In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

Not happy to see me, are you?

  “I have to tell you something....It’s...” I hoped she’d think the trembling quality in my voice was fear, not anger on the verge of exploding. “I don’t trust Cole with this.”

  That had her interested. Her teeth flashed in the dark.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  This time, I smiled. And when I slammed into her mind, I didn’t care if it broke apart. I ripped through memories of bunks, training, HQ, agents, tossing the images aside faster than they could solidify in my mind. I felt her jerk, tremble under the force of my attack.

  I knew when I had what I was looking for. She had imagined it so vividly, plotted it all out with a malicious efficiency that even I’d underestimated. Everything about the idea had an unnatural luster to it, like warmed wax. Cars dripped into the scene, faces I recognized as belonging to the kids upstairs were half-hidden by gags. Dust-colored military fatigues. Black uniforms. A trade.

  I was gasping for air by the time I surfaced, unable to get oxygen into my chest deeply enough. I had just enough thought to twist her memory, to plant a false one in the place of the last few minutes. I didn’t wait for her to recover, pushing past her to get to the ladder.

  Cole—my mind was firing too fast, black fading into my vision. I have to tell Cole.

  And I had to get away from the agent before I gave in to the terrifyingly real temptation to put a bullet in her right here and right now.

  Because it wasn’t enough for her to withhold food, to levy threats about leaving us behind if we weren’t quieter, didn’t move faster, didn’t keep up with the rest of them. She wanted to be done with us once and for all—to hand our leashes off to the one group she thought could actually control us.

  And she wanted the reward money we’d bring in to fund her next strike.

  BY THE TIME I REACHED the second level of the warehouse, my chest was on fire and my head was a tangle of dark thoughts and dread. The fire escape rattled as Sen started climbing after me, and I couldn’t get through the window—away from her—fast enough. Brushing aside the dark Ops jacket they’d hung up to block the weak interior light from the street, I slid my legs over the ledge and dropped inside.

  My eyes frantically jumped from one flickering puddle of candlelight to another, skipping over the dark spaces in between. Every single kid seemed to be huddled in the far corner of the room, as if Gates and Ferguson had backed them into it in exchange for food.

  No Cole, I thought, raking a hand back through my hair. Dammit. I needed him. He had to know—we had to figure this out.

  “A little appreciation would go a long way,” Gates sneered. It was like his words had disturbed a thick layer of dust in the silent room. Voices immediately floated up in quiet, quick thanks before the kids settled themselves back down again, eyes only on the floor or each other. I saw now what I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself before. In the end, all of the months—years—we’d spent training with the agents, and fighting alongside them...it all came to nothing the second they convinced themselves we were checks waiting to be cashed in.

  I found the three faces I was looking for. Vida was back from her own scouting, a nasty cut marring her deep bronze skin, which Chubs was trying to bandage. Next to him was a black backpack. I bit my lip, trying to keep the relief I felt to myself. Inside was the research I’d rescued from Clancy’s attempt to incinerate it—the sheets of graphs and charts and medical gibberish his mother had put together in her search for a cure for IAAN.

  “Grannie, I swear to God, if you don’t lay off the fucking fussing—” Vida hissed.

  “Let me just disinfect it!” I heard him protest.

  Liam sat with his back against the wall, knees up, arms resting on them. He was watching Gates out of the corner of his eye with the same hard expression he’d had ever since the attack. He didn’t reach for the food, but simply passed it on to Chubs when it came into his hands.

  The agents would turn them in, too. What if I hadn’t seen those agents tonight—stopped and actually listened to what Sen and the others were saying? They were going to blindside us with it, set the deal up in advance over the next few days. There wouldn’t have been time for me to do anything. Why did I think I could protect all of them? I couldn’t even protect one kid, not when it mattered most. Jude—

  Sen knocked against my shoulder as she swept into the room behind me. I barely felt it.

  I was above ground, I knew it, but it didn’t matter—right now, I was in a tunnel, blindly squeezing my way through the collapsed walls threatening to crush us. Chased by distant screams, unseeing eyes, and the roar of cement splintering; earth pouring down, smothering everything in its path. The face floating in front of my closed eyes was freckled, his doe-brown eyes wide as he watched his own life end. I saw all of those things, and nothing stopped them. No good memory was strong enough to wipe away how I imagined it must have been. How Jude had slipped away forever in the dark.

  I felt myself disconnect. Every nerve in my body lit up, every part inside of me was racing, picking up speed. The pressure inside of me built until I was sure I was going to be crushed by it, and the thought that everyone around me would witness it made everything ten times worse.

  The touch at my waist was gentle enough that I didn’t register it at first, but steady enough to turn me toward the door—strong enough, even, to keep me upright when my knees buckled at that first step.

  Outside of the shrinking room, the hallway was at least ten degrees cooler. Quiet and dark enough that my skin didn’t feel like it was bubbling up at the touch of fire in my veins. I only went a few steps down the hall, just enough to be out of the line of sight from the door, before I was carefully lowered down and maneuvered so my head was between my knees. Familiar hands slid the jacket off my shoulders, lifted my hair away from the sweat drenching the back of my neck.

  “You’re okay, darlin’,” Liam’s voice was saying. Something cool touched my neck—a bottle of cold water, maybe. “Just take a deep breath.”

  “I—I can’t,” I said between shallow gasps.

  “Of course you can,” he said calmly.

  “I have to—” I brought my hands up, clawing at whatever cord was wrapped around my windpipe. Liam took them in one of his own, holding them flat against his chest.

  “You don’t have to do anything right now,” he said softly. “Everything is okay.”

  It’s not, you have no idea, I wanted to say. A sharp ache pierced my right temple, throbbing harder and harder with each passing second.

  Touching him did help. I forced myself to match my breathing with the rise and fall of his chest. The cold air worked slowly to untangle the mess of thoughts knotting into a headache at the front of my skull. The pressure eased its grip enough for me to straighten and lean back against the wall.

  Liam was still crouched down in front of me, blue eyes searching my face. The wrinkles in his brow smoothed out as he released a small breath of his own. He took the water bottle and poured some water on the bandana he’d pulled out of his back pocket. Slowly, tenderly, he wiped the blood and dirt from my hands and face. “Better?”

  I nodded, taking the water bottle for a sip.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?

  “I just...” I couldn’t tell him. He and Chubs had been planning for days to find a way for us to slip away from the others when the time came to leave the city. What little hate he carried in him was aimed squarely at the agents. If he knew, he’d try to get us to leave tonight. Or, worse, he might accidentally tip the agents off. He’d never been able to guard his feelings the way Cole did. They’d read him like the day’s newspaper and dispose of him just as quickly to avoid him stirring up the other kids. “I just got...overwhelmed.”

  “Has it been happening a lot?” Liam sat cross-legged in front of me.

  God. I didn’t want to talk about these
attacks, either. I couldn’t, not even with him. Then I’d have to talk about Jude, about what happened, about everything we hadn’t had the time to talk through before things went to hell. He seemed to sense that, at least.

  “You’ve been gone all day,” he said. “I was starting to get worried.”

  “It took a while to find someone I could use,” I said. “I wasn’t just out there running around being reckless.”

  “I didn’t say you were,” Liam said. “I just wish you had told me you were heading out.”

  “I didn’t think I had to.”

  “You don’t have to. I’m not your keeper. I was scared, okay?”

  I said nothing. This was how it was between us now. Together, but not in the way that was important—the way we were only months ago. After I’d betrayed his trust so badly, I wasn’t sure it could be like that again. And it didn’t help that I could feel myself falling back on the only way I knew how to cope—wrestling with the thoughts inside of my head, trapping them there so they wouldn’t infect anyone else. I’d carefully constructed this invisible wall between us, brick by brick, even as I hugged him, gripped his hand in mine, kissed him.

  It was so selfish, I knew it was, to take even that much when I wasn’t giving everything back to him...but I needed him here. I needed the presence of him at my back, at my side. I needed to see his face and hear his voice and know that he was safe and I could protect him. That was the only way to get through each day.

  But it was impossible to clamp down or compartmentalize things around Liam. He was a talker. He felt things more deeply than anyone I’d ever met. He’d been trying to start these conversations with me for days. You aren’t responsible for what happened to Jude. About what happened in the safe house...

  “Ruby, seriously, what happened?” he asked, his hands loose around my wrists.

  “Sorry,” I whispered, because what else could I say? “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so...I didn’t mean to bite your head off. Nothing’s going on. I should have told you, but I had to leave in a hurry.” And I knew you’d try to tell me it was too dangerous and I didn’t want to argue. “But I got what we needed. I know how to get us out of here.”

  His lips compressed into a tight line as he studied me. Liam didn’t seem satisfied in the least with that answer, but he was all too willing to drop the topic in favor of another one. “Does that mean we can finally talk about what comes next?”

  “Cole isn’t going to let us go.” Especially not you.

  “We could look for my parents—”

  “Isn’t it just as dangerous to drive around aimlessly, looking for your mom and Harry, as it is to stay with the others?” I asked. “This is our fight...what we wanted all along, remember? Cole made a deal with me that we’d actually focus on helping kids now—freeing the camps.”

  At least, it was what we had wanted while we were at East River. Liam had been the one behind the wheel then, steering us all in the direction of getting the kids out of the rehabilitation programs. Maybe it was foolish of me to hope that what had happened there wouldn’t affect his dream. But sure enough, his eyes drifted over to the door down the hall that only Cole and I were allowed to enter, to the monster waiting inside.

  “Cole says that now, and the agents might be playing nice for once,” Liam said. “But how long before they’re back to their own agendas?”

  I tried not to wince. Sooner than you think. “This isn’t the League anymore.”

  “Exactly. It could be worse.”

  “Not if we’re here to keep it from becoming that,” I said. “Can we at least give it a little while? See what happens? If things head south we can get out, I promise. If nothing else...I have to see if Cate and the others made it. If they did, they’ll be waiting for us. She has the flash drive of Leda Corp’s research on the cause of IAAN. If we can put that information together with the cure—we won’t just be helping ourselves, we’ll be helping every kid that comes after us.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t want to make you feel like it was all for nothing, but what if there isn’t anything useful in the pages you fished out of the fire? For all the sense we can make of them, we could shred them tonight and it still wouldn’t make a difference to our lives. I don’t want us to just...attach ourselves to the idea of them in the hope that one day down the road it’ll make sense.”

  Objectively, I knew that what he was saying was true—but the words sparked such a fierce denial and fury in me, I almost pushed him away. I didn’t need reality right now. I needed hope that I’d be able to look at the singed pages and see beyond the familiar words: Project Snowfall. IAAN. The Professor.

  Giving up that last bit of hope would mean the fleeting moment of besting Clancy hadn’t been a small moment of victory at all. It would mean, in the end, he had still won. He’d survived HQ’s destruction, and the information he’d fought so hard to bury from us would be useless.

  We needed this. I needed this. My family’s faces bloomed in my mind, the sun at their backs. Just as quickly, the image was gone, replaced by another: Sam, the shadows of Cabin 27 hollowing her cheeks as she faded like a ghost. It became an endless parade of all of their faces—the ones I’d left behind the electric fence at Thurmond.

  My fingers dug into the top of my thighs, twisting the fabric there until I was sure it would rip. The awful truth was, no matter how much I denied it to myself, there was crucial information missing. And the only person in possession of it was the one person Clancy had ensured we’d never find: his mother, Lillian Gray.

  “I’m not giving up,” Liam said, a fierceness in his voice. “If this doesn’t work out, we’ll find something that does.”

  I reached up to brush my fingers along his cheek, stroking the rough stubble growing in. He sighed but didn’t argue.

  “I don’t want to fight,” I said quietly. “I never want to fight with you.”

  “Then don’t. It’s that simple, darlin’.” He leaned his forehead against mine. “But we have to decide these things together. The important stuff. Promise me.”

  “Promise,” I whispered. “But we’re going to the Ranch. We have to.”

  Before HQ was constructed, the League had operated out of Northern California, at a base that had been affectionately codenamed the Ranch. The location itself was fiercely guarded now—appropriate, given its status as a “last resort” base to fall back to in the event of an emergency. Only the senior agents—Cole included—had been around during that time, and actually knew how to find it.

  If Cate had made it out, she’d be waiting there. I could see her in my mind, pacing along an empty hallway, as if expecting us to walk through the door at any moment. She wouldn’t go against protocol. By now, she’d be out of her head with worry.

  One thought slipped in, chasing out every hopeful one. I’ll have to tell her.

  Oh, God, why hadn’t I thought about that? She wouldn’t know—couldn’t. She trusted me. She told me to take care of him. She had no idea that Jude...

  I closed my eyes, focusing on the way Liam’s hand was softly stroking up and down my spine.

  “—the hell is this?” Sen’s voice whipped out of the room, down the hall, slapping against our private bubble. “Stewart, you’ve done a lot of stupid shit—and I mean a lot—but this is—this is—”

  “A stroke of genius?” Cole said, and I could practically hear the grin in his voice. “You’re welcome.”

  I was on my feet before Liam could shoot me an exasperated look.

  “Come on,” I said, “something’s going on.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Liam said, putting a hand against my lower back and steering me toward the room. “When is there not something going on with him?”

  The agents had circled around the window so tightly, all I could see was Cole’s black knit cap behind their heads. I glanced over to the kids, most of whom were standing
, trying to see what was happening.

  “Roo?”

  My back straightened, and something gripped low in my stomach at the name. I turned toward the direction of Nico’s voice.

  “Yeah?”

  “Is everything...” he looked at the agents. “Is everything okay?”

  “What do you think?” I snapped. Nico flinched at my tone, which somehow only made me angrier. I didn’t have an ounce of sympathy left for him. Sad, scared, traitorous Nico.

  The Greens didn’t know what to do with themselves once they realized there was no bringing back any of the electronics, and there was no way for the two Yellows we had left to spark them back to life. Nico spent most of his time sleeping, only acknowledging me and Vida with a few words here and there.

  The pity I’d felt about the way Clancy had manipulated him had evaporated at the simple realization that if Nico had never fed Clancy the information about Project Snowfall and his mother’s location—if he hadn’t been stupid enough to ask the president’s son to track us down—we would never have been in this situation. Jude would be alive, and we wouldn’t be trapped in the hellhole that was Los Angeles.

  “Ruby—” Liam started, his voice disapproving. I didn’t care. I wasn’t here to comfort the kid.

  I held up my hand as Chubs and Vida cut through the agents between us, coming to stand next to us, but Chubs still let out a demanding, “Are you okay? Were you hurt?”

  “No, Gran, she’s dying. She’s bleeding out at your feet.” Vida rolled her eyes. “Did you get what you needed?”

  “Yes—”

  “Excuse me for showing concern for my friend,” Chubs growled, whirling back on her. “I realize that’s bound to be a foreign concept to any psychopath—”

  “This psychopath sleeps less than three feet away from you,” Vida reminded him, her voice all sweetness and light.

  “Wow, we have such nice friends,” Liam murmured. I’d already disengaged from the conversation. Cole glanced over, his brows raised in a silent question. I nodded, and he turned to look down—to the woman standing beside him.