In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  She was middle-aged, olive-toned skin sagging with wrinkles and obvious strain. What must have once been an expensive navy dress had torn at the skirt seam, and her hair hung loosely from a bun, whole sections of it gray with either cement dust or age. Wide, dark eyes scanned the room, catching at the sight of the kids.

  “Do you know who this is?” Cole demanded.

  “A civilian who can now identify all of us and report back to the military,” Sen shot back.

  “My name is Anabel Cruz,” the woman said, with a surprising amount of dignity for someone limping around in broken high heels.

  “Christ, you meatheads,” Cole said when he was greeted with blank looks. “One of California’s senators? The Federal Coalition’s international liaison? She worked on establishing contacts and negotiating possible support from other nations.”

  Sen didn’t look impressed. She turned on Cole again, her hands on her hips. “Did you even bother trying to confirm her identity? If she was with the FC, why isn’t she in one of the detainment camps?”

  “I can speak to that myself,” Senator Cruz said, eyes flashing. “When the attacks began, I was meeting with Amplify outside of our headquarters.”

  “The underground news org?” Gates asked.

  Liam turned to look at me, confused. I explained quietly, in as few words as I could. The group had been around for two years, maybe three. My take was that it was mostly a collection of reporters and editors who had landed on Gray’s shit list for covering “dangerous” topics like riots and protests, and then had to go into hiding.

  He opened his mouth, a spark of something in his eyes.

  “Which, yes—” Cole looked at the other agents. “I realize it says something about her common sense, but—”

  “Excuse me?” The senator crossed her arms over her chest.

  “He means Amplify doesn’t have a good track record of making their stories stick. They get seconds of glory here and there before Gray shuts them down,” Sen said, assessing the woman again. “Online, on the social media sites that haven’t been blocked yet, quick-and-dirty pamphlets. Their reach is too small. They’re getting jack shit done.”

  This was clearly the one thing Cole and Sen were in agreement on.

  “The reporter got trapped with her in the city,” Cole told the others. “I was out doing the usual sweeps and heard the military storming a building nearby. They were tracking him, not her. Shot him on the spot, and probably would have done the same to her if she hadn’t identified herself.”

  “So you swept in, saving the day.” Sen rolled her eyes. The hatred I felt for the woman was starting to overwhelm my better judgment. I felt myself take another step forward. “And all you succeeded in doing was bringing in another mouth to feed.”

  “Speaking of—” Cole slid the stuffed backpack off his shoulder and tossed it to one of the Greens. “Found one of those juice shops with some decent produce still in their refrigerators. It’s not a lot, but better than the crap we’ve been eating.”

  The girl looked like he’d just handed her a birthday cake he’d personally baked and frosted. Chubs was over there and unzipping it so quickly, I think he must have teleported. The others fell in behind him, thanking Cole, trying to pass a whole apple back to him.

  “I’m good. Thanks, though.” When he turned back to Sen, his smile was still there, broadening under her look of utter contempt. But I could see something dangerous in his stillness, the way he cocked his head to the right. It was like a match waiting to be struck against something just slightly rougher.

  “I’m a little surprised, Sen. I would have thought you’d be ecstatic to have someone like this on the team. Once we get out of here, she’ll be incredibly useful in helping us connect what we’re doing to the rest of the world,” he said finally, his tone light. “We’re turning over a new leaf, aren’t we?”

  Yeah, well. Sen had no interest in connecting us to the world. She wanted to burn it down around us. Still, there had been a question buried in his words—a challenge. The longer this went on, the more the other agents began to shuffle their feet, steal glances at one another. Some of the Greens, the fast thinkers, were clearly reading into this more deeply than the others, who seemed content to chalk the familiar tension up to the usual frustrations.

  He knows. Awareness prickled at the back of my mind. Cole might not have known the full details, but he must have had a sense they’d go back on their word to help us free the camps. He was baiting her, trying to get her to admit it in front of the kids.

  “I’d be happy to discuss my ideas with you,” Senator Cruz said. “Provided we have a way out of the city?”

  The room’s attention swung to me. “Yes—it’s like we thought. They don’t have enough manpower to be patrolling the streets and guarding so many miles of freeway. They’ve set up a few stretches that, at night, are just empty vehicles and floodlights.”

  I walked over to the driving map of Los Angeles we’d pinned to the wall after finding it in a nearby car. I pointed out the three spots I’d seen in the soldier’s mind, proud of how steady my voice was as shadowy images started creeping in at the corner of my mind. PSFs. The red-stitched Psi symbols. Zip ties. Muzzle. Money. Guns. I couldn’t look at any of the agents. Now that I knew what they really wanted, how they were going to repay me for getting their asses out of this city, a dark little voice at the back of my mind started whispering, lie. It wanted me to leave out a few key details. Let them brush close enough to danger to get bruised.

  “Here,” Cole said, passing me a pen. “Mark them for us.”

  Gates muttered something under his breath and I turned toward him, crossing my arms over my chest, meeting his gaze dead-on. He looked away immediately, playing it off as he wiped his mouth and nose against his sleeve. That flicker of fear I saw in his expression was better for my confidence than the steadying hand that Cole dropped on my head as he leaned over my shoulder to study the marks I made.

  “I’m sure there are more,” I said, “but these were the only ones I saw.”

  Cole glanced around the room, silently calculating how many there would be per group if we only had three potential exits. Seventeen kids. Twenty-four agents, down twenty from the group that had come to liberate HQ. Five had died in the initial attack, and the rest had deserted. Eight groups of five or so. It was doable.

  “It’ll have to be quick and timed exactly right,” Sen said. “It could be hundreds of miles before we reach an area the EMP didn’t affect. All on foot.”

  “They had it marked on the map I saw,” I said, uncapping the pen again and sketching out the area for them. Beverly Hills to the west, Monterey Park to the east, Glendale to the north, and Compton to the south. All in all, not a huge area. At least, much smaller than I’d expected.

  “We’ll assign teams tonight and head out in a few hours—three or four A.M.?”

  “We need to talk our strategy through,” Gates protested. “Gather supplies.”

  “No, what we need is to get the hell out of this city,” Cole said, “as quickly as possible. The others are waiting for us at the Ranch.”

  I gripped his wrist, eyes flicking toward the door.

  He gave me a slight nod before shifting his focus back onto the room. “Y’all need to hit the sack ASAP, because we’re rolling out in a few hours. Yeah, that’s right, Blair,” he said, turning toward one of the younger Green girls who actually gasped. “That’s what I like to hear. Excitement! We have a change of scenery coming our way.”

  “You can’t make a decision like that without the rest of us having a say,” Sen interrupted. “You don’t make the call.”

  “You know what?” Cole said. “I think I just did. Anyone got a problem with that?”

  The room was silent. The kids shook their heads, but the agents were a gallery of grim, tight expressions. No one spoke up, though.

 
“What about the people in the detention camps?” Senator Cruz asked, making her way over to us to study the map for herself. “We just leave them to their own fates? I’d rather stay here and—”

  “Get yourself caught and put on one of those trials?” Cole cut in. “You said you were in the middle of a big negotiation with world leaders; why would you want to table that discussion when seeing it through will help everyone? Unless you were lying about it?”

  “I wasn’t lying,” she shot back, dark eyes flashing. “Those people are my friends and colleagues. We’ve risked our lives trying to right this country.”

  “People will know what happened here,” Cole promised. “They won’t be left for long. I’m going to make sure of it, and you’re going to help me.”

  The conversation shifted then, moving toward strategy, the right way to break the groups up and which surface-street routes to take up north.

  “Everyone good?” Cole asked the clusters of kids, slowly working his way toward the door. His eyes jumped back to me as he continued, “Everyone get enough to eat?”

  There was a chorus of Yeah!s. They were lying, of course. I wondered if they thought the truth would disappoint him, or if it would send him back out again. Even if you were to subtract Cole’s ability to charm a cat into giving up its fur coat, he still would have won them over, by virtue of just acting like he cared.

  “I still want in on the crazy eights tournament,” he added, pointing at one of the Green boys as he passed. “I’m coming for that crown, Sean. Watch yourself.”

  He snorted. “Keep trying, old man. Let’s see if you can keep up.”

  Cole mimed like he’d been shot clean through the heart. “A bunch of whippersnappers! I could teach you a thing or two about winning—”

  “Or what the rest of us would call cheating,” Liam called over from where he, Chubs, and Vida had posted themselves by the window, talking quietly with Nico and another Green. My eyes darted from their backs to their hands to their feet. Where is it?

  “Which is why he always lost,” Cole told the others with a wink.

  The agents had migrated to the other side of the room to be closer to the map to, I assume, make their own plans. Whatever Senator Cruz was trying to tell them, they ignored her.

  Where’s the backpack? I circled back around the kids who were blocking me, searching the ground—and found it slung over Ferguson’s shoulder. The temperature in my body shot up five degrees. And I knew, just like that, if I wanted the cure’s research in my hands again, I was going to have to force them—I would need to compel each and every one of them to hand it over.

  Cole reached the door to the hall and tilted his head. I waited a minute longer before following him. If the agents noticed, they just didn’t care. I’d given them everything they needed to see their plan through, hadn’t I?

  The hallway was still a good ten degrees cooler than the room was; once I was outside of the dim glow escaping through the open door, I could barely see a few feet in front of me. I wished for a second that I had grabbed my stolen flashlight, but this seemed like a conversation best suited for shadows. Stripped of everything but its concrete and colorful piping, this building was like a tomb—even the air inside was stale.

  I counted a hundred paces off in my head, sure I was nearing the end of the hall, when a hand reached out of the darkness and grabbed me. I was pulled inside a small, tight space—a closet? My heart was still fluttering when the door clicked shut behind me.

  “So, Gem...” Cole began. “Busy night, huh?”

  The only way I’d been able to keep myself mostly together these past two weeks had been to screw a lid down over every terrifying impulse of emotion that tried to bubble up. Now, though, I’d been shaken so badly that it was only a matter of time before I exploded. I just wished it wasn’t now, and that it didn’t come in the form of gasping tears. I couldn’t get a word out.

  “Gem—Jesus.” Cole put a hand on my shoulder, steadying me as he snapped his fingers. A flame flickered at the tip of them, filling the cramped space with light.

  “I was coming back...” I managed to squeeze out. “I overheard Sen and the others....They aren’t going to—we aren’t going to the Ranch. I looked in her head and...they’re going to—they’re going to—”

  “Take it from the beginning,” Cole said. “Go slow. Tell me everything you heard the agents say. What you saw.”

  I repeated it, word for word. I told them about how they were going to take one or two of us kids in each car with them, how they planned to wait until we were an hour or two outside of the city before subduing each kid. The exchange of flesh and bone for blood money. The guns they’d buy, the explosives they’d set—they were going after Gray where they assumed he’d be stupid enough to be: the newly rebuilt Washington, D.C.

  Cole’s expression was shuttered, closed off in a way that Liam never could manage. If I hadn’t seen his hand spasm, I wouldn’t have known he was furious until he spoke. For a long time, though, he said nothing at all. I felt a trickle of sweat run down my face and was tempted, for a moment, to open the door and let the cool air in.

  Finally, he said, “I’ll handle it.”

  “We will handle it. But you have to decide,” I told him. “Right now. You can’t keep running down the middle, trying to have a foot on both sides of the line. Decide if you’re with us or you’re with them.”

  “Of course I’m with you,” he said sharply, looking pissed that I’d suggested otherwise. “You know I—this affects me, too. I made you a promise back in Los Angeles, didn’t I? You trying to make me out to be a liar?”

  “No, I just—” I sucked in a deep breath. “You won’t tell the others what you are. You won’t even tell Liam. You haven’t looked at the cure research since that first night.”

  “Oh, gee, could it be because I’m trying not to draw attention to the fact that I have a personal investment in getting rid of certain delightful freak powers?” He let the flame go out for a moment and then relit it for emphasis. “I can’t show interest in something without the other agents wondering why, or without them wanting it more, just because I do. It’s a game I’ve had to play for years.”

  “This is not a game, no part of it is,” I said. “They won’t give the research back now.”

  “I am well aware of that, and I’ve taken precautions. Their names are Blair and Sara.”

  The two girls were Greens. With photographic memories. “You gave it to them to memorize?”

  “I tested them. Had each reproduce a diagram and chart, and they nailed it. I think we should let the agents keep the backpack—it’ll help sell what we’re trying to do,” he said. I kept my back straight and looked just past his head, where I wouldn’t have to both listen to the Southern drawl and see that smile, the patented Stewart charm assault. “I have an idea, but I also have a feeling you aren’t going to like it.”

  “Way to set it up for me.”

  “I’m serious now, Gem. This has to be between you and me, understand? It won’t work otherwise. Promise me. It’s the only way to get rid of them before they get rid of us.”

  Cole offered a hand, and I hesitated before taking it. I held it long enough to feel the natural, innate heat of him warm the air around us.

  Clancy had told me once that there had to be a natural hierarchy of people with Psi abilities; that those with the most power should be leading the others, simply because there wasn’t anyone else powerful enough to question them. And now, holding Cole’s hand, I saw that was true, but for a different reason. We were the ones who saw the full spectrum of everything right and wrong with the abilities we’d been given; we’d been feared and hated, and we’d feared and hated ourselves. Neither of us wanted what we had; we’d never try to keep our powers or abuse our position for absolutely longer than we had to. And on a basic level, the ones with the most power had to be out front, if only
because we’d have the best shot at protecting the others.

  I squeezed his hand. A look of relief and gratitude passed over his features before he could steady them back into his usual look of arrogant nonchalance.

  “What’s our next step, then?” I asked. “How are we going to accomplish anything without trained forces? Where are we going to go?”

  “We are going to the Ranch,” Cole said. “They are going to Kansas HQ with the rest of the agents. They get to wash their hands of us, but they don’t get the damn Ranch. That is ours.”

  “How are you going to manage that?” I said.

  “Gem, the better question is: how long is it going to take you to convince them that the Ranch is...oh, run-down...stripped of anything useful...indefensible?”

  Understanding froze me at my center. “You want me to influence them. There are over a dozen agents—”

  “And you have three hours before we leave,” Cole said, letting his flame go out again. “So I would suggest working fast.”

  IN THE SCRAMBLE LEADING UP to our departure, everyone had different tasks to attend to. Some were sent to relieve the others on watch; some packed up the spare gear we’d accumulated; others, like Liam and Chubs, divvied up the last bit of food between the different teams. I moved between the agents like an unexpected breeze, brushing up against their minds just as softly. Cole and I had decided the order I should work in to make the shift in plan seem the most natural. Which meant starting with Agent Sen.

  I stood behind her, back-to-back, as she studied the map and made adjustments to the initial lists of who was driving with who. Having opened her mind once meant the second trip in was easier than fitting a key into a greased lock.

  With each agent, I started to feel myself slowing down more and more, forced to fight through scenes of bleak violence, training, dreams. I’d spent six months with these people, but it took me less than two hours to finally understand the trajectory of their hatred—for Gray, for us, for everything that stood in their way. There was so much aching loss between them, they created a black hole that sucked one another in.