Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  “It’s okay,” I told him, though it was so far from the truth, I would have laughed if I wasn’t already crying. It was amazing—I had no idea you could keep sinking, even after you’d hit the dark bottom of your life. But letting him get that close, letting him comfort me after everything I had done, was a bruising low.

  Before I could finish, Liam was talking again, and that strange tone was back in his voice. Even as he spoke, he was shaking his head. “Ruby—you’re Ruby. Chubs said that you and Vida and Little Buddy there were helping him look for me. He said that you and me, we never met before, but we had to have, we had to, because I know your face. I know your voice. How does that work?”

  “I talked to you while you were sick,” I said, feeling panic grip at my stomach. “In the warehouse in Nashville.”

  “No—no—I mean, yeah, I know you did.” Liam was rambling in a way that was almost agitated. Pacing, too, the small width of the wooden deck. “That’s not it; I know it’s not.”

  End this now. Don’t twist it any further. A clean cut and you can go and finish this.

  “I’m League,” I blurted out, because it was the one thing I knew would stop him from coming closer—the one thing that would change his look of compassion to one of total and complete contempt.

  “You—” he began. “What? That’s not…that’s not possible.”

  The camps. I needed to think about the camps we’d free as soon as I brought the intel back to Cole and Cate. The good work that would come from this, rising up above the blood pooling under my feet and the trail of smoke and fire my footsteps left behind. That was my future now. That was the only thing there was for me.

  “You’re right, though. We did meet before,” I said. “At a safe house in Maryland. I handed you the money from your brother, remember?”

  He did now. I could see it in his face, the way he squared his shoulders. I kept my eyes on the trees behind his head, my arms wrapped tight around my center to try to trap in that last bit of warmth. He looked like he was about to be sick.

  “But you got out, right?” Liam said. “Because Chubs would have told me. He wouldn’t have kept that from me. You were League, but now you’re—”

  “I’m League, and so are Vida and Jude.” I knew Chubs well enough to know exactly why he hadn’t let that piece of information slip. “He didn’t tell you because he knew that you’d want to split. But he and I have a deal.”

  “I—I don’t get it,” Liam managed to squeeze out. He was backing away again, running a hand over his face. “A deal?”

  I’d already driven the knife into his chest. Twisting it now would finish things forever.

  Don’t, a small voice whispered. Not again.

  He stared at me, waiting, shaking from the cold or anger, I couldn’t tell. I came toward him, and he let me. Liam was breathing harder now, a wheezing, wet whistle, as I reached for the bottom hem of his brother’s jacket and ripped the stitches Cole had hastily sewn in place.

  The flash drive was a simple black rectangle, stamped with Leda Corp’s golden swan. It was warm from having lived so close to his body for the past few hours—days, maybe.

  Liam stumbled back, his every thought crashing over his face. “What the hell is that?”

  “Your brother,” I said. “He sent us to find you. You took his jacket instead of yours when you ran in Philly. And you took this with you.”

  “What is that?” he repeated, trying to reach for it. I closed my fist and shoved the damn thing in my pocket before I was tempted to do something stupid. All of this for a tiny piece of cheap plastic.

  “It’s classified intel,” I told him, forcing my feet forward, up the path. “From the Op your brother was running.”

  I half hoped he wouldn’t come after me. That he’d stay down there, and I could go back and walk through the camp, through whatever woods we were in, and just disappear. But nothing in my life was ever going to be that easy. Instead, he pushed past me on the trail, taking those first few steps like he was staggering out of knee-deep water, unsteady and coughing up the fluid trapped in his lungs. Instinctively, I put a hand out to steady him, but he ripped his arm away and kept pressing forward, calling Chubs’s name.

  He must have already been out looking for us. We met him on the path, just as it curved into the campsite. The kid was a mess of sleepy eyes and rumpled clothes; his brain must not have fully warmed up yet, because he hadn’t thought to put on a coat or shoes despite the frigid temperature.

  “What?” he cried, looking between us. “What’s going on?”

  “I can’t even believe you,” Liam rasped. “What the hell kind of game are you playing here?”

  Chubs blinked. “What are you…?”

  “I know everything!” Liam stalked over to him, still breathing hard from the climb back up the trail. “How long were you planning on keeping this from me? The League. Really? Jesus—you’re supposed to be the smart one! You made a deal with them?”

  “Oh.” Chubs rubbed a hand over the tufts of his dark hair and blew out a long, exasperated sigh. I had about three seconds to deflect Liam’s anger back on me before Chubs said something he’d really regret.

  “Yes, that!” Liam charged up into the campsite, stalking over to the smothered fire. He wouldn’t let me get close enough to so much as share his breathing space.

  “Will you please listen to me?” I asked. “It was all my idea—all of it. Your brother sent us to find the flash drive, and in the process we found your friend. We agreed that if we helped him find you, we wouldn’t turn any information about you over to the League. And we’d help you get to California to find Zu.”

  At first I assumed the wide-eyed look Chubs flashed my way was because he’d been shocked at my ability to turn out one lie after another. But some part of me must have known, even as I said it, that I’d picked the wrong nail to hammer home.

  “And you know that how?” Liam demanded. “And you know her how, exactly?”

  I swallowed, wrapping my arms around my center, my mind spinning through excuses, each one worse than the next.

  “Answer me!”

  I flinched. “I just…have heard stories—from Chubs, I mean.”

  Liam spun toward Chubs, his face burning with anger and disbelief. “What else did you tell her?”

  “Nothing! Lee, you have to calm down—please, sit down. Listen.”

  “I can’t believe you! Don’t you realize they have ways of tracking her down? Do you want them to take her in? Zu—we promised that we’d—I thought—”

  “He didn’t tell me anything about her, other than you were traveling together for a while,” I said calmly. Liam had been protective of all of us in different ways, but Zu had been a special case.

  “Stay out of this, Green!” He was still wholly focused on Chubs. “What else did you tell her? What else did she get out of you?”

  I jerked back, one single word throwing me off balance.

  “What did you just call her?” Chubs interrupted. Of course he had caught it, too.

  “What? I’m not allowed to use her name now?” he demanded. The look on his face was ripe with derision. “What do you want me to call you? What clever codename did the League think up for you? Pumpkin? Tiger? Tangerine?”

  “You called me Green,” I said.

  “No I didn’t,” he said. “Why the hell would I call you that? I know what you are.”

  “You did,” Chubs insisted. “You called her Green. You really don’t remember?”

  My heart shattered the ice around it, slamming against my rib cage, beating harder with every minute of silence that followed. The anger had left him quickly, replaced by confusion that bloomed into an open, barefaced fear as he looked between us.

  “It’s okay,” I said, holding up my hands in a weak attempt to placate him, “it’s fine. You can call me whatever you want; it really doesn’t matter.…”

  “Are you messing with him? Are you forcing him to play nice with you?” Liam asked. His fac
e was flushed, and it almost seemed like his anger was edging into anxiety. He was looking at his friend and seeing a stranger.

  I couldn’t keep up with his flip-flopping moods, and I suddenly wondered if it was even worth the energy to try. The memory of what had happened when he’d found me down by the falls evaporated like mist in the sunlight. Maybe I had imagined it altogether.

  “Are you freaking kidding me?” Chubs said. “After what happened at East River? Do I need to remind you that while Clancy Gray turned you into his little poodle, he couldn’t even touch me?”

  “I don’t… What?” Liam’s breath exploded out of him. “What are you talking about?”

  Oh, I thought, damn.

  When I had gone in and pulled myself out of Liam’s memories, I’d had to…tweak a few of them, otherwise they wouldn’t have made sense. The night we tried leaving East River had been one of them, because the whole terrifying episode had been sparked by my letting my guard down and trusting Clancy when I shouldn’t have. I was a crucial part of that story.

  But now—what had I slipped into its place? Had I just erased that night completely? My mind was spinning, trying to dig up what images I had pushed into that vacant space, but everything was black, and black, and black.

  Chubs turned to look at me with a glare that could have incinerated a mountain.

  “What are you looking at her for?” Liam exploded. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here, and with them!”

  “We were trying to find you!” Chubs said. “All of us just wanted to help you!”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” came Vida’s shrill voice from inside the tent. “Can you two shut the hell up and just go back to spooning? We don’t need to hear this same shitty argument for the tenth fucking time before five A.M.!”

  Jude made a very valiant effort to shush her, but the damage was done.

  “You—you—I can’t—” Chubs sputtered, too furious to form an actual sentence. “Come out here. Right now!”

  “Come and get me, big boy,” she sang back. “I know I don’t have the parts you like, but we can always make it work.”

  “Oh, like a functioning brain?” he shouted.

  “Chubs!” I snapped. He knew what she was like—he was only playing into her hands. “Vida, please come out. You too, Jude.”

  She exited the tent with a blanket wrapped around her like a queen’s flowing robe. The effect was soured by the fact her fading blue hair was sticking straight up on either side of her head like horns. Jude didn’t look much better—I don’t know that I had ever seen such dark rings under his eyes. He slouched out after her in his EMT jacket, taking a seat on the opposite side of the fire pit.

  “I’m not gonna change my mind, so don’t even start spinning your little yarn about how great the League is, how wonderful the agents are,” Liam said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell Cole to go screw himself. I don’t need him—or you—to take care of me!”

  “Says the kid who was two steps away from death’s grasping fingers when we found him,” Vida said, rolling her eyes. “You’re fucking welcome, by the way.”

  “I promise that we don’t have any other motivation beside getting the flash drive and seeing our end of the deal through,” I told him, watching his chest heave with the effort to get enough air in. It was easier to talk to him like he was a stranger. And as pale, as thin, as unshaven and dirty as he was, it wasn’t hard to imagine him as one.

  This is not Liam, I thought. Something’s wrong.

  “Is that a fact?” Liam said coldly. “I didn’t ask for any of this, and the last thing I’d ever want is to be babysat by someone like you.”

  It took me a second longer than the others to realize that last zinger was for me.

  “Hey!” Jude cut in. “We’re just trying to help. You don’t have to be mean about it.”

  “Lee, you’re being dramatic,” Chubs began.

  “And you—God, it’s like you get a new pair of glasses, a car, and some tech and you think you’re Rambo in the jungle. I never thought you would play along with this.”

  “If he trusts us,” Jude tried again, “why can’t you?”

  “The League?” Liam let out a single bark of laughter. “Are you all really that stupid?”

  He held up a hand to silence whatever Vida was about to say. “They talk about rehabilitation and do nothing but hold kids hostage. They talk about training kids to defend themselves, and then turn around and send them off to be killed. Either we’re in camps, or we’re with the League, or we’re on the run, and it’s not even a choice. You wanna know what I want? A choice. Just one. And this is me making it. You might be okay heading back into the arms of those murderers, but I’m staying the hell away from them. From you.”

  With that, he shouldered past Chubs and me and started heading back down the same path to the falls. Chubs glanced sideways at me, but I kept my eyes on Liam as I lowered myself down onto the stump, rubbing absently at the row of stitches on my lower back.

  “You really think he wants me going after him this time?” I asked.

  Chubs sighed, rubbing his hands briskly over his arms, and followed his friend down the trail. Neither of them got far; if I stood on my toes, I could see where Liam stood, leaning heavily against a tree. At first, it looked like Chubs was keeping a careful distance, not wanting to provoke Liam’s temper again. But he must have said something, apologized, because in the next moment, Chubs was standing close to him, one hand on Liam’s back, the other pointing back in our direction.

  “I can’t believe he said all that bullshit,” Vida groused. “This kid has more mood swings than a toddler’s birthday party.”

  “I didn’t realize he hated us that much.…” Jude said.

  “He doesn’t hate you,” I promised, still watching the boys. “He hates the League. He thinks we’re better off without them—that we don’t need them.”

  “Well, he needed us,” Vida said, “right around the time when he was drowning in his own mucus.”

  Jude was quiet, even as he watched me watch the others. When I glanced back to ask him what was wrong, he only looked away and busied himself with digging Chubs’s coat out of the tent. I forced myself to sit on one of the tree stumps around the fire pit, my entire brain throbbing in time with my pulse.

  It was ten more minutes before Chubs and Liam made their way back over to us. Chubs was still shaking his head, clearly frustrated. Liam kept his own face down, avoiding all of us. The biting wind or embarrassment had turned the tips of his ears red. He kept his hands shoved in his pockets as he shuffled forward, past us, toward the tent.

  “He agreed to stay for now,” Chubs said. “He does want to go to California to find Zu, but he doesn’t want any of you to be able to tail us—we’ll probably have to split up before we hit state lines.”

  “That kid’s a few colors short of a rainbow, isn’t he?” Vida said, rolling her eyes. Jude huddled in close to the two of them, passing the coat over to a grateful, shivering Chubs. “Be sure to send us a postcard when you get your asses caught and hauled back into a camp.”

  “I’ll keep working on him,” Chubs promised. “He just needs to cool down.”

  “I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

  But I knew it wasn’t going to be enough.

  TWENTY-THREE

  NATURAL FALLS STATE PARK was located in Oklahoma, in what most considered the highlands of the Ozarks—right up in the northeast corner of the state, where it was really freaking cold in December. Chubs gave me a brief tour of the campsite as we made our way back to the others. A few picnic tables here and there, RV parking, a number of hiking trails that looped around one another. The only thing that really mattered was that the campsite was deserted.

  “Are you in any pain?” he asked, tossing another branch on the growing fire.

  “I’m fine. I just want to know what happened.”

  I scooted, giving him half of the stump so he wouldn’t have to sit in the snow, and t
hrew one end of the blanket over his shoulder, drawing him in close. He still smelled faintly of laundry detergent and hand sanitizer, only now I could pick up earthy scents, too—the kind that gave away just how many nights he’d slept on the ground without a shower in between. The poor kid probably felt like he was dying.

  “Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath.

  They knew, right away, that something was wrong when Olivia’s half of the team came back alone. She and her group of ten had made it back mostly unscathed, with as many supplies as they could carry over the water. Brett didn’t appear for another two hours, struggling through the soaking parking lot with Jude still draped over his shoulder. His team hadn’t fared so well—only five of them had made it back, and I wasn’t included in that total.

  “I showed Olivia how to give the kids the medicine the right way, dosed Lee, and then we carried him out to the car. We spent most of the night driving around, trying to pick up an Internet signal to download an update from the skip-tracer network. We all were so sure the PSFs had grabbed you.”

  “Almost,” I whispered, but didn’t think he could hear me.

  Even before they found a connection to hook into, Cate had sent a message through the Chatter. It turned out that when you got snapped by a profiler, the device the PSF snapped in my face, it not only brought your listing up for the PSF or skip tracer’s viewing pleasure. It also automatically updated that same listing with time and location stamps on both the PSF and skip-tracer networks.

  That’s how Rob knew to look in that area, I thought.

  “But how did you know to look for Rob in the first place?”

  “We didn’t at first. He was under a fake name.” Chubs glanced down at where his fingers were laced together. “He updated the skip-tracer network to say that you were recovered. Once that happened, I could look up his profile—see what car he’d registered and the license plate. We weren’t too far from the area, but I’m still amazed we kept it together long enough to find you. After we found you we came here—we’ve been camped out for almost four days.”