Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  “These were targeted attacks, designed to minimize the damage to civilians. Do not mourn the loss of these reprehensible human beings. There have been times, in the course of human history, that fire has been needed to burn out an insidious infection. These are such times. This is the only way for us to build our nation again, stronger than before.”

  “He forgot the God Bless America part,” Liam muttered, crumpling the paper.

  A gunshot fired behind us. I wheeled around, gripping Liam’s arm to force him behind me. The agents had formed a circle around something—someone—on the other embankment. The men and women who were armed had their weapons out. Aimed.

  “Are you kidding me?” Liam breathed out behind me. Vida practically screamed in rage, running toward the cluster of agents faster than any of us could catch her.

  Some of them knew to move out of the way as the Blue girl tore through their circle, but only Cole was dumb enough to try to keep her from tearing out Clancy Gray’s throat.

  “How?” she howled as we wedged ourselves through the kids and agents, pushing our way to the front. “How?”

  Clancy was filthy—covered in sewage and dust and blood that caked around his swollen nose and eyes. But even from where they’d pushed him onto his hands and knees, he managed to look smug. Defiant.

  For the first time, I noticed the door open behind him. It was directly across from the exit we had taken, on the opposite embankment, hidden in the blind spot in one of the pillars, under a layer of bright graffiti.

  Clancy let out a low, humorless laugh. “Through the drain in the boys’ showers.” His dark eyes met mine. “After I had to smash my way out of the closet.”

  “Was that how you were planning to get out?” I demanded. “After you got what you needed from Alban’s office?”

  Clancy shrugged, unbothered by the guns pointed in his face. “Didn’t know about that exit, did you?”

  “Jesus,” one of the agents said. “This is…this is really the president’s kid?”

  Clancy is alive, I thought, turning in to Liam’s side, and Jude is not. He tucked his arm around my neck, drawing me in closer. It didn’t make sense—it wasn’t possible.

  “He’s our ticket out,” another said suddenly. “We trade him for safe passage! Come on, Stewart—uniforms are swarming the city, and we have no transport or way to contact the ranch. What other card do we have to play?”

  “Well, it’s not exactly going to be a cakewalk dropping him off with our new neighbors, either. He’s an Orange; he’ll find a way out of it.” Cole glanced at Clancy, ignoring the shocked noises from the others. “So maybe it’s better to end him now and send the body back. That’d be quite the message to dear ol’ Dad. We’ll find another way out of the city.”

  There was a murmur of agreement from a few of the others.

  “You’re not getting out of this city,” Clancy said. “My father’s not reactionary. That’s not his game. He’ll have accounted for every possible exit strategy. Trust me, this has been in the works for months, maybe even years. When he got tired of waiting for an excuse to justify the attack, he created one.”

  That was almost too ridiculous to believe. “You think your father arranged a hit on himself?”

  “It’s what I would have done. I’m assuming he survived?”

  Liam’s hold on me tightened until it was almost unbearable. I was shaking again, only this time it was anger blazing through me. Vida and Chubs both glanced over my way, like they were waiting for me to contradict him. I don’t know what terrified me more: that he wasn’t wrong or that this was the old Clancy, the one who knew he could always get his way.

  “You guys believed me when I said we were starting over, didn’t you?” Cole was addressing the kids and agents who were still sitting beneath the bridge, looking torn and petrified. “Well, this is it. We make our own road. But he’s not coming with us.”

  “Think of the intel we could get out of him!” another agent cried, throwing her hands up in the air. “We can sedate him—”

  “Try it,” Clancy dared. “See how it ends for you.”

  “Yeah, you’re right,” Cole said, rolling his eyes. “We probably should just kill you.”

  “Go ahead, then.” Clancy’s teeth were stained with blood as he smiled. “Finish it. I finished what I came to do. And you all—” He turned toward the huddled masses of kids around him, his eyes focusing on Nico. The boy trembled under the intensity of his gaze. “You all can thank me when you can still fight back. I saved us. I saved us.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Cole was losing his patience. He glanced back at me, but I couldn’t look away from Clancy Gray. Not when I felt the first trickle of realization working its way through the grief still clouding my mind.

  That morning, a whole city had been destroyed, and countless lives with it. There would be so many people who would never return home to their loved ones that night, though those mothers, father, daughters, sons, wives, husbands would pass through the afternoon and midnight hours, waiting, hoping. The smoke would seep into the concrete that lined every inch of this place, permanently bruising an already beaten city. In ten years, twenty years, it would still be too terrible to speak of what happened—a morning that a thousand other blinding, brilliant mornings would never ease from memory. But somehow, when Clancy spoke again, it was his words that changed everything.

  “The cure for IAAN,” he spat. “The one my mother developed, the one Alban kept hidden from you, waiting for the right opportunity to trade it to my father to benefit himself.” Clancy swiped at the blood draining from his nose, laughing in that same humorless way. “The one that would have taken our abilities away and left us helpless. I burned it to ash, and my father buried it without realizing. Now her memory of it is gone, and no one will ever have the research—no one will take away what’s ours.”

  A cure. That single word was chiming like a bell in my ears, ringing again and again. My mind couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t recognize it. I’d spent so many years conditioning myself to accept that it was impossible, forcing myself to let go of thinking there was a world beyond the camp’s electrified fence, that the word no longer existed in my vocabulary.

  I felt myself start to turn, looking to Jude for his reaction—but Jude wasn’t here. I had left him behind. I had let him fall back into the darkness. And it was like seeing Liam and Chubs climbing out of the tunnel alone all over again. It stole the breath from my chest.

  One of the younger kids began to cry loudly behind me, asking in a panicked, confused voice, “What? What is he…what is he talking about?”

  Oh, I thought. Oh my God.

  I had been wrong—so wrong. The first lady hadn’t been studying what caused the disease. She had invested her life in figuring out how to end it.

  I felt myself step toward him, away from the others. Chubs was visibly shaking, about to collapse under the weight of what could have been. I caught Liam’s eye, but his expression was so open, so raw with pain and longing that I had to turn away. I knew what he was imagining. In my mind, we were standing on that beach, too, with the crystal clear skies overhead and our beautiful, whole families around us.

  A cure.

  Alban had been right when he said Lillian Gray had never been blinded by her love for her son. She knew Clancy would never willingly give up his abilities, and that she’d never find him. No. He needed to come to her, to be lured by the satisfaction of tracking her down after being shut out and denied access to her for so long. He had to be the first one to receive the treatment, because if he heard so much as a whisper of the possibility of it, he’d disappear forever. It made me wonder if that was the reason Alban had sat on the secret for as long as he did—if that was part of the deal. Clancy first. Then, he could present it to the world. He could be the nation’s hero.

  I studied Clancy’s face as I crouched down to his level. His gaze flickered toward my hand as I slid it into my coat pocket.

  Behind a
ll of his venomous words was the sting of true betrayal, an ache that ran so deep, his whole body seemed to throb with it. His mother, his own mother had set up the trap. And he had done what in return? Burned down her lab, attacked her, scrambled her mind, and used the situation at HQ to his advantage to finish what he’d started in Georgia.

  That’s how he knew she sent the results to Alban, I thought, slowly smoothing the papers out over my knee. I had his full attention now. He must have seen it in her mind.

  Clancy loved the idea his father had inadvertently buried the one thing that could potentially fix his country and salvage his legacy. But the true irony here was that if Clancy hadn’t come looking to destroy his mother’s research, we never would have found it in time. It would have been left behind like everything else as we escaped.

  He’d come here to close that door, but instead he had left it wide open for me to walk through.

  There is a cure. The insanity of that thought made me feel like the hand on Jude’s compass spinning, and spinning, and spinning, searching for its true north.

  He deserved this. I blinked back the prick of tears and let my anger rise to swallow the anguish for now. I let it propel me forward. Because Jude deserved to live to see this moment—he should have been here, now, next to me, suddenly seeing that everything was alive with the possibility of change.

  I held up the rumpled, smoke-stained papers directly in front of Clancy, high enough for the ring of Psi and agents around us to see them, too. And I don’t know what was more powerful and gratifying to me—the look of terror that swept across his face, or the exhilaration of knowing I finally had my future back in my own hands.

  “You mean this research?”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  RIGHT OFF THE BAT, I need to shower some love on the fantastic team at Disney-Hyperion for the incredible amount of hard work and enthusiasm that they’ve put into this series. Thanks especially go to my editor, Emily Meehan, Laura Schreiber, Stephanie Lurie, publicist extraordinaire Lizzy Mason, Dina Sherman, LaToya Maitland, Andrew Sansone, Lloyd Ellman, Elke Villa, and Marci Senders.

  None of this would have been possible without my fearless agent, Merrilee Heifetz. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I couldn’t be in better hands, and I’m grateful every day that I have you in my corner.

  Much gratitude to Anna Jarzab and Erin Bowman who read early, terrifyingly messy drafts of this story and gave me incredible, thoughtful feedback that made this story so much better than I ever imagined it could be. Thanks also to Sarah J. Maas, not only for her many reads and critiques, but the overwhelming amount of love and support she sent my way during an incredibly difficult year.

  Much love to Tyler Infinger and Catherine Wallace—the friendship and care they’ve shown me over the years has meant more to me than words can express.

  To fall back on a cliché, I really hit the jackpot with my colleagues and friends at RHCB, especially Adrienne Waintraub, Tracy Lerner, and Lisa Nadel. I really could not admire each and every one of them more.

  And, finally, all the love in my heart goes to my family for their bravery, resilience, and strength this past year. Just when I think they can’t be more amazing, they go and prove me wrong.

  Keep reading for a sneak peek of In Time, the eBook novella that bridges The Darkest Minds and Never Fade!

  ONE

  LISTEN, no matter what anyone tells you, no one really wants this job.

  The hours are endless and the pay is crap. No, I take that back. It’s not the pay that’s crap. There’s a sweet little penny in it for you if you can hook yourself a decent-sized fish. The only thing is, of course, that everybody’s gone and overfished the damn rivers. You can drop in as many hooks as you want, buy yourself the shiniest bait, but there just aren’t enough of them still in the wild to fatten up your skeletal wallet.

  That’s the first thing Paul Hutch told me when I met him at the bar this afternoon. We’re here to do business, but Hutch decides that it’s a teaching moment, too. Why do people constantly feel like they have to lecture me on life? I’m twenty-five, but it’s like the minute you take actual kids out of the picture, anyone under the age of thirty suddenly becomes “son,” or “kid,” or “boy,” because these people, the “real adults,” they have to have someone to make small. I’m not interested in playing to someone’s imagination, or propping up their sense of self-worth. It makes me sick—like I’m trying to digest my own stomach. I’m no one’s boy, and I don’t respond to son, either. I’m not your damn dead kid.

  Someone’s smoking a cigarette in one of the dark booths behind us. I hate coming here almost as much as I hate the usual suspects who haunt the place. Everything in the Evergreen is that tacky emerald vinyl and dark wood. I think they want it to look like a ski lodge, but the result is something closer to a poor man’s Oktoberfest, only with more sad, drunk geezers and fewer busty chicks holding frothy mugs of beer.

  There are pictures of white-capped mountains all around, posters that are about as old as I am. I know, because our mountain hasn’t had a good snow in fifteen years, or enough demand to open in five. I used to run the ski lifts up all the different courses after school, even during the summer, when people from the valley just wanted to come up and do some hiking in temperatures below 115 degrees. I tell myself, At least you don’t have to deal with the snotty tourists anymore—the ones who acted like they’d never seen a real tree before, and rode their brakes all the way down Humphreys’ winding road. I don’t miss them at all.

  What I miss is the paycheck.

  Hutch looks like he crawled out of a horse’s ass—smells like it, too. For a while he was working at one of those tour group companies that let you ride the donkeys down into the Grand Canyon. They closed the national parks, though, and the owner had to move all the animals back to Flagstaff, before ultimately selling them off. There’s no work for Hutch to do there anymore, but I’m pretty sure the woman lets him sleep out in the stables.

  He’s been here for hours already; he’s looking soggy around the edges, and when I walked into the dark bar, he glanced up all bleary and confused, like a newborn chick sticking its head out of an egg. His hair is somehow receding and too long at once, the wisps halfheartedly tied back with a strip of leather.

  Trying to speed things up, I slide a crumpled wad of money his way. The stack looks a lot more impressive than it actually is. I’ve been living off tens and twenties for so long I’m convinced they stopped printing the bigger bills.

  “It’s not that I don’t think you can do it, son,” Hutch says, studying the bottom of his pint. “It just sounds easier than it is.”

  I should be listening harder than I am. If anyone knows what the job’s really like, it’s him. Old Hutch tried for six months to be a skip tracer, and the prize he won for that misadventure was a burnt-up, mutilated, four-fingered hand. He likes to tell everyone some kid got to him, but seeing as he’s managed to burn down two trailers by falling asleep with a cigarette in his hand, I’m inclined to doubt it. Still, he milks it for all he can. The sight of the gimp hand gets him sympathy drinks from out-of-towners stopping in the Evergreen. Some extra nickels and dimes, too, when he’s holding a cup at the corner of Route 66 and Leroux Street, pretending his white ass is a military vet from the Navajo Nation. Somehow he thinks that combination elevates him over the rest of us bums.

  “Can I have the keys?” I ask. “Where’d you park it?”

  He ignores me, humming along to the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” which this bar has on loop apparently for no reason other than the fact that Arizona is mentioned once in it.

  I shouldn’t be buying this truck from him. I know there’s going to be something wrong with it; it’s older than I am. But this is the only one I can afford, and I have to get out of here. I have to get out of this town.

  “Another one,” he says stubbornly, trying to flag down Amy, the bartender, who is doing her absolute best to deny his miserable existence. She and I have talked about this b
efore—it’s hard to look at him. His teeth got bad over the years, and his cheeks sag so low they’re practically hanging like wattles against his neck. He’s only forty-five, but he already looks like the after photo of a meth addict—the mug shot of the killer on one of those crime TV shows they’re always rerunning. His breath alone is like a punch to the face.

  I used to like Hutch a lot. He got to know my dad when he dropped off fresh produce at the restaurant. Now it’s like…I don’t know how to explain it so it makes sense. It’s like he’s a cautionary tale, only one you know you’re speeding toward without brakes. A glimpse of the future, or whatever. I just look at him and I know that if I don’t get out of this place, I’m going to be this old man who’s not even old, but smells like he pisses himself on a regular basis. The guy who spins and spins and spins on his barstool, like he’s riding the old carousel at the fairgrounds.

  Hutch slides the key out of his pocket but slams his hand down over it when I reach for it. His other hand traps mine, and then he’s looking at me with these wet, feverish eyes. “I loved your daddy so much, Gabe, and I know he wouldn’t want this for you.”

  “He tapped out, which means he doesn’t get a vote,” I said, ripping my hand free. “I paid you. Now tell me where you parked it.”

  For a second, I’m sure he’s going to tell me he parked it at the mall, and I’m going to have to walk my ass up the highway for an hour to get there. Instead, he shrugs and says finally, “On the north end of Wheeler Park. On Birch.”