Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  I could tell Chubs wanted to ask exactly what we meant by that, but the pilot’s voice interrupted, telling us he had finished his final checks and was ready for takeoff.

  I didn’t relax my grip on the gun until we were up in the air, sailing high above the jagged peaks of the Rockies. For all the grumbling he’d done about how much more likely it was for this kind of jet to crash than a normal passenger plane, Chubs passed out in his seat five minutes after the plane was in the air. I glanced over my shoulder, watching as he began to slowly drift too far to the right, only to startle awake for an instant and catch himself. The others had laid their seats out flat or curled up on them, using the blankets we’d found in one of the storage compartments.

  Clancy unbuckled his seat belt, pushing onto his feet.

  “Going somewhere?” I asked.

  “To use the bathroom in the back,” he snapped. “Why, do you need to come in and watch?”

  No, but I followed him to the back regardless, shooting him a meaningful look as he slammed the door and locked it.

  I leaned back against the shelves of drinks and service ware in the back. My eyes drifted from Liam to Vida to Chubs and then, finally, to Jude sitting nearby. He’d been so quiet up until then, I’d just assumed he’d fallen asleep like the others.

  “Hi,” I whispered.

  He had been staring out the window to the unending stretch of land below, and he stayed that way, even when I touched his shoulder. Jude, who hated silence, whose past slithered up to him like a shadow along glass, did not say a single word.

  I sat down on his chair’s armrest, glancing across the way to make sure both Liam and Chubs were still asleep. I had known Worried Jude and Terrified Jude and Ecstatic Jude, but never this shade of him.

  “Talk to me,” I said.

  Jude burst into tears.

  “Hey!” I said, taking his shoulder. “I know it doesn’t feel this way, but it’ll be okay.”

  It took several minutes of coaxing for him to settle down and sit up. His skin went blotchy, and his nose refused to stop running. He swiped it against the arm of his jacket.

  “I should have been there. With them. I could have…I could have helped them somehow—Cate and Alban. They needed me, and I wasn’t there.”

  “And thank God for that,” I said. “Otherwise you’d be trapped there with all of the others.” Or dead. It was too horrible to even consider.

  I put an arm around him, and whatever invisible string had been holding him up promptly snapped. He leaned into my shoulder, still crying.

  “Oh my God,” he muttered, “this is so not cool. It’s just…I’m really scared Cate’s dead, too. All of them. It’s like Blake all over again, and I’m just as responsible. Would any of this have even happened if I hadn’t been so stupid? If Rob and Jarvin hadn’t caught us listening that day?”

  I blew out the breath I didn’t realize I had been holding and rubbed his arm. “None of this is your fault,” I told him. “None of it. You aren’t responsible for what other people do, good or bad. Everyone is just making the choices they think will help them get by.”

  He nodded, swiping at his eyes with the back of his hand. For a long while, the only sound between us was the moaning of engines and Chubs’s rhythmic snores.

  “But I could have made a difference,” Jude whispered. “I could have fought. I—”

  “No,” I interrupted. “I’m sorry. I get where you’re coming from, and they’re all good thoughts, but I just don’t think it’s worth it. It’s not worth it to weigh what you could have done or should have done when there’s no way of changing it. And it’s not worth risking your life over. Nothing is more important or valuable than your life. Got it?”

  He nodded but was quiet again. A little more settled, I thought, than before.

  “It’s just not fair,” Jude said. “None of this is fair.”

  “Life isn’t fair,” I said. “It’s taken me a while to get that. It’s always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You’ll make plans, and it’ll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they’ll be taken away no matter how hard you fight to keep them. You’ll try for something and won’t get it. You don’t have to find meaning in it; you don’t have to try to change things. You just have to accept the things that are out of your hands and try to take care of yourself. That’s your job.”

  He nodded. I waited until he had taken a deep breath and seemed a little more composed before I stood and ruffled his unruly hair. I was sure he’d groan or bat my hand away; instead, he caught it with his own.

  “Ruby…” His face was drawn. Not sad exactly, just…tired, I thought. “If you can’t change anything, then what’s the point of it?”

  I wrapped my fingers around his and gave his hand a steady squeeze. “I don’t know. But when I figure that out, you’ll be the first to know.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I NEVER THOUGHT I’D BE SO HAPPY to see California’s uneven, fractured mess of a freeway system as we headed toward the glowing high-rises of downtown Los Angeles. The ride was bumpy as all get-out, and the familiar stench of gasoline was working its magic through the car vents, smothering even the unnerving new-car smell clinging to the leather seats. It didn’t matter much to any of us, though.

  There had been a large black SUV waiting for us on the runway when we disembarked at LAX. I cut Clancy’s hands free so he could take the car key offered by a man in a dress suit and black sunglasses, but he was back at the wrong end of my gun before he could think of trying to get away. After it just being the five of us for so long, I felt Jude flinch at the look the man passed over him.

  “We need to talk about a plan,” I said once we were in the car, miles away from the airport. It was just past seven in the evening. If things had been normal at HQ, the first of two night classes would just be starting. Then it would be two hours to mandatory lights-out and another hour before the agents had to retreat to their quarters. It would be safer and easier to try to round up the kids from a single location—the sleeping rooms on the second level—but there were cameras in every corner.

  Not to mention success depended on three very big ifs. If we got that far. If we found the entrance. If we didn’t get caught sneaking in.

  “And that’s only if they are running the usual schedule,” I added. “Did Nico say anything about it? Hey—” I gripped the already torn collar of Clancy’s shirt. “I’m asking you a question.”

  Clancy grit his teeth. “He hasn’t responded to my last few messages. I’m assuming they took the Chatters away to keep rumors from spreading.”

  “They’d be running the usual schedule,” Vida said with certainty from the driver’s seat. “They wouldn’t want any of the kids to know that Alban was out. That’d cause a massive amount of panic, right? They wouldn’t tell any of them the actual objective.”

  “How are they going to rig the explosions without the kids figuring it out?” Liam asked. “It seems like a vest of the stuff would be a pretty big clue.”

  “That’s the easy part,” Clancy said. “You break them up into small groups of two or three, sew the explosives into the lining of a coat, and set it up with a remote detonator. All you have to do is wait to give the kids the jackets until the very end.”

  He said it casually, without a hint of disgust—like some part of him actually admired the plan.

  “That means prep time at HQ will be minimal. If they’re moving the kids out at six or so, wakeup will be at five.…” I shifted to look at Vida in the driver’s seat. “Does it make more sense to go in at three or four?”

  “Four,” she said.

  “Four?” Clancy repeated, like it was the stupidest thing he’d ever heard. “Sure, if you want to give yourself a better chance of being caught.”

  “Mandatory rolling blackouts,” I explained to the others, ignoring him. “California has been trying to conserve energy that way. They happen every night in our area between three and five. The security syst
em and cameras are the only things hooked up to the backup generator, but it’ll at least be dark in the hallways as we’re moving through them.”

  “Once we’re in, I can go take care of the agents in the monitor room,” Vida said. “We won’t even have to shut the system off. How long do you think it’ll take to get in and out through this entrance of yours?”

  “I don’t know; I’ve never walked it. I’ve only seen them bring people in and out.”

  “Where does it lead?” Jude asked. “And how come I don’t know about it?”

  I looked down at my hands, trying to keep my voice light. “It’s where they brought traitors and key assets for questioning. And then…took them out.”

  “Holy shit, they did have you torture people,” Vida said, looking both intrigued and impressed. So did Clancy. “Where is it?”

  “I didn’t torture them,” I protested weakly, “just…questioned them. Aggressively.”

  Liam kept his gaze focused on something outside of his window, but I felt him tense to the point of snapping beside me.

  “It’s the locked door on the third level, isn’t it?” Jude asked. “The one just past the computer room?”

  “Alban told me once it leads out to an entrance near the Seventh Street Bridge over the Los Angeles River,” I said. “If they’re holding any of the agents or hiding the evidence of what they’ve done, it’ll be in that room.”

  “Okay, well, bypassing the fact that the League has a secret torture dungeon,” Liam said, “are we sure they won’t have blocked the path in and out?”

  “Why do you all keep saying ‘we’?” Clancy asked. “I hope you don’t think I’m coming down in that shithole with you.”

  “Too bad for you, you’re the only one who doesn’t get a choice about it,” I said. “You want to see what’s happening at the League? You want to chat with your friend Nico again? You got it. Front-row seat.”

  He must have suspected it would come to this all along, but he didn’t look afraid. Maybe after everything, he still wasn’t convinced that I was willing to serve him up on a platter to the League to let them do with him what they would. Maybe he already knew that I would trade him to Jarvin and the others if it meant getting the other kids away. If there was so much as a crack in this plan, he’d find a way to slip through it.

  Which meant I would have to watch him that much closer, staying three steps ahead of him instead of just one.

  “What does happen if we can’t get them out undetected?” Chubs asked.

  “Then they’re going to have to do what they were trained to,” I said, “and fight back.”

  The Los Angeles River was a forty-eight-mile stretch of concrete that had always served as more of a punch line than an actual river. At one point in its long life, it probably had been a real waterway—but humanity had swept in and constrained its flow to a single concrete channel that wound its way around the outskirts of the city, lined on either side by railroad tracks.

  Cate had pointed it out once when we’d left on an Op, telling me that they used to film car chases down there for movies that I’d never heard of. Now, though, if you were to walk its length, which was usually as parched as the ground had been in Pueblo, you’d be hard-pressed to find anything other than the electric colors of graffiti tags and wandering homeless folks trying to find a place to settle for the night. If it did happen to rain, which was rare in Southern California, all sorts of things washed out of the storm drains and into the open river: shopping carts, trash bags, deflated basketballs, stuffed animals, the occasional dead body.…

  “I’m not seeing anything,” Chubs muttered, holding the flashlight higher so I could scan the bridge’s support pillars again. “Are you sure—”

  “Here!” Vida called over to us from across the channel. Liam waved his flashlight once, so we’d see them. The streetlights were off, and without the light pollution that usually came from the city, we were both struggling to see anything beyond a few feet in front of us and to not be spotted by anyone else.

  I took Liam’s arm and guided him down the slope of the embankment, then up again to the other side, to the place where the arch of the bridge’s underbelly met the ground. I kept my flashlight aimed at Clancy’s back, making sure he walked the entire way in front of me.

  Jude, I thought, counting them off with my eyes, Liam, Vida, Chubs.

  “I think this is it.” Vida stepped back, keeping her own flashlight aimed at the huge, swirling patterns of graffiti. There was a blue star at the center of it, but it was the way the paint looked that gave the hidden door away—it was thicker here, to the point that it looked sticky to the touch. I felt for a disguised handle before throwing my shoulder against it. The panel of cement swung inward, scraping the loose rubble on the other side. Vida, Liam, and I leaned in, shining our flashlights down the metal staircase.

  I reached over and hauled Clancy to the front. “You first.”

  If it were possible, this tunnel was somehow even cruder than the tunnel we usually took in and out of HQ. It was also about ten times longer and filthier.

  Clancy stumbled in front of me, barely catching himself with a quiet curse. The walls, which had started out wide enough for us to walk three across, narrowed until we were forced into a single-file line. Liam was at my back, the damp, rancid air wheezing in and out of his lungs in a way that was starting to worry me.

  I slowed a step, letting him catch up and nudge me forward again. “I’m okay,” he promised. “Keep going.”

  In the distant dark, I could hear the rush of some kind of water, though the sludge we were shuffling through had clearly been there long enough to start to rot and solidify.

  How many prisoners had they brought in this way, I wondered, and how many bodies had they hauled out? I tried not to shudder or turn my light down to see if the water was as red as my mind had made it out to be. I tried to stop myself from picturing the way Jarvin and the others would have dragged Alban out—Cate out, Cole out, their lifeless eyes open, gazing at the string of small flickering lights hanging overhead.

  “After this, we’re all bathing in bleach,” Chubs informed us. “And burning these clothes. I keep trying to figure out why it smells so much like sulfur, but I think I’ve decided to leave that one alone for now.”

  “That’s probably for the best,” Clancy said. His face was bone white as he turned in to my flashlight’s beam, which made his already dark brows and eyes look like they’d been stained with soot. “How many of these tunnels did the League make?”

  “A few,” I said. “Why? Planning your escape already?”

  He snorted.

  “Time?” I called back.

  “Three fifty-three,” Vida answered. “Can you see the end?”

  No. I felt the first cold drip of panic down my spine. No, I couldn’t. We’d been walking for close to a half hour, and it felt like we hadn’t covered any ground at all. It was the same cement walls, the same sloshing of our footsteps—every once in a while, one of our flashlight beams would catch a rat as it scampered against the wall or darted into some black crack in the ground. The tunnel seemed to draw us into its darkness like a deep breath. The walls shrank around our heads and shoulders again, forcing me to bend at the waist.

  How much longer could it be? Another half hour? An hour? Were we really going to have less than that to find the kids and get them back out again?

  “We’re almost there,” Liam whispered, taking my arm and aiming the flashlight toward the far end of the tunnel, where the path began to slope upward, out of the sludge.

  Where there was a large metal door.

  “Is that it?”

  I nodded, relief and adrenaline pulsing through me as I whirled back toward the others. “Okay,” I called softly. “This is it. Vida, start the clock. Fifteen minutes in and out. Everyone remember what you’re doing?”

  Jude squeezed past us to get to the electronic lock that flashed on as he approached.

  I scanned the nearby ceili
ng and walls, looking for any sort of camera, only half surprised when I didn’t find one. Interesting. Alban had either been dedicated to keeping the interrogation block a protected, classified secret from anyone other than senior staff and advisers, or he had been worried about the thought of someone getting visual evidence of the people he was trafficking in and out. Both, probably.

  Good. One less thing to worry about.

  I had just clicked the flashlight off when I felt a warm hand close around my arm. I turned right into Liam’s waiting arms.

  The kiss was over before it ever really started. A bruising, single touch filled with enough urgency, enough frustration and wanting to send my blood rushing. I was still trying to catch my breath when he pulled back, his hands on my face, his lips close enough to mine for me to feel him pant, too.

  Then he was stepping back, away, letting distance flood in between us again. His voice was low, rough. “Give ’em hell, darlin’.”

  “And for the love of God, bitch, don’t get stabbed this time!” Vida added.

  I would have smiled if I hadn’t heard Clancy’s faint laughter at my right. “Any sign of trouble from you is the only excuse I need to use this,” I warned him, pressing the gun to the curve of his skull. “The only excuse I need to leave your body down here to be eaten by the rats.”

  “Got it,” Clancy said in his low, velvety tones. “And if I’m good, do I get a kiss, too?”

  I shoved Clancy forward, keeping a grip on the collar of his shirt.

  “Okay, I’m ready,” Jude said as he put his hand against the lock pad to fry it. “Lead on, Leader.”

  The air down in the interrogation block was no fresher or cleaner than the tunnel had been. The familiar stench of human vomit and filth twisted my gut as I stepped through the doorway and down the short flight of stairs. I had my flashlight in one hand and the gun in my other, both aimed at the door on the other end of the hallway of metal doors with their observation windows. I swept the beam of pale light around the space, and, finding it clear, signaled for the others to come through.