In the Afterlight (Bonus Content)

by Alexandra Bracken

  When I came to, safely back inside of my own mind, I was on my knees, my forehead resting against the glass. I gulped down one breath after another.

  “Was that enough for you?” Clancy snarled. His skin had taken on a clammy quality, and he was trembling, shaking almost. “Are you satisfied?”

  I don’t know how I did it. I don’t. I just disconnected my mind from everything I’d seen, scrubbed every ounce of feeling from my voice. “No.”

  He wheeled back around.

  “I already knew what the Thurmond testing was like.” Oh God—oh my God. I felt like I was going to throw up all over again. What they’d done to his mind, even temporarily…“You’re supposed to be proving to me the cure itself is cruel.”

  “She adapted the cure from that research! From the shocks. You think I don’t know what you’re really trying to do?” he said. “That I’d be stupid enough to show you the actual cure procedure or where my mother is—”

  He knows. He knows where she is.

  He stalked over to his cot. There was enough of a link still left between our minds for me to be momentarily stunned by the resentment billowing through him. He needed to stop, I wanted him to stop—I stilled completely and reached deep into his mind, letting the intention steer me past his memories altogether into the part of his mind that was sparking with heat and drive.

  He froze: muscles, limbs, expression like stone. Clancy didn’t move until I did, and then it was only as a mirror of my actions. It was like plucking strings; each touch against this part of his mind produced a different response in him. I arranged him like I would an action figure, ignoring the pressure of his own mind trying to fight me off.

  This is it—this is what he felt each time he played with one of us. Lightheaded, dizzy with the possibilities.

  I wasn’t where I needed to be, not really—somehow, I needed to redirect myself back into his memories, only I didn’t know how to remove myself from this part of his mind. It was dark, and gripping—

  Mirror. The word sprang into my ears. Clancy’s voice, assertive, forcing me to listen—he knew I couldn’t get out on my own, and he must have been afraid of what damage I could do inside him if he was actively trying to help me. Mirror minds.

  I understood.

  My own thoughts shifted; I squeezed my eyes shut, hands clenched at my sides, as I forced the memory of me walking into the room to rise to the surface. I pulled free from the dark, feeling every bit like I was being physically dragged back by the hair. I was in the hallway again, watching as one by one the windows into his memories were slammed shut. I only had a second, just one, before he recovered—

  “Lillian,” I said, “mother—”

  The trick worked the way it always had. Hearing the words redirected his thoughts, drawing up the one memory he’d been thinking of most recently—the one he wanted to protect.

  I knew what I was looking for, having seen a glimpse of the memory before. At the first appearance of the beautiful woman, her face framed by blond hair, a plea on her lips, I dove in, driving harder than I ever had before. Lillian Gray’s lab took shape around me—objects clicking into place like a puzzle. She’d tried to trick her son in order to bring him in to perform the procedure. She’d leaked her location in Georgia, knowing he’d be able to find her—and he did. I tugged harder on the image, forcing it to pass faster. Her hands were up, pacifying, the words Calm down, it’s going to be okay tumbling out of her. I remembered the splatter of blood on the lapel of her white lab coat, how she’d ended up begging Clancy, no, please Clancy from the floor as he set the world around her on fire, trashed her machines.

  What I hadn’t seen was the way he gripped her neck between his hands. I could actually feel her racing pulse beneath my fingers at the slightest pressure. Oh God—he was going to—

  But instead, my hands drifted up, gripping either side of her face. There were no words to describe what I saw next—reading a mind within a mind, an explosion of memories within a memory. The heat at my back was unbearable, but I was working, holding her still as I twisted, bent, broke every thought the woman had.

  A gunshot broke the connection, pain tearing across my right shoulder. I turned away from the woman’s blank face, letting her crumple to the floor, as two dark figures burst through the door. The glass around her caught the winking light of the fire. The strange, entrancing beauty of it was the last thing I remembered before I ran.

  I was thrown out of his head so hard that I fell back, cracking my skull against the wall behind me. Clancy was on the floor, as far away from me as he could get. His face was turned into the wall, his whole body heaving for breath. The cot was on its side, a barrier between us.

  “Get out,” he snarled. “Get out!”

  This time, I ran. My hands fumbled with the first lock, Clancy screaming those two words at me the whole time. The door opened from the other side and I collided with the person there, struggling to get out of their grip as the door was kicked shut behind me.

  “It’s me, it’s just me—” Chubs hauled me down the short hall, into the old file closet. I clung to his arm, my mind a mess of thoughts and feelings that weren’t even mine.

  My legs gave out before we were in the hall. He jammed the key into the lock and turned it, stopping only long enough to rattle it once to make sure it was secure.

  “Ruby?” he said, his face splitting into two, three, four…We walked briskly toward the end of the hallway, me leaning on him the whole time, trembling with the effort it took to stay vertical. He opened one of the bunk room doors and pulled me inside.

  I slid down the nearest wall, trying to purge the sound of Clancy’s voice with each exhale. Chubs crouched down in front of me, watching me intently. How much of that had he heard? How much of what he’d seen had he actually understood?

  You out-Clancyed Clancy. I never even thought there was a chance I could do that with my abilities. To beat him, I’d managed to become him. And even with all of my promises to do whatever it took to find out about Lillian, I’d somehow never imagined…this. That I was capable of it.

  Don’t think about it. I had what I’d come for. I got the confirmation I needed.

  “She’s still with the League,” I said before he could ask me the question I saw in his face. “They came and took her away at the end.”

  “The First Lady? He definitely didn’t kill her, then?”

  I shook my head. “He did something much worse.”

  By the time I went looking for him, Cole was already gone. Senator Cruz delivered the news when I passed her in the upper-level hallway.

  “He went to meet with a friend who’s still associated with the League to see if they have information about the agents who were arrested,” she said. “He told me to tell you not to worry and that he’d be back tonight.”

  Of course he hadn’t taken a burner phone with him—there was no way to contact him to see if he could pump information about Lillian Gray’s whereabouts from this same “friend.” If she was still with the League, where were they keeping her? She’d been running her research near Georgia HQ with only a few agents assigned for her protection. Would they have brought her to Kansas HQ with the others when they closed the other location?

  I passed by the gym and did a double take at the sight of Zu, Tommy, Pat, and a number of the others trying to fuss around with the exercise machines.

  “Sorry,” Pat ventured, stepping away from the weights. “We were just…doing nothing. And we wanted to do something. Since, you know, we’re going—me and Tommy.”

  “Going?” I repeated.

  Tommy popped up next to him, bright red hair glowing under the bare lights overhead. “We volunteered. For Oasis. Sorry, we voted after you, um, left.”

  Ah. I looked at the two of them, sizing them up. When Tommy squirmed under the scrutiny, Pat smacked his side to get him to stop, forcing his chin up higher. I smiled.

  “Do you want to learn some self-defense?” I asked.

  I’m
not sure if their reaction could have been more enthusiastic if I’d offered candy. The other kids abandoned the machines, darting over to the mats, where I instructed them to line up. I led them through stretches, taught them how to break out of different holds someone might have on them, and demonstrated—repeatedly—how to flip someone over your shoulder if you weren’t a Blue. And hours later, when we were finished, I couldn’t say who was happier with how the day had turned out—me, or them.

  Finally, Cole announced his arrival with three bangs against the tunnel door. I came barreling out of Alban’s old office, abandoning the ancient Op files I’d been looking through, and unlocked it. He gave a guarded, uncertain smile as he came up the stairs.

  “The others are back, too,” he said. “I told them to bring everything around to the garage’s loading dock. Can you gather up the kids to help haul the stuff in? I’ll go ahead and cut the chain so we can get the damn door open—”

  “Cole,” I said sharply as he started to walk away.

  He shuffled to a stop, turning his head slightly. “I’m sorry, Gem. They’re looking for the agents, but they don’t know either. Liam must have contacted Harry behind my back, because he got in touch with me this morning to say he’d ask around. He’s ex-Special Forces and still has a number of buddies in different branches of the military and government.”

  The mention of his stepfather brought a flash of the memory I’d seen in Cole’s mind, and pain stirred in me. The man from his memory, his biological father, smiling down at their mother that way…

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “Thanks for trying.”

  He let out a shuddering breath and forced himself to shrug. “You…okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let me go get the others. I’ll meet you down there.”

  Cold night air filled the warehouse with a crisp, clean scent that reached us in the tunnel. The door at the other end was already open, waiting for us. But the moment I stepped through, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  The whole place looked as though they’d power-washed it for hours on end. They hadn’t been able to actually remove the junk from the building—it might have attracted too much unwanted attention—but they’d somehow fit everything together, using the four walls as the frame of a puzzle. They’d lined up all of the shelving units, made some new shelves out of the broken bunks, and created a workstation with the tools they’d found. The car lift and frame were still at the center of the expansive space, but it looked like they were piecing even that back together. Someone had outfitted it with wheels, at least.

  Two large SUVs and one white van had come up the loading ramp and were parked inside. I jogged over to Liam and Vida as they used their abilities to lift boxes out of the trunks and set them aside.

  Liam looked up as I came over, a familiar smile on his face. He waved the group coming in behind me over. “We’re organizing by type. Set computers and electronics over there—”

  There was an actual, blissful sigh from one of the Greens, which made him chuckle.

  “Food and water goes here. There should be a few bags of clothes, bedding—no, no, leave the stuff in the white van,” he said, jogging over to shut the door. “It’s—Cole’s going to take care of that stuff.”

  Meaning, I’d guess, weapons for our locker.

  Vida was…blank. Her expression didn’t so much as flicker with annoyance as Chubs pelted her with a series of endless questions. I wasn’t sure she was even aware of what she was doing, there was that much of a visible, numb disconnect.

  Zu came to stand beside me, her dark gaze meeting mine in question. I wanted to tell her not to worry about this, that I was coming to see the heavier your heart got, the stronger you had to be to keep carrying it around. But the truth was, all I wanted to do was risk a punch in the face and hug Vida. So, I tried.

  And she let me.

  Her arms stayed down around her sides, pinned there by my tight grip. Slowly, her hands rose and pressed against my back. I smelled dust and the salt of ocean water on her skin, mingling with the exhaust from the cars, and I wished like hell I had thought to volunteer to go instead, so she could have had the day to recover.

  “We are going to fucking get her back,” Vida said fiercely. “I will burn Gray’s house down over his head. If she’s not all right, I’m going to rip out his heart and eat it.”

  I nodded.

  “You really shouldn’t eat raw meat,” Chubs said somewhere beside us. “It can carry pathogens—”

  We both turned to him slowly. He lowered the computer box he’d been holding down to the ground and backed away.

  “The Canadians came through, didn’t they?” Senator Cruz looked around at the haul, strolling between the piles.

  “What are they going to want for this stuff?” one of the kids asked.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Senator Cruz said. “The reparations are still quite a ways off yet. This is what we’d call a favor. Oh—did they not provide gas?”

  “They sent a fuel tank,” Liam said. “We hid it behind the bar, since it wouldn’t fit through this loading dock. I also did not, um, feel super comfortable having a ton of explosive material in here.”

  “Fair point,” Senator Cruz said with a faint laugh.

  “They seem really invested in this. We established a drop site so they can bring things down when they find openings. They gave me this—” He pulled a sleek silver phone out of his pocket. “To make contact when the supplies are ready.”

  “Spray paint?” Chubs asked. “Did you remember to grab that?”

  “What for?” I asked.

  “When we send the cars out to pick up the tribes,” Liam explained, using his hands to add emphasis, “they’re going to mark the safe routes they take with the road code. That way, we can get back in one piece and there’s a chance other kids we don’t know about will catch on and follow the route in.”

  That smile on his face had always been contagious. I bit the inside of my lip; he was looking at me like I was the best damn thing he’d ever seen.

  Ruby can take your memories…

  “Great idea,” I said, glancing away.

  “Yeah…” His voice faltered. “Thanks?”

  The kids were only too happy to cart the load off into the Ranch. Cole stood at the back door of the white van, leaning against it as he watched the progress the kids were making around him.

  “Wait—” I said, catching Chubs and Liam by the backs of their shirts before they could follow Zu and Hina to the tunnel. “We need to talk about something.”

  Cole and Vida must have picked up on the nerves in my voice because they came around into our huddle.

  “I…dealt with Clancy today,” I said. “To find out where his mother is.”

  Cole straightened. “And?”

  “She’d been working out of some facility in Georgia, protected by the agents from the HQ there. They seem to have gotten her out in time. Her lab burnt down, though.”

  “Damn, girl,” Vida said softly. “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. And I doubt they would have let her out of their sight.”

  “You think they’re hiding her in Kansas,” Cole said.

  “It makes sense, doesn’t it? It’s League procedure that when the organization is under attack, remaining forces and resources fall back to a central, safe location. I don’t know that they would risk keeping her in an external location anymore after what happened with Clancy, and I don’t think she’s the kind of prisoner they would have cut loose…”

  “Would they trade her?” Vida interrupted. “A prisoner exchange?”

  “The First Lady?” Cole said. “Not even for a hundred agents. I just don’t understand why they wouldn’t have used her before now—they aren’t exactly shy about using hostages to make demands.”

  “Well…they might not want to put her in front of a camera,” I said.

  “Explain.”

  “Clancy tampered with her mind. Really tampered with it.”

&n
bsp; “Brain voodoo?” Vida clarified. “Awesome. So much for getting any answers.”

  “You want to go get her.” Liam’s voice was quiet, and I could hear the hint of unhappiness in it that went unspoken. “You think you can fix whatever he did.”

  I nodded.

  “You mean you want to send an extraction team into a secure facility, manned by a hundred trained ex-soldiers who specialize in torture and terror…because you have a theory,” Cole said.

  “If she’s not there, then at least we’ll find answers about where she is,” I said. “It’ll be a quick in-and-out. It’s not like we don’t know where Kansas HQ is. Two of us could go, survey the situation. If it seems too dangerous, we’ll back off. It’s worth the risk. If we find her and I can fix her, we’ll have answers about the cure. If not, then…we’ll have someone to trade for Cate.”

  Vida’s interest in the Op shot way up at that. “Promise me that we’ll eventually trade her for Cate, and I’m in. You and me, we can do this. It’s nothing we haven’t done a dozen times before.”

  Chubs groaned, putting a distressed hand to his face. “Don’t tell us that. That makes it worse.”

  “It can’t be Ruby,” Cole said, “she’s needed here. To deal with it.”

  I opened my mouth to protest.

  “Wait—wait, wait, wait—” Liam interrupted, “slow down. A few hours ago you were worried about Agent Conner revealing the location of the Ranch, but what if they spill their guts about Kansas HQ? What if they’ve already packed up and left?”

  “Then we’ll follow their trail,” Vida said. “Though I’ll put a hundred bucks on the smug assholes feeling too invincible and secure to beat a hasty retreat. They’re still there—a hundred bucks.”