Never Fade

TEN

THE TAN SUV REEKED of fake evergreens. The smell of the air freshener was so overpowering, I had to roll down my windows to get fresh air circulating.

“You wouldn’t be complaining if you were there to smell the guy I bought it off of,” Chubs said, handing me a pair of sunglasses to wear. “Now. Put your seat belt on, please.”

Vida and Jude were already buckled into the backseat, though they hadn’t gone quietly. My favorite team member got one look at the metal grating that separated the front seats from the back and just about ripped my hair out at the roots trying to yank me out of the front seat.

“Are we driving this slowly because you have no idea where we’re going,” Vida asked, “or because you’re hoping we jump out of the car and put ourselves out of our misery?”

Jude sat straight up, alarmed. We both recognized that tone. Vida picked fights when she was bored, and battles when she was stressed. If it were the latter, only one of them was going to make it out of this car ride alive. We’d be washing the blood off the windows for weeks.

“That’d be doing the psychos holding your leashes a favor.”

For the first time, I was grateful for the metal grating between us. “They are not psychos, you condescending dick!” she snarled.

“I’m condescending?” Chubs asked. “Do you even know what that word means?”

“You piece of flaming—”

“So,” Jude said, his voice high. “Roo, how do you and Chubs know each other?”

“Charles,” he gritted out. “My name is Charles.”

“That’s supposed to be better?” Vida scoffed. Chubs let the car roll to a stop at a red light and turned to look at me, fire burning behind the lenses of his glasses.

“Yup,” I said. “She’s always like this.”

The tension that welled up in the car hovered among us, strung tight. One word or wrong move would snap it. Jude drummed his fingers against the armrest.

“Cut that shit out, nimrod, before I cut them off,” Vida said.

“Nimrod?” he shot back, his voice jumping an octave with outrage. “You don’t have to be so mean, you know.”

I pressed a hand to my forehead. “That gets you upset? That dumb name? She’s been calling you Judith for months.”

Chubs laughed but turned it into a cough when he saw my look.

“Yeah, well,” Jude huffed, drawing his boney knees up to his chest. “I guess I just don’t see what’s so insulting about being called a girl. The two of you seem to do okay when you’re not biting my head off or acting like I’m five years old.”

“As opposed to what?” Chubs said, flicking on the turn signal to merge onto a highway. “The ten-year-old you actually are?”

“Hey,” I warned. “None of that. He’s almost fifteen.”

“Roo,” Jude began, his eyes shining, “thank you.”

“You were that gawky when I first met you,” I continued, poking Chubs in the shoulder, “and you were eighteen.”

“Never mind,” Jude grumbled.

“You were the gawky one,” he corrected, “Lee was the reckless one, Zu was the cute one, and I was the wise one.”

There was a knock on the grate behind us. Jude’s face was floating there, his dark brown eyes peering between the two of us from behind the metal screen. “It would be nice,” he said, “if we had any idea what you guys are talking about. Like who this Zu person is?”

Chubs’s eyes slid over to meet mine. “Exactly how much did you tell them?”

“Exactly nothing,” Vida said. “And if it stays that way, I will make you regret it.”

This time I rolled my eyes. “Sure. Whatever you say.”

I felt the familiar warm tingling at the center of my chest and had just enough time to gasp as some invisible hand yanked me forward, smacking my forehead against the dashboard with enough force to stun me dumb.

Chubs slammed on the brakes, forcing my seat belt to do its job and lock against my chest. I was thrown back into my seat, an explosion of colors bursting in my vision.

“Oh, hell no!” Chubs roared, slamming a hand against the steering wheel. “That’s it! We do not use our abilities on one another, goddammit! Behave yourself!”

“Chill the fuck out, Grannie,” Vida said. “You’re going to give yourself a stroke.”

“You cannot give yourself—” Chubs began in a growl but caught himself.

Jude let out a nervous laugh behind us, but I only pressed a hand to my stinging forehead. She had made her point.

“Zu was a friend of ours,” I said. “We traveled together for a while.”

“I thought Cate got you out, though,” Jude said. “Did you guys get separated or something? It seems like it would be dangerous just to be out wandering around.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Chubs said. “After the three of us broke out of camp—”

He might as well have told the others that he was a wizard. Even Vida leaned forward, suddenly so much more interested. “You?” she began. “You broke out of a camp?”

“Liam planned it,” Chubs gritted out. “But yes. I did.”

“Does that kid think he’s some kind of expert in getaways?” Vida muttered. “Goddamn.”

Jude’s eyes were bright with interest. “What was that like? Did you have your own room, like a little prison cell? Did they make you do hard labor? I heard that—”

The kids in the League knew about the camps—vaguely. There were only a few of us who had actually lived in one and experienced the life firsthand, but there was an unspoken rule we didn’t talk about it. Everyone knew the truth, but the truth didn’t live inside them the same way it did for us. They’d heard about the sorting machines, the cabins, the testing, but most of their stories were gossip, completely wrong. These kids had never stood for hours on end in an assembly line. They didn’t know fear came in the shape of a small black camera lens, an eye that followed you everywhere, at all times.

My chest tightened with the effort of keeping silent. One by one, my fingers closed around the seat belt’s silver fabric until I was all but choking it.

“Do you not remember it or something?” Jude asked. “Were you only there for a little while—is that why you can’t talk about it, because there’s nothing to say?”

“I would shut your mouth,” Chubs advised.

“Come on,” Jude whined. “If she’d just talk to us—”

“What?” The word exploded out of me. “What do you want me to tell you? You want to hear about how they tied us up like animals to bring us into the camp—or, hey! How about that time a PSF once beat in a girl’s skull so badly she actually lost an eye? You want to know what it was like to drink rotten water for an entire summer until new pipes finally came? How I woke up afraid and went to bed in terror every single day for six years? For God’s sake, leave me alone! Why do you always have to dig and dig when you know I don’t want to talk about it?”

I regretted the outburst halfway through, but the speech tumbled out, one vile, traitorous word after another. Chubs only glanced at the glowing blue clock, then back up at the soggy road. In the backseat, Jude was as silent as snow falling on asphalt, his mouth opening and closing, like he was trying to taste the burn of his words after they left his lips.

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d be up for hearing about the one-eyed chick,” Vida said with a shrug.

“You are actually the worst person I have ever met,” Chubs said.

“And people like you are the reason we have middle fingers.”

“Guys…” I started.

Cate had told me once, a long time ago, that the only way to survive your past was to find a way to close it off behind you, to shut one door before passing into another, brighter room. I was afraid. That was the truth. I was terrified of the guilt and shame that would come flooding in when I retraced my steps, turned the lock, and found the girl I had abandoned. I didn’t want to know what the darkness there had done to her, if she would even recognize herself in my face.

I didn’t want to know what Chubs would think of me after he found out what I’d done for the League.

I didn’t want to know what Liam would think of me or of the smell of smoke in my hair that never went away, no matter how many times I washed it.

“At least tell us about how you ended up splitting with Liam,” Jude said. “If you guys were traveling together, why did you…um, stop? Cate came to get you when you pushed the panic button, I know, but was Liam gone by then? What about him?” He pointed at Chubs.

Those memories weren’t any less painful, but they were important.

“All right,” I said. “You know that we traveled together—Liam, Chubs, Zu, and me. But what you don’t know is that we were looking for a place, a safe haven called East River. To understand why I did it and how he ended up on his own, I have to start there.”

“Fine,” Vida answered, leaning back away from the grating, her eyes drifting over to the window at her right. The first traces of snow drifted into our roaring path.

I told them about East River, how it had felt like a dream until we woke up and realized we were trapped in a nightmare. About Clancy, which was so much harder than even I expected. How we escaped, how Chubs was shot, and how it was just the two of us in the safe house. Jude started to interrupt, his eyes wide with either anxiety or confusion, I couldn’t tell. I felt my own heart drift up and up and up until I had to swallow it down to get through what came next. My decision and Cate’s deal. What I had seen in Cole’s memory and his own explanation of it.

In the strangest way, it made me feel closer to Liam. He was alive and vivid in my thoughts. Solid, warm Liam with his sunglasses on, the sunlight in his hair, and the words of a favorite song on his lips. I half expected to look up and see him in the driver’s seat.

No one spoke. I couldn’t bring myself to look behind me; I felt both Jude’s and Vida’s conflicted feelings cling to my skin the way condensation was gathering on the windows.

I felt a light touch on my shoulder. I turned, slowly, to see Jude retract his finger back through the metal grate. His bottom lip was white where it was caught between his teeth. But he was looking at me—not with fear or any of its ugly cousins. Just a deep, sincere sadness.

He could still stand to look at me.

“Roo,” Jude whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

“Can I just ask one thing?” Chubs said, his voice sounding tight in his throat after I finished. “What are you doing with the flash drive?”

“I was going to bring it back to Cole,” I said. “He and I have a deal—if I get the intel back to him, it’ll be enough to shift the priorities of the League back to freeing kids from camps and exposing the government’s lies.”

Chubs rubbed his forehead. “And you believe him? The only thing Liam ever said about him was that he used to set his toys on fire when he didn’t get his way.”

“I believe him,” I said. “He won’t hurt us. He’s one of the few who doesn’t want us gone, apparently.”

“Gone?” Chubs asked, alarmed.

I let Jude explain; his stumbling, rambling explanation was coated by rough grief, and it made the story that much more horrible to hear.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Chubs said. “You’re just going back, hoping that they manage to pick out all of the bad seeds?”

“Don’t say it like that,” Jude cried. “It’ll get better. Rob’s gone, right? Cate will let us know when we can come back.”

“You and Liam will be safe—at least from the League,” I told Chubs. “They won’t come after you. You get it, right? You understand why I told Cole I’d do this?”

“Sure. I get it,” he said, his voice cold enough to drive a chill through even my veins. And again, I read the question he was really asking in the silence he left to fill the space between us. I knew what he wanted to ask, because it was the same thought that had been circling in on me for days.

If the intel is that important, why would you ever give it to the League?

Of all the training, and Ops, and the League-sponsored explosions I’d been unfortunate enough to witness, none seemed half as dramatic as Chubs’s thrilling tale of escape.

We pulled into an old camping ground for the night, just outside of a city called Asheville in western North Carolina. I’d managed to fill most of the five-hour drive with explanations, and the whole thing had left me drained. I didn’t put up any kind of struggle when Chubs and Jude argued for stopping.

We did a quick walk-through of the area to make sure it was clear of other visitors before returning to pull supplies from the SUV. I popped the latch, stepping back from the door as it opened.

“Oh my God,” I managed.

The whole thing was just so…impressive. A wall of small, stacked plastic tubs and drawers, all labeled with handy reminders like: FIRST AID and ROPE and VITAMINS and FISHING HOOKS. The care and forethought it had taken to put this all together was impressive, if not completely terrifying in how ruthlessly thorough it was.

Jude gave Chubs a long look of appraisal. “You had day-of-the-week underwear growing up, didn’t you?”

Chubs merely pushed the glasses up the bridge of his nose. “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

He laid out the entire story for me as we set up the tent that had been folded neatly under the backseat. Vida, at least, was able to get a small fire going with a lighter.

“I don’t actually remember most of this stuff happening,” Chubs said, struggling with the tent’s frame. “The League brought me to the nearest hospital, which happened to be the one in Alexandria.”

“Not Fairfax?” I asked, smoothing the damp hair away from my face. Jude and Vida were doing their best to listen to all of this while pretending they weren’t.

Chubs shrugged. “I have a vague memory of seeing some faces but—I told you that I look like my dad, right?”

I nodded.

“Well, one of the doctors recognized me. She used to work with Dad, but transferred—Anyway, it’s not important. They managed to stabilize me, but this doctor and her staff knew I needed to be in a better-equipped hospital. So she got on the phone and tracked Dad down. He was going to meet us at my aunt’s restaurant, remember?”

“I remember.”

“He was able to meet the ambulance when it arrived at Fairfax Hospital; they already had a fake ID prepared for me, so that’s what they registered me under. They kept an oxygen mask on my face the entire time. I got walked through two sets of security guards, and no one looked twice.”

“And they didn’t tell the agents who brought you in,” I finished. “The League has no idea what happened to you. You’re still listed as MIA in all of the related Op files.”

Chubs snorted. “They tried telling the agents I coded out and died, but they didn’t bite. One day my dad had six different people come to him fishing for information, but they didn’t get a word out of him.”

The real trick hadn’t been admitting him at the new hospital under a false name. The hospital had become well versed in a don’t-ask-we-won’t-tell policy when it came to dealing with the government and their requests for information, so much so that they were nearly shut down a good half dozen times. Dr. Meriwether’s stroke of genius was to hide his son, “Marcus Bell,” in an isolated room in the maternity ward for treatment. When he was strong enough, he was zipped up in a body bag and taken out of the hospital in a rented hearse. The League agents found the transfer paperwork and tried to connect the dots, but Chubs became a ghost the moment he had been wheeled into Fairfax Hospital.

From there, it had been a matter of finding a place for Chubs to recuperate and build his strength back up again.

“I will leave it to you to imagine what it was like to live in a ramshackle barn in upstate New York for four months,” he said, grimacing as he rolled his shoulder back. “I will go to my grave smelling hay and manure every time I close my eyes.”

The old barn belonged to a close family friend in the Adirondacks—and it had been isolated, cold, and lonely, by the sound of it. His parents could only come up twice to see him without sparking suspicion, but the elderly woman who owned the farm was there twice a day to help with his physical therapy and provide food. Mostly, though, he was bored to tears.

“I like to think I get along pretty well with the elderly, but this woman looked like she dragged herself up from the crypt every morning.”

“Yeah, to feed and nurse you,” I reminded him.

“The only books she had were about a crime-solving spinster bothering people in her small village,” he said. “I’m allowed to be a little bitter about the experience.”

“No,” I said, “actually, I’m pretty sure you’re not.”

“How did you end up doing all of…this, though?” Jude asked.

Chubs sighed. “I actually have to give Mrs. Berkshire credit. It was something she said after I told her about how I got out of Virginia—that the last place people tend to look for the hunted is among the hunters. She fell asleep midsentence, of course. I had to wait four hours to be blessed with the second half of her old-lady mysticism.”

I pressed a hand over my eyes.

“I’ll have you know I haven’t been suspected once,” he said, a bit too pleased with himself. “My parents got the doctored birth papers, which was the hardest part. It’s actually not that difficult to be registered as an official skip tracer. You just have to provide the right paperwork and establish yourself.”

The fire popped loudly, collapsing the small pile of wood we’d gathered. It seemed to be the right place to take a break in the story. I stood and pulled Chubs up off the ground to come with me. Jude started to rise, but I waved him back.

“We’re just going to get some food,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

“Don’t worry,” Vida said in her sugary sweet voice. She wrapped an arm around Jude’s shoulders. “We have been known to survive two whole minutes without you.”

I tried very hard not to stomp over to the car.

“I really do not trust that girl,” Chubs said, glancing back over his shoulder to where Vida was still sitting, her legs stretched out in front of her. “Youths who dye their hair are always battling inferiority complexes. Or hiding secrets.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Youths?”

He was so focused on her that he almost whacked himself in the face with the rear door of the SUV. Chubs’s hand flew to his left shoulder, as if to protect it.

“Let me see it,” I said, stopping him before he could reach for the tub labeled PROTEIN BARS. He sighed and slipped that arm from its jacket sleeve. There was enough stretch in his shirt’s fabric for him to pull the collar down across his left shoulder where a quarter-sized patch of pink, puckered skin stood out stark against his otherwise dark skin.

“Did they…” My throat suddenly felt dry. “Did they get it out? The bullet?”

He adjusted his shirt, smoothing it back down again. “It was a clean shot. It went straight through. As far as bullet wounds go, it wasn’t anything awful.”

It wasn’t anything awful. I swallowed, a weak attempt to keep from crying.

“Oh jeez, not again,” he said. “I’m fine. I’m alive, right?”

“Why did you come back?” I whispered, hearing my own voice break. “Why didn’t you stay up there, where it was safe?”

Chubs, food cradled against his chest, reached one long arm up to close the door. “And leave you two idiots out on the run?”

I watched him heave in two deep breaths, then send them sailing out in a long white cloud.

“I’m so angry with you,” he said finally, his voice low. “I’m furious. I know why you erased yourself, I understand, but all I want to do is shake some sense back into you.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, okay?”

“Do you, though?” he asked. “You won’t leave these two, even though they could report me—and Lee—back to the League. You put yourself in the line of fire, with the worst people, and you did it without someone there to watch your back. How do you think Lee’s going to react when he finds out what you did?”

The knot in my stomach tightened to the point of pain. He was furious; the strength of the anger powering him was like a beacon to my mind. It made him vulnerable, exposed.

“He won’t find out,” I said. “I told you, all I was going to do was get the flash drive and make sure he was all right. I wasn’t going to…I’m not going to interfere.”

“That is the most bullshit, cowardly thing I have ever heard come out of your mouth,” he shot back. “You lied to us before about what you are, and I got it. I understand why you did it, but now…you’re out, and we can all be together again, and you’re choosing the only option that ends with us apart? Maybe Liam could forgive you for what you did, but if you go back to them, to California, I will never forgive you.”

He started to turn back to the fire and dark-green tent, only to pivot back to me. “Do you remember what it felt like when East River was attacked and we hid in that lake? All that night, I kept thinking, Well, this is the worst thing that will ever happen to me. I thought the same thing when we escaped Caledonia and we had to leave the other guys in our cabin behind, bleeding to death in the snow. And again, when I was shot—but the thing is, I was wrong. Ruby, the worst thing—the worst feeling—was being safe up in that barn and not knowing, for six months, what happened to you and Liam and Suzume. It was seeing your names pop up on the skip-tracer networks with upped rewards and potential sightings, and not being able to find any of you for months.”

Sometimes…most of the time with Chubs, really, it was impossible to tell his anger from his fear. They fed into each other.

“Then, all of a sudden, you were showing up everywhere. In Boston, in a train station in Rhode Island—you were being really careless there, you know.” He shot me a disapproving look. “Liam’s even worse. For months, nothing, then a tip about him being sighted in Philadelphia. I had to doctor evidence that the tip was bad to get it deleted off the network.”

The League had backdoor access to both the PSF and skip-tracer databases of kids, but neither of Liam’s profiles looked like they had been updated in ages. I knew—I checked twice a week. No wonder it looked like it hadn’t been updated the last time I looked.

“How did you know to go to his house?” I asked. The timing couldn’t have been a coincidence.

“I figured it had to be something to do with the protocol Harry set up to help them find each other—based on the sightings, I thought maybe the two of you were coming down to his old house to check to see if his stepdad set up the procedure.”

“Which was what?”

“When Cole and Liam left to join the League, Harry told them that if he and their mom felt like they needed to get out, he’d leave coordinates under the windowsill of Liam’s old bedroom.”

“And you have the coordinates?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “there was nothing there.”

“That must be why he went to find Cole in Philadelphia—to see if he knew anything.”

Chubs rubbed a knuckle over his lips, nodding. “That’s what I’m thinking, too. It doesn’t help us, though, if Cole had no idea, either.”

“I know,” I said. “Running blind, just like old times.”

Chubs sighed, and I swayed toward him, resting my forehead against his upper arm.

“We’ll watch the skip-tracer network, see if there are any other sightings.” Chubs shifted, hiking the cans up against his chest. “He’s screwed up a few times in the past. Chances are, he’ll do it again.”

It was a terrifying thought. We might pick up hints of him here and there, but chances were, we’d be too far away to swoop in and help if he were captured. He had a big enough head start on us that he could put some real distance behind him. And it was overwhelming to know that; suddenly, everything seemed so much harder and more impossible than only a few minutes before. It all felt so pointless.

“I’m so tired of this,” I told him. “I know I don’t have any right to be; I know I did this to us, to myself, but I don’t want to fight anymore. I’m so tired of everything, of all of this, and knowing it’s never going to get any better—that nothing I do will ever make anything better. I’m so sick of it all.”

Chubs shifted the cans in his arms, ducking down to get a closer look at my face. I wasn’t crying, but my throat ached and my head was pounding.

“No, what you are is exhausted,” he said. “Depression, anxiety, difficulty focusing—you’re a classic case. Come on, you’ll feel better after you get food and some sleep.”

“That won’t solve anything, either.”

“I know,” he said, “but it’s a start.”

I learned a long time ago that it was possible to be so far past the point of exhaustion that sleep no longer felt like an option. My stomach ached with the need for it, and my head felt heavy, but I could feel myself waiting for something, muscles tense and brain unable to settle. It was like no matter how hard I fought to focus on the point of the tent’s roof, to count off sheep, my mind kept drifting back to the night we had spent in the abandoned Walmart. To the kids we had been so convinced were going to screw us over in the worst way.

I must have nodded off at some point, because the next thing I knew, I was startled awake by a cold blast of air. Vida was at the opening of the tent, unzipping it slowly and as quietly as she could and stepping through. My head was slow to come up out of the fog of sleep, but I was alert enough to be suspicious, no matter how much I wanted to drift back into dreamland.

I counted to thirty, to sixty. I listened as her footsteps grew softer. Watched, waiting for her to come back.

She didn’t.

What are you up to? I thought, crawling over Chubs’s long legs to the tent’s opening. If she had needed to get a breath of fresh air or relieve herself, she would have been back by now.

Despite the crippling dark, I spotted her right away. She was shivering, rubbing her arms to try to shake off the night’s icy grip. I saw her glance back toward the tent once, and pulled back, hoping the moon wasn’t bright enough for her to make out my shape behind the tent’s thin waterproof covering.

Vida slinked her way around Chubs’s tan Ford Explorer, circling it twice before coming to stop by the driver’s side.

Sucks to be you, I thought, feeling a little smugger than was probably necessary. I had reminded Chubs to lock it, and with the gun inside the glove box, she’d have to find a rock or something heavy enough to break the glass if she wanted in—something that would be difficult to manage quietly.

If it hadn’t been for her bright hair, I would have lost her in the darkness as she headed off the trail into the forest. I stood and slipped out, tracing her steps around the car, trying to see how far she’d go. My toes were frozen stiff, sticking to the frost of the clumps of wild grass and mud. Vida kept walking, and I kept inching forward, more and more, until she was far enough for her hair to disappear into the night-cloaked trees completely—but not far enough to hide the blue-white glow of the device in her hands that cut through the darkness.