Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  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 lon
g 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.

  NINE

  THE PROBLEM WAS, ONCE I STARTED, I couldn’t stop. I felt every bit of me sag against him, needing the reassurance that he was solid and that the heart beating next to my ear was his. Chubs patted my back awkwardly as I buried my face in his jacket and went to pieces.

  “How?” I choked out. “Why are you here?”

  The rustling in the trees behind us barely registered in my mind, but Chubs looked up, calling, “Oh, come on, Lee—I know you want a hug, too—”

  It happened too fast for me to warn him—to stop any of it. Chubs released me only to spin me behind him, throwing me more off-kilter than I had been before. I thought, for sure, that my mind was playing tricks on me, because it looked like he had pulled a long hunting knife up out of the waistband of his pants. It looked like Vida was pointing her gun straight at him, switching off the safety.

  “It’s—” I began, feeling his arm strain under my grip. “Chubs—”

  “Who the hell are you?” he demanded.

  “Not the person who brought a knife to a gunfight,” Vida said, waving her weapon for emphasis.

  “Wait, wait, wait!” Jude said, popping out from behind the tree to her right. He slid partway down the muddy hill, throwing himself between them. “Not Liam,” he said, pointing at himself, then at Vida. “Not Liam, either.” Jude turned back toward Chubs, his thick eyebrows drawing together as he moved his finger our way. “Also not Liam…?”

  At that, Vida turned to stare at him. “In what universe does this tool look anything like Cole Stewart?”

  Jude’s voice went high when he got defensive. “I don’t know! Brother from a different mother? There is such a thing as adoption—”

  Chubs lowered his knife. I could see his mind working behind his eyes, jumping from one horrible possibility to another as he took account of the strangers, my tears, and the absence of Liam.

  “Oh my God,” he said, going gray in the face. He pressed a fist against his stomach, like he was about to be sick. “Oh my God.”

  “No, no,” I said quickly. “He’s not dead!”

  That you know of, my mind whispered.

  “Why aren’t you together?” Now he looked close to tears himself. Chubs’s hair had grown out past its usual neat crop, and the silver-rimmed glasses that actually fit his face made him look so much more mature than I remembered. He didn’t really look like himself, not until I saw the fear come crashing over him—this was the Chubs I remembered, always between one panic and the next. “He never would have left you, never!”

  I looked away. Not toward Vida and Jude, who had gone silent watching this, but to soft mud cupping rain puddles at our feet.

  “Ruby,” Chubs began, his voice strained. “What happened?”

  I shook my head, pressing my freezing hands to my face.

  “You left him?” he guessed. “You had a fight? You split up for a few days?”

  By whispering it, I was hoping I could take some of the sting out of the truth, but that wasn’t the case at all. Chubs took a stunned step back, his eyes flashing with horror.

  “No, you didn’t!” he said, gripping my shoulders. “That was the only reason I thought it would be okay! I thought you two would stay together!”

  “What was I supposed to do?” I demanded, not caring that my voice was rising. “You were—you were dead, and they had taken us in, and I made a deal, and I knew, I knew he wouldn’t go otherwise. What the hell was I supposed to do?”

  Chubs shook his head. “And these kids, they’re League? You’re with them?”

  “They’re—” I started to say.

  “—still standing here, waiting for an explanation as to who the
hell this is,” Vida cut in, every trace of amusement gone from her face.

  My brain was finally starting to reassemble itself into working order, and with it came fresh, sharp fear.

  Vida was here. Vida, who had been chasing us down to bring us back in to the League. Vida, who had now seen Chubs and could identify him to the League, if it came to that. Who might even try to bring him in.

  I pushed him back, trying to keep him behind me. “He’s no one,” I said. “He’s not any concern of yours.”

  “Uh, yeah he freaking is if he’s coming with us to find Stewart,” Vida said.

  “What did you say?”

  “Plug your empty-ass brain in,” she said. “I’m not here to take you back; I’m here to help you.” She turned on Jude. “Nice of you to repay me by electrocuting me, you little shit.”

  “If you weren’t there with Beta Team and Barton to take us in to HQ, then why?”

  Vida rolled her eyes but did answer eventually—with the smuggest look possible. “I was looped in on your little romantic quest. The only way to get me out without it looking suspicious was to suggest that I come after you dumb asses, since I supposedly know your crappy personalities so well.”

  “What about Beta Team?” Jude asked.

  “Recalled to HQ. Orders to bring Rob back in or something—you two lace panties about caused a fucking riot back home with your little stunt.” She tossed her hair back. “Alban gave me two weeks to find you. So let’s get this horror show on the road.”

  I stared at her, shaking my head. “You are so full of it. You think we’re just going to skip away with you into the sunset?”

  “No,” Vida said, “I expect you to fucking prance, and you’re going to do it with a smile and the least amount of bitching possible, or Cole isn’t going to honor your stupid deal to have the League free the camps.”

  It was true, then—she was telling the truth about being here to help us. Cole wouldn’t have looped her in otherwise. The objective was too valuable. It surprised me how much it stung my pride to know he didn’t think I could handle this Op on my own. That I needed backup.