Zu nodded.
“Does that make you angry, knowing that someone is profiting off you that way?”
She took a long time for what should have been a very easy answer: Yes, I’m angry, it makes me furious.
“I don’t know,” she said finally. “Sometimes, yes, it makes me very upset. The price isn’t a reflection of how much my life is worth—how could you calculate that? They take a flat amount, ten thousand dollars, and they increase it based on your abilities and how much potential they think you have to fight back. I think I’m okay with that price, because it shows them I won’t give up and just go with them. It says I’m going to fight to protect myself.”
The screen on the back of the camera showed Alice zooming in for a tighter shot of Zu’s face as the girl continued.
“There are some men and women out there who live for it now, not because they need the money, but because they like it, or they think they’re good at it. It’s messed up. They act like it’s hunting season. But I think…more of them have been forced into it. They need the money to survive. The PSFs have to do it because of the draft. I think if they stopped long enough to think about it, they would see that they’re not really angry with us for what happened. Maybe they’re afraid, but they’re angry at the people who didn’t protect them—the government, the president. They have no power to remove those things from their lives, so they transfer the blame. They act like IAAN was our fault, not something that happened to us. So the economy crashing? Us. Losing their houses? Us.”
Alice started to ask another question, but Zu wasn’t quite finished yet.
“I knew someone like that. He was a good person. Great person. The best. The thing is—if you want to be a skip tracer, you have to prove it. You can’t get into their system or get any of their tech until you turn your first kid in,” Zu explained in an avalanche of words. She twisted the notebook in her hands. “I was driving to California with a group of kids and we were being chased by these two skip tracers—real ones, the hungry ones I was talking about. They made our car flip and crash so bad that one of my friends…he died. They were going to take me, but another skip tracer came in and got me out of the car instead—I was trapped by the seat belt. I should have said that before. I couldn’t get out and run like the others.”
Liam swore loudly. I was too numbed by the account to do anything other than listen.
“Was he one of the ones you mentioned before—he needed to turn one kid in to start? Can you tell us about him?”
Zu nodded. “He was old—not old-old, but definitely in his twenties. Maybe twenty-seven?”
Alice gave a faint laugh. “Twenty-seven’s not so old.”
She shrugged before continuing. “We were in Arizona…I think he must have been from Flagstaff or Prescott, I’m not sure. He was really angry. Something really sad happened to him, I could tell, but he didn’t talk about it. He was someone who just wanted to get out of his life, but he couldn’t do it without money. No matter how many times he told me he was going to turn me in, I knew he wouldn’t.”
“How could you tell?” Alice asked.
Yes, I thought, how on earth could you have trusted this person?
“I told you, he was a good person. He was…really struggling. It ate him up inside. No matter how many times he tried to treat me like I was a freak, he always gave in. There were two chances to turn me over to the PSFs, but he couldn’t do it. Not only did he save me, but he helped save another kid and got him back to the people who were caring for him. He was the one who got me to California.”
The pieces of this were coming together for me now—those people she was talking about were Liam’s parents. That must have been the moment that she crossed paths with Liam’s mom.
“What happened to him?”
“He…his name was Gabe, did I say that? His name was Gabe, and he was…he was really kind.”
“What happened to him?” Alice asked again.
“Gabe died.”
Chubs released the breath he’d been holding, and scrubbed his face with his hands. I’d known how the story ended, but it was still devastating. Seeing her face, hearing those two words…
“What happened to him?” Softer this time, more hesitant. Alice looked back at Liam, as if to ask if it was all right to continue to head down this path. He nodded; he understood too. She wanted to talk about this. I had a feeling she agreed to this specifically so she could talk about Gabe and what he’d done for her.
“The kids I was traveling with before? They beat us to California and were waiting at my—at the meet spot we agreed on. We didn’t know that, though.”
Oh, God…
“Gabe made me walk behind him as we looked around. It was really, really dark—we could barely see anything. When we opened the doors to—to one of the nearby buildings, the other kids were hiding in there. They saw him and recognized him from Arizona, and they thought he had followed them. One of the girls panicked and shot him.”
I looked at Liam the exact moment he looked at me, absolutely stricken.
“He was a good person, and he was just trying to help—it was a mistake, but there was nothing we could do. They thought he was going to hurt them. They didn’t know what I did. He died because he helped me instead of helping himself.”
“That’s terrible,” Alice said, still looking for the right words. “That’s…”
“Everyone is so afraid of each other,” Zu continued. “I don’t want to look at a grown-up and assume they’re thinking of how much they can get for me. I don’t want them to look at me and think of how badly I could hurt them. Too many…too many of my friends are in pain. They’ve been hurt very badly by what they’ve been through, but they’ve taken care of me. That’s the other side of everything. Because there are people who are afraid, and then there are people who are so brave. We only survived being hungry and scared and hurt because we had each other.”
Alice let the camera keep recording for several more seconds before finally switching it off and sitting back. “I think that’ll do for today.”
Zu nodded, standing up and setting the notebook down on her chair, and came straight toward Vida. “Did I do okay?”
Vida held out her fist for a bump. “You killed it, girl.”
Liam was half listening to whatever Alice was saying to him, half listening to hear what was passing between Zu and Vida—he caught me watching him, and instead of looking away, he offered up a small smile. I felt myself return it, but the moment passed as quickly as it had arrived. What was important here was Zu; the small blip of happiness I’d felt at that small cease-fire was nothing compared to the joy soaring inside of me as she talked to Vida, her hands moving to emphasize her words. And as I listened to the sweet way the pitch of it rose as she got excited, a thought began to stir at the back of my mind.
I touched Chubs’s arm to get his attention. “What part of the mind controls speech?”
He came out of his daze like I’d thrown a pitcher of ice water in his face. “It’s a whole system, remember?”
“Right, I understand that. I guess my question is, is there something in your mind that could leave you silent or unable to process words, even if everything else seemed to be working fine?”
Now he just looked confused. “Zu didn’t talk by choice.”
“I meant Lillian,” I said. “Like all of the lights are on in the house, but she can’t get the door unlocked—she can pick up a few words here and there, but she can’t understand us and we can’t understand her. Have you heard of anything like that?”
He thought about it. “I can’t think of the medical term, but it’s been known to happen sometimes with stroke patients. My dad had someone come into his ER once who’d been in the middle of teaching a lesson on Shakespeare and then, two minutes after stroking out, couldn’t communicate at all. It’s…expressive…aphasia? Or is it receptive aphasia? I’m not sure, I need to double-check. One indicates damage in the Wernicke’s area of the brain.”<
br />
“Inglés, por favor,” Vida said, catching the tail end of this. “Unfortunately, you’re the only one here fluent in Geek.”
He snorted. “Basically, we form what we want to say in the Wernicke’s area of the brain, and then that planned speech is transferred to the Broca’s area, which actually carries out the speech. I wonder…”
“What?” I prompted.
“Maybe Clancy managed to…shut down, or somehow numb those parts of her mind? Or depressed them, maybe, so they’re not functioning at full capacity.” He turned a shrewd look on me. “When you restored Liam’s memories, what exactly did you do?”
“I was thinking about…I was remembering something that happened between us,” I said. “I was—” Kissing him. “Reaching out to him somehow, it was kind of…instinctive. I was trying to connect to something in him.” I was trying to find the old Liam I had given up.
Mirror minds.
“Oh,” I said, pressing both hands to my mouth. “Oh.”
“Share with the rest of us,” Vida said, hands on Zu’s shoulders. “Your half is the only half of the conversation I understand.”
“I need to jumpstart her,” I said.
“Excuse me?” Cole said, joining the conversation now. “Who are we giving the shock treatment to?”
“You think you can reset that system in her mind,” Chubs said, understanding. “But…how, exactly?”
“Clancy said something to me the last time I was in his head,” I said. “Mirror minds. I think that’s what happens when I enter someone’s head. I’m mirroring what’s in their mind with my own. When I’m tampering with memories and searching through them, it’s like I’ve set up a mirror between us, and all of those changes I’m imagining into existence are immediately reflected in the other mind.”
“Okay?” Cole said. This was going to be nearly impossible to explain—they had no idea what any of this felt like, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to articulate it.
Thank God for Chubs, though. “So you think that if you engage that part of your mind, it’ll engage that part of her mind, too, and reset it?”
I held up my hands. “Worth a try?”
“More than worth a try,” Cole said. “It’s time we checked in on her anyway—”
There was a bang on the loading dock door—one loud sound that came like a shot through the calm that had settled over the room. Liam jumped to his feet, a grin splitting his face as he jogged to the door. It was the only reason I let myself relax as he and Kylie unhooked the padlock they’d installed there and the door rolled up, rattling like thunder as sunlight spilled in.
I counted off the eight kids as they came in, each somehow looking worse than the next; filthy, in a variety of mismatched knits. We could smell them from where we were standing, which Cole chose to note with raised brows and an expression I’d seen Liam wear a dozen times.
I recognized the new faces, but I hadn’t been in Knox’s camp in Nashville long enough to assign them names from memory. The kids there had been so hopeless, left with next to nothing by way of supplies because Knox and a few of the others had taken everything they brought in for themselves. Now this group only seemed to be in slightly better shape. Between them, they had a few backpacks and makeshift bags tied together from old sheets. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought they walked from Nashville.
Liam had reached up to start pulling the door down, but stopped, leaning out to wave the last two in. One, a tall blond girl, stopped to clasp a hand on his shoulder. The other, an even taller guy wearing a bright red-checked hunting hat, dropped his backpack and stretched.
Olivia, I thought. Brett.
And sure enough, Kylie and Lucy rushed forward with a cry of “Liv!”
The girl turned toward them and the other two were brought up short, actually skidding against the cement at the full sight of her face. One side of it had been burned by Mason, the Red that Knox had kept prisoner in his camp, and had scarred badly as it healed.
“Got a makeover,” she said in a light voice, “as you can see. Hi, Ruby.”
Brett was there in an instant, running a hand down her long braid to rest against her lower back.
I crossed the last few feet between us. Despite the fact that neither of us were particularly warm, cuddly people, I hugged her like it had been years, not a month, since we’d parted ways. “It’s good to see you,” I said. It really was. “You too, Brett.”
“Feeling’s mutual,” he assured me. I stepped back, letting Kylie, Lucy, and Mike approach her, hug her, bring her more firmly into the fold. “So this is Lodi, huh?”
“This is it,” Liam confirmed. “We’ve been busy. Did you catch the news today? We did the camp hit I mentioned to you before.”
“You did it?” Olivia said, blinking. “I remember you mentioning it, but…”
She exchanged a confused look with Brett.
“It was all over the radio as we were coming in,” Brett said. “You guys do know that the Children’s League is taking credit for it…right?”
And just like that, the wind went completely out of Liam’s sails—in fact, the air itself seemed to have been sucked completely out of the garage. It was Cole who walked over to the workstation, sending the kids standing there scattering as he switched on the radio.
We’d caught the male radio host mid-sentence. “—we’ve just received the following statement made by representatives of the Children’s League—”
I looked down at my boots, hands on my hips. Senator Cruz and Rosa came rushing in from the tunnel, Nico right behind them. The woman’s face was pale as she opened her mouth to call out to us. The grave voice coming through the speaker prompted her news.
“‘Early yesterday morning we carried out an assault on one of Gray’s rehabilitation camps located in Oasis, Nevada. We have taken the victims of his cruelty, the children interned there, and will release them only following the president’s immediate resignation. Should these demands not be met, we will strike our next target.’ Powerful words. If you’re just tuning in, we have a breaking news update about the images and video released this morning by several noted papers…”
“They can’t do this!” Zach shouted over the chatter buzzing around us. “They had nothing to do with it! They’re making us look like terrorists—”
“Is this real?” Senator Cruz asked Cole. “Would they claim responsibility for it? Or is Gray trying to pin it on them to justify another attack on them?”
“I think they’re claiming credit,” I said feeling a need to inject a calm voice into the panicking fray. “Gray doesn’t need another excuse to attack them, and he’s been scrambling to float the theory that everything was doctored. I guess it doesn’t matter, though. The League has the target on their backs now, not us.”
Cole managed to wrangle his smug look—or at least dampen it somewhat. “Well, y’all have succeeded in putting another undeserved feather in their cap. But Ruby’s right. This is a good thing for us.”
The anchor continued, undaunted. “—fifteen Psi Special Forces officers sustained mild injuries and were treated on-site. All declined to comment on the treatment of the children and the rehabilitation camp when questioned before the arrival of ranking military officials. As of yet there has been no response from President Gray, and Washington remains silent.”
The unspoken words trickled through my mind. But not for long.
Lillian was not only awake when we unlocked the door and came in, she was pacing the length of the room in the dark. She’d left all of the lights off, save for the one at her desk. Compared to earlier, she looked a little more presentable. Someone, likely Cole, had brought her wipes to clean off her face, a hairbrush, and a clean set of sweats. I’d seen her in press clippings wearing the costume of a First Lady—suits, perfectly coiffed hair, pearls—and I’d seen her in Clancy’s memory as a scientist, crisp and clinical in her white lab coat. Here, dressed like this, she could have been anyone. And that made it easier to approa
ch her—easier to do what I had to.
“Hi, Dr. Gray,” I said. “Do you remember me and Chu—Charles?”
Vida and Cole had both wanted to watch, but I’d been worried about overwhelming Dr. Gray with too many people around her. I needed her calm, or at least calmer than she had been while dealing with me before.
The woman mumbled something to herself as she continued that careful stride back and forth, back and forth, not breaking pace as she glanced over at her bed and the papers strewn over it. Suddenly, she stopped and pointed at them with urgency, her mouth struggling around each sound she was trying to make. Her entire body shook with her frustration as she pressed a hand against her throat, rubbing it.
In that moment I understood. Clancy hadn’t just wanted to silence her from being able to tell others about the cure. He wanted to punish her, in the exact way he knew would hurt her the worst. He’d taken her brilliant mind and trapped her inside of it.
“That’s right, we want to talk about the research you did.”
“Chhaaaa—” She swallowed and tried again, looking as humiliated as I’d ever seen a person. I had to fight the urge to take her hand when she raised it toward us. “Chaaaart.”
“Right, the charts.” I carefully took her shoulders and guided her toward the bed. I don’t know if she remembered what had happened the last time I was in here with her, but she didn’t struggle until I tried to force her to sit.
“Ruby,” Chubs said. “Are you ready?”
Her shoulders bunched up, the muscles tightening beneath my hand. She was already preparing herself. She knew what I was.
Diving into her mind the second time was no less painful than the first. Dr. Gray turned her memories into a roaring river I couldn’t cross—a stream of landscapes, homes, roads, children’s toys, textbooks, flowers, silverware—anything and everything she could think of to protect the important memories.
But we were connected. That was all that mattered.
“Ruby.” Chubs was standing behind me, I knew that, but it sounded like he was talking to me from outside in the hall. “Ruby, what’s…er…your favorite color?”
In the Afterlight (Bonus Content) Page 32
