In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  Senator Cruz stuck her head in, and Cole waved her over, giving up his seat as he quickly explained what we were looking at.

  “My God,” she breathed out, leaning closer as Nico opened the folder labeled FEDERAL COALITION. Her discomfort grew exponentially when he pulled open the document with her name. There were hundreds, literally hundreds, of profiles spread out among the folders: PSFs, men and women in President Gray’s inner circle, Children’s League agents, Alban, and kids—including myself, Liam, and Chubs. In the latter case, he’d clearly pulled the original files from the PSF and skip tracer networks and expanded on them with his own new section: observations.

  His observations of me: Indecisive when making a decision that affects only her. More confident in dealing with others close to her to the point of being overly protective. No real vices—doesn’t enjoy sweet foods, enjoys older music (related to memories of father). Allows herself one unrealistic hope of finding her grandmother. Desperation for closeness and intimacy means response to overtures of friendship. Tease out thread of physical attraction. Gullible, not vindictive, forgives too easily...

  My jaw set in irritation and embarrassment at the less than flattering assessment. Forgives too easily? We’d see about that.

  “Here, that’s the one, TRIBES,” I said. “Open that one.”

  “Tribes?” Senator Cruz asked.

  “That’s what Clancy called the groups of kids who left East River—the safe haven...well, not really a safe haven in the end, but that was his claim. Whenever a group of kids left, he’d send them off with supplies.” And the road code to communicate safe routes to each other. I’d wondered, more than once, how many of these “tribes” had left East River together before we arrived there, and now I had my answer: twelve, most in groups of five or six.

  The grid was divided into columns by group, with dates and locations listed under each header. I had Nico scroll across until he found the listing for Zu’s group. There were two updates beneath it: one in Colorado, one in California. The last update was a month ago.

  He knew where she was. Or, at least, that she had made it out west. I gripped my hands together behind my back to keep from giving into the urge to punch the screen. He’d known, that whole time I’d felt hopeless about ever finding her again.

  “How did he get these updates?” Cole asked. “This is gold, but only if the information is good.”

  “He told me once...” Nico started to say. I felt, rather than saw, his eyes dart to me for a moment. His voice was soft again when he continued. “There was a number that they could call and leave status messages. Or ask for help. He said he sometimes helped one group find another if they were feeling scared to be out on their own in smaller numbers. He knew everything.”

  I didn’t doubt that. There was so much information here, we’d have to spend the next few days weeding through it. Our cursory glance through had turned up absolutely nothing about Lillian, not that I’d expected it to.

  “Can you go back to the Thurmond folder?” I asked. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Senator Cruz press a hand against her mouth and start to rise.

  “All of the camps...are they all like that?” she asked.

  “It’s sort of like comparing rotten apples,” Cole said, and I knew he was assessing her reaction the same way I was. “They’re all bad, but some of them make the others look appetizing.”

  “What’s the most recent file in the folder?” I asked Nico. “Can you tell?”

  “Yeah, it’s this one....”

  “The fire evacuation plan?” Senator Cruz clarified. We’d already looked through the document, seen the maps marked with the order in which the PSFs and camp controllers would clear out the cabins in the event of an emergency. The other files were on PSF personnel, and materials on the research conducted in what I knew was called the Infirmary. None of which featured Clancy himself, of course. If evidence had existed, he would have found a way to destroy it rather than let anyone see him so powerless.

  “Clancy kept dropping hints that there was something going on....”

  “And you’re sure he wasn’t just baiting you to get a rise out of you?” Senator Cruz patted my shoulder. “His father loves playing that game with people.”

  Nico was just about to close the file’s window when Cole sucked in a sharp breath and said, “Wait. Scroll back up.”

  Cole’s eyes narrowed and his hand came up to rub along his unshaved jaw. I looked between him and the screen several times, trying to see whatever it was he was seeing.

  “Damn,” Cole said softly.

  I felt something heavy drag down my stomach. “What?”

  “They’re moving kids out of the camp in this scenario, but if there were a fire, then why not move the kids to the inner rings until it’s contained? Or why not herd the kids to the boundaries of the camp? The thing is like a mile wide, right? And why only account for one scenario? What happens if the fire is in the Mess, or the work facility? We just assumed it was an emergency plan based on a bunch of arrows and numbers, but there’s nothing on here to indicate that that’s what it is.”

  “If it’s not an emergency action plan, then what is it?” I asked.

  “I think it was an evacuation plan, in the event of the camp’s location being compromised or if Gray was taken out or overthrown. But look—”

  I leaned forward. He was pointing to the small text at the top of the page. The word AMENDED was listed next to December 10th of the previous year. The date struck through beside it was from almost five years earlier.

  Cole took control of the mouse and scrolled down again, “They’ve labeled this with the operational name Cardinal. And here—I thought the numbers next to each cabin referred to how quickly by the minute the PSFs needed to reach them, but three-zero-one could be March first, couldn’t it?”

  “Wait—” I said, “wait, what does it mean, then?”

  “It means that they’re not evacuating the camp,” Nico said, his voice small, “they’re moving the kids out, four cabins each day.”

  “Am I wrong in assuming that the only reason they’d move the kids out is if they were closing the camp?” Senator Cruz asked.

  “There was another file labeled Cardinal,” Cole said. “Yeah, that one, the list of the small camps.”

  “And the PSF personnel transfer list,” I said. “Oh my God.”

  I pressed my hands against my face and forced myself to remember to breathe. The room was shrinking around me, tightening and tightening around my shoulders as the possibility solidified into something real. They’re closing the camp.

  “Sweetheart, are you all right?” Senator Cruz asked. “I don’t understand—isn’t it a good thing? From what you’ve told me about the conditions in the camp...”

  “If you look at it that way, it is a blessing,” Cole said. “But razing the camp likely also means moving or shredding all of the hard-copy records on site, not to mention, the camp can’t serve as evidence of the cruelty of the rehab program. The camp is...a powerful symbol. It’s the oldest, the largest, and, I’m going to venture a guess here, really sets the bar for abuse and mistreatment.”

  “Separating the kids...the cabins...” My throat was dry. Most of them had been together for almost ten years. They were each other’s families. And they wanted to take even that from them?

  “All right, so that’s one camp out of contention.” Senator Cruz leaned back against her seat and folded her hands in her lap. “What are the other potential big hits?”

  “There is no other big hit,” Cole said. “We’re still going after Thurmond. It’s our endgame.”

  I looked up. Shock must have registered on my face, because confusion spread across Cole’s. “Really, Gem? I must have said it ten times this morning. Thurmond, no matter what. What’s with that look?”

  I moved back through my day, trying to remember. It mu
st have been after we finished training...or before Liam and the others had returned? The whole morning had a strange, glossy sheen to it, as if exhaustion was clouding my memories like steam on a mirror.

  As if tracking my thoughts, Cole said, “Damn, kid. We need to get you more sleep.”

  “Is five weeks enough time to pull something like this off?” Concern creased Senator Cruz’s face.

  “We’ll make it work,” Cole said simply.

  “You asked them to write up proposals for a mission, correct?” Senator Cruz asked. “I don’t mean to be insulting, but how in the world are these children supposed to come up with plans for a successful military operation and then execute it?”

  “We received training,” I told her, “to do exactly that. At least those of us who were with the League. We need to have time to work with the other kids—bring more in, make sure they can function under pressure.”

  Cole reached for the small stack of papers he’d collected from the groups and passed them to her. “I’m impressed with some of their imaginations. There’s a lot of good stuff here. The Greens really put the best of the League to shame with some of this—I definitely wasn’t expecting to get statistical probabilities of success, or...” He squinted at the page he held. “Christ, I don’t even know what that word means. In any case, before we hit Thurmond, we’ll have to do a test run on a smaller camp first, make sure the plan is viable.”

  The senator sat up a little straighter. “Any camp?”

  “Preferably one on this coast, but yeah, sure. We’ll try to match a smaller camp with the layout of Thurmond, get an experience as close as possible to the real deal.”

  “Nevada?”

  Cole leaned against the desk, his eyes lighting up with excitement. “Are you thinking of Oasis?”

  Oasis? The League had kept a map of the United States posted on one of the hallways, all of the known camps, big and small, marked with thumbtacks. I closed my eyes, trying to picture the pastel spread of states, moving east to west. It was...in the northeast corner of the state. Remote.

  Nico didn’t break his gaze from the laptop’s screen. “That’s the one with the children from the Federal Coalition.”

  Senator Cruz nodded, swallowing hard, and brought up a hand to rub against her throat. She looked at some point past us, at the clock on the wall maybe. “My daughter Rosa is one of them. I put her in hiding with her grandmother, but...Gray was determined. He hired men specifically to find our children. To make an example of all of us. I know of at least ten other Federal Coalition officials who believe their children were taken there. Knew of. God. Is there a chance any of those people are still alive in the detainment camps? Will they ever get to see their children again?”

  “Sure,” Cole said, not sounding entirely convinced himself. “There’s always a chance, right? But regardless of whether or not their parents are still alive and kicking, they’ll have a place with us. A chance to fight, if they want it. Lord knows they don’t have anything else to go back to in Los Angeles.”

  Nico shoved his chair back and stood, his hands coming up to clutch at his elbows. His eyes were darting around, creating a scattered path across the room, trying to land on everything but us. “I’m going to...I’m going to go...shower...”

  He couldn’t have left the room faster if it had been on fire. I wondered if he even felt the sharp stab of pain as his hip checked one of the desks and sent him stumbling forward.

  I took a step to follow him out but caught myself. Cole raised his brows, his eyes sliding over to meet mine in a silent question. I shook my head. No. I wasn’t going to go after him. I could feel guilty about forcing him to relive that time in his life for a few minutes, but I wasn’t going to comfort him or try to shield him from his own horrific memories of Los Angeles. How could I, when part of me was glad that he was just as miserable over it as I was?

  You didn’t drop the bombs on the city, I thought.

  But neither had he. Nico hadn’t planned the attack carried out by the military; he hadn’t been responsible for the agents overthrowing Alban in a bloody midnight coup that fractured the League forever; he hadn’t—

  I pressed the heel of my palm against my forehead. I didn’t want to think about this now. It was like prodding a swollen, angry blister that hadn’t popped yet. I needed to focus on Thurmond, on the fact that, apparently, we had less than two months to not only gather supplies, but find additional kids, train them, figure out transportation, get to Nevada, get back from Nevada—the impossibility of it rose over me. A mountain that only stretched higher and higher into the sky the closer I got to it.

  “We’ll meet with everyone tonight to settle the plan,” Cole was saying. “We’ll clarify the goal we’re working toward, focus everyone’s energy. In the meantime...”

  “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll make contact with the Canadians, see what they might be willing to do for us about ammunition and gas.” Senator Cruz ran a comforting hand down my arm, then squeezed my hand. I barely felt it.

  “You are the queen of my heart, Madam Senator,” Cole informed her, with a devastatingly handsome smile.

  “Oasis,” she reminded him, heading toward the door.

  “We’ll meet in here at seven sharp,” Cole said. “I’ll have a plan ready for you.”

  She paused, turning back to look at him. It was there and gone faster than a blink, but I saw the moment she let herself hope. “Thank you.”

  I waited until she was gone before leaning forward and resting my head against one of the empty desks. Closing my eyes didn’t make the headache any better. In fact, the glassy film over my thoughts thickened as I turned my mind back in the direction of Thurmond. I felt myself sit up, suddenly flooded with images of men in black uniforms tearing the camp down before I could do it, destroying every last piece of evidence before the world could see what had really happened there.

  “—em? Ruby?” Cole was waving at me from further down the row of computers, an odd expression on his face. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said, rubbing at my irritated eyes. “Why?”

  “You just...were staring around the room, but you didn’t—”

  I was alert again, at least, pulling myself out of the slow, dulled, shapeless thoughts I’d sunken into. “I’m fine,” I interrupted him. “So the plans—the ones the kids made? You’ve read them?”

  “Yeah,” he said, slipping into Nico’s seat in front of the laptop and clicking around. “They’re not bad, but I seem to remember a better one.”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours,” he said pointedly. “You put together a whole plan for hitting Thurmond, remember? Gave it to Alban behind Conner’s back.”

  I had, hadn’t I? Three months ago might as well have been three years ago at this point. When they’d taken my plan and twisted it, wanting to use it to arm kids with explosive devices and send them into camps, it’d been like they’d cut off my legs at the knees. They’d turned a dream into a nightmare.

  “This thing about Thurmond...it sucks. I know that’s a crappy word to express the magnitude of how terrible it is, but it just plain sucks and we’re going to have to work harder and faster now. We have until the beginning of March to get our act together. It would help to have a fully formed plan to run with so we can jump into action—the one you spent months thinking through.”

  Cole picked up a small notepad he’d tucked into the folder of handwritten plans from the other kids and tossed it to me. “Here. Write it out—everything you remember from your original idea. I’ll work on combining everyone’s ideas into something cohesive and realistic for tonight’s meeting.”

  I found a pen in one of the desk drawers at the front of the computer room and sat down to write. The first words were halting, and I was self-conscious of the loops and uneven lines of my terrible handwriting. The longer I wrote, the easier it felt—the words came t
rickling back slowly, like they didn’t fully trust that this time it would be different. That this was worth getting my hopes up for, all over again.

  This is different. One kid enters the camp ahead of the assault with a tiny camera installed on a pair of glasses, so images of the interior of the camp can be relayed back to headquarters and the Op strategy can be mapped out. Cole promised this would happen. We take their own transportation in, blindside the PSFs and camp controllers, subdue them without killing them. If you can’t believe in this, then neither will they. We’ll leave one camp controller free under my influence, to report back in status updates until we’re all away.

  It took up ten whole sheets, front and back, and my writing got more and more illegible as excitement started fizzing in my blood again and I could see each of these moments unfolding with perfect clarity. By the end, my hand was cramped and I felt drained, but my head was clear. I did feel better. Calm, at least, which wasn’t nothing.

  I stood up and turned back toward where he was still sitting. Every now and again, I heard voices and sounds coming from his direction, and the part of my brain that wasn’t distracted by my work knew that he was watching the videos we’d downloaded. The crying, the soft begging, the questions that never had answers. They were the kinds of things I’d learned to tune out at Thurmond for my own self-preservation. I don’t know what it would have done to me to have nightmares every single night.

  The light from the screen flashed across his face, thrown onto the wall behind him. I lingered by my desk, caught by his bleak expression. Moving a few steps back, I was able to see what he was watching reflected in the windows lining the wall. Fire streaked across the screen. Cole glowed orange, red, gold, as the light from the video bathed him in deadly color. And just like that, my small slice of peace was gone, washed out by sudden, cold understanding. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.