Never Fade

EIGHT

EVERY SINGLE WORD that filtered through my mind was of the four-letter variety. “What are you doing here?”

The triumphant smile I expected to see there never made an appearance. Instead, she gave me a once-over and snorted. “Wow, your danger instincts are set on high-fucking-alert, aren’t they? And they said it would be hard to find you.”

I pulled the gun out of my waistband slowly and took careful aim. I let the invisible hands inside my mind unfurl, imagining them launching toward her, driving into her thoughts. But…nothing. Nothing at all.

“How cute,” she said. “I have one of those, too!”

For one long beat, neither of us moved; her dark eyes flicked down over me, the same way they did when we sparred in training. Sizing me up. Wondering if I’d really do it.

Neither of us saw him move; one minute Jude was cowering behind me and the next, he had sidled up to Vida, one hand on her shoulder. “I’m really sorry about this.”

A tiny arc of blue electricity leaped up from the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt, stroking Vida’s skin softly, like a snake’s exploring tongue. Vida must have realized what he was about to do at the same moment I did, but she couldn’t move away fast enough. Her eyes rolled back as she crumpled to the ground.

“Oh my God,” I said, dropping down beside her to feel for a pulse in her neck.

“I just gave her a little love zap,” Jude said, every hair on his head standing on end. “She’ll—she’ll come around in a minute, but, Roo, tell me I just did the right thing. I don’t want to leave her here. I don’t think we should go without her, but she wasn’t going to help, and we have to find Liam, and she would have told, and he’s important—”

“You did the right thing,” I said. “Jude, thank you. Thank you.”

“What are we gonna do now?” Jude whispered, following me down the hallway to a room marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

A quick look around told me that the tact team had divided—half were upstairs, visible in the glass offices above us, and half were heading out onto the train platform. What PSFs weren’t sprawled out and still on the floor were bound together in an unwilling huddle of black.

We followed the long hallway to its end, narrowly missing a station worker going into the employee break room. I kept my eyes focused on the double doors at the very end of the stretch of concrete, too scared of what I would see if I tore my gaze away.

I opened the right door as quietly as possible, motioning for Jude to follow. It shut with a faint click. It took me two precious seconds to figure out we were even looking at the bus terminal, and another two to see the old man in a navy uniform come hustling around the corner, a huge, wet coffee stain all down his front.

Every bone in my body went hollow as I grabbed Jude’s arm and hauled him closer. The man came up short of us, his already wide, panicked eyes going just that bit wider as he gave us the once-over. For one long, terrible moment no one said anything at all. There was only the sound of gunfire from inside the station and the screech of car tires from the parking lot on the other side of the building.

I raised a hand out toward him on instinct, but Jude caught it and pushed it down.

“Are they…?” The man—Andy, his nametag said—was having a hard time choking the words up. “Are they soldiers?”

“They want to take us in,” Jude said. “Please, can you help us?”

And then Andy did the absolutely last thing I expected him to.

He nodded.

We rode under the bus in the luggage compartment for the first twenty minutes of the trip, until the train station and the PSFs and Vida were too distant to be caught in his rearview mirror. It was freezing and uncomfortable to be tossed around under there; we’d slide across the cold metal with every single turn, hunched over our knees and disoriented. I let Jude loop his arm through mine, adding my little bit of body heat to his.

He was muttering something under his breath. I felt him shaking his head, his curls brushing my shoulder. Finally, when the road quieted, I heard what he was saying. “She’s never going to forgive us.”

“Who?” I asked, my hand squeezing his arm. “Cate?”

“No. Vida.”

“Jude…” I began. The guilt had clocked in at record time.

“We did the same thing her sister did to her,” Jude explained, cutting me off. “We just left her. She’s going to hate us forever.”

“What are you talking about?”

Jude turned back toward me, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “Well, you know about Cate, right? How she was our CPS case worker?”

Something heavy and slick rose in my stomach.

“You know,” he said quickly, “Child Protective Services? Okay, maybe not.”

“You and Vida both?”

“Yeah,” he said. “You seriously had no idea about that? Cate never told you what she used to do?”

No, but then again, it wasn’t like I had ever asked. “So she, what, pulled you out of foster homes and brought you into the League?”

“Sort of.” He leaned back against the door, sliding against me with the next big turn. I had to strain to hear him now. “When IAAN happened, a lot of kids got turned out of their foster homes—the ones who, you know, didn’t die. It was just a bad situation all around, because there was no one to even claim them for burial or anything like that. Cate said a lot of the case workers had a hard time trying to find out what had happened to their kids. She found me before someone turned me in for the reward or I got picked up in the Collections.”

The Collections had been a series of mass roundups of the survivors of IAAN who hadn’t already been sent to camps. Any parents who felt like they could no longer care for their freak kids or wanted them to enter the “rehabilitation” programs of the camps just had to send them to school, and the PSFs stopped by to round them up. It was the first big organized intake of kids. The next step was forcing them into the camps, whether the parents wanted them gone or not. Involuntary Collection.

“That must have been a really scary time.”

I felt him shrug, but he struggled to get the next words out. “It’s… Well, it’s over. It was better than being at home, anyway. Dad was a real winner.”

I forced my eyes on the road. The way he said it, with such forced brightness…

“And Vida…?”

It was like I had turned a key inside of him, or he was too exhausted to try to keep it all buried. “I don’t know what the deal is with her family. She has an older sister, Nadia, who was taking care of her for a while. Cate lost track of her—I guess they were squatting in some building? Vida woke up one morning to find her sister gone and the PSFs there. She thinks that her sister called her in to get the reward money.”

“How did Cate get to her, then?” I asked.

“The PSFs had packed about ten kids into this bus to ship them east to the camp in Wyoming, but the League got there first. You know this story, right?”

I did, actually. The League had found themselves in possession of five kids they had no idea what to do with, so they started the training program. I knew Vida had been with the League for a long time, but I had no idea she was one of the Wyoming Five.

“Wow.”

“I know.”

I didn’t know what to say, what I could say, so I settled on, “I’m sorry.”

Jude made a face. “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything. And besides, we were the lucky ones. Cate’s the one who has the hardest time. I don’t think she ever got over the kids she lost. Especially the ones who died in the fire.”

“What?” I breathed out.

“It was this group home she was in charge of keeping an eye on,” Jude explained. “A few of the kids started showing signs of Psi abilities and the person in charge just freaked out. Cate doesn’t know if one of the kids accidentally started it or if the woman did it herself—I guess she was really, really, really religious, but, like, crazy religious. When the police found her, she kept saying how she had done God’s work.”

“That’s…” There was no word for how horrible that was, so I didn’t try.

“Anyway, that’s the whole story.” Jude shrugged. “The beginning, at least.”

I held my breath as the bus stopped at what I assumed was a checkpoint and someone, probably a PSF, boarded. We couldn’t hear their conversation, only the heavy steps as they walked up and down the length of the bus aisle over our heads. A more thorough soldier would have forced him to open the luggage compartment, too, but we were waved on and soon the only sound was the growl of the road beneath us.

Still, he apologized repeatedly when he pulled over to retrieve us. I had every intention of wiping his memory and booking it, but there were no cars—there was nothing on that stretch of highway aside from trees and snow. It was either Andy or another fun day or two wandering around with Jude in a winter wonderland, looking for civilization.

“Are you sure this is okay?” Jude and I had taken one of the front seats to have a better look at the road while he was driving. “Can we repay you somehow?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Andy said. “This is a spectacular waste of gasoline, but I don’t mind sticking it to my fine employer every now and then. They cut my benefits the hot second things got bad, so I’m not feeling too generous toward them myself. Besides, the drive down is usually pretty empty, and I have to bring the bus to Richmond whether I have passengers or not. The return trip is usually pretty full. Some folks seem to have the notion that there’s more work up north than there is in the south, and hardly anyone can afford those stupid trains.”

Jude had proven to me about six times over in the past day just how naive he was, so it was a wonder he could still surprise me with his carelessness. After a few minutes he dropped off into an easy, trusting sleep. Like there was no danger of this bus driver using his radio to call us in or driving us to the first functioning police station he happened across.

“You look like you’re about to roll right off that seat and hit the floor, young lady,” Andy said, glancing up at me in the large mirror over his head. “Maybe you’d consider taking a cue from your friend and getting a little rest?”

I knew I was being rude and irrational and all sorts of sour, but I kept my eyes fixed on the bus’s radio and frowned. Andy glanced down, following my gaze, then started to chuckle.

“You’re smart,” he said. “I guess you’d have to be in this day and age to be out wandering around. Oh—tollbooth coming up; better get down.”

I slipped down between the metal guard and the seat, adjusting the blanket over Jude’s sleeping form. Andy waved back to whomever had let him through.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why are you helping us?” I asked.

Andy chuckled again. “Why do you think?”

“Honestly?” I said, leaning forward. “Because I think you want to turn us in for the reward money.”

The bus driver let out a low whistle at that. “That is a nice chunk of change, I will admit. Funny that the government can dig up the cash for that but can’t afford any sort of assistance for food.” He shook his head. “No, sweetheart, I have a job. I make do. I don’t need the guilty conscience or the blood money.”

“Then why?” I demanded.

Andy reached over with his left hand, plucking something off his dashboard. The tape around it peeled off without protest, like it was used to being lifted and then stuck back on. He held it out, waiting for me to take it.

A little boy smiled back at me from the glossy surface of the photo, dark hair gleaming. He looked ten, maybe twelve if even that. I recognized the muted colors of the backdrop behind him—a school portrait.

“That’s my grandson,” Andy explained. “His name is Michael. They took him from his school about four years ago. When I tried to contact the police about it, the government, the school, they wouldn’t tell me anything. Same for everyone. Couldn’t post about it online without my access being shut off. Couldn’t go on TV or write in to the papers because Gray was all over them, too. But some of the parents at his school, they said they overheard some PSFs talking about a place called Black Rock.”

I wiped the smudged fingerprints from the photo’s surface and handed it back to him.

“You’re right,” he said, “I’m not entirely selfless. I guess what I’m hoping is that maybe you can give me some information. Maybe you know what or where this Black Rock is and we can call it even?”

It was the pleading quality to his voice that did me in. I couldn’t detach it from the thought of my own grandmother, left wondering what had happened to me. My skin felt tight around my chest.

“I do. Black Rock is a camp in South Dakota.”

“South Dakota!” Andy sounded astonished. “All the way out there? You’re sure?”

I was more than sure. The League had a list of all fifteen camps the surviving Psi kids were divided among. Some were itty bitty—a couple dozen kids. Some were converted schools that could hold a few hundred. Then, you had camps like Black Rock and Thurmond that, because of their remote location, could hold thousands.

The South Dakota camp was of special interest to the League because of the rumors surrounding it. All new births from the time IAAN was officially recognized had to be registered in a special database. Those children were supposed to be brought into local doctors or scientists every month for tests, so they could chart any “abnormalities.” Any child that developed Psi abilities before the age of ten was put into a special study program run out of Black Rock. The other kids, if they survived IAAN and developed their abilities on the normal schedule, were forcibly picked up and brought to the “normal” rehab camps.

“They might have transferred him at some point,” I said. “Do you know what he is?”

“What do you mean, what he is?” Andy said, turning slightly. “He’s my grandson, that’s what he is!”

I only meant to find out if he was one of the dangerous ones—a Red or Orange like me. To see if there was a chance he had already been erased, permanently.

“These camps…” Andy began, shielding his eyes from the headlights of a passing truck. “You know what they do there? Have you seen one yourself?”

I glanced sideways at Jude. “Yeah.”

“And they let you out because they fixed you?” he asked, and the hope in his voice broke my heart. “You’re better now?”

“They can’t fix us,” I said. “All those kids they took aren’t doing anything other than working and waiting. I only got out because someone helped me escape.”

Andy nodded, like he had already suspected as much.

“These are terrible times,” he said after a long while. “And you’re right not to trust any of us. What we’ve done…what we allowed them to do to you, it’s a shameful thing. A shameful, shameful thing, and we’ll go to our graves knowing it. But I want you to know that for every person who would turn in a kid out of fear or for funds, there are hundreds and thousands more who fought tooth and nail to keep their families together.”

“I know.”

“It’s just…they were such bad times then, and the government kept saying—they kept going on about how if parents didn’t send the kids to go through the programs they would die like all of the others. Then it wasn’t a choice at all. They knew we couldn’t do anything to get them back, and it kills me. It kills me.”

“Did people really think the rehabilitation programs were going to work?” I asked. Jude shifted in his seat, trying to get more comfortable.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Andy said, “but I think they hoped like hell they would. You get down to nothing—no money, no work, no house—and hope is all you tend to have left, and even then, it’s a rare commodity. I doubt anyone believes the lies these days, but…what can we do about it? We have no information to work with, only rumors.”

It hit me then, how equally important it was for me to find Cole’s flash drive as it was to find Liam. All along, I had been thinking of it as this little plastic device, not sparing much thought to the value of what was locked inside of it. Finding Liam mattered to me, meant everything to me, but finding Cole’s data…that would help everyone. That had the potential to reunite families, loved ones.

“I’m going to get every kid out of every camp,” I said. “I’m not going to stop until they all get home.”

Andy nodded, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. “Then we’re more than even.”

The conversation died out, and the radio came on. I watched the sunrise, the colors lighting the horizon a mellow pink, feeling sick to my stomach with exhaustion. But still, I couldn’t fall asleep.

I pulled Liam’s leather jacket up over me like a blanket and felt something slip past my hand, out of one of the pockets. The two train tickets the woman had bought floated lazily to the ground, one facing up, the other down.

STAY

The word had been scribbled several times over by pen on the back of one of the tickets, the letters wild and jagged, and with each stroke, darker and deeper.

I picked them up, checking the other ticket. SAFE

STAY SAFE

Apparently I hadn’t had as firm of a grip on that woman as I thought. It was stupid of me to feel so frightened and anxious when she was hundreds of miles away, but I couldn’t stop myself from picturing the worst. How she could have warned everyone about the terrors in her backseat. She could have gone into that train station and run or called us in to every nearby skip tracer. She could have had the reward, the satisfaction of knowing we were off the street and out of her hair.

But instead, she had done this. Andy had done this.

I ripped up the tickets before Jude could wake up and see them. I didn’t want to give him the false hope that these people were anything other than lone candle flames in a sea of never-ending black.

Jude was still singing—literally singing—the praises of his new hero, Andy, when we saw the first signs for Wilmington. Just after he’d dropped us off near Richmond, he’d given us detailed instructions on the right highways to avoid on the way down. I’d been too flustered and annoyed with the delay to thank him at the time. Now, every clear road our little stolen car flew down filled me with a sharp pang of regret.

Wilmington kissed the Atlantic on one side and a river on the other. It surprised me to see how similar it was to the parts of Virginia that I knew—the style of the houses, the way the neighborhoods were laid out. Even the way the sky grayed out over the roofs, darkening until the clouds finally burst and it began to rain.

The address Cole gave me, 1222 West Bucket Road, Wilmington, North Carolina, was in a little neighborhood called Dogwood Landing, not too far from what I assumed was a university campus. It was a quiet part of the city, surrounded by frosty woods and filled with a good number of empty lots and crooked, weathered FOR SALE signs. I picked one and parked the green Volkswagen we’d stolen after parting with Andy in front of it.

“Is that it?” Jude asked, peering closer at the nearest house.

“No, it’s a ways down, I think.” I took a deep breath, wondering how it was possible to feel excitement and dread in the same breath. “I want to approach from the back in case anyone is watching the front.”

That had been the reason why Liam and the others hadn’t gone straight home after escaping Caledonia, right? I was torn about it. Alban’s advisers were always reminding us how overstretched the PSF forces were, but Liam was a priority catch. What were the chances that the government would still have someone posted here, watching Liam’s parents a good nine months later?

God. Liam’s parents. What the hell was I going to say to them?

I signaled for Jude to follow me around the side of one of the houses. Most were on the smaller side, just one story, with gray slanted roofs, brick faces, and white trim. I pulled Jude closer behind me as we made our way through the trees, following a small dirt access road that ran alongside the houses’ backyards.

Liam’s house was nestled deep into a pocket of trees set a ways off from the other houses on the block. It was a similar creature to the other homes around it, with sweet blue shutters and a long driveway leading up to the garage. What I really needed was a view of the front.

I held Jude back and forced him to crouch down beside me, and we watched. We looked for surveillance cameras, for footprints and tire tracks, for the undercover PSFs to come strolling around on patrol.

“It looks…” Jude began, hesitating.

Empty, my mind finished. It looked like no one was home, and the way the gutters were clogged with fall leaves and grime made me think they hadn’t been back in some time.

“Maybe they just ran out to do some errands?” he offered.

“At four in the afternoon on a Thursday? Seems sketchy,” came a new voice behind us.

The girl was a snake. It was the only explanation for how silently she slithered up through the leaves.

“Leader,” Vida said, nodding as she crouched down behind us. “Judith.”

Jude actually fell over.

“What are you—” I began. “How did you—” She couldn’t have just guessed where we’d be. She was good, but she wasn’t that good. I must have missed a tracker, something…

“The collar of the undershirt,” Vida said, nodding toward Jude. “Next time you decide to cut it and run, make sure you get all the damn trackers.”

“Trackers?” Jude repeated, looking between us.

“Jude fried the car,” I said, “and everything electric inside of it.” Including, I had assumed, the trackers in his clothes.

“That would be why they coat all of the Yellows’ trackers in rubber,” she said, shaking her head. “God, you didn’t know that?”

She was clearly proud of herself despite looking like she had just been ridden hard and put away wet. Her blue hair was twisting into its natural curly texture.

I hauled Jude closer, unzipping his coat to feel around his undershirt’s stitching. Sure enough, I felt the small bump, no more than the size of a grain, sewn into the collar. I cut it out with my Swiss Army knife and held it for him to see. Before he could grab it, I crushed it with the hilt of the knife.

“They…put trackers in our clothes?” Jude looked between us in disbelief, though it was clear he was talking to himself. “Why would they do that? That can’t be…”

Vida looked like she was about to burst into her particular brand of cruel laughter, but her expression changed—narrowed somehow. Her full focus shifted behind us, and she rose back onto her feet, swinging her gun up out of its holster in one smooth motion. I turned, my hair tumbling down around my face as I scrambled back onto my knees for a better look.

The world dropped.

I actually felt it cave under me, felt every bone and muscle in my chest fall with it. I don’t know how I managed to pull myself back up or how I came to be standing, but I was too numbed by shock to care that I was in full sight of whoever might have been watching.

Then, I was running. I heard Vida and Jude call after me, but the wind and rain carried their voices up and away, and I wasn’t hearing anything over the thrum of blood in my ears. I shoved my way down the slight roll of the hill, through the tangle of tree branches, through the collapsing fence, through to him.

He slipped out of the window, climbing through the torn dark screen one leg at a time until, finally, his shoes sank into the mud below. His hair was longer than I remembered it, the bones in the profile of his face sharper. He had gotten larger, or I had become smaller, or memory really was a lie—it didn’t matter. He heard me coming and spun around, one hand going for something inside of his heavy camo jacket, the other for something in the waistband of his jeans. I knew when he spotted me—every part of him froze.

But then his full lips began to work, silently, until they finally settled on the tiniest of smiles. My feet slowed but didn’t stop.

I was breathing hard. My whole chest heaved with the effort to keep the air moving. I pressed a hand hard against my heart. Exhaustion and relief and the same bitter terror I had felt the afternoon I’d lost him came flooding in. I just didn’t have the strength to fight them back anymore.

I burst into tears.

“Oh, for the love of…” Chubs shook his head and sighed, but I heard the affection in his voice all the same. “It’s just me, you dumbass.”

And without another word, he crossed those last two steps between us and wrapped me up tight in his arms.