Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Right behind you,” Vida called, her heavy footsteps matching my pace. Somewhere behind us in the dark, the others were working their way down the doors, looking for prisoners—for Cole.

  At the door, I crouched, releasing my grip on Clancy’s shirt and motioning for Jude to get behind me. Whether I actually drew it up from deep in my memory or it found it naturally, my training with the League had me propping the door open, scanning the hall with my gun in front of me before I so much as thought about stepping through.

  My pulse pounded in my ears, jumping, jumping, jumping with my nerves as I stepped out into the hallway and pulled Jude after me.

  Vida split with us as we came around the hallway’s curve and took the first set of stairs. One level, I thought. Fifth door on the right. She has the hard job here, not you. You have one level to go up; she has two to get to the surveillance room. One level, fifth door on the right.

  There was a loud clatter to my left. I skidded to a stop, Jude crashing into my back. My heart was in my throat when I turned back to where Clancy stood a short distance ahead, fading into the dim light. I jogged to catch up to him, waving him forward.

  We kept to the curve, heading around to the other staircase. Without the gentle hum of static in the computer room, it felt like the first I’d ever stepped foot in this place. Which was why, I guess, it was appropriate that the first unfriendly face we saw after we climbed the stairs and opened the door to the next level was one I didn’t recognize at all.

  There were dozens of agents at the League’s headquarters in Georgia, even more at the one in Kansas. I should have known Jarvin and the others would bring in every sympathetic soul they could to help take Alban out.

  I could smell the alcohol on him, the spice of whatever he had eaten for dinner that night. He must have been headed up to the agent quarters on the first level, but the sight of us was clearly enough to make him forget as much. His shaggy blond hair fell into his eyes as he jumped at our sudden appearance. The lazy, stupid smile on his face dropped to a scowl.

  “What the hell are you doing out of bed?” he demanded, reaching for me. I was faster, whipping the butt of the gun across his face and yanking him back into the stairwell. Jude caught the door before it slammed shut, peeking out through a crack to watch the hall.

  Slipping into a drunk mind was like sliding a spoon through pudding. The only challenge was trying to find what I was looking for in the tangle of thoughts, all of which seemed to wash into one another.

  “Roo!” Jude whispered. “Let’s go!”

  If the man’s memory was right, there were other agents on this floor, most of them in the infirmary, but one, for sure, stationed between the doors of the two sleeping rooms.

  I dragged the agent off to the side of the stairs, narrowly avoiding where Clancy stood silently waiting. I tucked the man into a corner and relieved him of the knife he was carrying in his back pocket.

  “Stay behind me,” I told Jude, my eyes on the way Clancy seemed to be fading in and out of the shadows. “The whole time.”

  The power was still out, and the hallway was little more than a dark curtain we were trying to fight our way through. They used glow-in-the-dark tape along the edges of the floor and around the different door handles and lock pads, but the combined light was less than a fraction of what it would have been if I could have turned my flashlight on.

  I counted the door handles as we moved. One, two, three…

  This is actually going to work.

  …four, five.

  Please let this work.

  The agent posted outside of the sleeping rooms—Agent Clarkson—wasn’t a stranger. She was tall, lanky, with dark features and a fondness for knife fighting that had gone uncontested for years. She’d been fighting so hard to be made a senior agent, her confidence had warped into desperation, and then, from there, a frustration that she could only ever take out on the ones below her: us. She was the opposite of Cate in so many ways that hadn’t mattered before now.

  “Andrea,” I called softly. “Andrea?”

  “Chelle?” she said. “It’s already time? I thought wake-up was at five?”

  There was a flutter of movement about seven feet ahead, on my left. I couldn’t meet her eyes to trap her that way, but the moment I caught the whiff of detergent and the subtle shift of warm breath that stirred the air in front of me, I lashed an arm out, catching her across the chest.

  Her gun clattered loudly against the floor, but her body was soft and silent as I pushed the image of her sitting and sinking into a deep sleep. She slumped against me, and I eased her down onto the floor.

  Jude bolted past me, heading for the boys’ door. I took the handle of the girls’ door, the same I’d opened for months without a second thought, and stepped inside, pulling the door shut silently behind Clancy. I flicked on my flashlight.

  “Up—” I started to say, shining it into the nearest bunk.

  The room wasn’t large. It only needed to house twelve girls, though there’d always been an extra bunk bed crowding the right wall, on the off chance the League ever picked up another kid. The bunk Vida and I shared, in the back right corner, had been neatly made, the sheets stretched tightly over the mattress with Vida’s military-like precision. All of them were—Almost like…

  Like there was no one left to sleep here.

  Too late.

  “Don’t say it,” I warned Clancy. “Not one damn word.”

  He stared ahead at the empty bunks, a cold expression on his face, but he stayed silent.

  My knees buckled slightly, mirroring the feeling of my heart as it dropped like a stone through my chest. Too late.

  Those girls, all of them—they were—they were—

  I pressed the heels of my palms against my forehead. Slamming them there, over and over, as a silent scream rippled up my throat. Oh my God. All of them.

  Too late.

  I ripped the door back open, letting Clancy slip out ahead of me as we moved to the boys’ room. Jude wouldn’t know—wouldn’t think to be silent—He’d wake up the entire base—

  Where the girls’ room had been cold and dark, this one was filled with the light of flashlight lanterns and the natural body heat of twenty kids, all awake, fully dressed, and crammed together on the bunk beds.

  My eyes flew around each of their faces before they settled on the small pile of weapons gathered at Jude’s and Nico’s feet in the center of the room.

  “No, no, no!” Nico cried. “What are you doing here?”

  “I told you: we came for you,” Jude said. “What the heck is going on?”

  “I thought you knew about their plans,” I said, “about the bombs and camps? You didn’t think we’d come to get you out after your friend told us what happened here?”

  Clancy only had that same unreadable expression on his face as he surveyed the room.

  “Of course I knew!” Nico let out a low moan. “We’ve been communicating on the Chatters this whole time. You were supposed to stay away! I told him to tell you not to come back until it was safe! Until tomorrow!”

  “What the hell?” I said, whirling toward Clancy. “What game are you playing?”

  The faces around me looked just as confused as I felt. “Who are you talking to?” Jude asked, glancing around.

  “Him!” I snapped, exasperated. I tried to grab Clancy before he slipped back out the door. “Who else?”

  “Roo…” Jude began, his eyes wide, “there’s no one there.”

  “Clancy’s—”

  “Clancy?” Nico said. “He’s here? He came?”

  “He’s right here,” I said, grabbing for his arm. My fingers passed right through it, drifting through cold air. The sight of him wavered, flickered.

  Faded into nothing.

  He’s… My mind was gripped with panic. I couldn’t finish the thought.

  “I didn’t see him get away,” Jude said. “Did Vida take him to disable the cameras…? Roo?”

  “The came
ras are already down! We hacked into the program hours ago!” Nico said.

  “We have to stay here,” one of the other kids added. “They told us to get into one room and stay until it was all over. You’re too early.”

  “Until what’s over?” Jude was asking. I barely heard him over the roar of blood in my ears. “What’s happening at six?”

  Nico let his head fall back for a second, taking a deep, frustrated breath.

  “That’s when Cate and the others are coming to get us.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  IT WAS A TRICK.

  “Okay…” I said, trying to catch one of the thoughts flying through my head long enough to put it into words. “Okay…we just…”

  He was there. In the tunnel, he was there. He came in with us. If he was going to get away, why didn’t he do it before? Clancy could influence more than one person. He could have tricked all of us by never getting off the plane in the first place. But he had. I had dragged him down the steps myself, felt his pulse jump when I pushed him toward the ladder down into the tunnel. Why not escape then? It had been just as dark outside.…

  “What should we do?” Jude was asking.

  Because he needed me to get him in here. Before Cate and the others came back.

  “You have to stay here where it’s safe,” Nico rambled. “If you go back out there—”

  I let him play me again.

  “Ruby—Roo!” Jude grabbed my shoulder, turning me back toward him, forcing me to break my gaze with a crack on the far wall. His hair and eyes were both wild, his freckles overlapping points on a map I’d only recently learned to read. He was anxious, but he wasn’t afraid. This was a good Jude to have.

  “Go down and get Chubs and Liam and bring them up here,” I said, “but come back if you think, even for a second, that you might get caught. Understand?”

  He nodded eagerly.

  “Vida will be here in a few minutes,” I told the others. And probably in a holy terror of a mood when she realized I’d sent her up to disable the cameras for no reason. “Once the four of them are back, move the bunks and barricade the doors. No one else comes in.”

  “What about you?” Nico asked.

  “I have to go take care of your friend,” I said, hoping my voice was enough to convey how deep Nico’s betrayal had buried us in this mess.

  “I should go with you…” Nico whispered. “He’s here? Really?”

  I’d seen that look a hundred times, a thousand, at East River—the wide-eyed adoration of someone who either had no idea there were scales under Clancy’s skin or someone unhinged enough to just not care. I thought of Olivia and the way she had all but clawed at her own throat when she said his name. I’d been nursing my anger toward Nico from the moment Clancy told us he’d been slipping him intel all this time, letting it grow into thoughts like, I’ll never forgive him. But looking at him now, I forgot it in an instant. Heartache just tore it away, and what was left was the true realization of how damaged the kid in front of me was. His paranoia, his nervous fidgeting, his silent moods. Of course Clancy was his hero. He had saved him from a hell too terrible for nightmares.

  “Did he ask you any questions about HQ recently?” I asked. “About particular files or people…?”

  By the way Nico’s mouth seemed to twist, it was looking more and more likely that his loyalty to Clancy was going to win out over his alarm that Clancy had flat-out lied and brought us here despite the warning he’d given him.

  “He gave me a list of words and people to look for,” Nico said. “There were a lot of them.… One of them pinged in the system a few weeks ago. An agent called Professor.”

  I tensed. “Professor? You’re sure?”

  “The agent was doing some kind of research at our Georgia base—it just suddenly popped up on the classified server a few weeks ago. I think he knew who it was because he wanted the base’s location.”

  What had the adviser said when he came into Alban’s office all of those weeks back? Something about a situation in Georgia with Professor—and a project called Snowfall.

  “What about stuff here at HQ?”

  “He asked about the different tunnels and the blackouts…” Nico said slowly.

  “What else?” I pressed. I was aware of the ticking clock, even if he wasn’t. “What about the blackouts?”

  “He wanted to know if they shut off things like the lock pads or retinal locks—”

  I turned on my heel, throwing Jude off me as I opened the door and bolted out into the hallway. Spots flashed in front of my eyes as they struggled to adjust again. I counted off the door handles as I ran. I kept to the outside curve, one eye always on the dark infirmary windows to my right. They’d drawn all the curtains. Not even the machine lights were bleeding through.

  In fact, the only light on the entire second level seemed to be the flashlight Clancy clenched between his teeth as he riffled through the filing cabinets inside of Alban’s office.

  All of the lock pads and retinal locks were on the backup power generator, and normally they would have been enough to keep even Clancy out, had they actually still been attached to the door. Someone had taken something—a crowbar, an ax, a small explosive—and blown them off that way.

  I slid forward, nudging the door open farther as I slid my gun out of the waistband of my jeans.

  Clancy made a small, triumphant noise as he ripped a bulging red folder free from where it had been trapped among a hundred others. He wasted no time flipping through the pages as he turned back around to Alban’s desk. Someone had flipped it onto its side as he or she ransacked the place. He used one of its wide, flat legs to lay the folder out and free up his hand to hold the flashlight. The look on his face was so painfully eager I felt a twinge of apprehension.

  “Found what you were looking for?”

  Clancy’s head shot up at the same moment his hand slid the folder back, off the desk, into a metal trash can. For a moment, anger fought with exasperation on his face, but Clancy settled on a devastating smile as he stared down the barrel of the gun.

  “I did, but…don’t you have more important things to worry about?” His voice had taken on the quality of smoke. “Other people more important than me?”

  He inclined his head toward the other end of Alban’s office, and even before I turned, the metallic scent of warm, sticky blood was everywhere. Just past my initial line of sight, I saw the two of them on the floor. Chubs had crumpled, curling in on himself the way a leaf would just before it fell from the tree in autumn. Liam was slumped over him, his face the color of ice. And he was looking at me, watching with unblinking eyes that had faded from a pale blue to a dull gray. His arm had been thrown out over Chubs, like he had tried to shield him, and now those same hands that had held my face so gently between them…they were in the pool of dark liquid gliding along the concrete floor.

  The gun slipped out of my hand.

  Clancy skirted around Alban’s desk, watching me with that same faint smile. He dropped what looked like a lighter into the trash can.

  Not real. I forced the words through my mind. Not them. I forced myself to look again. Really look, no matter how horrifying the image was. Chubs’s glasses were gold instead of silver. Liam’s hair was longer than it was now—Clancy clearly hadn’t made as close of a study of the way his hair curled at the ends as I had.

  It was a painfully close, near-flawless imitation. But it wasn’t them.

  I let Clancy come up beside me and allowed him three seconds of thinking he’d be able to slip by me, distracted as I was by my own grief. He was murmuring something in low, husky tones. He was close enough now for me to feel his warm breath on my cheek—which meant he was also close enough for me to punch him in the throat.

  I threw my mind at him in the same blow, drawing it down like a knife and shredding the image of Chubs and Liam he’d pushed there. Clancy stumbled out into the hallway, clutching his head, gasping for breath. The image of the woman in the white lab coat filtered t
hrough our connection again, but I forced myself to push it away for now. There was a line of smoke rising from the trash can; I tipped it over, scattering the burning pages onto the ground, stamping out the flames under my boot. If he wanted these pages gone, I wanted to see them.

  “Dammit.” He was panting when I met him again in the hallway, heaving in a deep breath, falling to his knees. There was some thin, fraying line of connection between our minds. I seized it before it could snap completely, flooding his brain with the illusion of heat. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I could hear him frantically slapping at his arms and legs—at the limbs his mind was telling him were burning down to the bone.

  Then, his hands slowed to a stop.

  “You…” Clancy began, “you really want to play this game?”

  There was a kiss of cold metal against the back of my neck—so suddenly that I had already convinced myself it was another one of his mind games. But when you lose a sense like sight, it’s true what they say: the rest of them are sharpened to ruthless efficiency. I felt the warm breath, heard the squeak of additional boots, smelled his sweat. Agents—they’d found us.

  Clancy twisted away to run; I didn’t see it happen, only heard the sickening crack as something hard connected with his head and sent him crumpling to the ground.

  And there was Jarvin’s voice in the dark saying, “I knew you’d be back.” There were his hands, as one closed over the back of my neck and roughly shoved me down to my knees. The barrel slid down to the sweet spot where my skull met my spine. “Rob said all we’d have to do is wait.”

  In their fatigues, he and the other League agent behind him were a shade lighter than the air around them.

  The safety switched off.

  “You don’t want to do this,” I warned, feeling the invisible hands inside of my mind unfurl. I felt anxious but not afraid. Controlled calm.

  “No,” Jarvin agreed. “I’d rather do this.”

  There was a faint click—the only warning before the White Noise flooded the hallway and drowned me alive.

  It was possible to forget that kind of agony after all.

  There was a time in my life, a few months into my stay at Thurmond, that they had turned the White Noise on nearly every day. Back when there were Reds to control and Oranges to punish, a single wrong look would have a PSF radioing in to the Control Tower. It was a given part of my life; maybe I had just grown so used to it, the actual impact dulled over time.