In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  To access the trap door that opened to the Ranch’s tunnel, we all had to cram into the small bedroom set at the back of the bar, and lift the bed and rug that had been placed over it. A cold, stale burst of air rushed up to meet us as Cole kicked the door open.

  “Cool,” Tommy and Pat said, leaning to look down into the dimly lit space. Kylie made a face in Lucy’s direction, but was the third one down after Cole. Most of the teens went next, too tired to really question what was happening or where they were being taken. It was worse for the younger kids. Zu and Hina were mirror images of complete and total fatigue. They swayed on their feet like they’d snuck a few glasses back at the bar, and they couldn’t focus their eyes on Liam, even as he was helping to navigate them over the lip of the ladder. He and I both had to help Vida get a half-blind, incredibly grumpy Chubs down next. Then, it was his turn.

  I knew it was irrational, the way that fear seemed to walk up behind me and press a blade to my throat. I knew that we were not under attack, that there were already kids down on the path and they were fine, that I’d have to walk it if I ever wanted to get to the Ranch. I knew all that. But I still couldn’t move.

  Liam caught my expression and brought a reassuring smile to his face. Even with all of those unspoken words between us, he could still read my every fear. One of his hands wove through my hair and cupped the side of my face as he kissed my temple.

  “Different tunnel, different destination, different end,” he promised. “Okay?”

  I swallowed and forced myself to nod as he started down the ladder. The moment his head of pale hair disappeared, I felt my skin shrink back against my bones and my stomach flip. Different end. I turned the words over in my head. An end.

  This was just the beginning of it.

  I straightened, smoothing my ponytail back over my shoulder and took the first step. The second. The third. I tried not to think of the way the darkness seemed to well up around me, swallowing me down. At the exact moment I was sure I’d be climbing down forever, I finally found solid ground.

  The rest of the morning took on a strange, almost unreal quality. The tunnel was lit by strings of Christmas lights, some of them blinking, some of them out completely, but only ever revealing a small section of path at a time. It was all stark, unforgiving cement. The low ceiling and narrow walls amplified each and every voice, carrying whispers and sighs back through the darkness like ghosts. I sucked in shallow breath after shallow breath, feeling the blood actually start to pound out a low beat behind my eyes. This really was the prototype for HQ in Los Angeles—on a much smaller scale, and partly aboveground if what Cole said was true, but similar enough to send a shudder through me.

  My mind was playing catch and release with the sights and sounds around me, filtering everything through a milky lens. It made me feel almost like I was seeing it all happen through someone else’s memories. The smell of sweat and damp clothes. A grunt of pain from Vida. Chubs’s bleak, hopeless expression as he stared down the dark. Zu, passed out against Liam’s back, her arms wrapped around his neck as he carried her in. We walked for so long, there were moments I forgot where we were heading.

  Up ahead of us, Cole climbed up a half flight of stairs and banged on something metal—a large, rusted square that must have been a door. There were no handles facing into the tunnel. We’d need to be let in from the other side.

  “What if no one’s here?” I heard Chubs ask. I pretended, for the sake of my heart, that I hadn’t heard him at all.

  He pounded his fist against it for another minute before the kids behind him crowded at his back and started banging against it with him.

  No one is here, I thought. They didn’t make it.

  I couldn’t breathe. There was nowhere to go—the walls were so close on either side of me, the kids behind me were blocking my route out. I felt Liam wrap an arm around my shoulder, but the weight of it made my chest feel even tighter. My feet tripped over themselves, backward, just as there was a loud groan, and the pathway was flooded with light.

  Cate?

  I shielded my eyes, trying to make out who the figure was, when Cole sang out, “Hello, Dolly!”

  “Oh my God!” There was a faint note of some kind of accent in her voice—maybe New York? New Jersey. “Hurry up, get in here—my God! We thought...we were worried we were going to have to go out and find you.”

  Liam guided us forward, up the stairs, into the light. I hadn’t realized how cold I was until a delicate wave of warmth rolled over us. I stepped inside, blinking against the flood of fluorescent light overhead.

  Dolly blew out an aggravated sigh, moving down the line of us, blinking as she reached where I was standing beside Liam. She glanced between him and Cole. “Oh, God, there’s another one of you? How has the world survived this long?”

  “Pure, dumb luck,” Cole said. “Is everyone here?”

  Dolly visibly hesitated. “Well...not exactly.”

  “Cate?” The word came out of Vida in a naked rush of hope.

  “Conner’s just fine. She’s been worried sick about everyone.”

  Liam’s arm tightened around me as he glanced down, his expression so sincerely thrilled on my behalf as I leaned into him that my faint smile was almost a reflex. It surprised me, though, that the first feeling to flood into the hole that fear had left in me wasn’t elation or relief. Those came only on the heels of a sudden, sharp ache that radiated out from my core. She doesn’t know. Cate had survived, made it up here in spite of fiercely skewed odds, and she’d been waiting. The only message Dolly would give her is that we were here; she wouldn’t know about Jude. I would have to keep from throwing my arms around her and crying long enough to tell her. She doesn’t know anything.

  And now she would.

  “What do you mean, not exactly?” Cole said, looking around. “Ten of you came to open the place, right? And Conner brought her dozen—”

  Dolly’s sneakers gave a faint squeak as she shifted uncomfortably. She was saved from having to answer by the sound of bare feet slapping against the tile. My heart jumped into my throat as a head of pale blond hair rounded the corner of the hall at full speed—Cate.

  Vida launched herself toward her, tearing through the mass of kids that stood between them, nearly tackling them both to the ground.

  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” Cate was saying, “we were just outside of the attack zone and couldn’t get back in through all of the barricades that were set up—”

  Cate looked past Vida’s shoulder to where I stood, a relieved smile on her face as her eyes met mine. Oh God, oh my God, she doesn’t know—I couldn’t get the words to my mouth, couldn’t move. Heat flooded beneath my skin, the sweat bringing the guilt and shame and anger and sadness up from every pore. And then she wasn’t looking at either of us, but at the empty space at my other side. She was looking at the whole hall, her eyes tearing from one person to another, all the while holding Vida to her tighter. She was looking for him.

  In the end, I didn’t need to say anything at all. She had to have known, the first second she saw my face.

  Liam’s hand found mine, tightening around my fingers as he pulled me away, bringing me in close to his side. I pressed my face against his good shoulder, listening to his heart pound against my ear, trying to catch my breath and stop the rising tears.

  “How about...” Dolly put a hand on Tommy’s shoulder. “How about I show you guys where the bathrooms are and where you can sleep? All of the rooms are open. Just pick which one you’d like. We’ll have to figure out sheets and blankets tomorrow, I’m sorry.”

  “What happened to the bedding?” Cole asked in a low voice.

  “They took it.” Dolly lifted a shoulder and shot a look from him to the kids and then back to him, and finally Cole stopped asking questions.

  She led us down another bright white hall, the lights overhead bleaching out everyone
’s skin, making the dirt and grime that much more obvious. Pictures taped to the wall fluttered as so many bodies moved past them. The sharp smell of bleach. A large room, the size of a school’s gym, wide open and littered with sleeping bags and bedding.

  Rest, I thought. I can finally stop.

  “Hey, Gem,” Cole said. “Can you come with us for a bit? I want to debrief Cate so she has the full picture.”

  Liam’s grip on me tightened and I almost said no—I didn’t think I could handle being around Cate until I recharged. But he and I were in this together. And I wanted to know where the other agents were.

  “I’ll be there in a second,” I told Liam. “Pick us out a good room.”

  “All right...” he began uncertainly, but followed the others downstairs with only one last look over his shoulder.

  Cole motioned for me to follow him into the room just to the left of the tunnel’s opening, but I held my ground a second longer, trying to get a better look at the place. And I was...unimpressed.

  Back in Los Angeles, HQ had had a kind of ramshackle look to it, like someone had dug a deep hole, poured in some concrete, and brought in mismatched tile, desks, and tables to decorate it. The lighting and plumbing had been exposed overhead, and we’d never had reliable hot water. But the Ranch just looked like it had been forgotten. Despite the fact that the agents had been up here for at least a week, the floor was coated with clouds of gray dust and dirt. Door handles hung limp and broken. Paint was peeling off walls and the wood on several doors was splitting. Light bulbs were either out or missing completely, leaving random patches of the hallway in darkness. The ceiling tiles were crumbling into powder; whole chunks of the ceiling had fallen to the ground and had just been kicked aside. It was like they didn’t care; a wave of anxiety went through me as I took it in. This was how you treated a place you had no intention of staying in. Owning.

  “—is bullshit! This is such fucking bullshit!” Vida’s voice called me to the room the others had entered. I stepped in and shut the door firmly behind me, nearly knocking into a wall of filing cabinets. The room was just large enough for a single desk, three chairs, and a few framed maps of the United States.

  This must have been Alban’s office, I thought, while he was still here. It wasn’t nearly as crammed with random junk as his office had been at HQ, but certain touches, including the limp American flag hanging on the wall, were recognizably him.

  “As soon as they were out of Los Angeles, Sen contacted the Ranch and told them they were heading to Kansas,” Cole explained to me from where he was leaning against the front of the desk with Cate. She kept her face turned down, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, thoughts clearly somewhere else. Vida paced what little free space there was to move, her hands on her hips.

  “And they all left,” I finished. Dammit. Cole had been sure that the agents who’d left HQ with Cate to look for transportation for us were, if nothing else, loyal enough to Cate to want to stay and help us.

  “And took pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down here with them, including most of the food,” Cole said. I was surprised at how calm he seemed. “Cate and Dolly were going to come looking for us—apparently you really sold that we were going to Kansas. We’re going to have to start from scratch in building this place up, but it’s doable.”

  Cate’s head shot up. “What do you mean, she ‘sold’ that?”

  “You knew,” Vida said, a scathing edge to her voice. “You sent them away?”

  I held up my hands, refusing to press my back against the door and get as far from those furious looks as I could manage. “I did. I influenced them to go straight to Kansas, so that we could break off on our own somewhere outside of the state. I should have made sure they didn’t contact the agents here before we could arrive, though.”

  “What the hell?” Vida seethed.

  “I second that,” Cate said, leveling Cole with a cold look. “Explain exactly what you were hoping to accomplish.”

  “Ah, well, how about trying to save the lives of all of these kids?” Cole shot back. He braced his hands on his knees. “You want to know what your pal Sen was planning? They were going to split the kids up between the cars, take them just far enough outside of Los Angeles to think they were safe, and then turn them in for the reward money.”

  If it were possible, Cate went even paler. Vida, finally, stopped pacing.

  “You can’t know that...” Cate began.

  “I saw it in her mind,” I said, letting the acid I felt in my stomach coat my words. “She had everything planned out to the minute. They wanted the money to be able to buy weapons and explosives on the black market. They want to go hit Washington, D.C.—they have no interest whatsoever in helping us free the camps.”

  “Our plan played out like we thought it would,” Cole said, “Mostly. Don’t get your panties in a twist, Conner. No one got hurt. It’s a clean break. The fact that the other agents left does nothing but prove that our instincts on this were right. No one wants to help the kids. At least this way, we’ve got the Ranch and we’ve muddled them on what our plans are. If they’re stopped or picked up by President Gray’s friends, they’ll give them wrong intel on us. This is the right base of operations for us, not them. It’s quiet, we have working electricity and water, and, now, plenty of space to work.”

  “Yeah, and look at what we don’t have!” Cate finally detonated. Her pale face flushed, and she was barely keeping a lid on her trembling anger. “You sent away trained professionals—the ones who could have conducted these camp hits you want to do, the ones who could have protected all of these kids! We should have spent time working to bring them over to our side, not manipulating them into thinking it was their idea to go. And how dare you make this kind of decision without even consulting me? I can’t—” She shook her head, her eyes latching so fiercely onto mine that I had to look away. “Ruby, what is going on?”

  “Give it a rest, Conner,” Cole said, with an edge to his tone. “The plan is to train the kids to fight. To empower them.”

  “To empower yourself,” Cate corrected sharply, and if Vida hadn’t been in the room, I have no idea what Cole would have said or done in response to that. His fist clenched at his side. “I get it, Cole...I do. But this wasn’t the right way. They took the computer servers. I have one laptop, and only because I brought it into my quarters to do some work last night and hid it when they started talking about leaving. They’ll lock us out of the system. What are we going to do then? You burnt this bridge without giving us a way to get back over.”

  The League had spent the better part of a decade building up a network of information on everything: whereabouts of former politicians, access into the skip tracer and PSF databases, building schematics, black site locations. I’d been counting on having access to it to proceed with any and all camp hits. If nothing else, we’d need the few known satellite photographs that had ever been snapped of some of the camps.

  “The Greens can break into the League’s network, that’s not even a question,” Cole said. “They’re the ones that built it. And I took measures to ensure that we would be able to copy the research on the cure. My only question is, where is the flash drive of the information I stole from Leda Corp? With the study on what caused IAAN?”

  Cate’s jaw set as she looked away. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, silent just long enough for a cold, gripping dread to come over me. “It’s in the garbage. We weren’t far enough outside of the city when the EMP went off. It was wiped clean by the pulse...I’m sorry. I wish—” She shook her head, stopping herself.

  At that, I sat down heavily in one of the chairs, feeling more and more like I was passing through a long tunnel in the opposite direction from everyone else. I barely heard Cole’s sarcastic “Oh, wonderful.” Didn’t register that Cate had stood and was already moving around me to get to the door.

  “Where are you goin
g?” Cole asked. “Let the kids sleep a little while longer.”

  “I’m not going to the kids,” she said coldly. “I’m going after the other agents to fix this mess you’ve gotten us into. To get them to come back so we can work together on this.”

  The chill in her tone sank through me, down to my bones. I’d never seen her like this, or at least I’d never had the full force of her anger barreling toward me. But I was angry too—furious. She had left us, she hadn’t been there when I needed her, and I’d done the best I could to help everyone survive.

  “You want them to come back?” I asked. “Who? The ones that ditched you at the drop of a hat to go play terrorists, or the ones that wanted to hand us over to the PSFs?”

  Cate couldn’t even look at me. “I’m sure there’s been a misunderstanding...”

  “You’re right,” I said, “I misunderstood how in denial you are about who these agents are—”

  “Ruby!” Vida snarled. “Shut the f—”

  “I don’t know how many times they have to prove it to you, but these agents have never cared about the League you joined, the one that actually cared about the kids who are still stuck in camps—who are still dying every day from something we’re within an arm’s length of finding a cure for. We don’t need them! We don’t need to have them taint what we’re trying to do here! Wake up!”

  “I am not interested in sending kids out to play soldier,” Cate said.

  “You didn’t have a problem with that before,” I said bitterly.

  “You were supervised by trained agents who led the tact teams—”

  “Right. You mean the agents who then turned around and started picking us off one at a time? How about Rob? The one who tried to kill both me and Vida in one ‘accident.’ Do you even know that he came after us? He hunted us. He put a muzzle on me!”