Never Fade

SEVEN

THE GROUND GRUMBLED beneath my cheek, a low clattering that underscored the dull pain in my brain. Feeling was slow to come back to my limbs. I took a deep breath, trying to swallow the taste of iron and salt from my dry tongue. Matted hair stuck to my neck in clumps. I tried to reach up and brush it away only to realize that my hands were trapped behind me, something sharp digging into the skin there.

My shoulders ached as I twisted to readjust myself on the van’s grimy floor. It was dark in the back, but every now and then a flash of light would come through the metal grating separating the front seats from the rest of the vehicle. Just enough for me to see that the uniformed driver and the man sitting in the passenger seat were dressed in black.

Damn. My heartbeat was in my ears, but I didn’t feel afraid, not until I saw Jude sitting pin-straight on one of the benches, his hands bound and his mouth gagged.

While the PSFs had bound my hands, for whatever reason—probably because I was already unconscious—they hadn’t used a gag on me, and I was grateful. Bile rose, burning the back of my throat, and the only way to make the whole thing worse would have been to choke on my own vomit. I could feel the anxiety in me building to a slow and steady beat of Not again, not again, I can’t go back there, not again.

Calm down, I ordered myself. You’re no good like this. Get a grip.

I couldn’t get my jaw to move, to say something to get Jude’s attention. It took several precious moments for him to notice that I was even awake, and when he did, his body gave a huge jerk of surprise. He tried in vain to rub the cloth out of his mouth with his shoulder. I shook my head. If we were going to do something, it would have to be quietly.

Jude’s fear was an actual, living thing. It hovered over his shoulders, black, thunderous. He began to shake violently. He tossed his head, trying to draw desperate gulps of air into his lungs.

He’s having a panic attack. The thought was a quiet, sure one, and I was surprised by how much resolve it flooded into my veins.

“It’s okay,” I whispered, hoping the guys in front wouldn’t hear me over the chatter of their radios. “Jude, look at me. You have to calm down.”

He was shaking his head, and I could read his thoughts clear as if I had actually been inside it. I can’t, not here, not now, oh God, oh God.

“I’m here with you,” I said, bringing my knees up close to my chest. It was painful, but I managed to drag my arms up around my legs, so my bound hands were in front of me.

“Take a breath through your nose, a deep one,” I said. “Let it out. You’re all right. We’ll be fine. You just need to calm down.”

And he needed to do it sooner rather than later. My mind was going in circles trying to think of where the nearest camp was—upstate New York? Wasn’t there one in Delaware, out near a whole town of abandoned farmland? Where were we now?

I held Jude’s gaze with mine. “Calm down,” I said. “I need you to focus. You have to stop the car. Do you remember Saratoga?”

If there was only one good thing I could say about the League’s methods of training, it was that the instructors were creative. They tended to have a supernatural sense of what kinds of situations we would find ourselves in, including a practice run-through of almost this exact scenario. In that simulation, Vida, Jude, and I had been on a make-believe Op in Saratoga and had been taken hostage. Vida and I had fought our way out of the van and both ended up “dead,” shot in our escape. Instructor Fiore pointed out everything we should have done, which included Jude doing something other than cowering in the back of the car.

I saw him take a deep breath and nod.

When I had traveled with Zu, the biggest hurdle she had to overcome was controlling her Yellow abilities. She had worn rubber gloves for the better part of our time together to avoid zapping machinery or the car, but we’d seen her lose control twice without them to block her charged touch. Jude, though—he’d been trained. He’d had the benefit of being around other Yellows who were willing to help him learn. Although he ran at a speed that was ten times faster than everyone around him, he kept his abilities in check. The scene out by the protest had been the first time I’d ever seen him slip, and in such a huge, horrible way.

He closed his eyes, and I rolled over onto my knees, trying to brace myself.

I felt the huge swell of electricity, felt it ripple along the hairs of my arms. It crackled in my ears, heated the air until it burned white.

It was too much for the car’s battery to take. The car didn’t even shudder as it died; it was like it had slammed into an invisible wall. I went sliding toward the front grate with the force of it. The two PSFs cried out in confusion.

But I didn’t think it through. Cars on the East Coast were rare, with the sky-high prices of gas and the cost of upkeep. I had just assumed that there would be no one else out driving, that the van would stop, and I would find a way to take the PSFs out one at a time.

I saw the flood of white headlights at the same moment the PSFs did. The force of the impact as the semi truck clipped the front of our van sent us spinning fast and wild. The airbags exploded with a scent like burning. I slammed into the bench opposite of Jude, who went tumbling to the floor.

The van went onto its right tires, and for a split second I was sure we’d start rolling and that’d be the end of the story. Instead, the van slammed back down onto all fours. Over the hiss of the smoking engine and the cusses one of the PSFs was hollering, I heard the semi truck’s tires squeal as it slid to a stop.

“—Flowers, Flowers!”

I shook my head, trying to clear my double vision as my hands felt along the ground for Jude. They didn’t stop until they met with his boney, warm ankle and I felt him twitch in response. Alive. It was too dark to see if he was in one piece.

“Flowers! Goddammit!”

If it had been anyone else beside the PSFs, I might have felt sorry for the trouble we’d caused them. One of the men in uniform—Flowers, I guess—was slumped forward in his seat, his deflating airbag smeared with blood.

“Shit!” The driver was pounding on the steering wheel. He felt around the crumpled dashboard until his fingers latched onto the radio. Jude had done his job, though. Anything electronic within fifty feet had been fried. The man kept trying to click it on, kept saying, “This is Moreno; do you read?”

The PSF must have remembered protocol, because he reached over and forced the door open, jumping out into the snow. He’d have to secure us, make sure we were all right.

I was ready for him.

My legs were shaking like a foal’s as I dove over Jude’s prone form, beating the soldier to the door. He had his gun in one hand but needed the other one free to unlatch the back door. I had my handcuffs looped over his neck and his face between my hands before he could let out a gasp of surprise.

The soldier, Moreno, was rattled enough that his brain didn’t put up much of a fight. Taking control was smooth, easy, without the slightest whimper of pain in my mind.

“Take…our handcuffs off,” I ordered. I waited for him to reach up and do it before ripping the gun out of his hand. Jude let out a blissful moan as their metal grip released.

“Turn around and start walking back toward Boston. Don’t stop until you reach the Charles. Understand?” My finger curled around the trigger of the gun.

“Walk back toward Boston,” he repeated. “Don’t stop until you hit the Charles.”

I felt Jude at my back, swaying, but kept the black handgun trained on the PSF’s head as he walked away, disappearing into the swirling clouds of snow, deep into the night. My arms began to shake, both from the frigid cold and the stress of keeping myself upright.

The truck driver took his time, but he appeared at the driver’s side window, pounding against it. “Is everyone all right? I’ve called for help!”

I signaled for Jude to stay back. The PSF was still visible as he made his way down the highway despite his dark uniform and the pitch-black road. The truck driver spotted him immediately. I counted off his steps as he ran after him, calling, “Hey! Where you going? Hey!”

At the sight of him, Jude slipped the cuffs from his shaking hands, and they clattered as they hit the floor. When the truck driver spun on his heel, I was already waiting for him, gun up, hands steady.

The truck driver’s face went stark white under his beard. For a moment, we did nothing but stare at each other, the snow collecting in his wiry hairs. His jacket was a vivid red plaid and matched the knit cap he had pulled down low over his ears. Slowly, he raised his hands in the air.

“Kids,” he began, his voice shaking, “oh my God—are you guys—”

Jude’s hand tightened around my shoulder. “Roo…” he began uncertainly.

“Get lost,” I said, nodding toward the gun in my hands.

“But…the nearest town is miles away.” I saw the driver relax, his hands dropping back down to his sides now that the shock had worn off. Clearly he thought I wasn’t capable or willing to shoot him if it came down to it. I didn’t know whether to be furious or grateful about it. “Where are you going to go? Do you need a ride? I don’t have much food, but…but it’ll be warm, and—”

Maybe the driver thought he was being kind. Jude obviously thought so. I barely caught the back of his jacket to keep him from jumping out of the van and throwing his arms around the man in weepy gratitude.

Or maybe the driver just wanted the $10,000 per head he’d get for turning us over.

“I need you to get lost,” I said, switching off the gun’s safety. “Go.”

I could tell that he wanted to say something else, but the words caught and stuck in his throat. The driver shook his head once, twice, and gave me a weak nod. Jude let out a strangled protest, lifting a hand in his direction, like he could compel him to stop. The driver was slow to turn and slower to walk away.

“What did you do that for?” Jude cried. “He was just trying to help!”

The thin layer of ice on the road cracked as I jumped down, snapping me back to full alertness. I didn’t have time for explanations, not when the need to run was singing through my veins. The night was long and the piles of snow in the heavy woods around us unmarred. We would have to move fast and cover our tracks.

“We help ourselves,” I said, and led him into the dark.

The distant specks of headlights down the highway did nothing to ease up on the chill that had dug its fingers into my chest as we ran. I kept hoping to come across a car we could use, but every single one that had been abandoned on this stretch of road had a dead battery or no gas. Five minutes of charging through the knee-deep snow of the nearby woods, following the edge of what I assumed was the Massachusetts turnpike, finally turned up an exit sign for Newton, Massachusetts, and another one telling me it was forty-five miles to Providence, Rhode Island.

This was what I knew about the state of Rhode Island: it was south of Massachusetts. Therefore, we were going to Providence. And then I was going to look for a sign for Hartford, the only city I knew in Connecticut, and then one for New Jersey. And that was how my fourth grade education was going to get me down the eastern seaboard, at least until I found myself a goddamn map and a goddamn car.

“Wait…” Jude sputtered, gasping for breath. “Wait, wait, wait…”

“We need to move faster,” I warned. I’d been dragging him along behind me, but I’d carry him if I had to.

“Hey!” He let his body go limp, dropping to his knees. I jerked back with the suddenness of it, almost losing my balance.

“Come on!” I snapped. “Get up!”

“No!” he cried. “Not until you tell me where the heck we’re going! Barton’s probably been searching for us all night!”

The highway was lined on either side by hills and pockets of dense trees, but we were still far too exposed. Every time a passing freight truck bathed us in white headlights, I had to steel myself all over again.

I took a deep breath.

“Do you have your panic button?” I asked. “Jude—look at me. Do you still have it?”

“Why?” he asked, patting around his pants pockets. “I think so. But—”

“Toss it.”

His thick brows were drawn together, the tip of his long nose red and running with cold. He used his free arm to swipe it against his coat. “Ruby, what’s going on? Please, just talk to me!”

“Toss it,” I said. “We aren’t going back to LA. At least not yet.”

“What?” Jude sounded small, far away. “Are you serious? We’re…ditching?”

“We are going back—eventually,” I said, “but we have another, special Op first. We need to keep going before someone comes looking for us.”

“Who assigned it?” Jude demanded. “Cate?”

“Agent Stewart.”

Jude didn’t look convinced, but I had him on his feet now.

“I have to recover information from one of his sources,” I explained, trying to make it sound as mysterious and dangerous as I could. And it worked. The nervous look he’d been wearing changed to one of interest. And a small, fizzing excitement.

“It’s vital to the mission of the League, but I couldn’t let Barton know the real reason for leaving. I had to figure out a way to make sure that Rob was gone by the time we get back.”

“You should have told me!” Jude said. “From the beginning—I could have handled it.”

“It’s classified. A need-to-know Op,” I said, adding, “a dangerous one.”

“Then why the heck are you taking me?” he asked.

“Because if you go back now, they’ll kill you just like they killed Blake.”

I felt ashamed—the feeling snuck up on me, gripping me by the throat. I’d taken him without giving him any kind of choice, and then simplified the truth to make this reality go down that much easier. Hadn’t I hated Cate for doing the exact same things to me? Had she felt as desperate to get me to agree as I did with Jude now?

Jude slowed again, looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “I was right,” he whispered. “That is why he picked me. I was right.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “You were.”

Jude nodded, working his jaw back and forth, trying to get the words out. Finally, he reached into his EMT jacket and pulled out the familiar black button, tossing it aside.

“It was dead anyway,” he muttered, pulling back out of my grip. “I fried that car and everything in it, remember?”

Right. Of course. The trackers in his clothes would be dead, too.

“All right,” he said, his voice sounding stronger. This was the Jude I had been counting on—the one who thought all Ops would be as cool as the video games he played with Blake and Nico.

I reached over and brushed the snow powder from his hair and shoulders. “You have to follow what I say exactly, understand? We’re going completely off the grid, and no one can know where we are. Not Cate, not Vida, not even Nico. If they find us and bring us in, we ruin every shot we have at this Op—at making sure the League is a safe place.”

As quickly and simply as I could, I laid the Op out for him. Everything, from where we were headed first to what Rob and the others had been planning. I gave him a sliver of the truth: that I had been traveling with Liam for a while, but we’d split up before Cate brought me in and I’d lost track of him.

Would it really be so awful to just tell him the whole truth? I was surprised there was a part of me that was even tempted to talk about those last few precious moments in the safe house. It just…didn’t make sense to complicate everything by letting him into that moment of good-bye. I was the only one I wanted living in it, thinking about it, dreaming of it. And, to be honest, I needed him to trust me absolutely now, more than he ever had, if this was going to work. If I told him what I had done to Liam, every look Jude would give me from that moment on would be tainted by the fear I could do it to him, too. If he could even bring himself to look at me at all.

This was the kid who had sat with me for every meal, when half of the League was too afraid to look me in the eye. He didn’t flinch when I touched him; he waited for me to get back from Ops to make sure I was safe. As annoying as it had seemed to me then, I had never thought about what it would be like to lose it. Him.

Jude listened to it all, strangely calm for him. He didn’t react at all when I told him what was on the flash drive Liam was carrying. At first I thought he had stopped paying attention, but at the end of it all, he nodded and simply said, “Okay.”

“What’s wrong?” I asked. I was fully aware of how stupid that question was. What wasn’t wrong? “Are you feeling okay? Nothing bumped, bent, or broken, right?”

“Oh, uh, no, I’m fine, all in one piece, at least.” He knocked on the top of his head. “It’s just I was wondering…”

“About?” I prompted.

“About before. Before-before, I mean.” He turned to look at me. “Did you have to deal with the PSFs a lot at your camp? It’s just—you were so calm. Don’t get me wrong, when you were all, Get lost! it was pretty epic, but you didn’t seem, you know, scared.”

My brows rose. “You think I wasn’t scared?”

“I wasn’t scared, either!” Jude added quickly. “It just made me wonder about before you came to HQ.…”

“Are you trying to ask me what I was doing before Cate brought me in?”

“Well, yeah!” Jude said. “We all wondered—there were rumors, but they seemed really hard to believe.”

“Really.”

“Really.” Seeing that his line of questioning was a one-way road into Silenceville, USA, he changed the subject as awkwardly as he could manage.

“Do you really think the scientists discovered what caused it?” Jude asked. “Idiopathic Ado-blah-blah-blah?”

“Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration,” I supplied. Otherwise known as the reason most of us died and the rest of us turned into freaks. How could he ever forget what those letters stood for?

“Right, whatever,” Jude said. “Oh man, can you imagine what the League could do with that?”

I could hear the hope underlying his voice and felt my heart break, just that little bit. How could I tell him it would be a miracle if we actually found Liam, let alone found him still in possession of the flash drive?

“I think about it a lot,” he said, “don’t you? There’s a lot I don’t understand, and Cate and the others don’t really give me anything to work with, but it’s sort of cool to think our brains somehow mutated. I mean, it would be slightly cooler to know how and why that happened, but still cool.”

I used to think about it, when I was at Thurmond and there was very little else to focus on outside of my own misery. I spent countless days staring up at the bottom of Sam’s bunk, wondering how and why any of this had happened to us. Why some of us were Green and others Orange and others dead. But almost from the exact moment Cate got me out, I forced myself not to dwell on it. There were more important things to focus on—like surviving. Not being recaptured. Liam, and Chubs, and Zu.

“I know it’s dumb, but I’ve been trying to puzzle it all out. Sometimes I really do think it’s a virus, and then other times…I mean, how could it be a virus or disease if it barely spread outside of the US?” Jude was saying. “What was different about us from those other kids, the ones who died?”

All fair points. All distracting points. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We have to find Cole’s brother first.”

Jude nodded. “Man, that’s going to be so…weird. Meeting him, I mean. I remember when he ditched. No one even noticed he was gone until they did the headcount at the end of the simulation.”

I glanced over. “You knew Liam?”

Jude glanced up, his amber eyes widening slightly. “Oh, no, not, like, personally. Knew of him. He was training at Georgia HQ, and Vida and me have always been in LA. Liam’s the reason they moved all of the Psi training to California, though. Less chance for people to go missing when everyone is underground, I guess.”

Right. Of course. Liam wouldn’t have been in California. I was surprised at how much better the thought made me feel, knowing that he hadn’t been forced to live in that dank hole in the ground.

“Is Liam one of the people you search for on the PSF network every week?” Jude asked. “Nico mentioned it once. Are we going to look for them, too?”

I felt my patience snap like the icy layer over the snow we were crunching through. I don’t think it ever stood a chance against tonight.

“Because it’s none of your business!” I hissed. “You wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t waded into such deep shit!”

“I know, okay? I know!” Jude said, throwing his hands up. “You don’t like us, you don’t like the League, you don’t want to be Leader, you don’t want to talk about yourself or Cate or training or your favorite food or your family and friends. Fine. Fine! Wait—what are you doing?”

I thought I had imagined them as we were walking; they’d been little more than distant, unidentifiable shapes. But as I guided us down the crest of the next hill, the woods suddenly pulled back, revealing a small, cramped neighborhood street.

I heard Jude slide to a stop at the edge of the icy street when he saw that these houses had lights on. That there were cars in the driveways and people moving behind the window curtains, ready to mark another Wednesday as finished.

A man with a beat-up truck was trying to plow the street, struggling through the thick blanket of snow. I nudged Jude back behind me again, eyes on the house directly across the street, an idea worming its way up through my haze of exhaustion. There was a small silver sedan parked in the driveway, but, more importantly, I had seen a blurry shape through the little window of the house’s front door.

Sure enough, as soon as the plow passed, a woman stepped out and turned to lock the door behind her. Her hair was an ashy blond, shot through with strands of silver. It peeked out between the emerald knit cap and black coat she was wearing. I saw a flash of her dress as she buttoned her coat up over it. The cut and design made it look like something a waitress in a diner would wear.

She swung her keys around her fingers as she walked, glancing up at the night sky and the snow falling in soft breaths around her. I waited for the beep beep of the doors unlocking before I moved.

“Come on,” I said, grabbing Jude’s arm.

The woman heard us coming. Her back went rigid with panic when she saw my face reflected behind hers in the car’s dark window. I saw fear chase confusion in her eyes and took the opportunity to slip one of my cold hands up the sleeve of her coat to her warm, bare flesh. She smelled like pineapples and sunshine, and her mind was just as bright. It was a quick touch; it had to be—so fast I didn’t even experience the usual flood of memories. I wasn’t even sure I had her until she blinked slowly at me, her eyes going glassy.

“Get in the car,” I said to Jude, looking over my shoulder to where he stood, mouth agape. “We have a driver.”

The benefits of coercing someone to drive us were twofold: she couldn’t report the car stolen and phone in the plates, and, even better, she could pay tolls and get us waved through security stations set up at town borders by the National Guard or police. After taking two seconds to really think it through, I compelled her to take us to whatever was the nearest transportation hub. In a perfect world, Amtrak and all of its many lines would still have been around, but the economic crash did such a bang-up job exposing its many flaws, it lasted only a year before collapsing. Now the government ran two electric trains up and down to the major cities on the eastern seaboard each day, mostly to shuttle National Guardsmen, PSFs, and senators around. The Elite Express, they called it, and tickets were priced to match its name.

Train jumping would be a lot riskier than driving a car, but I couldn’t shake the nightmarish image of us having to stop and siphon gas every ten miles. It would eat away every valuable hour we needed. We could luck out and get a nearly empty train, at least for a few cities. If it looked too dangerous, or the train started to feel too crowded with unwanted eyes, we could always bail early. I had a way of making us disappear.

“Turn on the radio, please,” I said. “One of the news stations.”

Jude and I were crouched behind the two front seats, nestled in the hollow of space between them and the backseat. It was awkward to sit that way and still be reaching around to touch her to maintain the connection. I took a deep breath, slowly pulling my hand away, but focusing on that shimmering line of connection between our minds. Maybe this was how Clancy worked his way up to not needing a physical touch to establish a mental connection with a person—by letting go for a little longer each time.

The woman obeyed, and the speakers behind my head burst to life with the sound of a catchy commercial jingle. Amazing—they were still advertising pool supplies, even though a good portion of Americans had lost their homes.

She flipped through the channels, skipping over music and static until she reached a man’s droning voice.

“—the Unity Summit, as it is being called, will be held on neutral ground in Austin, Texas. The state’s governor, who recently denied allegations of aligning with the Federal Coalition in California, will moderate the talks between several key members of President Gray’s staff and the Coalition to see if common ground between the rival governments can be reached in time for the completion of the construction on the new Capitol building in Washington, DC, on Christmas day.

“President Gray had this to say about the possibly historic event.” The voice changed abruptly from the grave tone of the reporter to the silky, easy tone of a president. “After nearly a decade of tragedy and suffering, it is my sincerest hope that we can come together now and start making strides toward reunification. My advisers will be presenting economic stimulus plans over the course of the summit, including programs to jump-start the construction industry and return Americans to the homes they may have lost in economic calamity of recent years.”

Calamity. Right.

“Do you think Gray will finally give up the presidency if they agree to the terms?” Jude asked.

I shook my head. I didn’t know Gray personally, but I knew his son, Clancy. And if the son was anything like the father, Gray definitely had another motive for wanting this summit to happen. The last thing he would want is to lose control.

Clancy. I pinched the bridge of my nose, forcing the thought out.

The nearest Amtrak station ended up being the one in Providence, Rhode Island—an enormous concrete building that might have once been beautiful before the times and graffiti artists found it. I glanced at the clock that had been built into its lone tower’s face, but it either wasn’t working or it had been 11:32 for the past four minutes by the dashboard clock’s estimate. There were a few cars in the nearby parking lot, but at least three dozen people piled off a city bus that rumbled up to the drop-off lane.

I touched the woman’s shoulder, surprised to feel her jump. Her mind was very quiet now, as milky white as the sky outside. “We need you to buy us train tickets that’ll get us to North Carolina—as close to Wilmington as possible. Do you understand?”

The loose flesh on the woman’s cheeks quivered slightly as she nodded and unbuckled her seat belt. Jude and I watched her stagger her way through the new snow, heading for the automatic sliding doors. If this worked…

“Why are we trying to take the train?” Jude asked. “Isn’t that going to be dangerous?”

“It’ll be worth it,” I said. “It’ll take us twice as long to drive if we have to keep stopping for gas.”

“What if someone sees us or there are PSFs on the train?” he continued.

I pulled the knit cap off my head and threw it to him, along with the thick white scarf I had wrapped around my neck. When we were seated on the train, I’d be able to cover him up with my jacket, but until then…we would just have to find a dark corner.

The woman came back faster than I expected, her eyes on the ground, something white clutched in her hands. She opened the driver’s door and slid into the seat, letting in a breath of freezing air.

“Thank you,” I said when she handed me the tickets. Then, as Jude stepped outside, I added, “I’m really sorry about this.”

I only looked back at the car once as we headed into the station. I had told her to wait two minutes, then drive back to her house. The woman—maybe it was my tired eyes playing tricks on me or the whorls of snow between us—but when the headlights of a passing car flashed through her windshield, I swear I saw the gleam of tears on her cheeks.

She had been able to get us tickets to Fayetteville, North Carolina, which could have been clear on the other side of the state from Wilmington as far as I knew. Worse, the boarding time was listed as 7:45 A.M., a good ten hours away. It was too much time to kill, too much of an opportunity to be caught.

The inside of the station wasn’t nearly as ornate as the outside of it was. There was too much concrete for it to be truly beautiful. I found us a bench in a corner, facing a wall of unplugged arcade games, and we planted ourselves there and didn’t move, not for anything. The overnight trains came and went, feet shuffled behind us, the arrivals-and-departures board clicked and spun and beeped.

I was tired and hungry. There was a coffee cart still open by the ticket windows, the only thing standing between the clerks and sleep, but I didn’t have any money, and I wasn’t desperate enough to use my abilities on the poor guy stuck manning the cart.

Jude dozed against my shoulder. Every now and then, the automated announcer would come over the speakers with an update on the time or delayed trains. But the silent gaps between them seemed to grow longer with every hour that we waited, and I was beginning to regret the decision more and more. Somewhere around four o’clock, right when I was teetering at the edge of exhaustion, the doubts came storming in. By the time we got down there, I wondered, would Liam still be in North Carolina? He was resourceful when he needed to be. He could cover a huge amount of distance in the time we sat here—in the time it took us to get down there.

There had been cars in the parking lot. Maybe the smart thing to do was boost one of those and try avoiding the tollbooths and National Guard check stations set up around the bigger cities? No, because that would also mean being spotted by the thousands of highway cameras the government had installed for the exact purpose of looking for kids like us.

It wasn’t the whoosh of the sliding doors opening that snagged my attention but the heavy steps. Now and then a few people would drift in and out of the station, and a good number of homeless had been allowed to sleep in the heated space for the night, provided they took up a corner and not a bench. But this sounded like a good number of feet; the rubber soles of their shoes squeaked as they struck the tile. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the window clerk sit up straighter.

I just needed one glance over my shoulder to confirm it. Black uniforms.

I grabbed Jude and pulled him down off the bench with me, putting it between us and the dozen or so uniformed PSFs pooling in the center of the station.

“Holy crap,” Jude was whispering, “holy, holy crap.”

I put a hand on his shoulder, keeping him firmly planted next to me. I knew what he was thinking—the same questions were flashing through my mind. How did they find us? How did they know we would be here? How do we get out?

Well, the answer to the last question wasn’t to freak out and panic; in one of those rare, fleeting moments when I was grateful for the lessons the League had taught me, I took a deep, steadying breath and began to reassess the situation.

There were eleven uniformed PSFs taking their seats on the benches near one of the bus gates. Two were women, and both got up to check the monitors. Their hair was neatly braided or combed back, but the men’s looked freshly buzzed. More importantly, at their feet were eleven camo duffel bags, not guns.

A guy at the center of the group stood, laughing loudly as he made his way over to the vending machines. The others called after him with their orders of Doritos or gum or Pop-Tarts. They weren’t scanning the premises; they weren’t questioning the guy in the ticket booth. They were in uniform, but they weren’t on duty.

“They’re new recruits,” I told Jude. “Hey, look at me, not them. They’re taking one of the buses to go report for duty somewhere. They’re not looking for us—we just need to find a quiet place to sit until our train comes. Okay?”

I turned my back toward the soldiers, scanning our section of the open room for a door that might be unlocked or a hallway I hadn’t noticed before. I barely felt Jude stiffen again beside me, but I did feel him yank on my braid, turning my head back toward the sliding doors just as Vida led Barton and the rest of Beta Team into the building. All of them were in street clothes, eyeing the PSFs who hadn’t seemed to notice them at all.

What’s she doing here? What are any of them doing here? There was no way…no way they could have tracked us.…

“Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap,” Jude whispered, clutching at me. At least he understood the danger of being brought back to HQ. I didn’t have to explain again that Vida wasn’t here to help us. I looked around frantically from the arcade games, to the Amtrak kiosks, to the nearby women’s restroom. This was so much worse than even I could have imagined. Half of me just wanted to sit down and give in to the overwhelming urge to burst into full-on tears.

I didn’t stop to break down the plan to Jude, who looked near tears himself at whatever he had just seen. There really was no plan. I dragged him after me—literally dragged him—into the small family restroom.

The door squeaked as I pushed it open with my shoulder. There were no windows in the restroom, no vents big enough for us to climb out. There was one toilet, one sink, and no way out aside from the way we came in. I reached up and switched off the lights before flipping the lock over. No more than a second later, the door rattled as someone yanked on it.

I sat down on the floor and I drew my legs up against my chest, trying to steady my breathing. Jude collapsed down next to me. I pressed a single finger to my lips.

We couldn’t hide in there forever—someone, eventually, would realize the restroom shouldn’t be locked and come with a key. So I counted. I counted out four minutes in my head, stopping and restarting every time I heard someone’s boots clobbering by.

“Come on,” I whispered, forcing Jude up onto his feet. “We’re going to have to run.”

We didn’t even get two feet.

Vida pushed herself up from where she leaned against the wall directly across from us, her brows rising along with the gun in her hand.

“Hi, friends,” she said sweetly. “Miss me?”