In the Afterlight (Bonus Content)

by Alexandra Bracken

  There’s a difference between broken and ruined. With one, you can hope to piece the object back together, but the other—there’s just no coming back.

  I pressed my face against my hands, giving up on trying to meet Lillian Gray’s dark eyes as they roved around the senior quarters we’d given her. She’d come into the Ranch yesterday afternoon terrified, and she’d spent the whole of the morning exactly that way, shaking like we’d dunked her into the Atlantic in the middle of January. It was a wonder she hadn’t passed out from exhaustion yet.

  Inside her mind…I couldn’t describe it. There was actually nothing to describe. The first time I’d slipped into her memories, I’d immediately yanked myself back out, dizzy enough that I almost threw up. It was so cluttered, bright flashes of images flashing in no order, speeding by in a quarter of a second—too quick for me to latch onto anything. The intensity of it all was like sitting in a car that jumped from zero to a hundred. It threw me back against my seat, even as I wondered if she was doing it on purpose.

  “Dr. Gray,” I said sharply, trying to drag her attention back to me. “Can you tell me what your first name is?”

  “Naahhmmeee,” she muttered, hands cupping the rim of the baseball cap. “Don’t…good…pale…shade…”

  “God,” Senator Cruz said, covering her face with her hands. “How can the two of you stand it? This poor woman…”

  Cole pushed himself off of where he’d been leaning against the opposite wall. “I think that’s enough for the day, Gem.”

  “But I haven’t made any progress.”

  “Maybe there just isn’t any progress to make,” Senator Cruz offered, a hand on my back. The former First Lady had been the only thing important enough to drag her out of the senior agent quarters she’d been given, away from Rosa. I almost wished she hadn’t come, because it was bad enough feeling disappointed in myself—it was gutting to think I was disappointing her, after all she’d done for us.

  “I haven’t even been trying for two full days,” I insisted. “At least give me another afternoon.”

  Lillian Gray repositioned herself so she was lying down on the small bed, her face turned into the pillow. I could feel the frustration pouring off her, and didn’t try to catch her hand as she slammed it into the plastic-covered mattress over and over.

  I sighed, rubbing my forehead. “All right. We’ll take a break.”

  “How much should we tell the others about her condition?” Senator Cruz asked.

  Vida and Chubs had promised to be tight-lipped, to claim the woman was exhausted and needed rest, if pressed by any of the kids. It only bought me a little time to figure out how to help her.

  Being up-front with the others wasn’t an option that was in the cards for me. If they saw that Lillian Gray, their one shot at deciphering all the research and data we had about the cure, was like…this… it wasn’t going to do anything other than swing them more firmly to Liam’s side. The side that seemed like it was actually doing something.

  From the moment we’d left Los Angeles, Cole and I had banked on having information about the cause and cure of IAAN to prove ourselves to the kids. But three weeks later, we had nothing to show that we’d delivered on our promises. Even the kids we’d pulled from Oasis spent more time in the garage than they did in the Ranch proper. The only time I saw them was when they came to the kitchen to pick up their meals, and even then they brought their food back into the garage to eat.

  “I’m going to turn the door handle around so it locks from the outside,” Cole said. “If we tell the kids to leave her alone, they will.”

  If they ever bother leaving the garage.

  “I’m worried about the agents—Cate,” I said. “What’s the reaction going to be when they realize that the League doesn’t have her to barter with anymore?”

  “The League will keep up appearances as long as humanly possible,” Cole assured me. “And I told you what Harry said. He and a few others from his old Special Forces unit are going to investigate the reports of a black site prison near Tucson. Dustin’ off the green berets, apparently.”

  How Harry had managed to find out about a black site—which by its definition didn’t exist in any formal records—was beyond me. I didn’t want to press Cole on it in front of Senator Cruz.

  “That’s promising,” she said, giving me a faint smile. I shook my head. It was barely anything at all.

  I removed Lillian’s hat and dirty tennis shoes and tried to ease her under the blankets. Her face was gaunt as she looked up at me, but there were still traces of the rare beauty she had been.

  Her eyes narrowed, and suddenly I wasn’t seeing her, but her son.

  “Alban would want you here with us,” Cole told the woman gently. “You have friends here. Friends. Safe.”

  “Alban?” Lillian sat straight up, her legs tangling in the blankets I’d carefully arranged for her. “John?”

  Cole and I exchanged a sharp look, but, just as quickly, she fell back into muttering nonsense beneath her breath. “Hap…the…ang…moh…”

  He moved to the small desk just to the right of the entrance, opening the drawer. “Dr. Gray, we have some things for you to look at after you get some rest. I’m just going to leave them here. They might be a little, uh, difficult. There’s a chart—”

  “Chaaaahrts.” He held them up so she could see and the woman—the reaction was instant. She sat straight up and reached for them. “Cerebellum, pineal body, thalamus, interventricular foramen—”

  The quality of her voice completely changed—it was sharp, almost aware. There was a refined edge to it, too, as if she molded each word on her tongue before she said it.

  “Okaaay,” Cole said, stretching the word out. “That was…unexpected.”

  And then the woman turned over on her other side, and promptly passed out.

  Cole started to move toward the door, but I stayed exactly where I was, staring at her prone form. I’m not sure what made me want to try, only that I’d had enough of a chance to process what I’d seen in her head to suddenly be curious about it.

  “What?” Cole asked, sounding further and further away as I slipped into her mind. The touch was as gentle as I could manage, and instead of trying to navigating the gleaming scenes that popped up behind my eyelids, I let myself be taken along their flow. I saw textbooks stacked high on a desk, young people in clothing decades out of fashion, movies flickering on screens in the dark, test grades; a bouquet of white roses that matched the dress she wore—that I wore—a younger, handsome version of the president waiting for her at the end of a long aisle strung with ropes of flowers; hospitals, machines; playgrounds, baby clothes, a child with black hair sitting at a kitchen table, his back toward me—all of these small moments of memory were cohesive, flowing as smoothly as if I had been guiding them with my own hand. It shifted, then, all of these glimpses into her life—splotches of rainbow color exploded over the scenes, and I was falling backward through white mist, nothing above or below me.

  A dream. She was deep enough in sleep now to relax both her mind and her body. When I pulled back out of her mind and away from her bed, she didn’t stir at all.

  “What?” Cole asked. “What did you see?”

  I saw a mind that worked, that had whole, cohesive memories. And I was more confused than ever.

  “I think…” I began, rising up from my knees, “I need to talk to Chubs.”

  Either anticipating the need, or just by virtue of his own curiosity, Chubs was in the computer room, sitting at one of the empty desks near the front of the room. Tall stacks of thick, intimidating books were piled around him like fortress walls. A few of the Greens had taken the laptops down into the garage to work on Liam’s and Alice’s projects, but Nico was still there, as he always was. He saw me before Chubs did, and by the expression on his face, I knew I needed to talk to him first.

  “Three things,” he said. “First, it’s done.”

  “What we talked about?” I asked him.
/>
  He held up a plain black flash drive on a string around his neck. “All I need is to find a smaller size—one I can use to modify and work into glasses frames.”

  “You’re the best,” I said, meaning it sincerely. Cole had been right—Nico was our man, and not just because he had something to prove.

  He flushed a bit, squirming at the praise, then lowered his voice drastically. “The second thing—the other thing we talked about.”

  “We’ve talked about a lot of things,” I reminded him.

  Nico clicked around, bringing up the now-familiar server log.

  “Someone sent something? Again?”

  “An email, two days ago, the night before you left for Oasis—this IP is from one of the laptops, while it was still here in this room,” he continued. “It went to an address that’s now been deleted.”

  “Maybe someone was making contact with Amplify?” I asked, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

  He shrugged. “Again, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

  My eyes narrowed slightly. “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “It’s just…suspicious. Liam made it sound like they only interacted with Amplify in person, so I’m not sure who would be leaking files to them now, or why. This one only stuck out to me because it was a simple message. Do you think it could have been Cole?”

  “I’ll ask,” I said. “I don’t know how he’s been contacting his stepfather.”

  “This is a pretty secure way of doing it,” Nico said approvingly. “And Liam and the others didn’t hide any of their activity when they sent the media package out last night.”

  “They got it together that fast?” I asked flatly. “Did any of it take with the press?”

  “Well…that’s the third thing.” He clicked into a folder on the desktop, bringing up yet another new window. “All of it is offline now—Gray’s censors shut the major news sites down until they stripped the story, but the photos and video have been popping up on hundreds of message boards, as well as several of the flash sites that Amplify feeds out to the net. They throw up hundreds of versions of the exact same site with different domain names and search terms embedded in the coding, so that at least one of them will pop up depending on the keywords that people are inputting. I did screenshots of everything I could find in case you wanted to see it.”

  He put up the screenshot of CNN’s homepage as an example. The feature not only was on the main page, it took up half of it: tiled photos of the exterior of the camp, the children with their faces blurred coming out of the bunks. Our backs as we ran down the hallway in those last moments, heading for the door. The largest of the photos was of the wall, the dozens of red handprints that, if you were only scrolling by, could have been mistaken for blood. The headline under which everything fell was NO OASIS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT A ‘REHABILITATION’ CAMP.

  “They also showed this video,” Nico said. The moment it loaded, from the very first frozen screen, I knew exactly what it would be of.

  I couldn’t see my face—Alice had filmed it all from behind me, so that she would have a clear shot of the children coming out of the rooms. “My name is—” The audio recording beeped straight through my name. “I’m one of you. All of us here are like you, except the woman with the camera. We’re getting you out of here—taking you to somewhere safe. But we have to move—fast. Fast as you can, without hurting yourselves or anyone around you. Follow them—fast, fast, fast, okay?”

  I gripped the edge of the desk hard enough that Nico leaned back as he said, “I take it they didn’t ask you before they used this footage?”

  “They did not.” And this, too, felt personal—it felt like they were throwing it back in my face. The rest of the video was shots spliced together out of order: the bound-and-gagged PSFs, a close-up of their uniforms, equipment with military decals—smart choices, to try to lend it additional authenticity.

  “From the comments I read on the different message boards, it sounds like at least two major papers picked up the story. By the time I tried streaming the TV news, though, there were already government people analyzing it, pointing things out that supposedly made it fake. Did you know they released a list of kids, too? Individual photographs of them and what their parents did for the Federal Coalition?”

  “I didn’t,” I said, gritting my teeth. “Did Cole see this?”

  “Yeah, he was in here watching with me earlier,” Nico said. “Look, they’re probably all down there patting themselves on the back for this. But the truth is, it didn’t stick. Less than twenty minutes after it went up, Gray scrubbed the web. Not only that, but a number of web hosting companies were taken offline. The comments on the forums—look, like this one?” He pointed to the timestamp. “From early this morning when the news broke.”

  The post read: This is sickening—are they all like this?

  “And two hours later,” Nico said, “the tone of the comments changed.”

  This has to be a hoax. It’s too perfectly put together. I could do this in my backyard with a few actors.

  The post below it read, Then how did they get images of the kids? Old stock images? Old movies?

  Have you never heard of Photoshop?

  “A lot of people don’t think this is real,” Nico said. “Part of the problem is that they—we, I guess—we don’t have a name or identity as a group. We couldn’t claim responsibility for this and then back it up with a history of other information dumps. Amplify is only known for boosting information that’s already been released by third parties; that’s where their name comes from. And even they haven’t had enough big breaks to seem wholly credible to the general population.”

  “But people at least saw the images,” I said. No matter how Nico spun it, that was a small victory. Because now, when others thought of the camps, these images were likely the first thing that would spring to mind.

  “This isn’t going to bring Thurmond down,” Nico said, his dark eyes flashing. “I believe in our plan. It’s the only option.”

  “Thanks, Nico,” I said, squeezing his shoulder. “Keep me updated, okay?”

  He nodded and turned back to his computer, fingers flying over the keyboard. I stood and made my way back over to Chubs. He was partially angled in the direction of Nico’s computer, wearing the expression of someone who’d been pretending not to listen, even as they heard everything.

  “I’m surprised you’re not working in the garage,” I told him, taking the empty seat next to him.

  “I have no idea what you mean by that,” Chubs said, though it was clear that he now had the full picture. Or, at least, Liam’s half of what had happened.

  “I’m sure you don’t,” I said, “but if that’s where you want to be…I can understand you picking Liam’s side. Everyone else did.” Even Zu. Even Zu.

  His hands came slapping down against the desk. “There is one side. That is the side of friendship and trust and love and that is the side that everyone should be on, and I am refusing to acknowledge that any other side could exist. Do you understand?”

  I blinked. “Yes.”

  “Though,” Chubs said. “I am inclined, being co-founder of Team Reality, to think the garage is being overly idealistic about how easily this will play out for them, as evidenced by your discussion with Nico.”

  “What does Vida think?” I asked.

  “Vi is down in the gym right now,” he said, “not in the garage. And she is, by her nature, inclined to the side that involves guns and explosions.”

  I nodded, then motioned toward the books, all of which, now that I was closer, seemed to be medical texts. “Are you trying to figure out what’s wrong with Dr. Gray?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Did you make any progress on that front?”

  I met his weak smile with one of my own. “It’s the weirdest thing,” I told him. “When I tried to look into her mind while she was awake, everything was racing—really intense colors and sounds, and images that moved
so fast. But when I tried again when she was asleep, they were real memories. Coherent, whole.”

  “Were you able to stay in her mind for long—the first time, I mean?”

  “No, it made me feel sick.”

  He nodded, taking that in. “Maybe that was the point. That’s the only way she knows how to keep Oranges out.”

  “That was my thought, too.”

  “It makes sense. If you knew you had a son capable of coming in and making a mess of everything inside of your skull, wouldn’t you try to teach yourself a few ways to block him out—protect yourself?”

  Someone intelligent and determined enough to come up with a cure for this sickness would have taken every precaution against it.

  “So her memories are in there, and they’re not damaged…” Chubs trailed off, running his finger down the side of one of the open textbooks.

  “Where did you get these?” I asked, picking up the nearest brick-like book.

  “A bookstore,” he said, then added quickly, “after hours. Vida took them for me since I was too chickenshit to get out of the car.”

  “I’m glad you stopped,” I said, flipping through its pages. Most of them were on anatomy, but several, including the one he was looking through now, were neuro-this and neuro-that, all with pictures of the human mind on the cover.

  He looked up, an unreadable expression on his face. “Clancy can…he can break into a person’s mind, right? What can he do once he’s inside?”

  I thought about it. “Influence their feelings, keep them frozen so they can’t move, and…project images into their head so they’re seeing something that’s not there.”

  Another voice chimed in. “He can also—” Chubs and I pivoted toward Nico, who looked like he wanted nothing more than to dive back behind the wide computer monitor. “It’s not just…it’s not just that he can make them freeze up. He can move people around. Like they’re toys. I saw him do it to the researchers at Thurmond a few times. He’d jump into their minds mid-conversation to listen to what others were saying. It was really hard for him to keep up. The last time he tried it, he slept a full day to recover. He would get terrible migraines so he had to stop.”