Never Fade

EIGHTEEN

IF YOU CAN HEAR THIS, you’re one of us. If you’re one of us, you can find us. Lake Prince. Virginia…

The sound of Clancy’s voice pouring out of the small boom box’s speakers made every single hair on the back of my neck stand at attention. Olivia had set it at the edge of Knox’s stage, and Jude had charged the batteries just enough to ensure we would have five minutes of solid listening.

“Why is this still broadcasting?” I asked. “I thought it was being sent out of East River?”

Olivia shook her head. “He set up a couple of signals so the message could be broadcast as far west as Oklahoma. I guess he didn’t think it was important to shut the rest down.”

This was the first time we had gathered everyone into the warehouse, and it was the first time I was able to get some kind of a head count. Fifty-one kids stood in a half moon around the small device, riveted by the words and bursts of static.

Finally, when it was clear that Olivia couldn’t stomach the thought of listening to it play through again, she switched it off. The spell of calm and curiosity went with it. Voices sailed up to the rafters, questions were shot back and forth, ricocheting off the water-stained cement walls. They wanted to know who the voice was, where the boom box had come from, why the kids from the White Tent had been moved inside and the fire barrels dragged closest to them.

“Does this prove it to you?” I asked them. “Knox was never the Slip Kid, at least not the real one, and this isn’t East River.”

I was annoyed we even had to do this at all; it was clear that most of the kids had believed what I said the night before, but a few holdouts from the hunting parties were clinging stubbornly to their loyalty to Knox. Maybe it wasn’t even that—I think they were just afraid they wouldn’t get the lion’s share of supplies now that Knox wasn’t there to enforce his bullshit rules.

Or maybe they really had deluded their hearts into believing that this was East River.

I sat next to Olivia on the edge of the stage. With the spread of kids laid out in front of me, I could see other traces of Knox’s cruelty. Burns. That bulging-eyed hunger. The jumps when the wind moaned through the cracks in the roof.

“Is that enough for everyone?” Olivia asked, turning to the kid in white who stood directly in front of the old device. Brett was no longer one of Knox’s little watchdogs. He was a seventeen-year-old, born and raised in Nashville, who had never once stepped foot in a camp and, apparently, was slow to process important news.

“Play it again,” he said, his voice hoarse. “One more time.”

There was a quality to Clancy’s voice—confidence, I guess—that made you listen to every last word when he spoke. I rubbed the back of my hand against my forehead and finally let out a breath when he drawled out the final Virginia.

“How do we even know that’s the Slip Kid?” Brett asked. He had been the one to call in the three other hunting teams and their leaders—Michael, Foster, and Diego. He had also been the one who insisted on watching us when we went through the crushing routine of putting Mason to rest. He hadn’t offered help or comfort, even as the blisters on my palms burst with the effort of trying to break the shovel through the frozen ground.

I understood, though. We were outsiders. We’d broken the system. I was only nervous he’d be so put off and angry about our little revolution, he’d convince the others not to make the supply run. Even now, I caught him tossing glances over his shoulder toward where Chubs knelt, tending to the sick kids.

It was becoming clearer to me that he was a key link in the community’s chain. If he came our way, the others would follow naturally. But we were running out of time. I could tell by the tight press of Chubs’s lips every time he took Liam’s temperature.

“I’m not here to give you anything but the truth,” Olivia said. “I’ve kept quiet about it long enough, thinking he’d get better or change his ways. He didn’t. He just got worse, and if Ruby hadn’t sent him away…I don’t know what he would have done next, but I know none of those kids over there would have survived it.”

“He really traded those kids? Knox said they tried running away, and he took care of them.” This from the same girl who had been draped over Knox’s lap on the day we were brought in. She had been one of the first kids I gave a blanket to out of the storage room. We’d pulled everything out of the cramped building, laying it out in the middle of the warehouse for everyone to see what was left. Some kids, the older ones, had been brave enough to go reclaim their things, but most had stared blankly at us, not understanding.

The murmurs rose again when Olivia nodded. “There were eleven of them, at least since I got here.”

“He did what he had to do to get food,” Michael snarled. “We have to make sacrifices. That’s what’s fair.”

“How is it fair for a sick kid to starve because he’s too weak to work, and because he can’t work, he can never get better?” she shot back. “How?”

Olivia pushed herself up so that she was standing on the platform. She tossed her limp blond hair back and stood straight and tall. “Look—it doesn’t have to be this way. I’ve been to East River, and I’ve seen all that it can be. I’ve lived through winters there, and summers, and everything in between, and I never went hungry, not once. I never felt scared—It was… It was a good place, because we took care of one another.”

I waited for the ax to fall, to see their faces when she told them how that same little slice of heaven was gone and the person behind it all nothing but a mask. But Brett, who’d clearly been struggling to process and accept all of this, was watching her, the tension in his face relaxing with each word until he was nodding.

“We can have that here,” she continued. “I know we can. There’s room to grow food, ways to set up better security. The Slip Kid doesn’t have to be one person, and East River doesn’t have to be only one place. We can make our own East River.”

“How are we supposed to do that with this?” Michael demanded. He shook his head, the ripped collar of his shirt falling open to reveal the strips of pale pink burn scars bubbling over his neck and shoulders. He jerked a thumb back toward the measly pile of supplies. “You’re as stupid as you are ugly, aren’t you?”

“Hey!” Brett barked, taking a charging step toward him. Michael backed off with a sneer.

“We start by making sure those kids back there survive,” Olivia continued, “that we all survive this winter. If you help Ruby and me with this hit, we’ll be able to feed ourselves for months. We’ll save their lives and, in the process, ours.”

“And where’s this magical land of make-believe, huh?” Michael pressed.

“One of the hangars at John C. Tune Airport,” Olivia fired back, meeting his gaze dead-on. “Does anyone know where it is?”

Brett raised his hand. “It’s a couple miles west of here, I think—ten at the most.”

“Okay,” Olivia said. Her jeans hung loose off her hips, half hidden by the jacket she fished out of the supply pile for herself. “That’s doable.”

“No,” Michael snarled, “it’s a trap. And anyone who agrees to participate in this shit show deserves what he or she gets.”

The kids in white—the hunters—began to shift, their teeth on edge. My mind stirred in response. I had just turned my gaze on him when Olivia spoke again.

“Look, if this is going to work—and it can, and it will—things have got to change around here. We can’t just be a tribe of Blues. No—no, listen to me!” Olivia raised her voice over the startled protests. “This isn’t about colors. It should never have been. This has to be a place where we don’t separate out by colors. This has to be a place of respect. If you can’t respect one another and your abilities, if you aren’t willing to help one another understand, then this won’t be the place for you.”

“And you get to decide this, why?” Michael pressed. “Who are you exactly to try to step up here? We had a system that worked pretty damn fine before. You want us to go soft? There’s a reason we only ran with other Blues—the rest of you are so goddamn pathetic you can’t do anything, not even protect yourselves.”

Olivia hesitated; her own doubts about herself had been simmering below the surface of her scarred skin. The doubt radiated off her, infecting everyone standing nearby. She seemed to wilt in front of me. I felt a small jolt of panic rush through me, like a second, unwanted heartbeat. We weren’t done yet. I needed her help—I needed her to be strong.

“Black is the color.”

I fought through the press of memory, letting those same words wash over me. Hearing them curled softly by Liam’s Southern accent, exactly as they had when he’d first said it all those months ago. “Black is still the color.”

She got it. I didn’t need pretty words to explain and, really, there were no words to describe what that place had been to us. We had been there together, had worked together, lived together, survived together. East River hadn’t just been a camp—it was an idea, a signal fire. A belief. Clancy might have been the Slip Kid, but so was every other kid who dodged the system. Who didn’t go quietly. Who wasn’t ashamed or afraid of what he or she was.

“Being smart doesn’t mean being soft,” I continued. “You can stay or you can go, but just remember—if you run, you run alone. And trust me, it’s a long, lonely road.”

“That’s right,” Olivia said finally. “If you want to go, now’s the time. Just know, though, that from this day on you will never stop running, not until they catch you. Never.”

“This is stupid!” Michael shouted. “It’s not how it’s supposed to work. If you think any of my guys are gonna support this—”

“Then, beat it,” Olivia said. “If you don’t like it, go. This only works if you want to be here. Take whatever you need and hit the road.”

I pushed myself off the small stage and walked right up to him. Michael was all razor edges and steel skin when I had been farther away from him, but I could see the way he was shaking now. He stood a full head over me, outweighed me by dozens of pounds, was armed…and none of it mattered. I didn’t have to pry inside his head to know that he was replaying last night. That his thoughts were looping on what I’d done to Knox.

What I can’t do to him.

The knowing hit me square in the teeth, stopping me dead in my tracks. I could influence him, that wasn’t even a question. But he’d been so outspoken and openly hostile that if I flipped him now, his miraculously sudden change of heart would raise suspicions. They would all know that I could and would do the same to them. They’d still be just as afraid of me, only then they’d be motivated enough to do something about it.

Michael stared at me, breathing heavily. Olivia was at my back in an instant, arms crossed over her chest. He licked his lips and started forward, the old hunting rifle at his side clattering with the force of his step.

“No man, come on,” another kid in white said, gripping him by the shoulder. “We don’t got to stay.”

Michael shrugged, throwing the other boy’s grip off him. He started toward the loading dock door, then spun toward Brett. “You too, huh?”

“When things go bad, you gotta fix them,” Brett said quietly.

Only five of the eight kids in Michael’s hunting party followed him out, not saying a single damn word, not taking anything from the pile of supplies, not acknowledging the waves of hands that reached out in silent good-byes. And only one of them turned back to look at me.

I saw the plan unfold in his mind as if he had opened a book and was turning the pages for me. Coming back to camp in the night, turn, sneaking back into the warehouse, turn, unloading every round in their guns on the kids sleeping in small huddles of blankets, turn, the five of them carrying out all of the supplies we’d be bringing back.

My spine stiffened from bone to granite to steel. I shook my head and blasted the plan clear out of his skull.

“Anyone else?” Olivia asked, surveying the huddled masses in front of her. “No? All right. Let’s get to work, then.”

The former occupants of the White Tent had been laid out beside the supplies, kept in a circle of warmth by the ring of blazing trash cans around them. Chubs glanced up from where he was hunched over Vida’s shoulders as I squeezed through the ring, the smell of smoke dragging up one black memory after another. I took a deep breath, pressing a hand against my mouth until Mason’s face had cleared from behind my eyes, and stepped over the sleeping kids. He had set them up in two lines again, this time not piled on top of one another.

“You suck at this!” Vida snarled. “What, did you forget your rake in the car? Pour some water on it and leave it the hell alone!”

She was sitting cross-legged in front of Chubs, her elbows resting on her knees and her face pressed firmly into her hands. It was a shock every time I looked at her now, an ugly little reminder of the previous night. When we returned to the warehouse, it had been obvious to all of us that most of Vida’s long hair couldn’t be saved. She managed to put out the fire before it reached her scalp, thankfully, but the blue ends had been charred and left in uneven patches. With one single, fierce look, she had pulled the small knife Jude had smuggled from the storage room and cut it off herself. Her wavy hair now curled around her ears and chin.

“A rake would make this go faster,” Chubs muttered. “I’m assuming you enjoy the luxury of having skin on your back, though.”

He licked away the sweat from his upper lip. The painstaking process of removing the charred pieces of her shirt from the burn on her shoulders had begun more than an hour ago, and we were all in agony listening to him try to disinfect the area.

“Scoot back!” she hissed. “You smell like unwashed ass.”

“How’s it going?” I asked, crouching down beside him.

“Could be better,” he muttered, “could be worse.”

“I am going to straight up murder you,” Vida said, her voice trembling with the intensity of the pain, “right in the face.”

The tweezers in Chubs’s hand stilled, just for an instant. He cleared his throat, but when he spoke again, the heat had evaporated from his voice. “Please. If it means getting away from you for five minutes, I’d gladly let you do it.”

“Could be much worse,” I amended, looking around again. “I have the list of all the meds you gave to Jude, but was there anything else you wanted me to look for?”

He set the rag back in the water. “Sterile gauze for Vida’s burns, any kind of disinfectant like alcohol pads…any complete first-aid kits if they have them, really.”

“What about other medicine?” I pressed, forcing myself not to look at Liam’s still form. “Something else to treat their pneumonia?”

Chubs rubbed the back of his hand against his forehead, closing his eyes. “There’s really nothing else, and even then the medicine will only work if it’s bacterial pneumonia. If it’s viral and it’s already this bad, I’m not even sure IV fluid would help.”

“There’s nothing else…not even in your book?”

He’d insisted on trekking all the way back to the car to retrieve some kind of medical text his dad had given him to double-check the list of medicine.

Chubs shook his head.

I felt the scream burning at the base of my throat. NOT HIM. Not Liam. Please don’t take him, too. I wondered if this was what all of those parents had felt like once IAAN had gone public and they knew there was a 98 percent chance their kids wouldn’t make it through, no matter what they did to help them.

“When are you leaving?” Chubs asked. “Who’s going with you?”

“In a few hours,” I said. “It’ll be most of the hunting groups, but a few of the guys are staying behind. And Vida.”

The gunfire flashing through that boy’s mind had been enough for me to worry about any other plans they might have for retaking their old home tonight. If they were stupid enough to try something, they’d be guaranteed some serious pain and trauma for their effort.

“And that’s comforting, how?” he asked.

Vida reached behind her, trying to punch whatever part of him she could reach.

“You’re done,” she announced, bolting. The strips of the shirt he had shredded to wrap her burns with fell out of his lap as he lunged after her. We watched her stumble through the ring of fire around us, Chubs’s eyes narrowing with every clumsy step she took. Slowly, after she’d disappeared into the kids milling around us, he turned to look at me.

“Yes,” I said. “You have to go after her.”

He raised his eyebrows in challenge.

“It’ll get infected,” I reminded him.

“She would drive a saint to murder. Like, ten-stab-wounds-to-the-torso murder.”

“Good thing you’re not a saint.”

He stood at that, thrusting a towel and bucket of warm water toward me, giving some kind of vague motion toward the spread of sick kids behind us. “I’ll be back in five minutes. Be useful and try to get them drinking water.”

I went down the lines of kids, waking them out of fever dreams, bringing a plastic cup of water to their lips. Short of forcing their mouths open and pouring it down their throats, there wasn’t much I could do to get them to swallow. I did the best I could cleaning off their faces with a rag, asking a series of questions that began with, “Are you in pain?” and ended with, “Do you feel worse than yesterday?”

Only one of the kids was able to answer. Yes, she had whispered, yes. To every question, an aching, soft yes.

A sharp cough drew my eyes across the way to where a familiar head of shaggy hair was struggling to escape from the baby blue blanket over him. He was attempting to get up onto his elbows, his chest heaving with the effort. It was his fluttering, shallow breaths that worried me—the way his arms shook supporting his weight.

“Stop,” I said, making my way over to him, “please—it’s all right, just lie back—”

Liam’s eyes were wide, rimmed with red and bruises still fading. His arms gave out under him, and without any thought to it, I caught him by the shoulders and carefully lowered him back down. His eyes never left my face; the blue was paler somehow, brighter and glassy with fever.

“Careful,” I murmured. After touching his burning skin, my hands felt as cold as they were empty when I pulled them away.

“What’s going on?” Liam whispered, struggling to swallow. “What’s…happening?”

“Chubs just went to get something,” I said softly. “He’ll be right back.”

Liam nodded slightly, closing his eyes with a soft sigh. I started to reach over to brush the curling ends of his hair off his forehead when he turned toward me and forced his lids open. “You’re…awfully pretty. What’s your…name?”

The words wheezed and whistled out of him in a heart-stopping way, but I was caught so off guard by how coherent he was, it took me several precious moments to respond.

“Ruby,” he repeated in the warm, caressing tones of his Southern lilt. “Like ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ That’s nice.”

Then Liam’s expression dissolved completely. His brows drew together in a look of intense concentration, his lips repeating that one word over and over again, soundlessly.

Ruby.

I knelt down next to him, sliding the bucket over. I braced one hand on the ground beside his upturned palm.

“Ruby,” he repeated, his light eyes cloudy. “You… Cole said… He told me we had never met, and I thought…I thought it was a dream.”

I brought the rag up to his face and began, with gentle strokes, to clean the dirt and soot away from it. It was okay like this, I reasoned. I wasn’t touching him directly. The stubble on his chin rasped as I brushed the rag against it. I focused on the small white scar at the corner of his lips. I focused on not pressing mine to that spot, no matter how much it felt like I was fading into him.

“A dream?” I pressed, hoping to keep him talking. “What kind of dream was it?”

It wasn’t… No, it wasn’t possible. I had seen people become confused after I’d messed with their memories, a bit muddled on the details, but I had gone through and picked every instance of me clean from Liam’s mind. I had replaced myself with thin air and shadows.

A faint smile formed on his lips. “A good one.”

“Lee…”

“I need… Are the keys…?” His voice was getting softer. “We’ll go get… I think Zu is—She’s in the aisle with—The one with—”

Aisle?

“I don’t want those guys to…to see her. They’re going to hurt them, both of them—”

I pulled back, but Liam’s hand somehow found mine on the ground, and his fingers latched onto it, pinning me there. “What guys? Zu’s safe; no one is going to hurt her.”

“The—Walmart…I told her, I told her to go with… She went with—No, where is she? Where’s Zu?”

“She’s safe,” I promised, trying to pull my hand back. His grip was persistent, like he was trying to force me to understand something, and the more he struggled, the harder it was for him to catch his breath. I took my free hand and pressed it to his cheek, leaning over his face. “Liam, look at me. Zu’s safe. You have to—you have to relax. Everything will be all right. She’s safe.”

“Safe.” The word sounded hollow. He closed his eyes on it. “Don’t go again,” he whispered. “Don’t go…where I can’t follow, please, please, not again…”

“I’ll stay right here,” I said, rubbing a thumb along his cheekbone.

You have to stop this. You have to leave. Right now.

“Don’t lie,” he mumbled, at the edge of sleep. “This is…a place we don’t have to…”

My vision blanked out with an array of spots and a pounding rush of blood as I shot up onto my feet. I pressed a hand to my mouth, waiting for my sight to clear, trying not to trip over the kids nearby. I knew what he had been trying to say. I had heard those words before, had said them myself, but there was—It wasn’t possible—

This is a place we don’t have to lie.

“Ruby?”

Vida and Chubs were standing in front of the fire barrels, watching me with twin expressions of concern. How long had they been standing there listening? Chubs took a step toward me, but I waved him off. “I’m okay, he just…”

I crouched down, putting my head in my hands, forcing in two deep, steadying breaths.

Not possible.

“Are you sure?” Chubs repeated, his voice sounding colder than before. “Are you finished playing this game?”

I nodded, keeping my eyes on the ground at his feet. My stomach rolled and heaved. I could hear Liam struggling with the blanket twisted between his legs, my mind suddenly stirring.

“You think it’s okay to be all sweet to him like this now and confuse him even more? The plan is still to take the flash drive and dump us for the League, right?” he demanded. “What’s going to happen when he wakes up?”

“She’s going to mope around and pretend like she’s never met him before in all the sad, pathetic years of her life,” Vida said, sitting down a short distance away. “Because this is a grab-and-go operation. Ruby knows that’s all this is, doesn’t she? She said she wouldn’t let her feelings get all mixed up and twisty about this, didn’t she?”

I swallowed hard. “I know. Can you… Will you tell him why we’re here?”

“The truth?” Chubs challenged, his voice sharp.

It started as a single cough, but I recognized the first sharp gasp behind me for what it was. Liam struggled against his blankets, trying to get his hands up to his throat as he fought for the next breath. He sucked at the air, trying to twist onto his side, but he couldn’t get himself over onto his shoulder. There was no way to tell which of us moved first. By the time I reached Liam’s side, Chubs was there, too, propping his friend up to keep him from choking.

“It’s okay,” Chubs said, leaning him forward so he could pat his back. He sounded calm, but a sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. “One breath at a time. You’re fine. You’re okay.”

He didn’t sound okay. He sounded like…

He’s going to die. My hands twisted in my hair. After everything, he was going to die here, like this, fighting and failing and drifting away to a place I couldn’t reach him.

“Water?” Vida asked as she hobbled over with a plastic bottle in her hand. I hated the hard glint to her eyes. The judgment I saw her pass on Liam’s condition and the look of pity she sent my way.

“No,” Chubs said, “it might obstruct his airways. Ruby. Ruby—he’s going to be okay; I’m going to keep him awake and make sure he moves around. I need that medicine. I need fluids, heat packs, anything. Quickly.”

I nodded, fisting my hands in my hair, forcing in one damp breath after another.

“Roo!” Jude’s voice floated over to us a moment before he appeared at the edge of the fires, holding up a familiar black jacket. “I found it, I found it, I found it!”

The three of us shushed him.

“Come here!” I waved him over, taking the jacket before he could accidentally light it on fire. I had only gotten a quick look at the coat in Cole’s memories, and even then, it had been half hidden by the shadows swirling there—but this looked close enough, even if it wasn’t black. The jacket was dark gray, waxed canvas with a flannel interior, and even after being separated from its current owner, it still smelled like him. Pine, fire smoke, and sweat. I felt both Vida’s and Chubs’s eyes on me as I ran my fingers along the seams, until they found the hard, rectangular lump that Cole had stitched into the dark lining.

“He’s right.” I passed the jacket over to Vida. “Leave it in there for now; we’ll cut it out after we go.”

My eyes drifted back to Liam’s ashen face. It screwed up with the effort of the next cough, but it sounded stronger to me somehow, like he was clearing out the blockage. Jude hovered behind me, taking all of this in, too. The pride beaming from his face drained away. His hand closed tightly around my shoulder, either to steady himself or me. Both, I guess.

“Can you go tell Olivia I’m ready when she is?” I asked. “And—hey—” I caught the back of his shirt. “Find yourself something warmer to wear, will you?”

A clumsy salute was all I got in exchange for that. Vida raised her brows as he bounced away, a smug Good luck with that one! look stamped across her face. Maybe Vida was right and I should have forced him to stay behind, but there was no telling what kind of tech we were going to encounter. He might not have been able to hit a target a foot away or run more than a hundred feet, but as a Yellow, Jude had been specifically trained to handle electronic locks and security systems.

I helped Chubs lower Liam back onto the ground, but he caught my hands before I could pull back. His eyes slid from his friend’s pale face to mine.

“Is this really better than it would have been if you’d just stayed together?”

I flinched.

“You think you maybe overestimated his ability to take care of his own sorry ass without us?” Chubs asked. “Just a little?”

It wasn’t better, but it wasn’t necessarily worse. Chubs could pick at this scab all he wanted, turning and pointing every single time the wound started bleeding again, but he didn’t understand. The Liam in front of us was a reflection of the world we were forced to live in, and as cruel and harsh as it was…at least it wasn’t the Liam the League would have turned out: a violent, unforgiving reflection of how they thought the world should be.

“I’m not happy about this.”

“I know,” I whispered. I leaned across Liam’s prone form to wrap my arms around Chubs’s neck. If he was surprised by my burst of affection, he didn’t show it. Instead, he patted me gently on the back before turning to finish his work with Vida. “You make me as crazy as a bag of cats, but if anything happens to you, I’m going to lose it. Are you sure…are you a hundred percent positive you know what you’re doing?”

“Yeah,” I said. Unfortunately. “I’ve had training, remember?”

His mouth twisted into a humorless smile. “And to think, when we found you…”

Chubs didn’t have to finish. I knew what I’d been when I’d found them: a terrified splinter of a girl who had been shattered a long time ago. I had nothing, and no one, and no real place to go. Maybe I was still broken and would always be—but now, at least, I was piecing myself back together, lining up one jagged edge at a time.