Never Fade

TWENTY-TWO

IT FELT FAMILIAR AND WRONG ALL AT ONCE, waking up. Like one memory had become tangled up in another, and both were struggling under the strange weight of déjà vu. Solid, flat, cold—I was on the ground. Hard, solid earth. It was all damp earth and something uniquely human that filled my nose, not the fake lemon smell from Black Betty’s past life as a cleaning service’s van. It wasn’t the drone of a radio host reporting the day’s horrible news drifting to my ears, but the steady, deep breathing of four others fixed fast into sleep.

Finding consciousness was like hauling myself up from the bottom of a thick-slimed swamp. It was only when I broke the surface that the pain hit me. It started in my lower back and shot up and down my right side, tightening every muscle and tendon to the point of snapping along the way. All at once, the ground, the blankets, the dark became too much. I felt the phantom grip of the leather band around my head, tasted the bitter tang of metal in my mouth. I realized then it was possible to choke on a memory, to feel it close tight and fast around your throat. Leather. All I could smell was leather.

Chubs’s tent, I realized. It had been real. They had found me.

Jude, Vida… I pushed myself up, ignoring the protest of stiff muscles and the wailing pain in my back. There they were, sleeping lengthwise over our heads, practically on top of one another. Chubs. Liam.

A freezing wind blew up the back of my shirt, but it felt refreshing compared to the stale, warm air inside the tent. I had the dim thought that I needed to find my boots, but it didn’t seem half as important as just getting away. Finding a place to be alone, to release the scream working itself up from my core. Just ahead were the smoldering remains of the campfire at the center of the clearing—an old, public campsite, maybe—and a clothesline scattered with shirts and sweatshirts that were strung up and frozen into stiff clumps.

It felt colder than it had been when we first arrived in Tennessee. They had found a flat clearing to park the car, but a quick glance around told me the hills here were more ragged than they had been before. The dead grass was finer, longer, buried beneath old, browning clumps of stone. Definitely not Nashville, then.

I took several deep breaths in through my mouth and circled back around to the pile of charred wood and ash that had been their campfire. Chubs had left a canteen out, but both it and the plastic water bottle next to it were empty.

My socks were wet and grimy, slick against the mud. I stumbled forward, muttering a few choice cuss words under my breath when my legs decided to give out. It took me longer than I would ever admit to reach the SUV, but once I careened into the passenger side, I had a chance to catch my breath. I had left a water bottle under the front seat. I remembered feeling the plastic butting up against my heels every time Chubs made a sharp turn. I just needed a sip. One single sip to get rid of the disgusting taste coating my tongue.

The doors were locked. I stepped off the car rail, shaking my head as I moved back toward the fire pit. There was a thin gray wool blanket draped over a well-used tree stump, and I claimed it, wrapping it tightly around my shoulders.

We got no place for you, here or anywhere. The only place for you is in those camps or buried with the rest of them.

I shook my head hard to clear the unwanted voice, throwing my loose hair around my cheeks and shoulders. It felt clean. Soft, even, against my cheeks. I slipped a hand out from under the blanket and felt for its straggly ends. No leaves or tangles. Someone had brushed it.

Jesus, I thought, wrapping the blanket tighter around me. That guy… He had dragged me after him, had dragged me straight to—

My throat ached. I could hear the blast of static stronger now over the rising pulse in my ears. For one terrifying second I was sure Rob was back, that he’d brought a White Noise machine with him. But this sound was low and distant, not at all painful.

I followed its rushing noise out from the clearing, spotting the old hiking trail immediately. Snow blanketed the uneven ground, hiding sharp rocks and unforgiving holes, but I saw the curved path, clear of trees. I braced my hands against the steady bodies of white oaks and maples. The sun was just beginning to touch the horizon; the first rays of pale yellow light fanned out against the snow.

By the time I made it down to the pool of water, I felt stupid for ever having thought it could be something so terrifying and awful—something as unnatural as White Noise.

Waterfalls. Tumbling, roaring waterfalls in what looked like a miniature canyon. The water jettisoned over the curling lips of the rocky cliff, branching out into smaller falls alongside the bigger one. The dark rocks circled in around the pool and leaned forward, almost like a body hunching its shoulders against the cold.

The path connected with what looked like a wooden deck, which had been built out over the edge of the small body of water. I stepped over a small creek that had split off from the pool, breaking the crust of thin ice that lined either side of it.

The deck was damp, covered in scattered patches of snow. I brushed aside a small glittering pile of it and planted myself right at the edge, where I’d have the best view of the wild, roaring water as it came tumbling down.

The waterfall cast a fine mist over the pool’s glinting surface. I reached down and scooped the blisteringly cold water into my hands and splashed it against my face.

I slipped a hand up under the blanket and the sweatshirt, trying to find the one source of white-hot pain. The lump of neat, even stitches only stopped stinging when my stiff, icy fingers were there to numb it.

I thought, at first, that it was only the mist clinging to my cheeks. That the wind might have carried over a spray of water from the falls. But the ache in my throat was still there, solid and unmoving, and something very much like a sob started to bubble up from my chest. There was no one there to see me cry and no point in trying to stop the tears from coming.

I pressed my face against the blanket, balling it up against my mouth to smother the scream. And it was like once I started, I unlocked that gate, the rest of it came flooding out, and I couldn’t stop. Every thought that raced through me was tainted by blood; I could actually taste it at the back of my throat.

I killed that man.

No, it wasn’t just that. I had tortured him with fear. It wasn’t that he didn’t deserve to be punished for the crimes he’d committed, it was how I had done it—how I had used those kids, manipulating them and their memory, when they were already victims. And I had liked doing it. I had relished how easy it was to consume his mind, filling it bit by horrifying bit with terror until I had felt it snap completely. The darkness that had reached out for me then had been warm. Exciting. The rush of it had left a tingling, jittery feeling in my limbs that I still couldn’t shake.

I had kicked Knox out for what he’d done to Liam, but I’d stubbornly ignored the reality that Liam would never, ever have considered it the right decision to make. I had assumed he was unredeemable, but he was a kid—Knox, or Wes, or whatever he wanted to call himself, was one of us. How was turning him out to the cold to die any more forgivable than turning other kids over to get food? And Mason…I could have helped Mason. I could have taken away his painful memories, but my first instinct had been to use him as a weapon. Like he wasn’t human at all and didn’t deserve to make his own choices.

Maybe…maybe the camp controllers had been right to do what they did to the dangerous ones. Maybe we needed to be muzzled, chained, conditioned to follow orders—it had felt so natural for me to command Rob, and Knox, and every other kid who challenged me at the warehouse.

And it made me Clancy. It made me Martin. It made me the Orange on the bus into Thurmond, who’d compelled that woman to kill herself with her own gun. It made me the countless others who tortured the PSFs and camp controllers by flooding their brains with horrifying images.

I wasn’t any different than them. I wasn’t any better. All along, I’d thought that gaining more control over my abilities would mean reclaiming my life. But that wasn’t the case at all, was it? It was entirely possible that not being able to control them—being afraid of them—was the only reason I hadn’t followed the other Oranges down that path earlier.

I saw now how the League had been good for me. They’d given me discipline, focus, and direction on how and when to use my abilities. It only proved I’d been right when I told Cate I shouldn’t be Leader—we needed people who were stronger, people who still had good left to their names. Or, at the very least, people who could still trust that their instincts wouldn’t take them into this kind of darkness.

Murderer. Just like all the other agents in the League.

The blanket was hot and damp with my tears. I lifted my face again, trying to cool my aching face and lungs, but nothing helped. Nothing erased the images of what I imagined Rob must have looked like to Vida when she saw him that last time. Nothing eased away the final thoughts that had blazed through his mind in the seconds before his life ended. A beautiful woman in a checkered dress, a red bicycle, an open field, the sunset over Los Angeles—

“Stop it,” I choked out, “stop.”

And I hurt. Every part of me, from the blinding headache behind my eyes to the cuts and bruises along my back. There wasn’t enough space in my lungs for the air I needed. No matter how hard the sobs shook my body, I couldn’t ease the pressure there. It felt like I was being folded, and folded, and folded again, until there was nothing left to do but break.

The rushing water swallowed every other sound, including the footsteps that tapped out a slow, hesitant trail over the wood behind me. But I knew he was there.

“Hey,” Liam said, his voice soft.

The mist from the falls passed between us, spinning the large snowflakes into a pure white screen. When it pulled away with the next freezing breeze, he was still standing there, still clutching my black boots to his chest, still with that tortured look on his already worn, ashen face. He opened his mouth, taking a small step forward. His legs were still unsteady, but it was the way he was openly looking at me, searching my face, that had me anxious.

But he was alive. He was standing on his own two feet. The glaze over his eyes had passed. His breathing was shallow but consistent—a steady in, a steady out, with only a small interruption for him to cough.

Liam had always been an easy read. He couldn’t hide any of his thoughts or feelings, no matter how many smiles he forced. His face was as open as it always was, so heartbreakingly perfect even with pain tightening the line of his mouth. His eyes were—they were so pale in this light, jumping from my eyes to my nose to my lips like he had never seen me before but never wanted to stop looking. An ache started at the center of my chest and worked its way out, twisting my insides until I finally forced myself to look away.

“I don’t…” he began, the words edged with soft desperation. “How can I help? What…what can I do to make it stop hurting? Make it better?”

Liam, you can’t. Not this time. The thought made me feel displaced somehow, like I was watching him come toward me from the top of the falls.

“Just don’t tell them about this,” I whispered. “Please.”

I wiped at the tears on my face. They stung as they dripped down my cheeks, my chin, onto my neck. It was embarrassing and overwhelming but somehow right that he was the person who found me.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Liam nod. Of course he understood—he’d gone off a number of times by himself because he didn’t want us to see him fray and unravel. When you have people relying on you, you can’t put on anything other than a brave, determined face, otherwise you chip away at their confidence, too.

“There has to be something in the medicine…in the bag,” he was saying, “something to help you rest or to…to…”

They had gotten the medicine back to camp, then. Chubs had administered it. The fact that Liam was even as coherent as he was now meant that the hit hadn’t been for nothing—some small good had come out of it.

I took my boots when he offered them, slipping them on. The numbed sensation was working up from my toes to my ankles to my calves, and I was waiting for it to spread. I was so tired; I hurt so badly. I felt myself slipping under a flat, gray ice, and I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up from under it. I sucked in a deep breath, tilting my head back—like that would be enough to stop the tears.

“Tell me,” he pleaded. “I can’t—This is… It’s too much.”

Too much. My mind latched onto that single phrase. Too much, too much, too much.

He knelt down next to me, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed; I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it, not until he reached over, his finger running along the scar on my forehead. When I didn’t flinch away, I felt it trail feather-soft down the side of my face, across my cheek. His hands were rough and chapped from the unforgiving weather as they slid back through my hair to the hollows behind my ears. I closed my eyes, letting his thumbs brush away the tiny flakes of snow that had caught in my lashes.

Move, I told myself as I forced my eyes open. Move—because he wasn’t. I could feel him leaning toward me, dipping his head closer to mine, and I mirrored him, tilting my face up to meet him halfway. Liam’s eyes were closed, and it seemed, just for a second, almost like he was trapped in some kind of a dream. I felt his breath warm my lips.

The touch was so assured, and I had wanted it for so long, that in that tiny slice of morning, it was almost easy to forget what I had done.

That he wasn’t supposed to know me at all, let alone care enough to try.

Too much.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

Every part of him seemed to seize up, and I recognized the alarm in his face when I saw it. Liam jerked his hands away, falling off balance in the process. He tried to scramble up onto his feet, but he was slow and weak, and the best he could manage was looking away as the tips of his ears went bright red. He was on his feet and moving before the feeling of his touch disappeared from my skin.

He muttered something, tucking his hands up under his arms as he shook his head. He backed away two steps at a time, and I wondered what kind of expression I must have been wearing for him to mirror such a lost one back to me.

“It’s okay,” I told him, though it was so far from the truth, I would have laughed if I wasn’t already crying. It was amazing—I had no idea you could keep sinking, even after you’d hit the dark bottom of your life. But letting him get that close, letting him comfort me after everything I had done, was a bruising low.

Before I could finish, Liam was talking again, and that strange tone was back in his voice. Even as he spoke, he was shaking his head. “Ruby—you’re Ruby. Chubs said that you and Vida and Little Buddy there were helping him look for me. He said that you and me, we never met before, but we had to have, we had to, because I know your face. I know your voice. How does that work?”

“I talked to you while you were sick,” I said, feeling panic grip at my stomach. “In the warehouse in Nashville.”

“No—no—I mean, yeah, I know you did.” Liam was rambling in a way that was almost agitated. Pacing, too, the small width of the wooden deck. “That’s not it; I know it’s not.”

End this now. Don’t twist it any further. A clean cut and you can go and finish this.

“I’m League,” I blurted out, because it was the one thing I knew would stop him from coming closer—the one thing that would change his look of compassion to one of total and complete contempt.

“You—” he began. “What? That’s not…that’s not possible.”

The camps. I needed to think about the camps we’d free as soon as I brought the intel back to Cole and Cate. The good work that would come from this, rising up above the blood pooling under my feet and the trail of smoke and fire my footsteps left behind. That was my future now. That was the only thing there was for me.

“You’re right, though. We did meet before,” I said. “At a safe house in Maryland. I handed you the money from your brother, remember?”

He did now. I could see it in his face, the way he squared his shoulders. I kept my eyes on the trees behind his head, my arms wrapped tight around my center to try to trap in that last bit of warmth. He looked like he was about to be sick.

“But you got out, right?” Liam said. “Because Chubs would have told me. He wouldn’t have kept that from me. You were League, but now you’re—”

“I’m League, and so are Vida and Jude.” I knew Chubs well enough to know exactly why he hadn’t let that piece of information slip. “He didn’t tell you because he knew that you’d want to split. But he and I have a deal.”

“I—I don’t get it,” Liam managed to squeeze out. He was backing away again, running a hand over his face. “A deal?”

I’d already driven the knife into his chest. Twisting it now would finish things forever.

Don’t, a small voice whispered. Not again.

He stared at me, waiting, shaking from the cold or anger, I couldn’t tell. I came toward him, and he let me. Liam was breathing harder now, a wheezing, wet whistle, as I reached for the bottom hem of his brother’s jacket and ripped the stitches Cole had hastily sewn in place.

The flash drive was a simple black rectangle, stamped with Leda Corp’s golden swan. It was warm from having lived so close to his body for the past few hours—days, maybe.

Liam stumbled back, his every thought crashing over his face. “What the hell is that?”

“Your brother,” I said. “He sent us to find you. You took his jacket instead of yours when you ran in Philly. And you took this with you.”

“What is that?” he repeated, trying to reach for it. I closed my fist and shoved the damn thing in my pocket before I was tempted to do something stupid. All of this for a tiny piece of cheap plastic.

“It’s classified intel,” I told him, forcing my feet forward, up the path. “From the Op your brother was running.”

I half hoped he wouldn’t come after me. That he’d stay down there, and I could go back and walk through the camp, through whatever woods we were in, and just disappear. But nothing in my life was ever going to be that easy. Instead, he pushed past me on the trail, taking those first few steps like he was staggering out of knee-deep water, unsteady and coughing up the fluid trapped in his lungs. Instinctively, I put a hand out to steady him, but he ripped his arm away and kept pressing forward, calling Chubs’s name.

He must have already been out looking for us. We met him on the path, just as it curved into the campsite. The kid was a mess of sleepy eyes and rumpled clothes; his brain must not have fully warmed up yet, because he hadn’t thought to put on a coat or shoes despite the frigid temperature.

“What?” he cried, looking between us. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t even believe you,” Liam rasped. “What the hell kind of game are you playing here?”

Chubs blinked. “What are you…?”

“I know everything!” Liam stalked over to him, still breathing hard from the climb back up the trail. “How long were you planning on keeping this from me? The League. Really? Jesus—you’re supposed to be the smart one! You made a deal with them?”

“Oh.” Chubs rubbed a hand over the tufts of his dark hair and blew out a long, exasperated sigh. I had about three seconds to deflect Liam’s anger back on me before Chubs said something he’d really regret.

“Yes, that!” Liam charged up into the campsite, stalking over to the smothered fire. He wouldn’t let me get close enough to so much as share his breathing space.

“Will you please listen to me?” I asked. “It was all my idea—all of it. Your brother sent us to find the flash drive, and in the process we found your friend. We agreed that if we helped him find you, we wouldn’t turn any information about you over to the League. And we’d help you get to California to find Zu.”

At first I assumed the wide-eyed look Chubs flashed my way was because he’d been shocked at my ability to turn out one lie after another. But some part of me must have known, even as I said it, that I’d picked the wrong nail to hammer home.

“And you know that how?” Liam demanded. “And you know her how, exactly?”

I swallowed, wrapping my arms around my center, my mind spinning through excuses, each one worse than the next.

“Answer me!”

I flinched. “I just…have heard stories—from Chubs, I mean.”

Liam spun toward Chubs, his face burning with anger and disbelief. “What else did you tell her?”

“Nothing! Lee, you have to calm down—please, sit down. Listen.”

“I can’t believe you! Don’t you realize they have ways of tracking her down? Do you want them to take her in? Zu—we promised that we’d—I thought—”

“He didn’t tell me anything about her, other than you were traveling together for a while,” I said calmly. Liam had been protective of all of us in different ways, but Zu had been a special case.

“Stay out of this, Green!” He was still wholly focused on Chubs. “What else did you tell her? What else did she get out of you?”

I jerked back, one single word throwing me off balance.

“What did you just call her?” Chubs interrupted. Of course he had caught it, too.

“What? I’m not allowed to use her name now?” he demanded. The look on his face was ripe with derision. “What do you want me to call you? What clever codename did the League think up for you? Pumpkin? Tiger? Tangerine?”

“You called me Green,” I said.

“No I didn’t,” he said. “Why the hell would I call you that? I know what you are.”

“You did,” Chubs insisted. “You called her Green. You really don’t remember?”

My heart shattered the ice around it, slamming against my rib cage, beating harder with every minute of silence that followed. The anger had left him quickly, replaced by confusion that bloomed into an open, barefaced fear as he looked between us.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding up my hands in a weak attempt to placate him, “it’s fine. You can call me whatever you want; it really doesn’t matter.…”

“Are you messing with him? Are you forcing him to play nice with you?” Liam asked. His face was flushed, and it almost seemed like his anger was edging into anxiety. He was looking at his friend and seeing a stranger.

I couldn’t keep up with his flip-flopping moods, and I suddenly wondered if it was even worth the energy to try. The memory of what had happened when he’d found me down by the falls evaporated like mist in the sunlight. Maybe I had imagined it altogether.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Chubs said. “After what happened at East River? Do I need to remind you that while Clancy Gray turned you into his little poodle, he couldn’t even touch me?”

“I don’t… What?” Liam’s breath exploded out of him. “What are you talking about?”

Oh, I thought, damn.

When I had gone in and pulled myself out of Liam’s memories, I’d had to…tweak a few of them, otherwise they wouldn’t have made sense. The night we tried leaving East River had been one of them, because the whole terrifying episode had been sparked by my letting my guard down and trusting Clancy when I shouldn’t have. I was a crucial part of that story.

But now—what had I slipped into its place? Had I just erased that night completely? My mind was spinning, trying to dig up what images I had pushed into that vacant space, but everything was black, and black, and black.

Chubs turned to look at me with a glare that could have incinerated a mountain.

“What are you looking at her for?” Liam exploded. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here, and with them!”

“We were trying to find you!” Chubs said. “All of us just wanted to help you!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” came Vida’s shrill voice from inside the tent. “Can you two shut the hell up and just go back to spooning? We don’t need to hear this same shitty argument for the tenth fucking time before five A.M.!”

Jude made a very valiant effort to shush her, but the damage was done.

“You—you—I can’t—” Chubs sputtered, too furious to form an actual sentence. “Come out here. Right now!”

“Come and get me, big boy,” she sang back. “I know I don’t have the parts you like, but we can always make it work.”

“Oh, like a functioning brain?” he shouted.

“Chubs!” I snapped. He knew what she was like—he was only playing into her hands. “Vida, please come out. You too, Jude.”

She exited the tent with a blanket wrapped around her like a queen’s flowing robe. The effect was soured by the fact her fading blue hair was sticking straight up on either side of her head like horns. Jude didn’t look much better—I don’t know that I had ever seen such dark rings under his eyes. He slouched out after her in his EMT jacket, taking a seat on the opposite side of the fire pit.

“I’m not gonna change my mind, so don’t even start spinning your little yarn about how great the League is, how wonderful the agents are,” Liam said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell Cole to go screw himself. I don’t need him—or you—to take care of me!”

“Says the kid who was two steps away from death’s grasping fingers when we found him,” Vida said, rolling her eyes. “You’re fucking welcome, by the way.”

“I promise that we don’t have any other motivation beside getting the flash drive and seeing our end of the deal through,” I told him, watching his chest heave with the effort to get enough air in. It was easier to talk to him like he was a stranger. And as pale, as thin, as unshaven and dirty as he was, it wasn’t hard to imagine him as one.

This is not Liam, I thought. Something’s wrong.

“Is that a fact?” Liam said coldly. “I didn’t ask for any of this, and the last thing I’d ever want is to be babysat by someone like you.”

It took me a second longer than the others to realize that last zinger was for me.

“Hey!” Jude cut in. “We’re just trying to help. You don’t have to be mean about it.”

“Lee, you’re being dramatic,” Chubs began.

“And you—God, it’s like you get a new pair of glasses, a car, and some tech and you think you’re Rambo in the jungle. I never thought you would play along with this.”

“If he trusts us,” Jude tried again, “why can’t you?”

“The League?” Liam let out a single bark of laughter. “Are you all really that stupid?”

He held up a hand to silence whatever Vida was about to say. “They talk about rehabilitation and do nothing but hold kids hostage. They talk about training kids to defend themselves, and then turn around and send them off to be killed. Either we’re in camps, or we’re with the League, or we’re on the run, and it’s not even a choice. You wanna know what I want? A choice. Just one. And this is me making it. You might be okay heading back into the arms of those murderers, but I’m staying the hell away from them. From you.”

With that, he shouldered past Chubs and me and started heading back down the same path to the falls. Chubs glanced sideways at me, but I kept my eyes on Liam as I lowered myself down onto the stump, rubbing absently at the row of stitches on my lower back.

“You really think he wants me going after him this time?” I asked.

Chubs sighed, rubbing his hands briskly over his arms, and followed his friend down the trail. Neither of them got far; if I stood on my toes, I could see where Liam stood, leaning heavily against a tree. At first, it looked like Chubs was keeping a careful distance, not wanting to provoke Liam’s temper again. But he must have said something, apologized, because in the next moment, Chubs was standing close to him, one hand on Liam’s back, the other pointing back in our direction.

“I can’t believe he said all that bullshit,” Vida groused. “This kid has more mood swings than a toddler’s birthday party.”

“I didn’t realize he hated us that much.…” Jude said.

“He doesn’t hate you,” I promised, still watching the boys. “He hates the League. He thinks we’re better off without them—that we don’t need them.”

“Well, he needed us,” Vida said, “right around the time when he was drowning in his own mucus.”

Jude was quiet, even as he watched me watch the others. When I glanced back to ask him what was wrong, he only looked away and busied himself with digging Chubs’s coat out of the tent. I forced myself to sit on one of the tree stumps around the fire pit, my entire brain throbbing in time with my pulse.

It was ten more minutes before Chubs and Liam made their way back over to us. Chubs was still shaking his head, clearly frustrated. Liam kept his own face down, avoiding all of us. The biting wind or embarrassment had turned the tips of his ears red. He kept his hands shoved in his pockets as he shuffled forward, past us, toward the tent.

“He agreed to stay for now,” Chubs said. “He does want to go to California to find Zu, but he doesn’t want any of you to be able to tail us—we’ll probably have to split up before we hit state lines.”

“That kid’s a few colors short of a rainbow, isn’t he?” Vida said, rolling her eyes. Jude huddled in close to the two of them, passing the coat over to a grateful, shivering Chubs. “Be sure to send us a postcard when you get your asses caught and hauled back into a camp.”

“I’ll keep working on him,” Chubs promised. “He just needs to cool down.”

“I know,” I said. “Thank you.”

But I knew it wasn’t going to be enough.