front of me, blocking both my path and line of sight. I followed the line of green coat up to Brett’s grim face.

  “You can’t be here,” he whispered. I felt him try to press something into my hands and glanced down. He’d taken his hat off and stuffed it with tiny packages of saltine crackers. “Take this and go back before he sees—”

  I had just wrapped my fingers around his wrist when the eyes up on the platform finally picked me out of the shadowy crowd.

  “Well, well, well…” Knox called. “Look what the wind went and blew in.”

  I glanced around, surprised to find nearly twice as many kids scattered around the space as before. Most were up near the platform, seated on the ground in circles with bags of chips and cereal boxes out in front of them. They were dressed in shades of gray and white—hunters, back from their hunting? The boys and girls at the far end of the warehouse were stretched out on the cement, moving just enough for me to see that they were breathing. I didn’t see any food or fire near them.

  I forced a deep breath in, relaxing my face into a fake smile. I had to work this slower, get him to drop his guard so I could get closer. Every nerve in my body was screaming for me to move, run, grab him. My heart throbbed with the refrain: now, now, now. But there were too many bodies between us. Too many hands with guns.

  Knox leaned forward in his chair. “Something you wanna say?”

  I noticed Vida then, her shock of electric blue hair shining over his shoulder. She moved carefully, long limbs graceful as she swerved and slid through the bodies on the stage.

  The look on her face told me everything I needed to know. If Knox made the mistake of leaning back in his chair just then, she would have gladly found a way to break his neck.

  Okay? I mouthed to her. Vida nodded, her eyes flicking down to Knox, then back at me. I knew what she was telling me to do.

  Michael stood from where he’d been pawing at some poor shaking girl’s chest, and he blocked Vida from my sight again.

  “I was just wondering what it would take to convince you to let me go out on hunts,” I said. I slipped my frozen hands into the back pockets of my pants as I walked up to the stage. “To let me go out and get supplies for everyone?”

  Knox threw his head back and laughed. Several of the girls and younger boys sitting on the platform around his feet forced out breathy laughter of their own. My skin prickled; it sounded like a pack of dogs with sliced vocal cords was trying to bark.

  I felt a body move behind me, coming up at my back, but I didn’t turn to see who it was. These kids weren’t about to force me out through intimidation. Michael could hit me, Brett could haul me back outside by force, but what I could do to them went beyond the physical.

  “You?” Michael scoffed. “A Green?”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid I’ll prove there’s nothing special about you Blues after all. I’ve always heard you guys were all brawn, no brain.”

  Just like I thought—he definitely wasn’t used to being spoken to this way. The bully in him was fascinated and very, very angry all at once. Most likely because everyone around us looked like they were starting to wonder why I couldn’t go out and get them the supplies they obviously needed.

  Knox stood slowly, tapping the ash from his cigarette out on the ground.

  Come here, I thought. Come here and let me end this.

  The trickle began at the back of my mind, turning to a full-on roar. I could do this. One step closer, and I’d show him why they ranked my kind as Orange, and his only as Blue.

  I would tear him down.

  Knox’s hair slid forward, past his ears. When he pushed it back, I saw he had woven together bright pieces of paper into rings around each finger. They almost looked like… They almost looked like the project a bored kid would make with a candy wrapper. I didn’t know what the hell they were or why he was wearing them, but it gave me an idea.

  “How about a trade?” I asked. “No work, no food, right? You let me join one of those hunting teams so I can eat, and I provide enough food to feed everyone for the winter.”

  Knox scoffed, rolling his eyes.

  “I’m not lying,” I said. “You saw what we had in our packs. That’s just what we could fit in our bags. We had to leave tons of it behind.”

  Vida’s full, petal-pink lips parted, a silent question dripping from them.

  Of course I was lying. She knew that. Come on, I thought. He’d have to accept. I could feel the mood of the kids around us shifting in eagerness. They watched me with a new light in their eyes.

  “There was canned food, walls of it—and gallons of clean water. Toilet paper, even,” I added, because, let’s face it, there are some things you want but don’t necessarily need. “Clothes, blankets, you name it. You could stock this place nicely.”

  By the time I finished speaking, it was so silent I could hear the plink, plink, plink of water dripping from a nearby leak in the roof.

  “Oh, yeah? And where is this wonderland? Half past nowhere, straight on into your imagination?” Knox was pacing across the stage again, still blocked by the kids sitting at the edge of it. If he didn’t bite soon, I was going to have to jump up there myself.

  “Why would I tell you?” I asked. “When you won’t give me what I want?”

  That was how relationships worked these days. No one did anything for each other unless it benefitted them in some way. Knox had clearly seen enough of the world we lived in to have figured this out, too.

  But he didn’t like it.

  Come on, I thought, fuming. Come on!

  With one jump, he was off the platform and I was shoved back by an invisible set of hands onto the cement. My teeth clacked against each other, and I just missed losing the tip of my tongue between them. Michael’s laughter boomed around me, like it was echoing off the timid, silent figures circling us.

  “You think I need to trade you something?” Knox spat. “You think I don’t have other ways of making you and your friends talk?”

  My hands pressed flat against the ground, wrists throbbing from the impact. This kid had more pride than greed—something I hadn’t expected. He didn’t even see that more food and supplies at his disposal meant more power for him. All he saw was a little girl who claimed to know better than him, who was giving him a solution to a problem he had created and stirring up unwanted questions in t
he kids around him. Even if the kids didn’t believe me, they wanted to.

  “Sure you do,” came Vida’s voice. “But are you willing to risk waiting when the National Guard is going to be back to clear the joint out?”

  She had made herself comfortable in Knox’s seat, to the visible horror of every kid nearby.

  Michael whirled back around, fury rising from his shoulders like steam. “Knox! You gonna take that from her?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re scared of a few little soldiers,” Vida continued, inspecting her broken fingernails. “Is that why you keep trying to prove her wrong? Because you’re scared of what’ll happen if she’s right?”

  “C’mon,” came Brett’s voice somewhere near my right. “You have to admit it sounds too good to be true. We’ve been up and down the river a million times looking for food and never found so much as an empty bag of chips.”

  “So you’d blow an opportunity like this?” I asked. “After you already saw the proof?”

  For his rough exterior, Brett was surprisingly reasonable when it came to hashing things out. “I could go with her—make sure she’s not trying to pull a fast one. I’d be happy to take another trip back with a team and get the supplies—”

  “Oh, you could?” Michael snarled. “You’d be happy to? Whose team are you talking about—mine? You think I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, dickhead? That I haven’t been watching your weak-ass attempts to steal my game—?”

  Knox held up a hand, stopping them before they could start circling each other like starving feral cats. “The answer is no. Not now, not ever.”

  “I should have known,” I said, pushing myself onto my feet. “You left those kids out in the freezing cold to die. Why would you ever care enough to give everyone here the food and supplies they need?”

  You can push someone’s button over and over again to get what you want, but there comes a point when your finger slips and you finally hit the wrong one.

  “Michael,” Knox murmured, suddenly very quiet. Vida had worked enough of a spell over the room that it took calling his name twice to get him to snap out of it. “Take these two…pearls of girls outside.”

  “Knox,” Brett began. “What about the supplies…?”

  Knox’s fist flew out fast, clipping the other boy under the chin. “Take them outside. If they’re so damn eager to be hunters, then they can prove it at initiation tonight, like everyone else had to.”

  Vida pushed herself up off the chair and dropped onto the floor next to Knox. Whether he meant to or not, his eyes flicked down over her face and body, over every exposed inch of rich, dark skin. “If you get through it, you’re on. But if I see your faces one more time before I send someone to get you, I will burn them off myself.”

  “Shake on it,” I demanded, fighting to keep the smirk off my face.

  I stuck out my hand, my head trilling with anticipation of how it would feel, of what, exactly, I would do to bring him as low as he had brought everyone around him.

  Knox came toward me, his face steeled, jaw clenched. He raised a hand toward mine, and just when his fingers came into reach, he shifted to grab the ends of my loose braid. It came down to him being just a second faster than my instincts. He pressed the burning red end of his cigarette into my palm, snuffing it out against my skin before shoving me away.

  The pain was raw and blinding; I didn’t cry, didn’t so much as give him a gasp. But I knew, from the moment he glanced back over his shoulder at me with that smirk, I hadn’t gotten my hooks into him, either.

  They brought us around to the other side of the warehouse, out of sight from the tents and door, to a caged-in area where dead power generators and AC units were locked up.

  Vida took one look at our future habitat and began to kick and snarl, struggling against the two guys holding her. With one ear-splitting shriek from her, they lifted Vida into the air and tossed her in. I was in such a state of blind pain, all it took was a nudge from the guy holding my arm for me to walk into the chain-link cage.

  I waited until they had secured the locks and were making their way back to the building before dropping to my knees. I pressed my blistered palm into a puddle of freezing slush, swallowing back the whimper. The burn had sliced through every other thought in my head.

  Next to me, Vida pushed herself up, dragging her legs over so she could lean against the fence. She took a deep breath in, closing her eyes.

  “Let me guess,” she said after she had steadied herself. “You found Prince Charming in the White Tent?”

  “Him and about twenty others,” I said, hating the way my voice shook. My entire hand felt like it was on fire. I tried shaking it out, but the burn felt like it was tearing its way down through each layer of skin.

  “Show me,” Vida said. When I didn’t flip my palm up, she did it for me. I was surprised to feel her vibrating with her own kind of rage.

  “Damn. I’ll kill him.”

  She carefully placed my hand palm down in the slush again.

  “I blew it,” I said. “I was right there. He was right there. I should have just…used my other hand or…”

  “Bitch, please,” she said. “If you had been able to recover fast enough to do something, then you really wouldn’t be human.”

  “As opposed to what?”

  She shrugged. “A mannequin? An unfeeling, heartless bitch who feeds on others’ misery and is physically incapable of crying, unless it’s tears of blood?”

  I flexed my good hand in my lap. “Is that my rep at HQ?”

  “They call you Medusa,” Vida said. “One wrong look and your brain turns to stone.”

  Creative. Also, fitting.

  “Where are the others?” she asked.

  “In the White Tent outside,” I said. I sat back against the steel AC unit so I could look at Vida. “They’re all really, really sick. Half of them look like they’re already dead.”

  “They’re that bad?” she asked. “Stewart, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Damn,” she muttered. “That explains why you looked so pissed.”

  “Yeah,” I said, feeling my anger start to prickle again. I’d had him—he was right there, and I had been too stupid and too slow to end it. “It does.”

  “Hey, boo,” she said. “I’m in this now, too, and I got a lot of experience playing assholes like they’re fucking harps. You need backup, I got you. Stop trying to convince yourself that you’re in this alone.”

  I looked up, surprised.

  “But just so you know,” she said, sounding like herself again, “if it turns out that we have to fight each other for this initiation shit, I’m still going to kick your ass.”

  SIXTEEN

  WE WERE LOCKED UP LONG ENOUGH that what little sunlight there was seeped into winter’s early night. Long enough that hunger started to set in, for a fine mist of rain to turn to flurries of snow, and a worried Jude to leave the shelter of the White Tent and come looking for us.

  Without any kind of electricity to pump through the light poles in the parking lot, it was damn near impossible to make out anything other than someone’s or something’s general shape. I gave up looking for a friendly face and turned my full attention back to the kids standing at the corner of the warehouse, about a hundred yards from where we were locked up. I was so absorbed in the horrifying conversation they were having about Knox putting down a wild dog, I didn’t see Jude until he popped up at the other end of the cage.

  “Roo!” he whispered. “Roo!”

  Vida whirled around, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. “How did you…?”

  “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. I had to go the whole way around the building to get by without them seeing me.”

  I cast one last look over my shoulder at our “guards,” and then moved toward his glowing face. To his credit, he knew to duck down so Vida and I could block him from the other kids’ sight.

  “What happened?” The chain-link fence rattled as he pressed himsel
f up against it. “I thought you were just going to chat with him, but you were gone so long, oh my God, why are you in there, what did you do? Chubs was—”

  “Jude,” I tried to interrupt, “Jude—”

  “—and then I was all, ‘no way; Roo wouldn’t let anything bad happen,’ but Olivia started saying all of these terrible things that Knox has done, and we couldn’t find the flash drive on him, which means it still must be in that jacket—”

  “Jude!”

  He stopped mid-ramble. “What?”

  “…I need you to go ask Olivia where they store the jackets and stuff they swipe from the kids they recruit,” I said.

  “Why?” Jude asked. “To try to find Liam’s?”

  Vida snapped her fingers, cutting him off. I shot her a grateful look.

  “No—no, we don’t have time to look through them all, and another kid might have grabbed it. We need Liam to be able to tell us what happened to it. What I want you to do is find the jacket I was wearing—the leather one, remember? The Chatter is in the inside left pocket. That’s all I need you to get.”

  He stared at me, clearly not comprehending this.

  “The Chatter,” I repeated. Vida, oh so helpfully, poked him through the fence, directly between his unblinking eyes. “In the inside left pocket. Can you get it for me?”

  “You… You want me…”

  “Yes!” Vida and I both hissed.

  He hesitated for a split second, then broke out into the biggest, goofiest grin I had seen in a long time.

  “All right, cool!” he said. “Of course I can do that! Do you think I’m going to have to pick a lock, though? Because I never got that one door open at HQ when Instructor Biglow tried to teach me—Wait.” Jude looked from Vida’s face to mine, the bright eagerness in his eyes fading quickly with his smile. “Why are you guys in a cage?”

  Very quickly, with as few interruptions from Jude as we could manage, I told him what happened.

  “Which means you can’t go right now, okay?” I said. “You have to wait until tonight, when we’re doing the initiation.”