Never Fade

TWENTY-THREE

NATURAL FALLS STATE PARK was located in Oklahoma, in what most considered the highlands of the Ozarks—right up in the northeast corner of the state, where it was really freaking cold in December. Chubs gave me a brief tour of the campsite as we made our way back to the others. A few picnic tables here and there, RV parking, a number of hiking trails that looped around one another. The only thing that really mattered was that the campsite was deserted.

“Are you in any pain?” he asked, tossing another branch on the growing fire.

“I’m fine. I just want to know what happened.”

I scooted, giving him half of the stump so he wouldn’t have to sit in the snow, and threw one end of the blanket over his shoulder, drawing him in close. He still smelled faintly of laundry detergent and hand sanitizer, only now I could pick up earthy scents, too—the kind that gave away just how many nights he’d slept on the ground without a shower in between. The poor kid probably felt like he was dying.

“Okay,” he said, taking a deep breath.

They knew, right away, that something was wrong when Olivia’s half of the team came back alone. She and her group of ten had made it back mostly unscathed, with as many supplies as they could carry over the water. Brett didn’t appear for another two hours, struggling through the soaking parking lot with Jude still draped over his shoulder. His team hadn’t fared so well—only five of them had made it back, and I wasn’t included in that total.

“I showed Olivia how to give the kids the medicine the right way, dosed Lee, and then we carried him out to the car. We spent most of the night driving around, trying to pick up an Internet signal to download an update from the skip-tracer network. We all were so sure the PSFs had grabbed you.”

“Almost,” I whispered, but didn’t think he could hear me.

Even before they found a connection to hook into, Cate had sent a message through the Chatter. It turned out that when you got snapped by a profiler, the device the PSF snapped in my face, it not only brought your listing up for the PSF or skip tracer’s viewing pleasure. It also automatically updated that same listing with time and location stamps on both the PSF and skip-tracer networks.

That’s how Rob knew to look in that area, I thought.

“But how did you know to look for Rob in the first place?”

“We didn’t at first. He was under a fake name.” Chubs glanced down at where his fingers were laced together. “He updated the skip-tracer network to say that you were recovered. Once that happened, I could look up his profile—see what car he’d registered and the license plate. We weren’t too far from the area, but I’m still amazed we kept it together long enough to find you. After we found you we came here—we’ve been camped out for almost four days.”

“Thanks,” I said after a small stretch of silence, “for not giving up on me.”

“You seriously thought we would?” he asked. “That we wouldn’t have done everything and anything we could to find you?”

“That’s not what I meant,” I said. “It’s just…” Maybe it would have been better if you had let them take me. The buzz in my ears drowned out the world, and I felt the first touch of panic creep back in. “If he’s this unhappy with us around, it might be for the best to split up.”

“No. It doesn’t make sense,” Chubs said. “I can’t keep up with his moods. He was freaking out when we found you—it was a full-on meltdown. I’ve never seen him like that before. Maybe some part of him figured out you guys were League before you told him…that’s the only thing I can think of that would explain why he’s acting like this. The Liam I knew wouldn’t have wanted to abandon a bunch of kids if he thought we all could get along—I mean, you’re proof of that. But it’s like, ever since he started feeling better, he’s been jumpy. Irritable.”

“He has no reason to trust us,” I said. “I understand why.”

“Look, I’m not going to choose,” Chubs said. “I can’t let him go on his own again, but I’m not going to leave you, either. So you have to find a way to make this work, got it? You have to get him to trust you. Wait—why are you shaking your head?”

“I meant what I told him,” I said. “It wasn’t the full truth, but it’s the best I can do. I’m going to help you guys get wherever it is you decide you want to go, then head back to Cole to finish this.”

Chubs’s grip on me tightened, but it was the shock and hurt and fear he let off that choked me up while I struggled to speak.

“You know…you know how important this is. I feel like if I’m not there to make sure it happens, if I don’t see for myself what caused this”—I motioned between us—“I’ll never forgive myself. If I can’t…if I can’t be around Liam anymore, I can at least do that for him. That was his dream, remember?”

“No,” he whispered, “I can’t do this again—it can’t be the way it was with Zu, the way it was the last six months. I know it’s selfish, but I have to know you’re safe, and you’ll never be safe with them. At least think about that, okay? Give me a chance to change your mind, too.”

No, I thought, giving him a weak, reassuring smile. Even if Liam didn’t look at me with such hate in his eyes, even if he had kissed me down by the falls, none of it would have mattered. I wasn’t the blank slate I’d been when Liam, Chubs, and Zu found me. I had done things I was ashamed of then, sure, but now I’d gone to a place I couldn’t come back from, and there was too much light in them to drag them there with me.

“We’ll see,” I said, squeezing his fingers, “we’ll see.”

Despite the fact he had no maps and no way of downloading any kind of update from the skip-tracer network to navigate us, Chubs still pushed to have us move out of the park as quickly as we could. We’d have one more night to rest, then start driving west again first thing in the morning.

I doubted it was because he was in any hurry to get to California. Chubs had reached his absolute breaking point for being able to handle this kind of cold—both physically and on an emotional level. I wasn’t sure what Vida was going to do if she got one more lecture about hypothermia, but I imagined it probably involved holding Chubs, the fire pit, and one well-aimed push. She hadn’t figured out that it wasn’t himself that he was worried about.

The cold weather was wreaking havoc on Liam’s lungs. He was huffing, and puffing, and hacking, and coughing every time he tried to increase his pace above a hobble. Instead of trying to gather the scattered supplies, he crouched down next to Jude and helped him stoke the fire, debating whether Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. was a better album than Born to Run.

Finished with that, they went to the backseat of the SUV to fish out more layers to pile on. Without a second thought to it, Liam reached down for his old leather jacket and slipped it on over the thinner dark gray one.

“But that’s—” Jude started to protest. I shook my head sharply in his direction and ducked away before Liam could turn and see what caused him to clam up. I made it a point to give him space after that, going right when he’d go left, always keeping the fire between us. By the time Jude started hinting strongly he needed to be fed dinner, Liam seemed to have relaxed. Enough, at least, to crack a smile when Chubs tripped and went down with a squawk, sending the food rations in his arms flying.

“I was wondering what happened to this stuff,” I said as I helped him gather up the foil packets again.

“We had to leave most of it behind,” Chubs said as we made our way back to where the others were hunkered down around the fire pit. “It was mostly what we could stuff in our pockets. It’s been enough—okay, who wants what?”

“I’ll take one of the Chinese fig bars if you see one,” Jude said.

“The French trail mix,” Vida said. “Silver packet.”

“Did anyone ever figure out where this stuff came from?” I asked. “Or why it was just there, going to waste?”

“We decided to chalk that one up to the president being a sneaky asshole and the rest of the world not sucking half as badly as we thought it did,” Vida said. “The end.”

All along, President Gray had been insistent in his weekly addresses that Americans were pulling themselves up by the bootstraps and taking care of themselves and their countrymen. He made it a point, time and time again, to nail the United Nations for the economic sanctions they put on the country. No one did business with us, so we would have to do business with one another. No one would send in financial relief, so the few people who hadn’t lost the bulk of their fortunes when the markets crashed were the ones who would have to donate. Americans would help Americans.

The United Kingdom, France, Japan, Germany—they just do not understand the American way, he once said. They weren’t affected by IAAN; they didn’t feel the razor’s edge of our pain. I watched him on one of the TVs in the atrium, back at HQ, his face looking older and grayer than it had just a week before. It looked like he was sitting in the old Oval Office, but Nico had pointed out the glow around the edge of the image, which pointed to the use of some kind of green screen. For a guy with endless opportunities for protection, he hadn’t been back in DC since the first bombings—he just moved from one Manhattan high-rise to the next.

They do not understand that certain sacrifices must be made in times like these, Gray had continued. That we can rise above it, given time and dedication. We are Americans, and we will do it our own way, as we have always done.… And it was like the longer he talked, the more words he used, the less they came to mean anything. It was an endless stream of ideas that were as flat as his voice. All they did these days was spin, and spin, and spin us around in circles until we were too dizzy to listen to what they were really saying.

“What about you?” I asked Liam. “Hungry?”

Time and silence and obvious embarrassment about his earlier breakdown had softened Liam just a tiny bit—first toward Jude, who, despite everything Liam had flung his way earlier, was watching Liam the way a kid might gawk at his favorite baseball player. Then toward Vida, whose charming personality didn’t let anyone ignore her for long. I could see he was still angry with Chubs, but even that was draining away now that the initial shock had faded. I was glad Vida and Jude were getting a glimpse of who he really was—without the strange, battered armor he’d sewn himself into.

“Yeah…whatever is fine.” He didn’t glance up from the small black booklet in his right hand.

I reclaimed my seat next to Chubs, letting him fuss over me without hearing a word of what he was saying. To my right, Jude was building a miniature snowman, using the M&M’s from his own trail mix to make its grin—though it was lopsided enough to look more demented than cute. He was humming a soft, breathy version of some Springsteen song.

“Joseph Lister?” Liam said suddenly, cutting through the silence. “Really? Him?”

Chubs stiffened beside me. “That man was a hero. He pioneered research on the origins of infections and sterilization.”

Liam stared hard at the faux leather cover of Chubs’s skip-tracer ID, carefully choosing his next words. “You couldn’t have chosen something cooler? Someone who is maybe not an old dead white guy?”

“His work led to the reduction of postoperative infections and safer surgical practices,” Chubs insisted. “Who would you have picked? Captain America?”

“Steve Rogers is a perfectly legit name.” Liam passed the ID back to him. “This is all…very Boba Fett of you. I’m not sure what to say, Chubsie.”

Say it’s okay, I thought, remembering the fear in Chubs’s voice when he’d confessed about turning that kid in. Tell him you understand that he had to do this, even if you don’t.

“What?” Chubs scoffed, his voice just that tiny bit too light. “For once, you’re speechless?”

“No, I’m just…” Liam cleared his throat. “Grateful, I guess. That you came looking for me and you had to do…this. I know it wasn’t…I know it couldn’t have been easy.”

“Just shut up and start sucking each other’s faces already,” Vida grumbled, leaning awkwardly against the stump. She would never admit it aloud, but I knew the burns on her back were eating her alive with pain. “I’m trying to make up for the sleep I lost when you started screeching at each other like cats in heat.”

“Miss Vida,” Liam said, “has anyone ever told you that you are positively the whipped cream on the sundae of life?”

She glared at him. “Anyone ever told you your head is shaped like a pencil?”

“That is physically impossible,” Chubs groused. “He’d be—”

“Actually,” Liam began, “Cole once did try to—What?”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Chubs said, “apparently the middle of my sentence interrupted the beginning of yours. Do continue.”

“I’m going to guess you probably don’t want to hear about the time he pushed my head through the neighbor’s fence.…”

“Was there a lot of blood?” Vida asked, suddenly interested. “Did you lose an ear?”

Liam held his hands up next to his ears, indicating both were still firmly attached to his skull.

“Then, no,” she said. “No one wants to hear your boring-ass story.”

Night settled in quickly overhead. I tracked the movement of the sun through the trees overhead. The faint orange glow swept across the forest’s snowy floor until it finally faded away into a sleepy gray, and the cold forced us back inside the tent.

Vida lay on her back, holding the Chatter up in the air, moving it around to find that exact right position to catch a signal. She’d been trying to send an ALL CLEAR // OBJECTIVE ACCOMPLISHED in response to the ten REPORT STATUS messages that had been waiting for us when she turned it on a few days before. If Cate was half as anxious as Vida was to make contact, I had a feeling there’d be ten more messages waiting once the device reconnected with the Chatter network.

“Nothing?” I asked.

She let it fall onto her chest with an annoyed sigh and shook her head.

“Maybe once we get out of the mountains,” I said, but she didn’t seem comforted by the thought. Vida squinted at me from across the dark tent.

“Since when did you start drinking from the half-full glass?”

I grunted, pressing my face back down against my arms at the next sharp stab of pain in my back.

“Does this hurt?” Chubs asked. He kept one hand flat on my shoulder blades to keep me down while the other poked and prodded at my stitches.

I managed another grunt in response.

“I’m going to disinfect it again,” Chubs warned.

“Super.”

We settled into a quiet little calm that was at odds with the billowing winds outside. Once he was finished with me, Chubs picked up a book, White Fang, and settled down on his sleeping bag to read. I stayed on my stomach, trying to force myself to sleep.

Jude reappeared at the tent entrance with the flashlights he’d been sent to find in the car. His curly hair was coated in a thick layer of snow that he then decided to shake out all over us. It was the first grin I’d seen him crack in…days? Weeks? But when he caught my eye, Jude looked away, sitting next to Liam to resume their game of war.

The longer it stayed silent between us, the more overwhelming the awkwardness became. Vida was starting to get that dangerous gleam in her eye, too: a smile that got progressively more wicked the longer she stared at the side of Chubs’s head.

“So a thought crossed my mind,” Liam said suddenly.

“That must have been a lonely journey,” Chubs said, flipping the page of his book.

Liam rolled his eyes. “It’s getting late, and I was just thinking that we should take turns on watch. Set up shifts. That sound good?”

I nodded.

“Young Jude here and I can take the first one,” Liam said. “Ruby and Chubs the second, and Vida can bring up the rear.”

I thought about protesting the lineup, but Liam looked like he was ready for a challenge and I just didn’t have it in me.

I faded in and out of sleep all night, twisting and turning against the blankets serving as bedding in the tent. I was awake to hear Liam tell Jude, in quiet tones, about some horror flick he’d watched religiously as a kid.

The blankets rustled as they shuffled back over to the bedding. Jude had all but dropped to his knees between Chubs and me in exhaustion, patting us on the shoulders until we were both awake and sitting up. He let out a blissful sigh as he curled up under the blankets. But Liam was slower in his approach, almost hesitant. I felt his eyes fix on me the way you feel a beam of sunlight cut through a window. Warm. Focused.

I got up as he slid under the other end of the blanket, positioning himself as far away from me as he could without giving up the warmth or comfort of the fleece padding under us.

To stay busy and keep our blood flowing, Chubs and I did a quick walk around the camp, glad to have the wind and snow die down, if only for a few minutes.

“Is that where you drove in?” I asked, pointing to a trail that seemed wider than the others.

Chubs nodded. “It winds around and connects to a highway. This section of it was closed off, I think, because there’s no one to plow the roads. I’m hoping the snow starts melting tomorrow, otherwise I have no idea how we’re going to drive out of here.”

A few hours later, just shy of dawn, it was Vida’s turn. She stood up in the tent, physically trying to shake the sleep off her, before stumbling out into the cold morning. I stared at the tiny sliver of space between Chubs and Liam and promptly turned on my heel, following her back outside.

Vida broke the intense gaze she’d fixed across the clearing when I sat down next to her, but she didn’t seem surprised.

“I slept too long in the car,” I lied, warming my stiff hands near the fire. “I’m just not tired.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Want to tell me what’s really on your mind?”

“Why?” I asked. “You actually care?”

“If it has to do with Prince Charming, then, no, not really,” Vida said, leaning back. “But if it has to do with you ditching out with Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumbass and leaving me and Judith to finish out the Op, I want to hear about it.”

I shook my head. “Sorry to break it to you, but I’m not going anywhere.”

“Really?” Now Vida actually did sound surprised. “Then what was all that whispering between you and Grannie?”

“He asked me to go with them,” I admitted, “but I can’t.”

“Can’t or won’t?” Vida asked.

“Can’t,” I whispered. “Won’t. What does it matter?”

Vida sat up straighter at that. “What’s going on with you?”

I shrugged, rubbing my fingers along the worn edge of the blanket I’d wrapped around myself.

“You’ve been acting like a spooked cat since we picked you up.…” I saw her mind working behind her dark eyes, narrowing as she made the connection.

I’m not sure why it was easier to tell Vida this, or why I wanted to, when I hadn’t been able to speak a word of it to Chubs. Maybe it was because I knew she already had such a low opinion of me that it didn’t matter either way if it made her hate me that much more.

“I went too far,” I said. “With Knox, the kids at that warehouse—with Rob.”

“How?” she asked. “You mean the fact that you don’t have to touch people to use your brain voodoo?”

“It’s complicated,” I mumbled. “It won’t make sense to you.”

“Why? Because you think I’m stupid?” Vida kicked at my foot. “Give me an answer, straight, and if my little-bitty brain has questions, I can ask them.”

“That’s not—” I stopped myself. I needed to stop fighting with her over every damn thing. “It’s just…you’re okay with your abilities, right? Okay as you can be, I mean,” I corrected, seeing her sharp look. “But I hate what I can do. I hate it every day, every minute. And it’s better now that I have a grip on it, but before…” Every minute had been a waking nightmare. I had lived life second to second, holding my breath, waiting for the inevitable slip that would ruin everything again. “It’s not right, okay? I know it isn’t. I don’t like how it feels to compel people to do things, especially when I know it’s the opposite of what they would normally do. I don’t like seeing their memories or their thoughts or the things they wanted to keep to themselves.”

Vida didn’t break her gaze for an instant. “I’m not seeing the problem…?”

“I just…got in too deep,” I said. “I could feel myself digging deeper and deeper, but it didn’t matter to me. I was in control. I could get anyone to do anything I wanted. I got to punish the people who hurt me, and you, and Liam—and I still wanted more. Once I didn’t have to touch a person to use him or her, it was like taking away that last roadblock.”

She sighed. “Not that it’ll make you feel any better, but that Knox kid got what he deserved in the end.”

“It wasn’t just him,” I said. “I was in Mason’s head—and I thought, I really thought about turning him on Knox. That was my first instinct, not helping him. And then, with Rob…”

Vida didn’t react as I laid out exactly what had happened in the car—what I had done to him—in vivid detail. I confessed it all to her, the words flooding out, releasing the knot that had been tightening in the pit of my stomach since it happened.

“I don’t want to be him, Vida,” I heard myself saying. “I don’t want to use my abilities unless I have to—but then how do I stop myself?”

“Is that why you were screaming at us to leave you?” she asked. “Which, by the way, screw you. You think I’m that big of an asshole?”

“What if I can’t stop,” I said, “and something happens to you? Or Jude, or Nico, or Cate, or Chubs, or…”

Liam. The thought turned my stomach over.

I was surprised by the quiet that followed. Vida drew her hands into her lap, fixing her gaze on them as she went to work picking at her bloody cuticles.

“That other Orange,” she said after a while. “He was a grade-A freak.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “he was. He was never shy about taking whatever he wanted from whomever he wanted.”

“Gave me the fuckin’ creeps,” she muttered. “Wormed into my head and whispered all of this disgusting shit. Tried to get me to…do things.”

“I know, he—” I started to say. My mouth finally caught up with my brain. “Hold on—what?”

“That kid. Martin,” she squeezed out. “I wanted to tell Cate, but he never let me get close enough to her.”

I don’t know what it was that rose up inside of me then—surprise, maybe, that I had never once pictured Martin positioned at the center of my team, talking with Nico, battling Vida at every turn, teasing Jude. The tiniest flash of jealousy that he had had them, even if it had only been for a few weeks. Horror, mostly, that Cate had subjected them to that monster.

I still had nightmares about riding in that car with him, feeling the first brush of his influence spike through my blood. He had played with me, batting at me with his claws, and I hadn’t been able to do one damn thing about it.

“I just figured that you would be the same way.” Her dark eyes found mine. “But you’re okay…I guess.”

I let out a humorless laugh. “Thanks…I guess.”

“The president’s kid was like that, though?” she asked. “Man, what the hell?”

“It does something to you,” I said. “The thing that scares me is that some part of me understands where they’re coming from. They took everything from us, you know? Why shouldn’t we be able to take it back if we have the power to?”

“Are you shitting me?” Vida said. “The fact that you can even ask these questions means you haven’t fallen to their level and you probably never will. I get it—I mean, I understand why you’re afraid. I do. But you’re missing the key difference between you and those two.”

“What?”

“You are not alone,” she said. “You aren’t, even if it feels that way sometimes. You have people who are in your corner, who care about you like crazy. Not because you forced them to feel that way, but because they want to. Can you honestly tell me those other two shitheads have that? Do you think they would have been half as bad if there had been people there to step in and tell them when to stop?”

“I can’t stop thinking about those kids,” I said, tears pricking the backs of my eyes.

“Good,” Vida said. “It’s on you to remember them and what that felt like to come up out of the dark and see what you’d done. Forgive yourself, but don’t forget.”

“And if it’s not enough?”

“Then I’ll stop you,” she said. “I’m not afraid of your crazy power. Not anymore, at least.” Vida stood up, brushing her pants off. “I’m going to go take a walk around. When I come back, you better already be asleep, or I’ll knock you out myself.”

“Thanks,” I said. “For listening, I mean.”

“Don’t mention it.”

I waited until Vida was heading down a trail before I turned back to the tent and crawled between Liam and Chubs. I was too tired and too drained to wonder or care if it was a bad idea. I settled down and closed my eyes, letting my thoughts slow and spill into a soft, pale blue dream.