Never Fade tdm-2

by Alexandra Bracken

  Right away, I could see that the hallway hadn’t been an accurate predictor of what the rest of the building’s structure would look like. It was as though they had finished the entry and either ran out of funds or decided it was pointless to keep going. The general look of the place was what you’d expect walking through a half-finished construction site. The walls were exposed gray cement blocks, braced by metal supports. The floor was painted cement. Everything was cement, everywhere, all the time. I might as well have been back in Thurmond for how welcoming the place looked.

  The ceilings hung low overhead, crowded with pipes and brightly wrapped electrical lines. And while HQ was nowhere near as dark as the Tube had been, without any kind of natural sunlight flooding in, the flickering fluorescent lights cast everything in a sickly, anemic glow.

  The most interesting thing about HQ was its shape; the door from the entry opened up directly in front of a large, circular center room that was enclosed by curving glass walls. The hallway we stood in formed a ring around that room, though I could see at least four different hallways that branched out from it in straight lines.

  “What is he?” My eyes kept darting to the right as we walked, watching the figures milling around the big room. Inside was a handful of TVs mounted to the walls; below them were what looked like round cafeteria tables and an assortment of League agents playing cards, eating, or reading at them.

  The curving hall wasn’t tight, but it wasn’t enormous, either. Anytime more than one person tried to pass by us, heading in the opposite direction, one of us had to fall back to allow the other person room.

  The first two agents we encountered, young women in army fatigues, confirmed another suspicion: my story had beaten me here. They were all friendly smiles as their eyes met Cate’s, but when their eyes shifted down to me, they stepped around us and continued at a brisk pace.

  “What is he?” I repeated. Seeing confusion cloud Cate’s pale blue eyes, I clarified. “What color?”

  “Oh. Nico’s Green—incredible with tech. It’s like he processes everything as a program. Vida’s Blue. Jude is Yellow. This is the only team that has a mix of abilities. The others are strictly all one color each, and they serve different support functions on Ops.” The overhead lights turned her blond hair a pearly white. “You’re the only Orange here now.”

  Great. We were the goddamn Rainbow Connection. All we needed was a Red to complete the deck. “So you got stuck with all the leftovers when the other teams filled up?”

  Cate smiled. “No. I just chose carefully.”

  We finally exited the outer ring, ducking down one of the straight hallways. She didn’t say a thing, not even to the clusters of agents that squeezed by us as they passed. Their eyes followed us all the way to a door marked with Cate’s name, and every single time it felt like jagged fingernails down my spine.

  “Ready?” she asked. Like I had a choice.

  There’s something really personal about seeing someone’s bedroom, and at the time—even now—it made me uncomfortable to see the little knickknacks she had smuggled in. The room was cramped but livable—compact but, surprisingly, not claustrophobic. A cot had been tucked into one corner, and behind it, Cate had tacked up a dirty patchwork quilt. The pattern of bright red and yellow daisies punched through even the worst of the fabric’s stains. There was a computer on the card table serving as her desk, a purse, a lamp, and two books.

  And everywhere, there were pictures.

  Finger-paint drawings, shapes of people smeared into life by little fingers. Pencil portraits of faces I didn’t recognize. Charcoal landscapes looking just as stark as life below ground. Photographs of warm faces and snowy mountains were taped up in neat rows, too far for me to see each beautiful, glossy detail. Not to mention the three bodies in the way.

  A tall, whip-thin kid was somehow pacing the two feet of space between the desk and the cot, but he jerked to a stop at our entrance, swinging his head of reddish-brown curls our way. His whole face beamed as he threw himself at Cate, locking his pencil-thin arms around her shoulders.

  “I’m so glad you’re back!” His voice broke in relief.

  “Me too,” she said. “Jude, this is Ruby.”

  Jude was all bones and skin, and it looked like he had grown something like five inches in five days. He wasn’t a bad-looking kid by any means; it was just readily apparent that he hadn’t finished baking. There’d be time for him to grow into his long, straight nose, but the big brown eyes—those were like something out of a cartoon.

  By the look of him, he was thirteen, maybe fourteen, but he moved like he was still mystified by how to control his newly long limbs.

  “Nice to meet you!” he said. “Did you just get back? Were you in Virginia this whole time? Cate said that you guys got separated and she was so worried that something had—”

  The kid didn’t let one word finish before starting the next. I blinked, trying to twist away from his embrace.

  “Judith, girlfriend looks fresh out of cuddles,” came a low voice somewhere past his shoulder. “Unclench.”

  Jude backed off immediately, letting off a nervous laugh. “Sorry, sorry. It is nice to meet you, though. Cate told us a lot about you—that you were in the same camp as Martin?”

  There was a weird twinge in his voice when he said the other Orange’s name. His pitch went up, cracking on the word.

  I nodded; he knew what I was, then. And he’d still touched me. What a brave, stupid kid.

  “That’s Vida on the bed over there,” Cate said, nudging me toward the other girl.

  I must have taken a step back; the force of her gaze made me feel like I had been shoved into the nearest corner. I don’t know how I had missed her sitting on the cot, arms and legs crossed with total and complete indifference. But now that I was seeing her, I felt myself shrinking back just that tiny bit.

  She was honest-to-God lovely, some perfect mix of ethnicities—her skin a glowing brown that reminded me of a warm autumn afternoon, almond-shaped eyes, hair dyed an electric blue. It was the kind of face you’d expect to see in a magazine: high, bold cheekbones and full lips that seemed always fixed in a small smirk.

  “Hi. Nice of you to finally drag your ass in.” Her voice was loud, rich, and every word felt like it was punctuated with a slap. When she stood up to hug Cate, I felt two inches tall and as solid as air.

  Instead of reclaiming her seat, she stayed standing, inching in front of Cate so that she stood between us. I knew that stance. How many times had I taken that position in front of Zu, or Chubs, or Liam? How many times had they done it for me? With her back to the woman, Vida studied me closely. “You poor thing. Just follow me and you’ll be fine.”

  It’s like that, is it? I thought, bristling at her tone.

  When she looked back at Cate, it was all sweetness again. Her dark skin had an unmistakably happy glow.

  “That’s Nico in the corner,” Vida said, taking over the introductions. “Dude, can you unplug for two seconds?”

  Nico was sitting on the floor, his back to Cate’s tiny dresser. He looked small to me somehow, and I immediately saw what Cate meant when she had used the word delicate. It wasn’t his stature or his build, both of which were slight, but the tense lines of his face. A stray strand of raven-black hair escaped from the clutches of the gel cementing his comb-back as he said, “Hi. Nice to meet you.”

  And then he dropped his eyes to the small black device in his hands, his fingers flying over the keys. The device cast his tan skin an unnaturally bright white, highlighting even his near-black eyes.

  “So, what’s your story?” Vida asked.

  I tensed, one arm crossing over the other in a mimic of her stance. And I knew, without any doubt, that if this was going to work—if I was going to live with these kids and see them and train with them—then there needed to be distance. The one thing the past few weeks had driven into me over and over was the more you got to know someone, the more you inevitably came to care about him
or her. The lines between you became blurred, and when the separation came, it was excruciating to untangle yourself from that life.

  Even if I had wanted to tell them about Thurmond, there was no way to put that kind of pain into words. No way to make them understand, not when just the thought of the Garden, the Factory, the Infirmary was enough to choke me with anger. The burn stayed in my chest and lingered there for days after, the same way the bleach used to blister our hands in the Laundry.

  I shrugged.

  “What about Martin?” Jude asked. His fingers twisted around one another, wringing his hands pink. “Are we going to have five on our team?”

  Cate didn’t miss a beat. “Martin was transferred to Kansas. He’ll be working with the agents there.”

  Vida swung back toward her. “Really?”

  “Yes,” Cate said. “Ruby will be taking his place as team leader.”

  It was over that quickly. Whatever fake pleasantries Vida had managed to summon up for Cate went out with a single, sharp breath, and in that second, I saw the flash of betrayal. I saw her physically swallow the words down and nod.

  “Wait, what?” I choked out. I didn’t want this—I didn’t want any of this.

  “Cool! Congrats!” Jude gave me a friendly punch to the shoulder, pushing me out of my daze.

  “I know you’ll all help Ruby feel welcome and show her the ropes,” Cate said.

  “Yeah,” Vida said through her teeth. “Of course. Anything she wants.”

  “Let’s go get dinner together,” Jude said in a bright voice. Totally and blissfully ignorant of the way Vida’s fists were clenching and unclenching at her sides. “It’s pasta night!”

  “I have to check in with Alban, but the four of you should go—then you can show Ruby where the bunks are and get her settled in,” Cate said.

  No sooner had I stepped out the door and shut it behind me than I felt someone grab my ponytail, wrench me around, and throw me up against the nearby wall. Black stars exploded in my vision.

  “Vida!” Jude gasped. The outburst was enough to get even Nico to look up.

  “If you think for one fucking second that I don’t know what really happened, you’re wrong,” Vida hissed.

  “Get out of my face,” I snapped.

  “I know that story about Cate losing you is bullshit. I know you ran,” she said. “I will tear you to shreds before you hurt her again.”

  “You don’t know anything about me,” I said, feeding off her anger in a way I didn’t expect.

  “I know everything I need to,” Vida spat out. “I know what you are. We all do.”

  “That’s enough!” Jude said, taking my arm and pulling me back. “We’re getting dinner, Vi. Come or don’t come.”

  “Have a lovely fucking meal,” she said in her sweetest voice, but the fury that radiated off Vida’s form cut through the air between us and closed around my neck like a fist. Like a promise.

  I’m not sure why the ring of empty tables around us bothered me as much as it did. Maybe it was the same reason Jude felt like he had to talk through the entire meal to make up for their silence.

  We had only just sat down at one of the smaller circular tables when a number of agents and other kids got up from theirs. They either took their trays and left the atrium completely, or they squeezed themselves onto one of the already full tables farther away. I tried telling myself it wasn’t because of me, but there are some thoughts that live in your mind like a chronic disease. You think you’ve finally crushed them, only to find them morphing into something newer, darker. Of course they’d get up and leave, a familiar voice whispered in my ear. Why would they ever want to be around something like you?

  “—is where we eat and hang out if we have some downtime. After Mess hours they clean everything up so you can come in and play cards or, like, Ping-Pong, or even just watch TV,” Jude said around a mouthful of lettuce. “Sometimes an agent brings back a new movie for us to watch, but I mostly stay downstairs in the computer lab—”

  It was bizarre and sort of dizzying to be in the circular-shaped room, and the feeling was intensified by having ten televisions in eyeshot at all times. Each was tuned to the single surviving national news channel—it turns out when you’re willing to jump into the president’s pocket, you find quite a bit of money there—or giving us a riveting view of silent static. I didn’t have the stomach for whatever horrors of the day the anchors were trotting out. It was a much more interesting game to see which new arrival to the atrium broke away to which table. The kids, after they picked up their food from the buffet tables, flocked toward the other kids. The beefier guys that were probably ex-military sat with all the other guys with the exact same look, with only a few female agents scattered in there for some variety.

  I was so focused on counting the women off that I didn’t notice Cate at all until she was standing directly behind Jude.

  “Alban would like to see you,” she said simply, reaching over to take my tray.

  “What? Why?”

  Jude must have mistaken my revolted look for one of fear, because he reached over and patted my shoulder. “Oh, no, don’t be nervous! He’s really nice. I’m sure…I’m sure he just wants to chat, since it’s your first day. That’s probably all it is. A one-and-done kind of thing.”

  “Yeah,” I mumbled, ignoring the note of jealousy I detected in his voice. Apparently being summoned wasn’t a typical thing. “Sure.”

  Cate led me out of the atrium and back into the hall, leaving my tray on a waiting cart beside the door. Instead of taking a right or left, she guided me toward a door on the opposite wall I hadn’t noticed before, half dragging me down the stairwell behind it. We bypassed the second level, winding down and around to the third. I was happier from the second she shouldered the door open. It was warmer, dryer than the creeping dampness of the upper floors. I wasn’t even bothered by the smell of static and hot plastic as we passed the large computer room that sat where the atrium did on that level.

  “I’m sorry about this,” Cate said. “I know you must be exhausted, but he’s so eager to meet you.”

  I clasped my hands behind my back to hide the way they’d started to shake. On the flight over, Cate had tried to paint a noble portrait of Alban as a gentle man of true intelligence—a bona fide American patriot. Which was, you know, a little at odds with everything else I’d heard about him: that he was a terrorist who’d coordinated more than two hundred strikes against President Gray around the country and killed a good number of civilians in the process. The evidence was everywhere—agents had tacked up newspaper articles and newscast screen shots on the walls, like the death and destruction were something to be celebrated.

  This was what I knew about John Alban from personal experience: he’d formed an organization called the Children’s League but was only willing to break kids out of camps whom he saw as powerful. Useful. And that if the man was one to hold a grudge, there was a decent chance I’d be punished for making that plan as difficult as possible for him.

  We walked to the other side of the loop. Cate tapped her ID against the black pad there, waiting for the beep. A part of me already knew to hope it wouldn’t flash green.

  There was no trace of heat left as we made our way down the cement stairs. The door slammed shut behind us on its own, sealing with a sucking noise. I turned back, startled, but Cate gently nudged me forward.

  It was another hallway, but different than the ones I’d seen upstairs on the first level. The lights here weren’t as powerful and seemed set on a flickering loop. One look was all I needed to rear back, my heart climbing into my throat. This was Thurmond—this was a piece of what it had been to me. Rusted metal doors, solid cinder-block walls only broken up by small observation windows. But this was a prison with twelve doors instead of dozens, with twelve people instead of thousands. The rancid smells tinged with a hint of bleach, the barren walls and floors—the only difference was that the PSFs would have punished us if we’d tried banging a
gainst the doors the way the prisoners currently were. Muffled voices were begging to be let out, and I wondered, for the first time, if any of the soldiers had felt the way I did now—sick, like my skin was tightening over the top of my skull. I knew exactly when their faces found the windows and their bloodshot eyes followed us to the end of the hall.

  Cate tapped her ID against the lock on the last door to the left, turning her face down into the shadows. The door popped open and she pushed it in, motioning toward the bare table and set of chairs. The hanging bulb was already on, swaying. I dug my heels into the tile, pulling away from her.

  “What the hell is this?” I demanded.

  “It’s all right,” she said, her voice low and soothing. “We use this wing to hold assets or rogue agents we’ve brought in to question.”

  “You mean, interrogate them?” I said.

  No, I thought, the realization blooming like black spots in my vision. Martin interrogated them. I’m going to interrogate them.

  “I don’t…” I began. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want any of this.

  “I’ll be here with you the whole time,” Cate said. “Nothing will happen to you. Alban just wants to see what your skill level is, and this is one of the few ways we can show him.”

  I almost laughed. Alban wanted to make sure he had made a good deal.

  Cate shut the door and drew me into a seat at the metal table. I heard footsteps and started to rise, only to be guided back down. “It’ll just be a few minutes, Ruby, I promise.”

  Why are you so surprised? I asked myself. I knew what the League was, what they were about. Cate told me once it had been founded to expose the truth about the kids in camps; funny, then, how far off-message they’d traveled. I’d been here for less than a half a day, and even I could see that in five years, all they’d managed to accomplish was turn a few kids into soldiers, capture and interrogate people, and bring down a few key buildings.