In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  The men and women in white coats swarmed the table I’d been laid out on, their voices buzzing around my head. They pulled wires off my skull, replaced them with new ones, touched everywhere—everywhere—forced my eyelids open roughly to shine a blinding light there. I could hear their quiet jokes and murmurs, see the outlines of their smiles behind their paper masks.

  He had shown me a memory like this once, back when we were at East River. It had been horrifying to watch, even more so to realize that it was taking place in a part of the Infirmary I recognized by sight. But the simple truth was, the stronger the memory—the stronger the feelings associated with it—the clearer everything became. I knew now that when I heard something, smelled something, felt something in a memory, it was because it had been burnt so deeply into that person’s mind, it had left a scar.

  This wasn’t a memory about the cure research—that had been under his mother’s control, far away from him. This was what they had done at Thurmond, before he’d been able to get himself out. They were studying him like a specimen, the way they had studied that Red. Nico.

  A plastic mask was lowered onto my face, and sickly sweet air came flooding into my lungs. The overload of sensation dampened at the first touch of drugs to my system.

  He’d told me once that they kept the kids sedated but awake during procedures, so the machines could better monitor their normal brain functions and map the way the Psi abilities rippled through them. Thurmond’s blue tiles echoed the machines’ screeching, making it sound like they were everywhere, all of them drawing in closer, waiting for their turn. I couldn’t swallow around my dry, heavy tongue; saliva dripped past cracked, swollen lips into the muzzle they’d secured over my head.

  The jolt of fire came without warning, zigzagging down my spinal column, a ripping sensation that left me breathless with pain. It was—it was like a static shock had been cranked up to a thousand levels higher. I couldn’t control myself as my body seized up, relaxed; seized; relaxed.

  “Try it again, this time—” A stocky researcher let out a cry of disgust, jumping back from the table. The stench of bleach was replaced by piss and blood and burnt flesh. I would have emptied my stomach, too, if there’d been anything in it. In that moment, I would have given anything to have choked on my own vomit and died. Humiliation seared through me as one of the researchers waved a nurse over to clean me up so they could start again.

  I’m going to kill you—I’m going to kill you, all of you—The words were lost as my brain was overloaded with a crackling sheet of pure, burning white.

  My gaze dropped from the U-shaped fluorescent light over me before its glow overtook the room and blinded me completely. I was surrounded by white coats and clipboards again, the clatter of metal instruments against metal trays, the goddamn beep, beep, beep of a heartbeat that wouldn’t give out. The woman in front of me stepped to the side, flicking something on—music, the Beatles, singing, I want to hold your hand, I want to hold your hand, their bright voices perfectly in sync with the cheerful music. One researcher began to sing along, off-key, as another bolt of white-hot lightning tore through my skull.

  When my vision cleared, the black at the edges retreating, my body was still throbbing, but it was dark around me, sweetly dark, and the surface under me was cloth, not steel. Done.

  “—will give a good report of progress—”

  “—carefully adjusting treatment—in good hands—treatment—working—”

  The stocky, balding doctor shook hands with a man in a jacket...what color was that? Not-blue...not-blue...Panic rose up, gripping my brain as it grasped for the word. The man in the jacket pulled his mask away. I see beard. I see nose. All familiar. Head hurts—no name, only face. Face next to Father. Phone. Report. Report me to him. Help. Help. Help.

  Lift hand—lift hand—trying. No go, not without—without me. Words broke and crumbled in my mind, leaving sounds. Letters. Tongue stuck. Arms stuck. Pain—burning, everything burning—

  A small shape appeared, the cot next to mine groaned. He came forward now. It was safe. Nico. Nico, help.

  A cold cloth on my face, cleaning. My hands. Neck. Careful. Careful, Nico. Aching head, soft touches, soft fingertips. Nice. I was lifted, arms put into sleeves, shirt down over my head. Held. Warm heart. Dark eyes burning. Safe. “It’s okay. I’m here.” Cup to lips. Water. Metal to lips—not-fork...not-fork...what is...spoon. Spoon. Sweet. Meal.

  Nico. Ni-co-las.

  Crying.

  Warm Nico.

  Crying—

  I RIPPED MYSELF OUT OF THE MEMORY, shoving against it. The exit was worse than the entry. I couldn’t tell which direction I was going, couldn’t navigate. Forward meant seeing that horrible moment again, Nico’s shaved head and gaunt body, the heart-wrenching expression I recognized on his face. I didn’t want to see it again, but I couldn’t escape it, the simple truth. So I went the other way, only to find it was like passing through a field of barbed wire backward. No matter which way I tried to pull out of the memory, I was cut up, I was in pain.

  When I came to, safely back inside of my own mind, I was on my knees, my forehead resting against the glass. I gulped down one breath after another.

  “Was that enough for you?” Clancy snarled. His skin had taken on a clammy quality, and he was trembling, shaking almost. “Are you satisfied?”

  I don’t know how I did it. I don’t. I just disconnected my mind from everything I’d seen, scrubbed every ounce of feeling from my voice. “No.”

  He wheeled back around.

  “I already knew what the Thurmond testing was like.” Oh God—oh my God. I felt like I was going to throw up all over again. What they’d done to his mind, even temporarily...“You’re supposed to be proving to me the cure itself is cruel.”

  “She adapted the cure from that research! From the shocks. You think I don’t know what you’re really trying to do?” he said. “That I’d be stupid enough to show you the actual cure procedure or where my mother is—”

  He knows. He knows where she is.

  He stalked over to his cot. There was enough of a link still left between our minds for me to be momentarily stunned by the resentment billowing through him. He needed to stop, I wanted him to stop—I stilled completely and reached deep into his mind, letting the intention steer me past his memories altogether into the part of his mind that was sparking with heat and drive.

  He froze: muscles, limbs, expression like stone. Clancy didn’t move until I did, and then it was only as a mirror of my actions. It was like plucking strings; each touch against this part of his mind produced a different response in him. I arranged him like I would an action figure, ignoring the pressure of his own mind trying to fight me off.

  This is it—this is what he felt each time he played with one of us. Lightheaded, dizzy with the possibilities.

  I wasn’t where I needed to be, not really—somehow, I needed to redirect myself back into his memories, only I didn’t know how to remove myself from this part of his mind. It was dark, and gripping—

  Mirror. The word sprang into my ears. Clancy’s voice, assertive, forcing me to listen—he knew I couldn’t get out on my own, and he must have been afraid of what damage I could do inside him if he was actively trying to help me. Mirror minds.

  I understood.

  My own thoughts shifted; I squeezed my eyes shut, hands clenched at my sides, as I forced the memory of me walking into the room to rise to the surface. I pulled free from the dark, feeling every bit like I was being physically dragged back by the hair. I was in the hallway again, watching as one by one the windows into his memories were slammed shut. I only had a second, just one, before he recovered—

  “Lillian,” I said, “mother—”

  The trick worked the way it always had. Hearing the words redirected his thoughts, drawing up the one memory he’d been thinking of most recently—the one he want
ed to protect.

  I knew what I was looking for, having seen a glimpse of the memory before. At the first appearance of the beautiful woman, her face framed by blond hair, a plea on her lips, I dove in, driving harder than I ever had before. Lillian Gray’s lab took shape around me—objects clicking into place like a puzzle. She’d tried to trick her son in order to bring him in to perform the procedure. She’d leaked her location in Georgia, knowing he’d be able to find her—and he did. I tugged harder on the image, forcing it to pass faster. Her hands were up, pacifying, the words Calm down, it’s going to be okay tumbling out of her. I remembered the splatter of blood on the lapel of her white lab coat, how she’d ended up begging Clancy, no, please Clancy from the floor as he set the world around her on fire, trashed her machines.

  What I hadn’t seen was the way he gripped her neck between his hands. I could actually feel her racing pulse beneath my fingers at the slightest pressure. Oh God—he was going to—

  But instead, my hands drifted up, gripping either side of her face. There were no words to describe what I saw next—reading a mind within a mind, an explosion of memories within a memory. The heat at my back was unbearable, but I was working, holding her still as I twisted, bent, broke every thought the woman had.

  A gunshot broke the connection, pain tearing across my right shoulder. I turned away from the woman’s blank face, letting her crumple to the floor, as two dark figures burst through the door. The glass around her caught the winking light of the fire. The strange, entrancing beauty of it was the last thing I remembered before I ran.

  I was thrown out of his head so hard that I fell back, cracking my skull against the wall behind me. Clancy was on the floor, as far away from me as he could get. His face was turned into the wall, his whole body heaving for breath. The cot was on its side, a barrier between us.

  “Get out,” he snarled. “Get out!”

  This time, I ran. My hands fumbled with the first lock, Clancy screaming those two words at me the whole time. The door opened from the other side and I collided with the person there, struggling to get out of their grip as the door was kicked shut behind me.

  “It’s me, it’s just me—” Chubs hauled me down the short hall, into the old file closet. I clung to his arm, my mind a mess of thoughts and feelings that weren’t even mine.

  My legs gave out before we were in the hall. He jammed the key into the lock and turned it, stopping only long enough to rattle it once to make sure it was secure.

  “Ruby?” he said, his face splitting into two, three, four...We walked briskly toward the end of the hallway, me leaning on him the whole time, trembling with the effort it took to stay vertical. He opened one of the bunk room doors and pulled me inside.

  I slid down the nearest wall, trying to purge the sound of Clancy’s voice with each exhale. Chubs crouched down in front of me, watching me intently. How much of that had he heard? How much of what he’d seen had he actually understood?

  You out-Clancyed Clancy. I never even thought there was a chance I could do that with my abilities. To beat him, I’d managed to become him. And even with all of my promises to do whatever it took to find out about Lillian, I’d somehow never imagined...this. That I was capable of it.

  Don’t think about it. I had what I’d come for. I got the confirmation I needed.

  “She’s still with the League,” I said before he could ask me the question I saw in his face. “They came and took her away at the end.”

  “The First Lady? He definitely didn’t kill her, then?”

  I shook my head. “He did something much worse.”

  By the time I went looking for him, Cole was already gone. Senator Cruz delivered the news when I passed her in the upper-level hallway.

  “He went to meet with a friend who’s still associated with the League to see if they have information about the agents who were arrested,” she said. “He told me to tell you not to worry and that he’d be back tonight.”

  Of course he hadn’t taken a burner phone with him—there was no way to contact him to see if he could pump information about Lillian Gray’s whereabouts from this same “friend.” If she was still with the League, where were they keeping her? She’d been running her research near Georgia HQ with only a few agents assigned for her protection. Would they have brought her to Kansas HQ with the others when they closed the other location?

  I passed by the gym and did a double take at the sight of Zu, Tommy, Pat, and a number of the others trying to fuss around with the exercise machines.

  “Sorry,” Pat ventured, stepping away from the weights. “We were just...doing nothing. And we wanted to do something. Since, you know, we’re going—me and Tommy.”

  “Going?” I repeated.

  Tommy popped up next to him, bright red hair glowing under the bare lights overhead. “We volunteered. For Oasis. Sorry, we voted after you, um, left.”

  Ah. I looked at the two of them, sizing them up. When Tommy squirmed under the scrutiny, Pat smacked his side to get him to stop, forcing his chin up higher. I smiled.

  “Do you want to learn some self-defense?” I asked.

  I’m not sure if their reaction could have been more enthusiastic if I’d offered candy. The other kids abandoned the machines, darting over to the mats, where I instructed them to line up. I led them through stretches, taught them how to break out of different holds someone might have on them, and demonstrated—repeatedly—how to flip someone over your shoulder if you weren’t a Blue. And hours later, when we were finished, I couldn’t say who was happier with how the day had turned out—me, or them.

  Finally, Cole announced his arrival with three bangs against the tunnel door. I came barreling out of Alban’s old office, abandoning the ancient Op files I’d been looking through, and unlocked it. He gave a guarded, uncertain smile as he came up the stairs.

  “The others are back, too,” he said. “I told them to bring everything around to the garage’s loading dock. Can you gather up the kids to help haul the stuff in? I’ll go ahead and cut the chain so we can get the damn door open—”

  “Cole,” I said sharply as he started to walk away.

  He shuffled to a stop, turning his head slightly. “I’m sorry, Gem. They’re looking for the agents, but they don’t know either. Liam must have contacted Harry behind my back, because he got in touch with me this morning to say he’d ask around. He’s ex-Special Forces and still has a number of buddies in different branches of the military and government.”

  The mention of his stepfather brought a flash of the memory I’d seen in Cole’s mind, and pain stirred in me. The man from his memory, his biological father, smiling down at their mother that way...

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “Thanks for trying.”

  He let out a shuddering breath and forced himself to shrug. “You...okay?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Let me go get the others. I’ll meet you down there.”

  Cold night air filled the warehouse with a crisp, clean scent that reached us in the tunnel. The door at the other end was already open, waiting for us. But the moment I stepped through, I stopped dead in my tracks.

  The whole place looked as though they’d power-washed it for hours on end. They hadn’t been able to actually remove the junk from the building—it might have attracted too much unwanted attention—but they’d somehow fit everything together, using the four walls as the frame of a puzzle. They’d lined up all of the shelving units, made some new shelves out of the broken bunks, and created a workstation with the tools they’d found. The car lift and frame were still at the center of the expansive space, but it looked like they were piecing even that back together. Someone had outfitted it with wheels, at least.

  Two large SUVs and one white van had come up the loading ramp and were parked inside. I jogged over to Liam and Vida as they used their abilities to lift boxes out of the trunks and set them aside.


  Liam looked up as I came over, a familiar smile on his face. He waved the group coming in behind me over. “We’re organizing by type. Set computers and electronics over there—”

  There was an actual, blissful sigh from one of the Greens, which made him chuckle.

  “Food and water goes here. There should be a few bags of clothes, bedding—no, no, leave the stuff in the white van,” he said, jogging over to shut the door. “It’s—Cole’s going to take care of that stuff.”

  Meaning, I’d guess, weapons for our locker.

  Vida was...blank. Her expression didn’t so much as flicker with annoyance as Chubs pelted her with a series of endless questions. I wasn’t sure she was even aware of what she was doing, there was that much of a visible, numb disconnect.

  Zu came to stand beside me, her dark gaze meeting mine in question. I wanted to tell her not to worry about this, that I was coming to see the heavier your heart got, the stronger you had to be to keep carrying it around. But the truth was, all I wanted to do was risk a punch in the face and hug Vida. So, I tried.

  And she let me.

  Her arms stayed down around her sides, pinned there by my tight grip. Slowly, her hands rose and pressed against my back. I smelled dust and the salt of ocean water on her skin, mingling with the exhaust from the cars, and I wished like hell I had thought to volunteer to go instead, so she could have had the day to recover.

  “We are going to fucking get her back,” Vida said fiercely. “I will burn Gray’s house down over his head. If she’s not all right, I’m going to rip out his heart and eat it.”