Gem. Ruby.
The air burned where it was trapped in my lungs. Where are you?
Roo, are you okay?
I thrashed against the water, stretching my arms up and up again to drag myself to the surface. Up—there was a light, a pinprick of it, growing larger, waiting—
Come on, darlin’, come on...
I pulled, dragged, clawed my way up—
“She’s going to—”
“—do something! Stop her!”
“Ruby!”
I slammed back into my own mind. The thick, murky water drained around me as reality took shape. The static, dry smell of the computer lab. The glow of monitors reflecting against the nearby white wall. Nico’s face, bloodless, hands up in front of him. My eyes shifted from the cold, heavy gun in my hand to the pale-haired woman on the floor, her arms up over her head protectively.
I jerked, looking at Nico again as the gun came down a fraction of an inch. My arm was on fire, aching like it had held the weight for hours. Comprehension dawned in his eyes, and I saw his stance relax, only to tense again as he shouted, “Vi, no!”
One minute I was vertical, the next I was on the ground, pain consuming every confused, disoriented thought. I’d been laid out flat by a hit between the shoulder blades, and what breath I had left flew out of my lungs as Vida kept me pinned to the ground.
“Wait!” Zu said. “Ruby...?”
“What...” My mouth felt like it was full of sand.
“Ruby?” Chubs’s face floated above me. “Vi, get off her—”
“She was going to shoot her—I thought she—she was going to shoot—”
“What is going on?” Senator Cruz cried, somewhere above us.
“I don’t...” I started to say, the pain splitting my head in two. I felt turned around and upside down, flipped inside out. “How did I get here?”
“You don’t remember?” Dr. Gray asked, sounding the calmest of anyone in the room. “You left and came back in—you shoved me to the ground. You didn’t say a word.”
“What?” My nails scraped against the tile. “No! I wouldn’t—I don’t—”
“You weren’t yourself,” Chubs said, gripping my shoulders. “You didn’t respond to anything we said—”
“I’m sorry, shit, I’m so sorry,” Vida said. “I didn’t know what to do—every time we got close, you looked like you were going to shoot!”
“Nico?” I said, pressing a hand against my eyes to stop the flow of tears. There was no way to hold them in; the pain was clouding my brain, overriding my body’s response. “Nico?”
“He just ran out—” Senator Cruz said. “He looked at the monitor and just took off—what is happening?”
Him. It was him. And through the pain, through lingering confusion clinging to my mind, I finally understood what was happening.
I clutched at Chubs’s arm. “You have to—listen to me, okay?”
“Okay, Ruby, okay,” he said, “just take a breath.”
“No, listen. Go...you and Vida go get the others. The kids. Go get them and take them, Senator Cruz, and...and Dr. Gray out through the garage. Go into one of the nearby buildings. Don’t let anyone leave. Understand?”
“Yes, but what are you—”
“Take what food and water you can carry, but wait in the building until you get the all clear.”
The gaps in my memory, began to color themselves in. If I closed my eyes, I could see myself in the middle of a conversation I didn’t remember having. Sitting down in the computer room with all the lights off. The tips of my fingers remembered each keystroke, tingled with the thought. Sleepwalking. The messages that were sent. The communications that were sent. He can move people around. Like they’re toys. Clancy’s last warning.
My thoughts spiraled, spinning together until they formed a whole, gut-wrenching realization.
He’s planned an out.
They’re coming.
Someone is coming to get him—and he used me to arrange the ride.
“There’s been a security leak,” I told them. “Me.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Vida said, helping me up from the ground.
“Nico...he noticed someone sending messages outside of the Ranch and trying to cover them up, delete them from the server activity log, we thought it was—” I turned toward Alice. “We thought it was you, or one of the kids working with you. But it wasn’t, was it?”
“No, dammit, I told you that!” Alice said.
“I know, I’m sorry. I know that now. He’s been walking me around, using me to spy on what’s happening. He had me send messages for him. Shit!”
Escape. I let my mind work it through the way he would have. The only group that could extract him was his father’s military or some kind of contractor. He hadn’t known exactly where the Ranch was, likely, until I’d gone out to Oasis and he’d been able to watch through my eyes how to get back.
He’d only need the soldiers to unlock his cell, and then it’d be as easy as compelling them to leave him alone, to turn their attention to rounding up the other kids in the Ranch. All he’d have to do was slip away.
But why hadn’t he just compelled me to open the cell door for him? Why wait, go such a roundabout way?
“You weren’t in control of yourself?” Dr. Gray said. “Who was, then?”
I stared at her and I had my answer. Clancy wanted us to find her. To bring her here, to finish what he’d started. Only, she’d been right—he would never kill her.
He’d have me do it for him.
I looked away. She’d know soon enough that I couldn’t keep our bargain.
“Lillian, let’s go,” Senator Cruz said, “I have to get Rosa—the others—Ruby will follow us, won’t you, Ruby?”
“That’s—” I could see the need to protest this in her eyes, but the senator took her arm firmly and began walking her to the door.
I ran to the board at the front of the room, wiping it clean, tearing down the satellite image of Thurmond, folding it up, and tossing it at Vida. “Please,” I said to her and Chubs, “go get the kids, get them out—I need to take care of Clancy, but I’ll be there soon. Guys—please! Pull the server and take whatever you can out of the locker.”
The weapon stock would be low; the kids who’d gone out to the water treatment facilities had taken most of the handguns as a precaution. There were so few of us left in the compound—Oasis kids, mostly, who were still too wet behind the ears to go out into the field. We hadn’t had time to train them for something like this.
“If you think I’m leaving you, you’re out of your damn mind,” Chubs said.
I doubled down on my grip, broken nails cutting into his skin. “Go! You have to go right now—right now. The Ranch’s location has been compromised. You have to get the kids out. Take Senator Cruz and Dr. Gray. Charles! Listen to me! I’ll be right behind you, but if—if you stay, no one is getting out. Go!”
Vida’s dark eyes flashed as she took his arm and started to drag him away by force. “Right behind us?”
“Right behind you.”
I ran from the computer room, shouldered my way through the double doors and stopped dead. A shiver raced through me as the unnatural silence in the hallway was punctuated by the sound of a hysterical voice. I recognized it with a terrible, sinking feeling.
I pivoted toward the storage room. The door was already unlocked, left partly open. My anxiety spiked and I couldn’t tell if the low growls I heard in the distance were actual helicopters or the product of my frantic imagination.
“—you promised! You promised you wouldn’t do this again!”
I bolted down the small hallway, through the open door, and into the scene already unfolding.
Nico’s hands were gripped in his black hair, destroying its slicked-back shape, making it stand on end. H
e was pacing alongside Clancy’s cell, his face bright red, as if he’d been crying. “And you did it to her! How could you hurt Ruby? How could you?”
Clancy sat cross-legged on his bed, looking annoyed but other wise unfazed by the breakdown Nico was having in front of him. His eyes shifted over to me as I entered, his arms coming up to cross firmly over his chest. Nico hadn’t gone into the cell, thank God, but I saw a copy of the same keys I had in my hand.
Cole’s set, I realized. We’d kept this area a secret from most everyone here at the Ranch, but Nico could have seen any one of us go inside, or found some kind of layout of the building on one of the servers. Hell, he could have just deduced it.
“Ruby—he can’t keep getting away with it! He can’t!” There were tears in his eyes. “You have to make him leave, just let him go, before—”
“Finally,” Clancy said to me. “Can you please get him out of here? I already have enough of a migraine.”
“If your head aches now, imagine how it’ll feel when I rip it off your neck,” I snarled.
Clancy smirked, looking me up and down. “It looks like you had an interesting night.”
“Shut up! Shut up! Ruby, he—” Nico sucked in a breath. “It’s like I told you—he can control other people’s bodies. He can move them around like puppets without them realizing it. He did it all the time, to all of the researchers, I know he can do it—and he made you—he made you send those messages through the server!”
For a moment, I was sure he’d try to deny it all, brush Nico aside as being out of his mind. But Clancy didn’t bother to hide the small smile tucked in the corner of his mouth.
“Really had you going there, didn’t I?”
“You...” The idea of it was almost too much. Coming into my mind while I was asleep would keep me from sensing the tingling rush down the back of my skull that came when someone tried to force a connection between our minds. He’d walked me around like a doll—listened in on conversations, stolen whole moments of my life. I’d been his eyes and ears, and I hadn’t even thought that it could be done, that there was the possibility of it.
“How long?” I demanded.
“How long have you been having those ‘stress headaches’?” Clancy folded his hands in his lap. “They’re the worst, aren’t they? I’m glad I haven’t been suffering through them alone. But you should know you only have yourself to blame. Every time you enter someone’s mind, you form a connection with them—their memories, thoughts, will become yours. Each time you came into my mind, each time I got you while your defenses were down, you let me reinforce our bond. You’re the reason I was able to do this.”
“What did the messages say?” I demanded, stepping up to the glass. Nico slumped down against the wall behind me, hiding his face behind his hands. “Who were they sent to?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Clancy said. “You’re both clearly too emotional to understand. You’ve been so stressed, Ruby. It’s harder to control your abilities when you’re so...frayed...”
...Isn’t it?
I heard the words like they had been spoken inside of my skull and immediately threw down a black wall between the two of us, clipping the connection before it could fully form.
This was how he’d played me again—he knew the symptoms of anxiety and lack of focus, and even the headaches could be explained away by the stress of our situation.
Again, and again, and again, I thought. Every time, I walk right into it. We were on different levels, and I needed to stop pretending like we weren’t. My mind hadn’t even been twisted enough to imagine he’d be capable of doing this.
“That’s better.” Clancy gave me an approving nod. “You understand now. Your role in this is over. The Red is gone. You’ve set this up so well, it’ll be easy to step in and finish it. You can rest now. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“You knew he’d be hurt—killed,” I said, choking on the words.
“Only because you guaranteed it,” Clancy said, victory making his dark eyes shine. “Who do you think sent a message to the trainers there, warning them to be on the lookout?”
There was a moment of skull-shattering pain and then I did scream. I screamed and screamed, slamming my hands against the glass until I had nothing left but a miserable, low sob to give. My fault. My fault. My fault.
“It’s a bit tragic, isn’t it? To give someone the one thing they desperately want, knowing that in the end, it only has the power to destroy them. He wanted so badly to know he wasn’t the only one like him—to fit in with us. It was pathetic.”
I lurched forward, vision flashing red, black, white, the invisible hands in my mind already driving toward him.
He couldn’t have this.
East River, Los Angeles, Jude, the research, Cole—he had taken so much, destroyed every trace of hope just as it solidified into something real in my hands. He can’t have this. We were too close. I was too close to finishing this.
Nico brought me up short, stepping in front of me brandishing the keys. Hands steady, expression focused, he unlocked each of the three deadbolts on the door.
“Leave!” he said, throwing the door open. “Disappear again, the way you always do! Get out of here before you ruin everything for us—call off the people you hired to get you out, just...disappear!”
Clancy stood up from his cot, a strange expression on his face.
“Don’t you get it?” Nico said. “You haven’t hurt the people who hurt you by doing this—you never will, and you won’t admit it to yourself! You can’t even get close to them. The only thing you’ve ever done is hurt the kids who wanted to help you. We all wanted to help you!”
“Then you should have stayed out of my way.”
“Why did you help the League get me out of Leda’s program?” Nico asked, holding his ground as Clancy sauntered toward him. “You gave them the plan to extract me in Philadelphia, didn’t you? But you were the one who left me behind at Thurmond—you left all of us, even after you told us we would get out together, we would be able to live without fear or shame or pain. Clancy...don’t you remember the pain?” His voice dropped to a whisper. “Why couldn’t you have just let me die like the others? You told me I had to live, but I wish I had just...I wish I had died, so you couldn’t have used me.”
Clancy was watching him, an expression on his face I’d never seen before.
“Why do you have to take every good thing we try to give you and break it into pieces?” Nico said. “You let them turn you into this...”
“This is who I am,” Clancy snapped. “I won’t let them change me. I won’t let them touch me. Not again.”
“No one is going to force you to have the procedure,” Nico said, his hands up, placating. “You’re free to go. You can disappear. Please...please...just call off the people who are coming. Please, Clance. Please.”
“I told you to stay out of this,” Clancy said, his voice shaking, even as he eyed the exit, even as I could see him considering it. “Why can’t you ever listen?”
“Please,” Nico begged.
“It’s too late,” he said, hands fisted in his sweatpants. “If you weren’t so stupid, you’d have realized that. Can’t you hear it? They’re on the roof. They’re here.”
“But you could get them to leave. You could make sure they go.”
He’s working him, I realized, half-amazed. Clancy was actually considering this, weighing Nico’s words. I didn’t move, too afraid I’d break the strange spell that had fallen over the room. My eyes kept darting between the two boys just outside of the cell. The tension in the room was softening, easing naturally.
“Who’s here?” came a soft voice from the doorway. “Who did you call to get you?”
And just like that, Clancy hardened again, shoving past Nico. “Hello, Mother. Were you hoping I’d leave without saying good-bye?”
<
br /> “Who did you call?” she repeated, her stiff posture perfectly mimicking her son’s.
“Who do you think?” he said, all sweetness. “I called Dad.”
“I told you to leave!” I barked at her.
“No, stay,” Clancy said. “Clearly, last time didn’t take. We’ll have to try again, and this time Ruby won’t be there to help you.”
There was a beat of silence, and then the whole building rocked, shuddering under the force of some kind of explosion. Clancy looked past her, toward the door, and in that moment I was sure I had never hated him more.
The light caught the gun—my gun, the one that had been knocked out of my hands in the computer room—as Lillian Gray raised it and aimed at Clancy.
“I love you,” she said, and fired.
A SPRAY OF BLOOD BURST from his shoulder, knocking him back against the glass wall. But Lillian wasn’t finished. She took another step forward, ignoring her son’s scream of pain, and aimed lower, this time firing at his leg. The whole time, her face was a cold mask, as if she’d had to shut off some crucial part of herself to see this through.
Nico and I jumped with each shot. He covered his face and turned away so he wouldn’t have to see it. I watched. I had to make sure he didn’t get away this time.
The ceiling shook, the sound of heavy footsteps thundering over our heads. We’d have minutes, maybe, before they found us. It would need to happen fast. And wouldn’t you know it? The only thing I could think of as the old, familiar calm came over me was one simple phrase: accept, adapt, act.
The certainty of it was more comforting than terrifying. That, too, seemed so strange—at some point, after pushing the possibility to the darkest corner of my mind, it had taken root and flourished. The old plan was gone. The new one bloomed in its place.
The string around his neck holding the flash drive had slipped clear of Nico’s shirt as he stumbled away from Clancy, falling back against the cell’s glass wall. I was in front of him before he could catch his breath, gripping the black piece of plastic and yanking hard enough to snap the string he’d threaded it on. And before he could react, I shoved a shell-shocked Nico back into the empty cell and slammed the door shut.
In the Afterlight Page 40
