I stepped back into the computer room and caught sight of the white board out of the corner of my eye. Someone, likely Cole, had started scribbling information on it—coordinates, camp populations, number of PSFs assigned, anything and everything the League might have had in its files. Peppered through were details from Clancy’s documents—I saw tidbits about the camp controllers tossed in like afterthoughts.
The basic outline of the Oasis plan was there, too. I found my name written next to influence camp controller in charge of communications.
“You don’t have to stay,” Nico said. “I can do this myself.”
“I know.” I picked up the dry erase marker from the ledge, and started to fill in additional information about Thurmond, fleshing out sections of the plan where I could.
“It was your strategy,” Nico said over the warm purring of the machines around us. “Right? It seemed like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“A little reckless. Smart, but not giving attention to the details.”
“Really,” I said dryly, turning back to face him.
He kept his back to me the whole time, shoulders bunched up with tension. I’d really been a monster to him, hadn’t I? There seemed to be a five-foot radius around me that Nico was too frightened to cross. I fought to keep from cringing at the thought of how badly I’d mistreated him.
“How would you do it?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the blank space under the word Thurmond, trying to ignore the way it seemed to be taunting the both of us.
He stared at me and sixty full seconds of awkwardness passed before he took a tentative step closer. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”
“You said I wasn’t paying attention to the details,” I prompted. “What did you mean by that?”
Nico looked down at the floor, running his shoes over the tile. I had a fleeting thought of how Vida used to call the Greens “squeakers” because of the way they all seemed to shuffle their feet as they walked. “The Oasis plan is okay,” he said finally. “The way we have it now makes sense. Based on the size of the camp, there’ll only be two or three camp controllers, and it’ll be easy for you to figure out who is in charge of security and sending the status updates to their network. It won’t work that way at Thurmond.”
I watched him wring his hands, still unable to look at me. “There’s going to be, what, two dozen camp controllers in the Control Tower? That was the estimate in...in Clancy’s files. Its position at the center of the camp means that anyone forcing their way in through the gate is going to have to fight through all of the rings of cabins to get to it to subdue the PSFs and controllers inside, and by then the camp controllers will have called for reinforcements. Even if you found a way to subdue all of them, it would still be too late. All they’d have to do is turn on the White Noise and we’d be done. The power generator and backup generator are all on the camp premises, and I have a feeling cutting the power would automatically trigger an alarm on the military’s network.”
In the space of two minutes, he’d managed to chisel my confidence down to dust. “So we’ll need a bigger attack force. One that can work faster, get them in and out.”
“Liam’s idea about trying to get the parents to storm the camp might work,” he offered, “but its success depends half on us being able to inspire civilians to revolt and come after the camps, and half on whether or not the PSFs would fire on civilians or figure out some other way to deter them.”
“He has an actual plan?” I asked.
“Not in the technical definition of the word. I just heard some kids asking him about what he would do.” Nico shrugged. “His option isn’t perfect, either.”
“Is there a third option?” I asked.
Finally Nico stood up and, with tentative, halting steps, walked beside me. I tried to offer him the marker, but he didn’t take it. “Are you sure you want to know?”
“Try me.”
“The only way I can think of to disable the camp controller’s access to the camp’s systems—not even disable or disarm the system itself, but lock them out and keep the system running so no one outside notices anything amiss—is to install a Trojan horse program in their system and control it remotely. They’ll be so disoriented that the tactical team will have an easier time of it.”
“Is that something we could upload into their server?” The League had given us a limited education on technology and the way viruses worked, but this was out of my depth.
“No, the programs don’t install automatically like a virus. Someone has to install it,” he said. “And with all of the security safeguards in place, I don’t think one of them would carelessly download any kind of email attachment.”
“So someone would have to go into Thurmond and install it before the assault,” I said. “But the camp has been closed to new kids for years.”
“They take escaped kids back into the camp they were originally processed in,” Nico said quietly. “I already started coding the Trojan horse. Cole told me to...”
I held up a hand to cut him off. “Cole approved this already?”
He nodded, eyes wide. “He said he’d talk to you about it. I can have it ready in a week. They’ll be powerless to stop it once the program is installed.”
I felt every last drop of blood drain out of my head in horror.
“No,” I said, horrified. “No way—”
“I meant me,” Nico said quickly. “Not you. I could bring the Trojan horse program in on a flash drive, the same way we’re bringing the cameras into Oasis. Glasses frames. Have you seen them?” Nico crossed the room, retrieving a pair of glasses with black plastic frames.
I had to lean against the desk to stay vertical. “Nico—no.”
“It’s already installed—right there,” he said, ignoring me and pointing to one of two shiny silver screws that looked like they were holding the frames together. “This is the camera, and this is just a screw the frames don’t need. We had to make them seem as real as possible. Tommy said they’re fine, so he’ll get this pair. For Thurmond, maybe I could take one of the thicker frames—break up one of the arms that hooks behind the ear and replace a piece of it with a small flash drive? It’s either that or embedding it under my skin, but they still do strip searches, don’t they? The cut would be too obvious.”
“Nico!” I interrupted. “Listen to me! No. There’s no way in hell you’re going back in there! Even if they brought you back into the camp, how would you get yourself into the Control Tower to upload it? You haven’t been there since the camp changed. They don’t just let you walk around unsupervised. Every move you make in there is choreographed down to the minute. And it’s the most fortified building in the camp.”
He paused, trying to think this through. “I’d need to observe the schedules of the PSFs, figure out a moment I could slip away. It doesn’t matter if they catch me in the end, not really. It would be okay...I would get to...there’s not anyone left for me now that Cate’s gone. And this is how I could make it right.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “This is how I could make it right for Jude.”
I stood straight up at that, whirling around to face him fully. “Throwing yourself into danger...throwing your life away...what would Jude say about that? What would Cate say? I haven’t been a good friend to you these past few weeks, but Nico, I swear to God—please, I forgive you, I do, I understand what happened and I’m sorry I treated you the way I did. I’ve been up in my own head too much, and it was hard for me to see things clearly. But please listen to me—”
“It’s okay.” Nico’s voice was hoarse.
“It’s not!” It wasn’t. It wasn’t even remotely all right how I’d been acting—blaming him for everything, hating him because I couldn’t function if all of my energy went into hating myself. I tried to think of what Jude would say and do in this situation. Or even Cate, all those times she’d h
ad to talk the kid out of a manic fit about some conspiracy.
“We can’t change what happened in Los Angeles. I was angry—I was so damn angry that he just...slipped away, and I couldn’t save him. I should have talked to you, should have helped you, or at least tried to understand what you’d done. I let everyone down, but it was easier to blame you. It hurt less. But the truth is, I knew what Clancy was capable of. I should have tried to confirm some other way that what he said was true. And you know what? Jude would have wanted to go anyway, even if I said no.”
“He was my best friend,” Nico choked out.
“I know. But...it’s different with Clancy, isn’t it?” I said quietly. “Rules don’t apply when you love someone. And that’s how it was with Clancy, right? It’s not like how you loved Jude, or the way I love Chubs.”
I’d known it the moment I saw his face in Clancy’s memory. The tortured expression and the ragged sobs were only part of it. It was the way Nico had held the other boy, how he’d fed him and cleaned him with every ounce of tenderness he had in him. You see it in others, I thought, when you recognize it in yourself.
“You trusted him, and he took your words and twisted them for his own ends,” I said. “I was so angry with you for believing him, for giving him everything you did. But I know firsthand that people are capable of doing things for the people they love that they never would have considered before.”
Nico buried his face in his hands, letting out a shuddering breath.
“I didn’t mean to ruin everything,” he whispered. “I trusted him. All the intel I gave him, he swore he was using to help us and I thought...”
“You thought that he would help keep us away and safe, didn’t you?” I finished for him. “I know. It sounds to me like maybe you fell into my pattern for a while there.”
“I don’t know why—I knew it was wrong, that it was bad, but he was good. When I knew him, he was good and he helped me. And I just extrapolated it would apply to everyone else. The only reason you were there was because I forecast the results incorrectly. I didn’t factor all of his behavioral outliers in.” His voice became so small, I had to lean in that much closer to hear him. “He wasn’t always the way he is now. They broke something in him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “For not letting you explain. For acting the way I did and not being there for you.”
“I have to fix this,” he said, voice ragged, “I have to make things right. I can’t—I can’t stop thinking about all of the other outcomes we could have had. Vida said if you hadn’t been there we wouldn’t have had the cure, but we don’t have it, do we? It was for nothing.”
It was a punch to the gut. I felt tears spring to my eyes and fought to hold them back. The pain in him was unending. His life was tragedy upon tragedy upon tragedy. And I’d ignored him, punished him. Vida hadn’t made any real attempt. Cate had left altogether. He didn’t have anyone to help him through this. We’d stranded him out in a dark sea without so much as a life vest.
“We can make it right,” I said, taking him by the shoulders. “You’ve done so much already, but there’s still so much left. We’ll figure out another way.”
“You have no logical reason to trust me,” Nico said.
“You may have noticed this about me, but I’ve never been good at listening to logic.”
“That’s true,” he agreed. “It’s not your pattern. Jude liked that. He said you knew when it was okay to break the rules to help people. He said you were like a superhero because you always tried to do good things even if the odds were bad.”
“Jude’s pattern was exaggeration,” I said, hoping he didn’t catch the hitch in my voice.
Nico nodded, his jet-black hair falling forward into his face. He looked sick to me—sick in body, mind, and heart. The pallor of his usually golden-brown skin made it look like his ghost had already up and left his body. “Jude never made logical decisions, but he tried.”
He tried. He tried so hard, at everything, with everyone.
“Ruby, what does the future look like?” Nico asked. “I can’t picture it. I try all the time, but I can’t imagine it. Jude said it looked like an open road just after a rainstorm.”
I turned back toward the board, eyes tracing those eight letters, trying to take their power away; change them from a place, a name, to just another word. Certain memories trap you; you relive their thousand tiny details. The damp, cool spring air, swinging between snow flurries and light rain. The hum of the electric fence. The way Sam used to let out a small sigh each morning we left the cabin. I remembered the path to the Factory the way you never forgot the story behind a scar. The black mud would splatter over my shoes, momentarily hiding the numbers written there. 3285. Not a name.
You learned to look up, craning your neck back to gaze over the razor wire curled around the top of the fence. Otherwise, it was too easy to forget that there was a world beyond the rusting metal pen they’d thrown all of us animals into.
“I see it in colors,” I said. “A deep blue, fading into golds and reds—like fire on a horizon. Afterlight. It’s a sky that wants you to guess if the sun is about to rise or set.”
Nico shook his head. “I think I like Jude’s better.”
“Me too,” I said softly. “Me too.”
AFTER LEAVING NICO TO HIS WORK, I headed to the upper level, barely keeping a lid on the fury ripping through me. It didn’t matter, not even for a second, that Senator Cruz was in Alban’s old office with Cole and they were having a serious, quiet discussion. I let myself explode into the room.
Senator Cruz leapt to her feet and pressed a hand to her chest. Cole only leaned back in his seat.
“He told you,” Cole said, his voice flat.
“Yes, he told me!” I snapped. “How could you authorize—”
“Shut the door—Ruby!” Cole slammed a hand down on the desk, cutting off my tirade before it could even really begin. The way his voice immediately softened, the pained quality of it, brought me up short. “Shut the door.”
I kicked it shut behind me, crossing my arms over my chest.
“It is a death sentence to send that kid into Thurmond,” I told him. “He won’t be able to handle it, and even if he could, who’s to say they’ll take him to the camp and not back into Leda’s testing program?”
“The one he was in was closed shortly after I got the flash drive out,” Cole said.
“Like there aren’t others?” I said.
“You were fine with sending Tommy and Pat into Oasis,” Senator Cruz reminded me. She knew about this, too.
“I’m not fine with it. I don’t like it. But they’re functioning as eyes and ears only, and we’ll have them out within two days. Nico won’t be able to get away to install the program, and even if by some miracle he does, he won’t be able to get away from the Control Tower once it’s complete.”
“Then, what do you suggest?” Cole asked. “Really, I’m all ears.”
I thought of Zu’s reaction to Vida and Chubs leaving, the pale shock that had wrapped its icy hands over her. If Nico was right, and this was the only way, then it...I took a deep breath in, my fingers curling into fists. Wouldn’t it have to be me? Nico was too fragile right now. Being back there would destroy him. But I could—if it helped the people I loved, if it helped every kid that came after us—I could accept that it was the role I was meant to play in this.
They’ll kill you, I thought. Clancy had already confirmed what they had done to the other Oranges. You would have to convince them again—make them think you’re Green. I shook my head, trying to clear the thoughts. Last resort. This was a last resort plan.
“I think we need to consider Liam’s ideas,” I said. “Maybe we should go more indirect. Use the media. Get the parents involved. If we take Gray’s image down, shake up that last bit of trust people have in him, we can dismantle his government that way. Th
e international community can’t ignore evidence of abuse and wrongdoing for long. They’ll step in—”
“Sweetheart, they’ve been ignoring evidence for years,” Senator Cruz said. “They tried to drop aid into the country and it backfired. Gray threatened to shoot their planes out of the sky if they crossed into our airspace again. I’ve tried and tried.”
“We just have to get them the right proof,” I said. “We can use Lillian Gray’s words about the cure and whatever she knows about what caused IAAN to prove it’s safe for them to travel in, and help overthrow Gray. Haven’t there been peacekeeping forces formed in the past?”
“We have a deal. Oasis for supplies,” Senator Cruz said sharply, turning to look at Cole. “Are you reneging?”
“No, I promise you, that’s not what we’re doing,” he said, both hands out and placating. “It’s natural to have cold feet before an Op like this. Can I speak to Ruby alone for a few minutes?”
Senator Cruz rose stiffly, casting an unhappy glance in my direction as she exited the room and pulled the door firmly shut behind her.
“Talk to me, Gem,” Cole said. “Tell me what’s going on in that head of yours.”
“We should keep the plan for Oasis, but I think we need to rethink our approach to Thurmond. Nico won’t be able to handle the strain, and we have no guarantee he’d even be brought in. We don’t have to be the League—default on a straightforward assault.”
Cole let out a humorless laugh, rocking back in his chair again. “Do you know why that became the general strategy? It wasn’t always that way. Alban tried for years to release the truth about Gray and the quality of life in the camps. He tried propaganda, straight-up emotional manipulation. And what messages did get through fell flat. It wasn’t that people didn’t care. It was that their heads were already in Gray’s game, and he told them, time and time and time again, that if they took their kids out of his camps, they would die. For what Liam’s suggesting to work, it’s not just about getting the parents there, it’s making them willing to come. And if you don’t think the PSFs wouldn’t open fire on civilians, you are dead wrong, Ruby. Dead wrong.”
In the Afterlight Page 25
