In the Afterlight (Bonus Content)

by Alexandra Bracken

  “My favorite color,” I repeated, letting the word take shape in my mind, “is green.”

  The shift came midway through the word. One moment I was being dragged between scenes lasting no longer than a fraction of a second. The next, it felt as if I’d been thrown against a wall of glass shards. I recoiled, physically and mentally.

  “Tell me what your middle name is,” Chubs said.

  “It’s…” The words brought me up closer to the pain, the sharpness of it. This part of her mind was so dark, so unbearably dark. It must have been painful for her every time she tried to speak, to use this part of her mind. He wanted her to hurt. Hurt.

  “What’s your middle name?” he repeated.

  “It’s Elizabeth.” I felt my mouth form the words, but I couldn’t hear them over the rush of blood inside my own head. I have to push through this. This is glass. I have to break it. I have to get through it. Mirror minds.

  “Who were you named after?” Chubs’s questions were keeping me in that part of her mind. Every time I had to stop and think about what he was asking, the pain became slightly more bearable.

  “Grandmother,” I said. “Grams.”

  Grams. Grams. Grams. The person who remembered me. Who I’d be able to find once this was over. I need you. We need you.

  My grip on her tightened to the point where I’m sure my nails dug into her flesh. With one final, deep breath, I pushed against the wall as hard as I could, turning my mind into a bat and slamming against it until I felt it give with a deafening crack. I slid forward, forcing my way through, until it shattered and cut the connection to ribbons.

  “Ruby, what was the name of our van? What did we call it?” Chubs must have been shouting the question to me. His voice was ragged.

  “Black…” I mumbled, my mind in pieces—pain everywhere—agony—“Black Betty.”

  I didn’t slide through, so much as fall past the remnants of the barrier. The world around me exploded into electric blue light—

  When I came around, rising up from the murky pain, I was flat on my back on the floor, Chubs’s anxious face an inch above mine.

  “Okay?” he asked, taking my arm to help me sit up. “How do you feel?”

  “Like I took a flaming knife to the head,” I got out around gritted teeth.

  “You were out for a full minute. I was starting to get worried,” he said.

  “What happened?” I asked, turning toward the bed. “What—”

  Lillian Gray was sitting at the edge of her bed, her face hidden behind her hands. Her shoulders shook, trembling with each gasp of breath.

  She’s crying, I realized, rising up to my knees, I hurt her—

  Her face was red, swollen from the force of her weeping. The air in the room had shifted, a thunderstorm of feeling had rolled back, and what was left was weightless blue sky. When she looked at me, she saw me. Her lips pulled back into a painful smile.

  “Thank. You.” She treated each word like the small miracle it was.

  And then, without warning, I began to cry too. The pressure that had built in my chest gave way with the next heavy breath in, and expelled fully as I released it. I did this. If I did nothing else worthwhile in my life, I helped this woman. I gave her back her voice. I hadn’t broken someone; I’d put them back together.

  “Um…” Chubs began awkwardly. “Should I maybe…er…”

  I stood up, swiping at my face with a laugh. “I’m going to find Cole,” I said. “Can you tell her what’s going on? Make sure everything is okay?”

  I used the hem of my shirt to scrub my face once I was outside of the room, allowing myself a few steadying breaths before I looked in on the gym and office, then the big room, where kids were already sitting down with their plates of macaroni and cheese.

  Right. Dinner. That meant…

  I took the stairs two at a time, bounding down the hall to the kitchen. The kids serving there only shrugged and said Cole had come in and left with two plates. It would have looked too suspicious for me to wait outside of the storage room; I slipped the string I held the key on up from around my neck and glanced back and forth, making sure no one was watching as I went inside and locked it behind me. The overhead bulb swung with the movement of air, and the door behind the shelf unit groaned, not fully shut.

  It was curiosity, more than anything else, that made me step into that narrow hall. It was the first time in days I’d gone to see him—Cole had simply waved me off each time I offered to do it, saying it was better for me to stay away and avoid antagonizing him when he was already furious with me. That he’d been perfectly cordial, with no evidence of trying to influence Cole’s mind.

  Now that she was back, I half expected Vida to be there, watching them from the small window in the door at the other end of the hall—but no. There wasn’t anyone there, making sure Clancy wasn’t running wild inside Cole’s mind.

  If you had told me that Cole and Clancy would have been sitting facing each other on the floor eating, separated by only an inch-thick wall of bulletproof glass…I would have told you to keep your delusions to yourself. But there they were. The two of them, relaxing and talking with the ease of old friends.

  I leaned forward, pressing my ear against the door, catching snippets of conversation.

  “—wouldn’t be any files on it, that’s how confidential it is, the only reason I know it exists still is a PSF account—”

  “—worth it if it means more boots on the ground—”

  “Don’t discount the propaganda they’re releasing—try to use it to get your own message out there. Recruit willing soldiers—”

  Ten minutes went by; fifteen. The elation I felt deflated into something that resembled dread. Not that the two of them were talking—I trusted Cole to take everything Clancy said with the largest grain of salt known to mankind—but that I was agreeing with what I heard.

  “The goal should be to keep as many choices open for the kids as possible, to not let someone sweep in with regulations on how they could or should be,” Clancy continued. “Is the senator even willing to stand up for their right to make decisions about their future?”

  The cure is another way to control us, take decisions out of our hands.

  I stepped back from the door, shaking my head. No—helping Lillian was giving us a choice. We couldn’t make a real decision without knowing what the cure was.

  Then why, all of a sudden, did the past few hours feel like such a mistake?

  “—nothing else you can tell me about Sawtooth?” Cole was on his feet now, taking Clancy’s empty plate from the slot in the door.

  Clancy returned to his cot. There was a new, thicker blanket there now—a real pillow, too. A stack of books beside the bed stood up nearly as tall as the cot. Apparently Clancy had been a very good boy, if Cole had been willing to bring him all of that.

  “You know everything I do. That wasn’t the camp I helped set up—it was the original one in Tennessee,” Clancy said. “Are you ever going to come in, Ruby?”

  I leaned away from the door, but it was pointless. His eyes shifted over to the window and caught mine through the glass. With a deep breath, I unlocked the door and propped it open with my foot. Cole’s hand twitched at his side as he strode toward me. I was starting to have a hard time telling his apprehension apart from his irritation.

  I waited until we were back out in the hallway before opening my mouth.

  “Don’t,” he said, holding up a hand. “I have this under control.”

  “Nothing is ever really under control with him,” I pointed out. “As long as you’re careful…”

  “You’re killing me, Gem,” he said, raking his hand back through his hair. “What is it?”

  “I think you have to see it to believe it.”

  With the others occupied by editing Zu’s interviews and, at Liam’s suggestion, giving their own, Cole and I were left to do the planning for an actual assault on Thurmond. We stayed up through the night rehashing the details. I woul
d go in with the flash drive on February twenty-seventh. On March first, our team of twenty kids and Harry’s forty-odd soldiers would storm the camp at approximately seven in the evening and engage and restrain the PSFs—I would need to get the program uploaded into their servers by a quarter till. The kids would then be brought to a secure location within walking distance of the camp to wait for their parents to retrieve them. Written out step by step, it almost sounded simple. The reality was stark.

  The morning officially began with Cole dropping a large blanket of paper over my head, startling me awake from where I’d fallen asleep at one of the computer room desks.

  “What’s this?” I asked, pulling it away. At least fifteen sheets of paper had been taped together to form a whole, cohesive image of rings of cabins, shoddy brick buildings, a silver fence, and the green wilderness around it.

  I jumped to my feet. “This is Thurmond. How did you get this?”

  In response, he calmly passed me a silver burner phone—there was something grudging in his expression, reluctant. I took it from him, raising it slowly to my ear. “Hello?”

  “Is this Ruby?”

  “Speaking,” I said, watching Cole’s face as he watched me.

  “My name is Harry Stewart—” There was static on the other end on the line, and it only made me grip the phone harder. Harry. Liam’s Harry. His voice was deeper than I expected, but I could hear the smile in it. “I wanted to let you know that last night we conducted an operation—”

  “We?” I repeated dumbly. Nico had come over to stand next to Cole, looking bewildered. I switched the phone over to speaker so that he could hear it as well.

  “One you never cleared with me,” Cole muttered.

  “A group of old, retired army types,” he said with a laugh. “Some new friends, too, who have recently had a change of heart about serving the President. This morning at approximately oh-two-hundred hours, we conducted a raid on a suspected black site prison.”

  My heart actually stopped. I felt it throb, then nothing as I held my breath.

  “It was successful, and we were able to recover a number of suspected traitors and informants.” He said those words—traitors and informants—lightly, a thread of humor in his voice. “We’ve forwarded on what intel we were able to recover from the site as well as from our own sources in the government. We’ll be joining you by the end of the week, but I wanted to let you know that we did get your—”

  His voice was muffled, moving away from the phone. I heard another voice, this one higher—a woman.

  “Lie back down,” I heard Harry say, “I’m glad you’re awake—these gentlemen will explain what happened—yes, you can speak to her in just a moment—”

  My heart was beating crazy fast, I heard it my ears, I felt it down to my toes. There was a scuffle as the phone forcibly shifted hands.

  “Ruby?”

  Nico let out a cry, pressing his hands against his mouth. Hearing her voice—it couldn’t have been real—they—Cate was—

  “Cate,” I choked out, “are you okay? Where are you right now?”

  “Ruby,” she said, cutting me off, “l-listen to me—” Her voice was so rough my own throat ached in sympathy. “We’re okay, we’re all okay, but you have to listen to me, some…something happened with the League, didn’t it? They—”

  I heard Harry in the background saying, “It’s okay, please lie back—”

  Cole braced his hands against the desk. “Conner, what’s going on?”

  “We overheard some of the…the guards posted there, they were taunting us, they said that Kansas HQ’s going to be attacked. None of the agents—none of us can get a hold of anyone there. Can you warn them? Can you give them the message—?”

  “We’ll take care of it,” Cole promised her. Nico had already moved back to his computer station, his hands flying across the keyboard. “You sit tight, Harry’s going to bring you guys back up here.”

  “The agents want to go to Kansas,” she said, her voice strained.

  “Well, they might not have a choice,” Cole said, not unkindly. “Hey, Conner, it’s great to hear your voice.”

  “You too. You taking care of my kids?”

  Cole gave me a small smile. “They’ve been taking care of me.”

  “Ruby?”

  “I’m here.” The words came out of me in a rush. “Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay—”

  “I’m okay. I’ll see you soon, under—understand? I’m sorry—the—connect—out—”

  Dial tone.

  I stared at the device, letting Cole reach over and turn it off. I didn’t have the strength to fight off the numb dejection that bled through me. I needed more than that. She had to know—she had to know how sorry I was.

  “They’re driving through the middle of nowhere,” he told me. “Bad reception. Harry will call again when they get closer.”

  I nodded. “Do you think it’s true? They’re going to attack Kansas HQ?”

  “Their servers are offline,” Nico said. “I just tried to ping them and…nothing.”

  “I’m going to try to make telephone contact with some of the agents who are still out in the field, see if they know.” Cole tucked my hair behind my ear, ran a knuckle down around my cheek. “This is a solid win. Cate’s okay. We have an actual fighting force coming. Two weeks and we’ll be on the other side of this. Focus on that for now. Don’t let this Kansas thing trip you up. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter either way.”

  “Of course it matters,” I said. “So many people have already died—”

  “I get it,” he said, “I didn’t mean it like that, only that the League is done either way. Claiming the hit as their own was a desperate, last gasp for relevancy. Focus on the future. The cure, now that we have Dr. Gray back in working order. Thurmond—” He tapped his fingers on the printout. “Harry went to all that trouble to track this down for us. Let’s put it to good use.”

  He stood, taking the printout with him to tack up on the wall. I stayed where I was until he left, presumably to make good on his promise to investigate Cate’s claims, and then rose, moving toward the satellite images of Thurmond’s grounds, as if in a dream. My eyes traced the rings of cabins—lopsided, uneven rings, apparently. Seeing it from above, like a free bird passing overhead, smoothed out the sick feeling that had started to squirm around in my stomach.

  “It’s much bigger now,” Nico said. I nodded, accepting the permanent markers he handed me.

  He stepped back to lean against the desk and watch. The longer I worked, the more attention I seemed to attract, until I knew I had a full-fledged audience without ever needing to turn around. I labeled each of the larger structures—FACTORY and PSF BARRACKS on the two rectangular-shaped buildings to the left of the rings of cabins, GARDEN on the square of green at the northernmost point of the camp, and MESS HALL, INFIRMARY, and GATE on the right. Then I moved on to the cabins, and marked the circular CONTROL TOWER. Each ring of small cabins was outlined with either the green or blue marker to indicate its inhabitants.

  I felt the focus of someone’s gaze between my shoulder blades like sunlight coming through a lens, burning until I couldn’t ignore the small waves of self-consciousness that began to rise. It was irrational, but it felt like I was revealing something shameful, something I had to be embarrassed about. My mood had slid so quickly from eager excitement to horror and pity that I felt myself start to prickle in self-defense.

  “Are there only Greens and Blues there?” I turned around at Senator Cruz’s question. She stood in the doorway, her arm looped through Dr. Gray’s, who seemed to be trying to come closer. Nico took one look at her, froze, and then fled to the back of the room, almost tripping as he sat back down.

  “There were Yellow, Orange, and Red children,” I answered, looking back at the women, “but they were moved out of the camp about five and a half years ago. The Reds were taken into a training program, Project Jamboree. The Yellows were moved to another camp in Indi
ana that specializes in non-electrical containment.”

  “What about the Orange kids?” Dr. Gray asked.

  My hand stilled, as did the air around me.

  “We have no confirmed reports of their whereabouts,” I said.

  “Where is this?” Dr. Gray’s words were still slightly halting, as if she half-expected them to start failing her again at any moment. She took a step closer, taking in the patches of wild grass and snow. If anyone looked hard enough, they would have been able to see the little dots of blue uniforms working in the Garden.

  “This isn’t Thurmond,” she said. “Thurmond was only one building. I saw it myself.”

  “Once they moved the initial research programs out, they rapidly expanded the camp to house more kids,” I said. “I’ve added a little R, O, or Y next to the cabins they used to reside in. They switched out the non-electrical locks on the Yellow cabins and never changed them back. As far as I know, the Red cabins only had additional spigots and sprinklers inside.”

  Senator Cruz put a hand on my shoulder and she leaned forward, inspecting my work. “Why were the Reds and Oranges in the second ring from the center, instead of in the outermost? If they were going to cause problems, it seems like they’d try to move them as far away from the Control Tower as possible.”

  “They surrounded them on either side with a buffer of Green cabins,” I explained, “so that if they tried to attack the camp controllers, or tried to escape using their abilities, they’d have to burn down a few kids on their way.”

  “Did that ever stop them?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did anyone ever escape?”

  I shook my head again. “The ones who tried were shot before they reached the fence. They kept at least one sniper on the roof of the Control Tower at all times—two if a group was working out in the Garden.”

  “Well, that kills what little faith I had left in humanity,” Cole said, coming back in.

  “Any luck?” I asked him.

  “Nada,” he said. “We’ll talk later. Right now, can you walk us through a typical day? I’m sure you had some kind of a routine, right?”