Never Fade

TWENTY-FOUR

I WAS SO USED TO THE STRANGE on-off sleep schedule of my life now, I’m not sure what it was that actually woke me up. Not a noise. Vida was back in the tent, humming softly, some old song I half recognized. I watched, disoriented, as she gleefully tore out scraps of White Fang’s pages, rolled each into a tiny ball, and threw them one by one into Chubs’s mouth, which had fallen wide open in sleep.

I sat up and rubbed my face, trying to clear the crud from my eyes. “What time is it?”

She shrugged. “Half past who the hell knows? Go back to sleep.”

“Okay,” I said, lowering myself down onto my elbows. Chubs’s rattling snores kept time with the persistent rip of each page. Both he and Jude were sleeping flat on their backs, shoulder to shoulder. I slid back down under the covers, turning onto my left side again. The blanket twisted with me, leaving Liam without an inch of it.

I sat up again, heavy limbs and all, and untangled myself from the soft wool. With Liam’s half of the blanket finally freed from under me, I tossed it carefully back in his direction, watching, with disbelieving eyes, as the pale peach fabric fluttered down through empty air and settled on the ground.

“Where’s Lee?” I hadn’t been awake before. I was now.

“He went out,” Vida said, not looking up from her work.

“Out,” I repeated, the word tasting like blood on my tongue. “Out where?”

“To walk around for a while,” she said. “He said he couldn’t sleep.”

“You let him go alone?” I scrambled for my boots, hands shaking as I pulled them on. “How long ago did he leave?”

“What’s going on?” Chubs mumbled.

“Liam left,” I said.

“What?” His hands smacked around on the ground until they found his glasses. He shoved them onto the bridge of his nose. “Are you sure?”

“I’m going to bring him back,” I said, tugging on the navy sweatshirt and an oversize dust-smeared black peacoat they’d grabbed by mistake as they left the warehouse in Nashville. “Vida—did he tell you where he was going?”

“Leave him alone, boo,” she said, not turning around. “He’s a big kid. Wears the underwear and everything.”

“You don’t understand,” I said, “he’s not coming back. He’s leaving for good.”

Vida’s lips parted as she glanced around, the full weight of realization knocking the breath out of her. “Well…you have the flash drive, right? It’s not a total disaster.…”

“Are you kidding me?” I shouted. Jude sat straight up, blinking, but I didn’t have time to answer any of his questions. “Where would he go? He’d need a car or a bike—did he mention anything to any of you?”

“No!” Chubs said. “I would have told you!”

“Definitely not,” Jude said. “He kept talking about all of us going together tomorrow. Maybe…I mean, he could come back, right? If we give him a few minutes?”

He could be right. I forced myself to gulp down a deep breath. I pressed a hand, hard, against my chest, trying to ease the fluttering beat of my heart. He could have just gone down to the falls. That was possible, wasn’t it? Liam would never have left without Chubs or some kind of—

I stopped mid-thought, noticing for the first time the tiny sliver of paper sticking up out of his shirt’s front pocket. The button there had been undone, making room for a folded note. I reached over and plucked it out before Chubs could stop me.

Gas station off highway, 2 miles south. Come by 6.

I crumpled the note in my fist, throwing it back at him.

“I didn’t know!” he said before he’d even read it. “I didn’t!”

We had a total of two guns that Vida and I traded off carrying, since both Chubs and Liam refused on moral grounds. The revolver was on the ground at Vida’s feet, and the black semi-automatic was resting on top of the deflated backpack. Which meant Liam had neither.

Of course—of course he would go to the one place he had the best chance of being spotted by someone else. What was he thinking? That he’d be fine under the cover of night?

I took off at a stumbling run, shoving the tent flap open. The thick soles of my boots smashed through the snow.

“Wait for me!” Vida shouted. “Ruby!”

Outside of our small shelter, the freezing air hit me like a bat to the face. In the precious few seconds it took for me to get my bearings and head toward the small road Chubs had pointed out earlier, large flakes of snow had already managed to work their way along my loose hair, down into the collar of my coat. But they weren’t nearly heavy enough to cover the careless footprints he’d left behind.

I ran. Through the flurries of snow, the morning misty haze, the overgrown trails, until I found the highway. The blanket of snow on the road wasn’t nearly as thick-skinned as the layer covering the forest floor. I lost sight of his trail just as I skidded onto the icy blacktop, the stitches pulling so tight in my back it momentarily knocked the breath out of me. I staggered forward, lungs burning. The sun was rising in the east; it was the only reason I knew how to set my feet toward the south.

It was another twenty minutes, a whole lifetime of poisonous terror, before the small strip of businesses took shape down the misty highway and I spotted the gas station they must have passed on the way in.

I was out of breath, my lower back screaming in pain each time I swung my leg forward. The paved road disappeared into slushy dirt that splattered up onto my shins. The half dozen gas pumps had been knocked face-first into the torn-up pavement.

There were a couple of vehicles parked behind the station, one—a truck—with its hood propped open, as if someone had just taken a look. If he had found something wrong with it, there was a chance he was looking for a part in the service garage. Or food, I thought, turning back toward the building. Stocking up before he runs.

The back door of the station was unlocked; if I were being technical about it, the lock and handle had both been blown right off. It creaked as I opened it, and I slipped inside.

The store was bigger than I was expecting it to be but in worse shape. Someone had done a fairly thorough job of cleaning the joint out, but here and there were jumbo bags of chips, and a soda dispenser was still glowing and buzzing with last gasps of electricity. The gun stayed in my hand, cold and solid, trained on the glass doors of the drink refrigerators and the endless graffiti tagging that masked from view anything still inside.

I followed the line of the shelves as they flowed past the cash register and empty cardboard candy containers, around the front of the store to a fairly new-looking section of the building labeled FULL SERVICE.

The short hallway between the store and the mechanic garage was decorated with photos and posters of old cars with bikini-clad girls perched on top of them. I took in a slow, steadying breath. It was all rubber, gas, and oil; no amount of time or bleach was going to scrub that stench from the air.

There was another entrance into that section from the outside. The sign on the glass door was still flipped to OUT—BACK IN 15, and it directed visitors to kindly inquire at the back garage if it was an emergency. There were chairs, photos of vacant-eyed employees lining the wall, and model tires—but no footprints, no noise, no Liam.

A spike of fear cut through me as I shouldered the door to the mechanic shop open. I turned, trying to catch the heavy thing before it could slam shut, and that was the mistake—I knew it even as I turned, even as Instructor Johnson’s favorite saying rang out in my ears: Don’t turn your back on the unknown.

There was a tingling sensation at my back that I recognized a second too late. A burst of pressure slammed into me, throwing me forward as if someone had tackled me from behind. My forehead cracked against the door frame. My eyes flashed black, white, black as I crumpled. The gun clattered away, skimming across the cement, out of reach.

Then, a warm, familiar voice, pitched with fear: “Oh my God! Sorry, I thought—” Liam’s pale form burst out behind the hollowed-out car frame in the middle of the garage. “What are you doing here?”

“What are you doing here?” I demanded, looking around for the gun under the workbenches and tables. There were tools and parts scattered everywhere, collecting dust and even more grime. “You came out here alone, without any kind of way to protect yourself—”

“No way to protect myself?” he repeated, raising a brow.

“You know what I mean!” I crouched down, blinking back the dark spots in my vision, and felt under the metal table until my fingers closed around the barrel. I waved it toward him for emphasis. “What were you going to do against one of these?”

He turned back to the car, his mouth pressed tightly into a line of disgust. “I disarmed you pretty easily. What would the instructors say about that?”

It stung more than I expected it to. I watched in silence as he flipped the hood of the skeletal car back open, the tool flashing silver in his hand. But he wasn’t working; instead, his hands were braced against the green frame. The leather jacket clung to his shoulders as he leaned forward, hanging his head. I kept my back flat against the door, a silent guard against anything that might come in.

“So you found me,” he muttered, his voice strained. “I suppose I have Chubs to thank for that?”

His mind was turning through a wild range of emotions, flipping between what felt like hot anger and murky guilt and crushing hopelessness in a matter of seconds. It felt like his mind was calling to mine, like it was screaming for me.

I pressed the back of my hand against my forehead. Ever since I’d given in and stopped trying to fold them away, my abilities had been quieter. Settled, even. Now was not the moment to lose that bit of calm.

“I know—” I began, licking my dry lips. “I know you can take care of yourself. But we don’t know anything about this town. We don’t know who could come by, and the thought of you out here alone…”

“I wanted to be alone,” he said, his voice gruff. “I just wanted…I just needed to clear my head. Away from them. Away from you.”

I stared at him, trying to take what he had just said and align it with the look of all-out desperation on his face.

“Look,” I began, “I get it. You don’t like me, but—”

“I don’t like you?”

He let out a low, flat laugh. One fell into the next, and it was awful—not at all him. He was half choking on them as he turned around, shaking his head. It almost sounded like a sob, the way his breath burst out of him.

“I don’t like you,” he repeated, his face bleak. “I don’t like you?”

“Liam—” I started, alarmed.

“I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,” he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. “I can’t think straight when you’re around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t breathe—I just—”

“Liam, please,” I begged. “You’re tired. You’re barely over being sick. Let’s just… Can we just go back to the others?”

“I love you.” He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. “I love you every second of every day, and I don’t understand why, or how to make it stop—”

He looked wild with pain; it pinned me in place, even before what he had said registered in my mind.

“I know it’s wrong; I know it down to my damn bones. And I feel like I’m sick. I’m trying to be a good person, but I can’t. I can’t do it anymore.”

What is this? The look of open pain on his face was too much to process. My mind couldn’t work fast enough.

My hands fisted in the pockets of my coat. I felt myself backing away toward the door, trying to escape that look, trying to stop my heart from tearing out of my chest. He’s confused. Explain it to him. He’s only confused.

“Look at me.”

I couldn’t move; there was nowhere to go. He wasn’t hiding from me anymore. I felt his feelings unravel around him, a flood of warmth and a piercing pain that cut through the daze I felt when he stepped in close to me.

My hands stayed in my pockets; his were at his sides. We weren’t touching, not really. I had the sudden, sharp memory of the way his fingers had brushed against mine a few hours before. He bent his face down to my shoulder, his breath slipping through three layers of cloth to warm the skin there. One of his fingers hooked a belt loop on my jeans and inched me just that tiny bit closer. His nose skimmed up my throat, along my cheek, and I saw none of it. I squeezed my eyes shut as his forehead finally came to rest against mine.

“Look at me.”

“Don’t do this,” I whispered.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he breathed out. “I feel like…I feel like I’m losing my damn mind, like your face has been carved into my heart, and I don’t remember when, and I don’t understand why, but the scar is there, and I can’t get it to heal. It won’t go. I can’t make it fade. And you won’t even look at me.”

My hands slipped out of the safety of my coat and gripped his jacket’s soft leather. He was still wearing Cole’s beneath it. “It’s okay,” I choked out. “We’ll figure it out.”

“I swear,” he whispered, his mouth hovering over mine. “I swear, I swear…I swear we were on that beach, and I saw you wearing this light green dress, and we talked for hours. I had a life, and so did you, and we lived them together. It doesn’t fit. That piece doesn’t fit. Claire was there, and Cole promised we’d never been. But then…I see your face in the firelight, and I remember different fires, different smiles, different everything. I remember you in the green dress, and then it becomes a green uniform, and it doesn’t make sense!”

Green dress—the beach? Virginia Beach?

One tear escaped my lashes, then another. It had happened so fast; I’d had to work so quickly in that sky blue room. What he was saying now—none of it had happened, not really, but the way he had told it then had felt real to me. We could have met that summer, on that beach, with nothing but a tiny stretch of sun and sand to keep us apart. I must have been thinking about it, even as I pulled myself out of his thoughts and memories. I must have missed that one tiny sliver of myself, or pushed it, or—

“I’m… It’s—it’s like torture.” His voice was strained, hardly even a whisper. “I think I’m losing it—I don’t know what’s happening, what happened, but I look at you, I look at you, and I love you so much. Not because of anything you’ve said, or done, or anything at all. I look at you, and I just love you, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me what I would do for you. Please…you have to tell me…tell me I’m not crazy. Please just look at me.”

My eyes drifted up to his, and it was over.

His lips caught mine in a hard kiss, driving them apart with the force of it. There was nothing gentle about it. I felt the door rattle against my back as he shifted, pressing me against it, taking my face between his hands. Every thought in my head exploded to a pure, pounding white, and I felt the dark curl of desire begin to twist inside me, bending all my rules, snapping that last trembling bit of restraint. I tried one last time to pull away.

“No,” he said, bringing my lips back to his. It was just like it had been before—I slid my hands under his jacket to press him closer. The low groan at the back of his throat, a small, pleading noise that set every inch of my skin on fire.

Then, it changed. I pulled back, gasping for a breath, and when I found him again, it was deeper, and softer, and sweeter. It was a kiss I remembered, the kind we used to have when it felt like we had all the time in the world, when the roads stretched out just for us.

I gave in to that feeling. I didn’t care what it made me—weak, selfish, stupid, terrible. I remembered that tiny bit of warm peace before I had ruined him, throwing his mind into a jumble of desperate confusion. There was so much darkness to it now; the clear, bright corridors of memories had collapsed in on themselves. I fought my way through, tearing down filmy sheets of black and burned brown. I was drowning in it, in him, and it was so different, so strange, that I didn’t recognize the fact I was in his mind until it was too late.

Stop, stop, stopstopstop—

I shoved him back, breaking the physical connection between us. We both stumbled, my head screaming with pain as I crashed down onto my knees. Liam fell back onto the nearest work table, sending the hundreds of little tools and bolts stacked there tumbling to the ground in a shower of piercing noise that seemed to go on and on, echoing the final snap that whipped through me as my mind broke away from his.

Shit, I thought, gasping for breath. I felt sick, physically ill, as the world bobbed up under me. For several terrifying seconds, the burning in my mind was bad enough that I couldn’t see at all. I all but crawled, feeling for the gun I had dropped as he grabbed me. I tried to haul myself back onto my feet using one of the shelves of hubcaps, but I only succeeded in tearing it down off the wall and sending them showering down over me.

Finally, I just gave up, leaning back against the wall, drawing my knees up to my chest. The ache had trickled down the back of my neck, dripping bit by bit into the center of my chest. Shit, shit, shit. I dug the heels of my palms against my eyes, sucking in another ragged breath.

“Ruby.”

I looked up from my hands, searching for his face in the darkness.

“Ruby, you…” Liam’s voice had an edge of panic to it now as he reached for me and pulled me up toward him. I fell against him, too stunned to move as he wrapped his arms around my shoulders, buried his face in my hair. “We—That safe house—”

Oh my God.

“You did something—you—oh, God, Chubs!” Liam pulled back, trapping my face between his hands. “Chubs was shot! They took him, and they took us—we were in that room, and you—what did you do? What did you do to me? Why would I leave? Why would I leave without you?”

The blood drained from my face, from my entire body. I ran my fingers back through his hair, forcing him to look me directly in the eye. Every one of his muscles shook. “He’s okay. Liam! Chubs is okay; he’s fine. We came to find you in Nashville, remember?”

He looked over at me again, and for the first time in weeks, his eyes were sharp. Clear. He was looking at me, and I knew the exact moment he realized what I’d done to him. His hair fell into his face as he shook his head; his lips worked in silent disbelief. I couldn’t bring myself to say one thing.

This isn’t possible.

How many memories had I wiped clean now? Dozens? A hundred? And from the beginning, from that look of pure fear on my mom’s face, I knew there would be no going back. When it happened again to Sam, it only confirmed it. Slipping into her mind, trying to fix what I’d done, had only ever proven there was nothing I could do. That there wasn’t a trace of myself left to draw out to the front of her mind again.

But now—I hadn’t pushed the memories into his mind. I knew what that felt like. This was something different; it had to be. All I’d done was pull myself free before I could sink in too far and do real damage. There was no way that this was happening. No way.

He stepped back, out of my reach. Away from me.

“I can explain,” I started, my voice trembling. But he didn’t want to hear any of it. Liam turned back to the car at the center of the damp garage, scooping up a small backpack I didn’t recognize and swinging it over his shoulder. Panicked movements brought him back to the door. He needed to see it for himself, I realized, that Chubs was all right. That everything that had happened since we found him had, in truth, actually happened.

“Wait!” I called, starting after him. “Lee!”

I heard his footsteps pound against the linoleum of the front office, and his frustrated grunt as he knocked into the desk.

I heard the gunshots. The one-two punch of explosive sound that shattered a wall of glass and brought my world down with it.