The video zoomed in on the face of a young boy, no more than thirteen, strapped to some kind of metal post. He was panting hard, thrashing against the restraints that trapped his arms against his sides. There were small electrodes dotting his shaved head, ringing his scalp with a crown of wires. Revulsion rose in me, bile burning its way up my throat. I pressed a hand against my face and had to work up the courage to watch the terrible truth of it.
Cole glanced at me once as I stood behind him, then turned back to the screen. It was as much of an invitation as I was going to get. He started the video again from the beginning, and it was that much worse to hear the Red’s guttural sounds and screaming mixed with the scientist’s calm, dry notations to the camera.
“They were testing the kid to see what kind of emotional response triggers his abilities,” Cole said, staring at the last, frozen close-up of the boy’s face, streaming with sweat and tears. “Trying to map the way his mind processed it.”
“Ruby,” he said, turning so his face was in profile, “after tonight...after we have our Op strategy...I want you to do everything in your power to find Lillian Gray. Everything. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said, finally finding the words as he started the video over again. “I do.”
I LEFT THE COMPUTER LAB in another glassy daze, walking and walking with nothing but the images of all of those kids trapped inside of my head. Burns. Surgeries. Blood being drawn. Questions. So many variations of What’s happening? And Why are you doing this?
Even if my mind was checked out, my body at least knew where it wanted to go. This whole day had passed like a year spent underwater. I just wanted to go to sleep for a little while, and try surfacing again later.
The others had claimed one of the empty bunk rooms on the lower level—I had my own creaky bed and everything. Truthfully, though, I would have curled up in the corner of one of the halls on the cold tile, as long as it meant shutting my eyes for a little while.
Someone clearly had the same idea. The overhead light was off, but a smaller, desk-sized one was on, perched on top of the crappy little dresser on the other side of the room. I hadn’t realized how badly I wanted to see him until he was there, and a little glow lit at my center. Liam was sprawled across one of the bottom bunks on his stomach, his face turned away, his hands tucked up under the folded sweatshirt he was using as a pillow. His hair and back were still damp from the shower he must have taken.
“Hey,” I said, coming toward him. A small test of sorts to gauge his mood. If he wanted to be left alone, I’d turn and go without a second’s hesitation. Instead, his shoulders, then the rest of his body, visibly relaxed. I dropped my knee on the free space at the edge of the bare mattress. His hand automatically moved to hook his arm around it.
“Hey yourself,” Liam mumbled. He didn’t sound sleepy, but he did sound wrung-out. “Time for dinner?”
“Not yet. How’s the garage looking?”
“Getting there. You can see half of the floor now. That’s an improvement, right?” he said, finally lifting his head and turning toward me. “Present for you.”
I followed his gaze over to the dresser, where there was a square of clear plastic to the left of the lamp. I picked it up and laughed—it was a CD case, The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds. I popped it open, smiling at the liner notes and disc inside.
“It’s like our song is following us everywhere,” he said.
He meant “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” the opening track. I smiled. “Our song?”
“Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older...” His soft voice trailed off into a hum. “I figured you could use some pleasant background music to drown out the sounds of you and Cole beating the shit out of each other, if it’s going to be an every-morning kind of thing.”
The warmth at my center evaporated. I closed the case, pressing it against my chest. “How did you know?”
“The two of you were the only ones that showed up to breakfast with new bruises. It’s not that hard to put two and two together.” He finally looked up at me. “Please...please be careful. The thought of him hitting you, pushing you around...it just makes me want to kill him.”
“It’s just sparring. I have to train.”
“And you couldn’t ask Vida?”
I felt myself heat up. “Are you...implying something?”
I didn’t want to explain this to him. I shouldn’t have to explain. It had nothing to do with him. I started to pull back, but his hand reached out again and caught mine.
“No, dammit, of course not. I’m sorry. That’s not the reason.” He closed his eyes and sighed. “I found it in the car they’d stripped, its glove box. I brought it because it made me think of you.”
I reached over, placing it on top of the nearest dresser.
“Sorry. I’ve got a real knot in my tail today,” he said, turning those blue eyes up on me again. I felt frustration retract its claws from my stomach. “And I know you can take care of yourself, but it still drives me crazy to think about it. I guess I’m being a hypocrite, considering how close I came to hitting you this morning.”
He’d spent the whole day hauling junk around, trying to put it into some kind of order—and that was after having his brother read him the riot act. Of course he was entitled to be short with me.
I sat down on the edge of the bed. “You didn’t hurt me. Hey—I mean it. Not even close. I wouldn’t have jumped in if I didn’t know I could block you.” I picked up his hand, folding his thumb toward his palm and the other four fingers over it. “Plus, you had your fist like this—and that’s a good way to break your thumb.”
I pressed my lips to his knuckles to show I was just teasing. Finally—finally—I was rewarded with a smile.
His soft cotton shirt had ridden up his back slightly, exposing a sliver of skin. I wanted to touch it, so I did. I dragged his shirt up that much farther as I worked my fingers up and down his back in soft strokes.
“Feels nice,” he whispered. “Will you stay? I don’t want to see anyone but you for a while.”
He moved back toward the wall, a silent invitation to slide into the small bunk beside him. It felt so good and easy now; I knew exactly how we fit together, as if we’d been cut from the same pattern.
“You okay?” I asked, fingers worrying the front of his shirt. Liam wrapped an arm around my waist, drawing me closer. Everything that came out of the laundry practically reeked of detergent and bleach, including the shirt he wore, but underneath it all was this scent that was all warm skin and evergreens and mint toothpaste. And that was Liam.
The scent had a drugging effect on my system. I took in one steadying breath after another.
“Just dog-tired, darlin’.”
The silence that followed was the first true spell of calm I’d experienced in months. It was the dim, shadowed light, the steady rise and fall of his chest against my cheek, his warmth pressed against mine. All of these things conspired against me; one moment I was awake, Liam’s fingers carefully stroking the loose hair back out of my face, the next I was slipping into a slow, sweet doze.
The soft kiss was the only thing to bring me out of it.
“Dinner time,” he said, his own voice sounding rough from sleep. “They just shouted down the hall.”
And yet, neither of us moved.
“What did you do today?” he asked after a while. “I didn’t even ask...”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
He leaned back at that, the focus in his eyes sharpening.
“I got us into Clancy’s private collection of files. Besides a list of the different tribes and their last known locations, it basically was a digital scrapbook of nightmares.”
“How did you get access?”
Now it was my turn to fix him with a look. “The usual way.”
I watched his reaction carefully, already feeling th
e words settle between us, add to that space. They were an unwelcome reminder. This is what I do. This is who I am.
He took it in stride. “Was there anything about the cure on there?”
“A bit about the testing they did at Thurmond to find the cause. But...it turns out that they’re going to close Thurmond down at the end of March.”
“Oh, damn,” he said, “I’m sorry.”
“Cole still wants to plan a hit.”
“Well...I guess two months is better than two weeks,” he said. “We’ll figure it out. But can I ask you something, and can I get an honest answer out of you?”
I bristled a bit at that.
“This quartermaster thing you suggested, me being in charge of supplies...is it a consolation prize?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is this a way to keep me here? Keep me behind, I mean. When things get rolling with the camps, am I going to be left waiting here, hoping everybody comes back in one piece?”
“You mean, exactly what we’re all going to be doing while you’re out looking for supplies?” I said. “No. And for what it’s worth, Cole was only panicking because you didn’t tell him where you were going. It was the same for me—you were just gone. I know you can fight if you have to, but I don’t know that he does.”
“He has no idea what I’ve been through...what I’ve had to do. He acts like I don’t even know how to use a gun.” His hands bunched up the back of my shirt. “I do, though. Harry taught me before I left home. I just don’t want to shoot one unless I have to.”
“That’s the way it should be,” I told him. “Sometimes I can’t believe that this happened to us, and I wonder when it became so natural to pick up a gun and act like it’s nothing. I have to teach the other kids how to shoot, and I have no idea how I’m going to do it. I don’t know how to show them how absurd and terrible it is that they even have to learn.”
“Maybe it doesn’t have to be that way,” he said, quietly. “Maybe we don’t have to actually show up with guns blazing.”
I’m not sure I could have been more surprised if he’d suggested we should just go straight to the top and assassinate Gray. I’d based my camp liberation plan on the one he and the others had come up with at East River. And both involved considerable use of force.
“No, it has to be a real fight,” I said. “They have to take us seriously. The thing is...what I can’t get over is, how the kids will take it. What’ll happen if they find themselves in the position to kill and pull the trigger. We can train them to steady their nerves and we can give them targets to practice with, but it feels like forcing them to drink poison that’ll never leave their system. I know it’s a sacrifice and that they’ll be the ones choosing to make it, but I worry about the cost. I’m afraid of what we’ll be at the end of the road.”
Look at what it’s done to us. Zu’s crying face the other night floated to the forefront of my mind, only to be replaced by the memory of Chubs’s confession about the requirements of becoming a skip tracer; him being shot; Liam’s battered face—all of these were linked in my mind now. They’d never fade, not even in the afterlight of all of this.
“I think they understand more than you’d think,” he said, tracing a finger along the edge of my ear. “The kids who aren’t League have been out there running—for years. No one is innocent here. They want it just as bad as we do. We’ll figure out a way to keep them as safe as possible. We’ll take care of them.”
“Is that enough?”
“It will be.” Liam’s kiss was unbearably tender. “I missed this. Us talking, I mean.”
A bolt of guilt shot through me at his words, at how content he sounded.
“Everything else seems crazy,” Liam said, one hand threading through my loose hair, “Let’s just stay here, you and me, and not let anyone or anything else in for a while, okay?”
This was the danger of him. In an instant, he could lift everything off my shoulders and set it aside. He became the answer to every doubt and lingering question. My world refocused, settling on him—beautiful, perfect him. I didn’t have to think about what I’d done, what would happen to us even five minutes from now.
Maybe he would never forgive me, not fully, but there was no thinking in this. If I couldn’t bare every secret to him, unload everything in my heart, at least I could be close to him this way. He wanted comfort, and so did I.
I nodded and brushed my lips as soft as a breath just behind his ear. The response was instant—a shudder ran through him and it became a challenge to get that response from him again and again. He rolled over on top of me and I shifted to draw my legs around his. He pressed down to capture my mouth and I froze at the friction between us.
Liam pulled back, bracing his elbows on either side of my head, his brows drawing together as he studied my face. I felt myself flood with color, the way it spread down my throat, across my chest. It wasn’t the first time I’d felt how much he wanted me, but here, in this room, on this bed—it felt like more of a decision that needed to be made. One I wasn’t ready for.
“It doesn’t have to be anything more than this,” he said, softly. “I don’t want you to think it has to be. This is actually pretty damn great.” Fingers skimmed against my ribcage, ran along the edge of my sports bra. Every last ounce of his attention focused on my lips again. “But if...when I went out, I made sure to get...” The words were flustered, tangled up in one another, but I understood his meaning and it sent a small, growing spiral of happiness through me. He wanted this enough that he’d thought ahead; he would take the necessary precautions. “Days, weeks, years from now...when you’re ready, so am I. Okay?”
I wondered if he could feel how quickly he’d dialed up my heartbeat with only a few words. I was close enough to see the pulse at the base of his throat, if the trembling in his hands hadn’t already spoken for him.
I wrapped my arms around his waist, drawing him down to me again.
“What am I going to do with you?” I asked, only half joking.
That tiny smile grew as he lowered his face toward mine. “Oh, you could try out a thing or two...”
“Like what kinds of things?” I teased, pulling back as he came forward. He made a small, impatient noise. “Things that’ll get us in trouble?”
“You are trouble,” he said. “Capital T and everything—”
I pulled him down, cutting his laughter off before it had the chance to start. My kiss eased off under his touch, becoming slower, a sweet kind of lazy. It made me feel, for the first time in my life, that I actually had time. We could take that soft pace. Explore.
“Can we not go to dinner every night?” I asked as his lips left mine and started to work toward my throat.
“Okay,” he whispered, “works for me.”
I didn’t feel shy or clumsy when my hands slid under his shirt again and began to draw it up, off. I heard him whisper my name, the sound of it breathy and raw, and it was like a hit of a drug to my system. I wanted to hear it again. Again and again and again and again...
There was a tentative knock on the door.
Liam pulled back, breathing hard. It was hard to tell which looked more wild—his hair or his eyes.
Don’t make a sound, I thought, they’ll go away...
They seemed to. I let out a soft sigh as Liam settled back down over me, blocking the rest of the room with his broad shoulders.
Then, the door cracked open.
Liam shot up so fast, he nailed his head against the top bunk and actually half tripped, half fell onto the ground. Cold air hit my skin and I looked down, realizing that at some point, my own shirt had mysteriously vanished, only to reappear on the other end of the bunk’s thin mattress.
“Hang on!” Liam barked. “Just a sec!”
I shoved the thing back over my head just as he bent to scoop his up off the floor. A small piece of
folded paper fell out of his back pocket, fluttering to the ground softly. He stumbled over himself to get to the door before it could open the rest of the way, catching it in his hand. Liam filled the doorway with his body, preventing whoever was there from looking or coming in.
“Hey sorry,” came the timid voice, “but the showerhead is going crazy. Do you think you could fix it?”
Liam’s whole posture relaxed. “Now’s not really a great time...”
“The whole bathroom is flooding and, I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean for it to happen—”
“It’s okay,” Liam said, glancing back at me. His face was a portrait of apology. He held up one finger, motioning for me to wait.
As soon as the door shut behind him, I set my mind to remaking his bed, refolding the top blanket one or both of us had managed to kick off at some point. My heel brushed something warm—something that wasn’t the cold tile.
I bent down, retrieving the piece of paper that had fallen out of Liam’s pocket. It had been folded over once into a smaller square, but it had opened as it hit the ground. My eyes were already taking in the neat letters carefully printed there before I could spare a thought to it being wrong.
Your name is Liam Stewart. You are eighteen years old. Your parents are Harry and Grace Stewart. Cole is your brother and Claire was your sister. You were in a camp, Caledonia, but you broke out. East River did burn. You were lost. You’re in Lodi by choice because you want to stay with Chubs, Zu, and Ruby. You want to be here, helping them. Do not go, even if they tell you to. DO NOT GO! Ruby can take your memories, but what you feel is the truth. You love her, you love her, you love her.
I read the words again, and a third time trying to make sense of them. Because the words were ones I knew, I recognized I was reading sentences, but my mind disengaged. It up and left the picture before my heart could make the connection.
Ruby can take your memories...
It was a note to himself—to a future self, one he apparently was so sure would fall victim to my mind again. This was a cheat sheet. Security; because, clearly my word wasn’t going to cut it. I could promise him over and over again that I’d never touch his mind again, but it meant nothing. I had done it once. The trust between us was already broken.
In the Afterlight Page 18
