Never Fade

NINETEEN

WE ONLY WAITED LONG ENOUGH for the sun to go down before heading out. The quick sunset was one of the few blessings of a rapidly approaching winter. I tried to calculate, in a distracted kind of way, exactly how much time had passed since I set off looking for Liam. Two weeks, if even? It was December; I remembered the digital display in the train station in Rhode Island. I counted back.

“We missed your birthday.”

We were hovering at the back of the pack, drifting there almost naturally while Olivia and Brett had taken charge in front.

Whatever Springsteen song Jude had been humming under his breath was bottled back up, mid-note. “What?”

“It was last week,” I said, reaching out to steady him as he jumped over a fallen tree. “Today’s December eighteenth.”

“Really?” Jude crossed his arms over his chest and began to rub them. “Feels like it, I guess.”

“Fifteen,” I said with a low whistle. “You’re getting up there in years, old man.”

I started to unwind the wool scarf from around my neck, but he waved it away and marched on, his EMT jacket crinkling as he moved. For such a large group, we were moving quietly through the undergrowth—snapping a few twigs here and there, breaking through pockets of ice. We were still too deep into what Brett had called the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area to attract much attention anyway.

“Oh! You found it?” I asked when I caught the flash of silver gripped in Jude’s palm.

Jude held it out for me to see. It was a circular, nearly flat disc. The silver coating glinted in the single strand of moonlight that cut through the tree branches. I plucked it out of his hand and put the warm metal at the center of my palm. The compass’s glass had cracked in two places.

“Yeah,” he said, taking it back. “For a second there…never mind.”

“Never mind?” I repeated in disbelief. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just that, for a second, I was really happy I found it, you know? And then I started to think that maybe I shouldn’t take it with me.”

“Because…?”

“Because Alban gave it to me,” he said. “A few days after I came to HQ. He kept saying how proud he was that I was part of the League, but it’s like…now I don’t think I’m so proud of being part of it.”

I let out a long sigh, trying to find the right words. Jude only shrugged again and slid the string over his head. The compass disappeared under his jacket, and I thought, That’s the difference. That was the fundamental difference between the two of us. Once I woke up to reality, I couldn’t go back to the dream—but Jude was still able to hold out hope in his heart that it would be there waiting for him when he was ready to return. After everything, he still believed that the League could be different, better, healed.

I wasn’t out of shape by any means, but hiking over hill after hill, fighting through the thick mulch of newly dead leaves on an empty stomach, all the while trying to keep my brain from circling back to Liam, was beginning to weigh on me. Jude’s stomach had growled no less than four times in the past half hour alone, and while he seemed immune to getting cranky like the rest of us, I felt him start to sag next to me.

“Almost there,” I assured him, shooting a dirty look at the back of Brett’s head. It wasn’t his fault; we didn’t have cars to transport everyone. There’d been some discussion about trying to navigate down on the Cumberland River, but even months after the flooding, Brett felt like its current was too unstable for their rafts. So we were walking, using fabric cut from the tents as makeshift bags for the supplies.

We were walking ten miles, eleven, twelve. My fingers were frozen stiff; not even pressing them up under my armpits could get the blood flowing back through them.

Jude pursed his lips together, reaching up to adjust his cap. With it pressing down at such an awkward angle over his curly hair, it bent his ears out, making them look bigger than they actually were. For a bizarre second, I felt my heart swell just the smallest bit at the sight.

“Annnnnnyway,” said Jude, master of awkward transitions. “This is going to be so great. So, so great. We’ll be in like this”—he snapped his fingers—“swipe the meds and some food, and out, like, bam!” He clenched both fists and flashed his fingers out. “They won’t even know we’ve been there until we’re gone. We’ll be freaking legends!”

Jude kept saying “they” this and “they” that, but that was the problem—we didn’t know who was in charge of the airport or why they were hoarding supplies. I’d tried to send a follow-up message to Cate and Nico to ask, but they hadn’t responded before we left.

We were still heading east, toward Nashville’s center, but the river didn’t follow a straight path. It had looped down again, directly in front of us.

I nudged my way up to the front of the group. My outstretched hand eventually found Olivia’s shoulder, and she reached back, pulling me to the edge of the Cumberland River.

“Whoa,” was Jude’s only comment.

Until we hit that first barrier, I hadn’t really understood why, months after the floodwaters receded, the city was still closed. But it was like with any disasters; the cleanup was almost always worse than the stress of the disaster in progress. No wonder the ground had become little more than a swamp under my boots, no wonder the river was still flooding out. The initial storms had been powerful enough to carry whole sections of homes back into the river, to upend massive river barges and leave them stranded and rusting under the sun. It was like a terrible drain clog. The water couldn’t flow naturally down toward the city, which meant it was still bleeding out into the nearby fields and forests.

“It’s right over there,” Brett said, pointing to distant white shapes. As if on cue, a red light on one of them began to pulse slow and steady. “Nice to see Gray and his boys got around to cleaning this mess up like he swore he would.”

“Are we…swimming?” I asked, trying not to grimace.

Olivia turned toward me, holding up our one lone flashlight. The scarred half of her face stretched into a genuine smile. “Nope. We’re going to play leapfrog.”

It turned out that “playing leapfrog” with a bunch of Blues essentially meant resigning yourself to being flung from floating object to floating object like a rag doll. The system they’d worked through was impressive; the river was too wide for the Blues to lift another kid with their abilities and send him cruising the whole way across it. Instead, Brett took advantage of the flood’s wreckage, lifting Olivia and setting her down, with impressive accuracy and care, on the upturned corner of a half-sunk barge. She, in turn, sent the next Blue a little farther, onto the roof of what looked like a large mobile home. With the three of them in position, they were able to pass each of us along without much trouble at all. I landed on my knees, finally on the other bank.

We cut another path through a thicket of trees, emerging muddy and slick with the fresh rain falling overhead. The runway was shorter than the ones I’d seen at bigger airports, jam-packed with planes of all sizes and shapes. Mixed in between the helicopters and one-seaters were green-and-tan military vehicles. The airport wasn’t in use after all, then—and if the planes and trucks were out here, it meant there really was a good chance that Cate and Nico’s intel was good, and something else was being stored in the hangars.

Someone—the National Guard by the look of the vehicles—had halfheartedly put up a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the runways and hangars, along with signs that read things like NO TRESSPASSING and HIGH VOLTAGE. Olivia threw a rock, which bounced back and hit the mud with the tiniest rattle. Jude twisted out of the grip I had on his shirt to belly crawl through the grass.

“Hey!” I whispered. “Jude!”

He tapped the fence with his finger, then again for good measure before he hustled back over to us. “That has about as much electricity as my shoe,” he whispered.

This isn’t right, I thought. If there was something worth having here, there’d be people to protect it…right?

I scanned the field in front of us again, Instructor March’s voice ringing in my ears: If it looks too good, too easy, it never is. And the simulation we’d run after—with Vida and I storming a warehouse—had proven that point. Sure, it had been all clear on the outside. The agents playing the roles of the National Guardsmen had been waiting for us inside.

“Roo.” Jude groaned. “Come on.”

There was no real cover between the trees and the hangars, but that didn’t stop Brett and some of the others from blowing past us to continue forward. Even Olivia looked over at me, exasperated, before she stood and jogged to catch up to them.

“All right,” I told Jude, “stay close—”

But he was already up and running, too, weaving through the vehicles and planes on the runway. I finally caught up with them when they stopped at the edge of the asphalt, crouching down behind the last line of vehicles.

“I’ll take Brett and Jude with me,” I said, taking the flashlight from Olivia. “Two flashes for all clear, one for turn back. Got it?”

“There’s no one here, Ruby.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as odd?” I hissed back. There were tire tracks and footprints all around us; if they were old, they would have been washed out after days of rain.

The nearby parking lots were mostly empty or filled with large shipping trucks. Now and then a light above them would flicker, but aside from that, the airport was dark.

Every nerve in my body was tingling by the time I met up with Brett again after we’d lapped the buildings. I jerked my chin back in the direction where we’d left Jude waiting.

“This is too easy,” Brett finally admitted, shifting his old rifle to his shoulder. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Please not in the hangars, I thought. Please. This was my idea—I’d pushed them into this, and it would be on me to get us out if everything blew up in our faces.

Cate wouldn’t have sent us here if she thought it was too dangerous, I told myself, not if there was a chance we could be caught.

“Call the others over,” I told Jude, silencing the small voice before it could send me spiraling into true fear.

I counted them again as they ran toward us. One, two, three, all the way up to twenty-one.

The hunting party shrank into the shadow of Hangar 1, backs pressed to the wall, eyes scanning the dark field. The hangar door was locked with a series of imposing chains we had no way of slicing through, but there was a side-access door that, like I’d predicted, had some kind of electronic lock that looked like it had been beamed back from the distant future.

“Step aside,” Jude said, shooing me away with his hands. “The master is here.”

“Careful,” I warned. “Frying it completely will probably trigger it, too.”

“Honestly,” he said, squinting at the display. It lit instinctively when he stepped in front of it, pulling up a digital number pad. “You’re acting like I’ve never done this before!”

“You haven’t,” I reminded him. “Nico usually disables the alarm systems remotely.”

“Details, details.” Jude waved me off with one hand and brought his other palm up against the screen. “Be silent so the master can do his work!”

“Can the master hurry the hell up?” Brett hissed, hopping from foot to foot, arms crossed over his chest. I was starting to feel the winter bite, too. The sweat gliding down my face felt like it was two degrees away from freezing into solid crystals.

“Count of three,” Jude breathed out, “push on the door handle. Ready?”

I slipped around him, getting a good grip on the metal bar. “Go for it.”

At three, the system’s screen flickered black, and I waited only long enough to hear the lock pop before shoving it open with my shoulder. When the system’s number pad flashed back up, it cast an eerie red halo on the drifting snowflakes.

I waited for the shrill cry of an alarm, the blinding flash of floodlights spotlighting our small group. I waited to feel Jude shrink against the wall behind me in terror. I waited, waited, waited. But there was nothing to wait for.

“Okay!” Jude called. “I tricked the system into thinking that the door is actually closed—we just have to keep it open, and then we won’t run into any problems.”

“Nice job!” I whispered. The others streamed in past us, leaving a trail of mud and slush on the concrete ramp. We smelled like wet dogs that had rolled around in an ashtray.

Jude grinned as he dashed in after them. Someone hit the overhead lights and flooded the room with pristine white. I covered my eyes with a hand, trying to adjust to the glare.

There was a strange charge to the air now; I felt Jude’s mood shift from a sparkling excitement to the kind of shock that only ever comes like a brick to the face. The shift was so fast, and so sudden, that I was almost too afraid to see the hangar for myself.

“Holy…shit.”

There were rows of metal shelves lining the echoing room; they’d been set up almost like the stacks in a library but had to be a good two or three times the normal size. The soldiers had dragged them into tight, neat rows. The thick layer of faint peach paint someone had coated the cement with still had the gouges and scuff marks to prove it. Stacked on top of them were pallets and pyramids of boxes. Many were unlabeled, even more wrapped up tightly in a nest of clear plastic.

“What language is that?” Olivia asked. She kicked at the nearest one, knocking the dust and clumps of dirt from it with the toe of her boot. It was buckled on one side, the thin wood cracking as if it had fallen from a great height and landed wrong side up in a field.

“Chinese?” Jude guessed. “Japanese? Korean?”

I didn’t recognize the words printed there, but the simple red cross that had been stamped over it—that I did recognize.

The American Red Cross branches had, if you believed the news, run out of funds and supplies once all shipping to and from the United States was halted. People were afraid that IAAN was contagious and could jump ship, riding shotgun on a package or in a person to go plague another, healthier country. Once the economy was gone, the organization barely had funding to stay afloat for two more years.

So what the hell was this stuff?

“Liv—check it out!” one of the guys called. He and a few of the others had sliced through the plastic and were levitating boxes down to the ground from the upper shelves. One of them was already gutted, its fire-engine-red innards sliding across the floor. I picked up one of the red packages that had spilled out, surprised by its weight and rectangular shape. There was a sketch of a man lifting food to his mouth, and a flag, both printed under the words HUMANITARIAN DAILY RATION.

“‘This bag contains one day’s complete food requirement for one person,’” Olivia read. There were more lines beneath it—in French and Spanish, maybe?

“‘Food gift from the people of China,’” I finished, passing the package back to her.

There were several sharp intakes of breath around us, but most of the others had been driven onto the next shelf, pulling down cardboard boxes printed with TEN 24-HOUR RATIONS GP NATO/OTAN APPROVED.

“This stuff is from the UK, I think.” Jude had ripped into one of the boxes and was examining a pamphlet that had been left inside. “There’s…there’s so much stuff. Matches, soup, chocolate—oh my God, there’s even tea!”

“Take what we need,” I said, “but look for the medicine. Do you see any of it?”

“This stuff is from Russia!” I heard Brett call from the next aisle over.

“Here’s Germany, Canada, and I think Japan,” Olivia called back.

“France and Italy, too,” came another voice. “They all say daily rations!”

I slipped the thin piece of notebook paper Chubs had scribbled out his list on, holding it up to catch the light. His handwriting was as dark and smudged as ever; whatever pen he’d managed to dig up out of the supply pile had started sputtering ink when he hit penicillin. He branched out all of the different kinds beneath that word: Amoxicillin (Amoxil), Ampicillin (Rimacillin), Benzylpenicillin (Crystapen)…

I jogged down the aisles, scanning the boxes and crates with wary eyes. More food, trash bags of what looked like wool blankets, all boxed up, all stamped with flags I didn’t recognize. There were red crosses everywhere, on everything. Dirt and clumps of dead grass clung to their edges. It had all been outside once, I realized. Dropped by planes passing overhead, maybe? Cate had mentioned rumors of foreign aid being left in parts of the country, but those same rumors had died out when no one turned up any evidence to prove it.

“One minute!”

My heart jumped from my ribs to the back of my throat; the air whistling in between my teeth sounded loud to my ears. It was quieter back here under the towering plastic tubs that were stacked against the hangar’s back wall. I leaned down, brushing away the dust from its clear side. More of those strange red packages. I moved onto the next tub, half listening to the anxious whispers carrying over from the other side of the hangar.

I didn’t stop searching, not until my eyes drifted over the familiar curved neck of Leda Corp’s golden swan. Chubs’s list fluttered to the ground as I stood on my toes, trying to see what was inside of this one. Leda Corp meant medicine; my experiences riding in the back of cargo planes had taught me that much. I got as good of a grip as I could on the plastic lid and began to yank it out. Jude was calling for me, his voice drifting above the others’.

“Come on, come on,” I grumbled, my arms shaking with the effort.

The tub exploded open as it hit the ground; I dug into the clear packets of vials and sterile needles until I recognized one of the penicillin names that Chubs had written down. I took as many as I could, scooping them into my bag. Another tub was labeled VACCINES, but the one below it had wound-up ribbons of gauze, cotton pads, and rubbing alcohol.

“A little help over here!” I called. One of my bags was already full, and the second one was quickly going the same way. We needed more. Liam needed more.

Footsteps fell fast and heavy on the cement. I felt someone rush behind me, muttering something under his breath that I didn’t quite catch—one glance over my shoulder told me that half of the group, struggling under the new weight of their packs, was doing one last loop through the different aisles.

“Ruby!”

It wasn’t the crack in Jude’s voice that sent me spinning back—it was the sudden, overwhelming stench of stale cigarette smoke.

I wasn’t fast enough. I shifted, meaning to throw up an arm to block the blow, but the knife found me a moment before the punch to the back of the head did.

I don’t know if I screamed. My jaw dropped with the burst of pain. I tried to catch myself as I pitched forward into the tubs, but a hand fisted around my ponytail and wrenched me back. I didn’t have a chance to regain my balance. The gun was ripped out from the back of my pants before I could think clearly enough to pull it.

Michael was breathing ragged and uneven, more with fury, I thought, than the effort of the attack. The knife, or whatever he’d used, twisted in my lower back, and that time I knew I screamed. The arm across my chest slid up to press against my throat, my gun fisted tight in his hand. He pressed it up under my chin, forcing it as high as the bones in my neck would allow without snapping. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t swallow, couldn’t move.

“Miss me?” he hissed.

I tried throwing my head back, twisting, anything to get away. You’re okay, I told myself. Not your spine, not your kidney, just—

“Thanks for finding this place,” he continued, slamming me forward against the tubs. Michael leaned down low, bringing his lips up to my ear. “You and the others can get your sweet fill until the PSFs get here, yeah?”

The force of Jude ramming into us shoulder-first wasn’t enough to throw Michael off me completely, but it was powerful enough that I could turn and drive my knee up into his center. I heard the knife give way from my skin with a sucking sound and clatter against the floor. Jude’s mop of curling hair dove for it at the same time Michael did. My entire right side screamed in pain as my foot went flying toward his face.

“Bitch!” he screamed, and then I was flying back, slamming into the shelves opposite us. Jude was sent flying in another direction, back toward Brett and Olivia, who were coming down the aisle to see what was happening. One shot fired—another one—and the lights changed from white to a flashing red, and everything after was swallowed by a pulsing screech.