Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  Green dress—the beach? Virginia Beach?

  One tear escaped my lashes, then another. It had happened so fast; I’d had to work so quickly in that sky blue room. What he was saying now—none of it had happened, not really, but the way he had told it then had felt real to me. We could have met that summer, on that beach, with nothing but a tiny stretch of sun and sand to keep us apart. I must have been thinking about it, even as I pulled myself out of his thoughts and memories. I must have missed that one tiny sliver of myself, or pushed it, or—

  “I’m… It’s—it’s like torture.” His voice was strained, hardly even a whisper. “I think I’m losing it—I don’t know what’s happening, what happened, but I look at you, I look at you, and I love you so much. Not because of anything you’ve said, or done, or anything at all. I look at you, and I just love you, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me what I would do for you. Please…you have to tell me…tell me I’m not crazy. Please just look at me.”

  My eyes drifted up to his, and it was over.

  His lips caught mine in a hard kiss, driving them apart with the force of it. There was nothing gentle about it. I felt the door rattle against my back as he shifted, pressing me against it, taking my face between his hands. Every thought in my head exploded to a pure, pounding white, and I felt the dark curl of desire begin to twist inside me, bending all my rules, snapping that last trembling bit of restraint. I tried one last time to pull away.

  “No,” he said, bringing my lips back to his. It was just like it had been before—I slid my hands under his jacket to press him closer. The low groan at the back of his throat, a small, pleading noise that set every inch of my skin on fire.

  Then, it changed. I pulled back, gasping for a breath, and when I found him again, it was deeper, and softer, and sweeter. It was a kiss I remembered, the kind we used to have when it felt like we had all the time in the world, when the roads stretched out just for us.

  I gave in to that feeling. I didn’t care what it made me—weak, selfish, stupid, terrible. I remembered that tiny bit of warm peace before I had ruined him, throwing his mind into a jumble of desperate confusion. There was so much darkness to it now; the clear, bright corridors of memories had collapsed in on themselves. I fought my way through, tearing down filmy sheets of black and burned brown. I was drowning in it, in him, and it was so different, so strange, that I didn’t recognize the fact I was in his mind until it was too late.

  Stop, stop, stopstopstop—

  I shoved him back, breaking the physical connection between us. We both stumbled, my head screaming with pain as I crashed down onto my knees. Liam fell back onto the nearest work table, sending the hundreds of little tools and bolts stacked there tumbling to the ground in a shower of piercing noise that seemed to go on and on, echoing the final snap that whipped through me as my mind broke away from his.

  Shit, I thought, gasping for breath. I felt sick, physically ill, as the world bobbed up under me. For several terrifying seconds, the burning in my mind was bad enough that I couldn’t see at all. I all but crawled, feeling for the gun I had dropped as he grabbed me. I tried to haul myself back onto my feet using one of the shelves of hubcaps, but I only succeeded in tearing it down off the wall and sending them showering down over me.

  Finally, I just gave up, leaning back against the wall, drawing my knees up to my chest. The ache had trickled down the back of my neck, dripping bit by bit into the center of my chest. Shit, shit, shit. I dug the heels of my palms against my eyes, sucking in another ragged breath.

  “Ruby.”

  I looked up from my hands, searching for his face in the darkness.

  “Ruby, you…” Liam’s voice had an edge of panic to it now as he reached for me and pulled me up toward him. I fell against him, too stunned to move as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders, buried his face in my hair. “We—That safe house—”

  Oh my God.

  “You did something—you—oh, God, Chubs!” Liam pulled back, trapping my face between his hands. “Chubs was shot! They took him, and they took us—we were in that room, and you—what did you do? What did you do to me? Why would I leave? Why would I leave without you?”

  The blood drained from my face, from my entire body. I ran my fingers back through his hair, forcing him to look me directly in the eye. Every one of his muscles shook. “He’s okay. Liam! Chubs is okay; he’s fine. We came to find you in Nashville, remember?”

  He looked over at me again, and for the first time in weeks, his eyes were sharp. Clear. He was looking at me, and I knew the exact moment he realized what I’d done to him. His hair fell into his face as he shook his head; his lips worked in silent disbelief. I couldn’t bring myself to say one thing.

  This isn’t possible.

  How many memories had I wiped clean now? Dozens? A hundred? And from the beginning, from that look of pure fear on my mom’s face, I knew there would be no going back. When it happened again to Sam, it only confirmed it. Slipping into her mind, trying to fix what I’d done, had only ever proven there was nothing I could do. That there wasn’t a trace of myself left to draw out to the front of her mind again.

  But now—I hadn’t pushed the memories into his mind. I knew what that felt like. This was something different; it had to be. All I’d done was pull myself free before I could sink in too far and do real damage. There was no way that this was happening. No way.

  He stepped back, out of my reach. Away from me.

  “I can explain,” I started, my voice trembling. But he didn’t want to hear any of it. Liam turned back to the car at the center of the damp garage, scooping up a small backpack I didn’t recognize and swinging it over his shoulder. Panicked movements brought him back to the door. He needed to see it for himself, I realized, that Chubs was all right. That everything that had happened since we found him had, in truth, actually happened.

  “Wait!” I called, starting after him. “Lee!”

  I heard his footsteps pound against the linoleum of the front office, and his frustrated grunt as he knocked into the desk.

  I heard the gunshots. The one-two punch of explosive sound that shattered a wall of glass and brought my world down with it.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  I SCRAMBLED THROUGH the front waiting room, the gun swinging up in my hands as I ran. Liam had just turned the corner back into the store—I saw him on the ground, flat on his back. The glass was scattered thickly over him; on first glance, it almost looked like someone had broken a solid sheet of ice against his chest.

  That was all it took. Something cool and collected slipped into place. The terror that had almost brought me down to my knees distilled into something useful, something calculating, something the Children’s League had been careful to grow and nurture.

  Controlled panic.

  I wanted to run straight into the store, but I knew from countless simulations how that scenario would play out. Instead, I stuck my head out just enough to see which drink coolers had been blown out. Only the very last one, the one closest to me was shattered.

  The shooter was likely by the back door—he or she must have seen a flash of Liam coming around the corner and fired.

  I glanced down, long enough to see his chest rise and fall. His hands rose and settled down over it as he gasped for breath. Alive.

  Where was the shooter?

  I swallowed the burning anger, fingers choking my gun as I searched the front wall for something reflective. There was one of those round security mirrors just behind the cash register stand, and as grimy as it was, as narrow as my vision had become, I would never have missed her. The woman was thick around the center, in her late fifties, early sixties, if I had to pinpoint it. The wiry gray hair that was only half tucked under her hat and green hunting jacket’s collar gave her away.

  She was shaking hard, cussing as she dropped the shells she was trying to reload, and she disappeared behind the shelf of ChapStick to retrieve them. I positioned myself over Liam and took aim through the gold fr
ames of the coolers. When she popped back up, I was ready—squeezing off two shots that lodged into the wall behind her.

  I don’t think she even looked at me before she fired that one last shot and bolted. I ducked on instinct, though it was obvious she had aimed wide. The front window of the store shattered as the shotgun’s slugs tore through it. And it was all thunder and noise, anxiety and terror, and glass. So much glass.

  Liam groaned at my feet. I dropped down, brushing the shards from his hair and front. My hands slipped inside his jacket again, feeling for blood. The floor was clean and my fingers came away the same. Not hurt. The thought was fleeting as I hauled him up into a sitting position. He slumped against the cooler’s frame, clearly stunned. His ears must have been ringing something terrible.

  I cupped his face between my hands in relief, pressing my lips to his forehead, to his cheek. “Are you okay?” I breathed out.

  He nodded, pressing a hand over mine. Falling had knocked the breath out of him. “I’m okay.”

  A car engine roared to life outside. I pushed back, sweeping the gun off the floor.

  “Ruby!” Liam called after me, but I was already running, ramming my shoulder into the broken, swinging back door. The taillights were burning bright red, growing smaller and smaller with the distance the woman put between us. I ran after her as long as I could, surging forward on a tide of anger. She’d come this close to hurting him, to killing him.

  I planted my feet and raised the gun one last time, my aim fixed steadily on her back left tire. If she had seen one of us and still had enough wits left to report us—

  No. My arm dropped heavily back to my side, and I switched the safety on with my thumb. Even if she had seen us, even if she had figured out what we were, this was the beating heart of the Middle of Nowhere. It wasn’t a town, let alone a place skip tracers or even PSFs would think to haunt. She could call, but it would be hours, maybe days, before someone responded.

  I rubbed the sweat off my forehead with my wrist. God. That woman had probably come in looking for food, maybe shelter. She hadn’t been trained, and the sloppy way she’d held that gun made me wonder if she hadn’t fired those first shots by mistake. Liam and I hadn’t been quiet in the garage. Maybe she’d heard us, heard him coming, and panicked at the thought of being caught stealing?

  It wasn’t worth it to try to puzzle it out, and I didn’t have the energy to. My problems weren’t up ahead anymore. They were standing right behind me.

  I turned on my heels slowly, walking back toward the gas station where Liam was waiting. With the sun rising steadily at his back, his face was thrown into shadow. There was still crushed glass dusted across his shoulders, but I kept my eyes on the backpack clenched between his fingers. His cracked, white-boned knuckles.

  There was a new cut across the bridge of his nose, and blood oozed from an open gash on his chin, but that was the worst the flying glass could manage. I only had to take one look at his face to know that what I’d done had cut him to the core.

  He waited for me to reach him, one agonizing step at a time. I felt a flood of hot shame wash down through me, tightening my throat, pricking my eyes with tears. A flush of red swept up his throat, over his face, to the very tips of his ears. Liam watched me, the longing on his face etched bone deep; I knew how hard he was struggling with it, because I was fighting with everything I had not to reach out and take his hand, run my thumb over the warm pulse in his wrist. It was unbearable, that thing between us. How much I wanted to pretend we’d never lived a life outside of this moment.

  “Did…” Liam pressed a fist against his mouth, struggling with his next words. “Did you just not want to be with me?”

  It was almost too much for me to take. “How could you think that?”

  “What else am I supposed to think?” he demanded. “I feel like I’ve been…underwater. I can’t get a thought straight, but I remember that. I remember the safe house. We were together; we were going to be okay.”

  “You know we weren’t,” I told him. “It was the only thing I could do. It was the only way they’d let you go, and I couldn’t let you stay.”

  From almost the beginning, Liam and I had a kind of understanding between us that lived without words, only looks and feelings. I knew, instinctively, why he made the choices he did, and he could trace my lines of thought as easily as one would follow a lit road. I’d never thought this moment would come to pass, but I also never believed he wouldn’t just know why I’d made that decision.

  “You’re not even sorry,” he breathed out.

  “No,” I managed to say around the stone lodged in my throat. “Because the only thing worse than being without you would have been watching them break you day after day, until you weren’t yourself anymore, until they sent you on an Op that you didn’t come back from.”

  “Like they did to you?” said Liam harshly. “And now I just have to accept it? You took away my choice, Ruby—and for what? Because you thought I wasn’t strong enough to survive being with the League?”

  “Because I’m not strong enough to survive seeing you with the League!” I said. “Because I wanted you, after everything you went through, to have a chance to find your parents and live your life.”

  “Dammit—I wanted you!” Liam seized my arms, his fingers tightening like he could make me understand his pain that way. “More than anything! And you just…crashed through my mind and sealed everything away, like you had the right to, like I didn’t need you. What kills me is that I trusted you—I was so sure you knew that. I would have been okay, because you would have been there with me!”

  How many times had I told myself a version of that? Hearing it, though—that was a knife to the throat, a razor’s edge I had no choice but to lean into.

  “My head is so damn muddy, nothing is lining up.” He took a step back, letting himself drop down in a crouch. “Chubs was shot, and Zu is still out there, and East River burned, and—everything after that is like a nightmare. And you…you were with those people this whole time. Anything could have happened to you, and I would never have known. Do you know what that feels like?”

  I dropped down to my knees in front of him, hitting the ground hard enough to finally jar the tears clinging to my eyelashes. I felt exhausted. Empty.

  “I can’t fix this,” I said. “I know I’ve messed everything up, and there’s no way back from this, okay? I do. But your life was worth more than what I wanted, and it was the only way I could think of to make sure you didn’t get it in your head to come find me.”

  “Who says I would have?” I knew he meant it cruelly, that it was a weak moment and all he wanted was for me to feel as much pain as he did, but there wasn’t enough venom in his words for them to sting. He just wasn’t capable of it.

  “I would have torn this whole damn country apart looking for you,” I said softly. “Maybe you really would have left. Maybe you wouldn’t have come looking for me. Maybe I misread everything. But if you even felt a quarter of what I did…” My words wavered. “I used to wonder, you know, all the time, if it was all because you felt sorry for me. Because you pitied me or were looking for another person to protect.”

  “And you could never see another reason?” he whispered in a fierce voice. “It couldn’t have been because I respected how hard you fought to survive? Because I saw how kind your heart was? Or that you were funny, and brave, and strong, and you made me feel like I was all of those things, too, even when I didn’t deserve it?”

  “Liam—”

  “I don’t know what to say or what to do here,” he said, shaking his head. “It feels like it never ended for me. Do you get that? I can’t forget it ever happened. I can’t hate you—I can’t, not when I want to kiss you so damn badly.” Then, so brokenly, I almost couldn’t understand him, he continued. “Why couldn’t you have taken everything? Not just the memories but the feelings, too?”

  I stared at him, my mind blanking in confusion.

  “It’s terrifying—te
rrifying—to meet a stranger and feel something for her so intense it actually stops your heart, and you don’t have any basis for it. No context. The feelings are there, and it’s like they’re clawing at your chest, needing to get out. Even now, even when I just look at you, it feels like they’re crushing me—with how much I want, and need, and love you. But you’re not even sorry; you just expect that I’ll be okay with the fact you threw your life away for mine.”

  The world around us had retreated so far back from our pocket of misery, I’d forgotten it even existed. That we were out at the edge of an open highway, exposed to the freezing cold and any passing eyes. Reality came roaring back in the form of a car engine, a blaring horn, and headlights aimed directly at us.

  I pulled Liam up onto his feet, reaching for the gun tucked into my coat pocket—but I saw the car now, the familiar dusty tan of Chubs’s SUV. The car skidded to a stop a few feet away, kicking up an explosion of snow.

  Chubs jumped out of the driver’s seat, leaving the engine running. “Oh, thank God. I saw you both on the ground and I thought you killed each other.”

  I turned my back to them both, wiping my cheeks against my coat sleeves. Behind me, I heard Chubs suck in a sharp breath, but Liam was the one to speak, his voice frighteningly calm.

  “Come inside for a sec. There’s some food left we can take.”

  I didn’t want to follow them, and I didn’t want to get into the car. I couldn’t move; the fight, if I could even call it that, had drained me to the point that I was seeing two of Jude as he jumped out of the car and came toward me.

  “Roo?” He sounded scared.

  I physically shook myself to clear my head. “It’s okay.”

  “What happened?” he whispered, pressing a comforting hand to my back. “Did you guys fight?”

  “No,” I said. “He remembers now.”

  We turned, watching as Chubs stumbled over himself, trying to keep up as Liam dragged him over to the gas station. He looked back at me with wide eyes as Liam kicked the door open with his foot. The bang as it slammed against the opposite cinderblock wall was enough to draw Vida out of the car, too.