Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  But it had been months, and the onslaught of pain twisted my stomach to the point of sickness. I collapsed onto the floor, close enough to Clancy that I could see the cut across his forehead seeping blood. There were thoughts in my head; there was a voice that said, You can take Jarvin; you can take him; you can ruin him…but even that was silenced as the White Noise rose and fell over us like a wave, crushing down on my chest.

  And it was amazing—everything we could do, the kind of power we could have over others—it all meant nothing. It all came to nothing.

  At Thurmond, we would have heard two warning blares, and a heartbeat later, the noise would explode from the camp’s loudspeakers. It wasn’t something that could be easily described—it was shrieking static, cranked up, sharpened to drill through the thickest part of your skull. It passed through us like an electrical current, making our muscles jump and twitch and sing with pain until the only thing left to do was to try to drive your head into the ground to escape it. If I were lucky, I wouldn’t pass out.

  I wasn’t so lucky. I felt myself fade, drift back into the darkness of the hallway. I couldn’t move my arms out from where they were pinned under my chest. My legs had turned to air. Finally, seeing that I couldn’t so much as lift my head, Jarvin switched it off. I drifted from one moment to the next, my ears ringing. The blackness of the hall pulled me in, pushing my head under its murky surface.

  When I came to again, someone had a grip on my arm. I could hear Jarvin talking to the others around him, only because he was shouting now. “Get the damn lights on! I don’t care what you have to do—switch them on, dammit! Something’s going on. Can someone just give me a damn light?”

  It was a warm Southern voice that answered him. “Sure, brother. I got you covered.”

  There was a snap, just one, and the tiniest flame appeared in the dark, illuminating Cole Stewart’s furious face.

  I thought, at first, he’d struck a match, but the fire at his fingertips bloomed, swallowing his hand, devouring the arm he sent flying toward Jarvin’s face. There was screaming, so much screaming, as the fires around us grew, catching the soldiers behind him and engulfing them in a wave of heat that sent them running down the hall, stumbling over one another until they finally collapsed. The smell of burned skin made my stomach convulse. I couldn’t escape it.

  “Holy shit, you’re—!” one of the agents began to say.

  One of us, my mind finished, shutting down at the sight of the fire between Cole’s fingers again, the way he threw a ball of it at the agent who had spoken. How he stoked it, letting it rip over the screaming man’s body until I could only see the dark silhouette trapped in the flames dancing over his skin.

  Red.

  No—no, he was—Cole was too old, he wasn’t—

  “Hey—hey!” The fire was gone now, but Cole’s hands were still hot to the touch as he tried to haul me to my feet. My legs still weren’t there. He tried lightly slapping my face. “Shit…kid, come on. You can do this; I know you can.”

  “You…” I tried to say. “You just…”

  He let out the breath he’d been holding, relieved. Cole lifted me over his shoulder, smacking the back of my thighs in irritation. “Dammit, Gem, making me worry like that. I heard the Calm Control from down the hall, but I had to wait until he turned it off. I couldn’t get close. I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.”

  He kicked the door open to Alban’s office, dropping me to the ground behind the desk, rearranging my limbs so I was at least sitting up, and un-holstered one of his handguns to press into my limp fingers.

  Then, he gripped my face between his palms. “You can’t tell, you hear me? No one else can know, not even Liam, especially not Lee—okay? Nod your head.”

  Jesus—Liam didn’t know? No one else knew about this?

  “You, me, Cate, and Alban,” Cole said, as if reading my thoughts. “That’s it. And we’re now a party of three. You tell, and it’s over for me.”

  I nodded.

  “…other one…” I said weakly, tilting my head toward the hall.

  Cole grunted. “I don’t do the damsel-in-distress thing with dudes.”

  I shot him what I hoped was a glare and not a cross-eyed look. He sighed and stood, squaring his shoulders in the way Liam always did when he was set on something. Cole disappeared for a second, ducking back out to grab Clancy. I doubted he even looked at Clancy’s face before he dumped him next to me.

  “The Greens sent us the message you were here, so we decided to start the party early,” he explained. “Couldn’t wait one more day to see this handsome mug, could you?”

  I coughed, trying to clear whatever was lodged in my throat.

  “If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay in here,” he snapped. “Leave this room before we give the all-clear, and I’ll skin your ass!”

  When he turned for the door, it was like his confidence and control clicked back into place. His movements were smooth, assured.

  I don’t know how much time passed before the sound of the firefight reached us—five minutes, ten, maybe even fifteen. Feeling was returning to my limbs in hot rushes of pins and needles, but I preferred the pain to limp uselessness. When I could, I pushed myself onto my knees and began to shove Alban’s old desk against the door. I knew it wouldn’t provide much cover or pose much of a challenge to anyone hell-bent on getting in, but it felt better than doing nothing. And, if I were being honest, it was a visual block for me, too. A reminder that I needed to wait and let Cole and the others clean out Jarvin’s infestation before I went to find the others.

  They’re all right; they’re all right; you’re all right…I crawled back over to the filing cabinets, drawing my legs up to my chest and wrapping my arms around them, trying to cage in the feelings that felt too big to keep inside.

  They are okay.

  Clancy shifted beside me, a stray lock of dark hair falling into his eyes. As much time as we had spent together at East River, I’d never seen him sleep before—he would never, I realized, ever let someone else be around him while he was so vulnerable.

  My eyes drifted over to the trash can and the papers I’d spilled out of it. I crawled over to them on my hands and knees, scooping up the flashlight Clancy had dropped. There was so much shouting happening outside of that dark room that I couldn’t understand what any one voice was saying.

  I took a deep breath as the shooting eased off and the doors to the staircase slammed open and shut repeatedly. They are okay; you are okay.

  I aimed the flashlight away from the door, down at the scorched pages I’d gathered into my lap. A quarter of the pages or so were unreadable—sizeable holes had burned through the photographs and pages. Aside from the smears of soot and smoke stains from the top sheets, the bottom of the stack was in much better shape. Most were charts and graphs, all in that same strange scientific language that would have tripped up even Chubs. These were medicines—medical terms. They had the same sort of complicated names as the list of medicines Chubs had given me in Nashville. Every now and then my eyes would catch a few stray words of plain English.

  Subject A is free of symptoms following the procedure and routine…

  Showing signs of passive behavior…

  Conclusive results are pending…

  But at the top of them all, printed in bold black text, were two words I did recognize: Project Snowfall.

  I only stopped flipping through the pages when I reached the photographs. The one that showed the woman’s face.

  It was one of the unexpected drawbacks to living almost half of your life locked away in a camp with no access to any kind of media. You got the feeling that every face you encountered on TV or in the papers was somehow familiar, but the name would slide away from you before you could grasp it. I felt it now, staring at the familiar blond woman.

  The shot itself was strange—she was glancing over her shoulder but not into the camera itself. There was an unmarked brick building behind her that seemed oddly run down in
comparison to the neat, classic navy dress suit she was wearing. The look on her face wasn’t afraid so much as nervous, and I wondered, for a second, if she rightfully thought someone was tailing her. The next photo was smaller, torn in a way that made me think Alban had started to rip it up, only to change his mind. In this one, she sat between the former leader of the League and a much younger President Gray.

  The connection stole my breath.

  Clancy, no, please, Clancy—

  “Holy shit,” I whispered. The woman I’d seen in his mind…this was…

  The First Lady of the United States.

  I reached for the other scattered pages, gathering them back up in a pile. Out of their proper order, the documents and reports didn’t make much sense, but there were diagrams of brains with tiny, neat Xs marked over them.

  I skimmed through the newspaper articles describing charity work Lillian Gray had done across the country; someone had highlighted different key phrases about her family (“a sister in Westchester, New York,” “parents retired to their farm in Virginia,” “a brother, recently deceased”) and her different school degrees, including the PhD she’d earned in neurology from Harvard. She’d also given a “touching” eulogy at the vice president’s funeral, “flanked by the smoking wreckage of the Capitol,” and had refused to comment on the president’s reluctance to immediately replace him.

  The last article I found was focused on her disappearance from public life shortly after the attack on Washington, DC. In it, the president was quoted as saying, “My wife’s protection and security is my number one concern,” with no other details given.

  And that was her legend. Not the dozens of award ceremonies she’d attended, not her groundbreaking research in systems neuroscience, or any of the parties she’d hosted on her husband’s behalf. Not her treasured only son. According to the Time article Alban had slipped into the folder, there were rumors that she’d been killed or abducted by a hostile country shortly after the outbreak of IAAN. It became especially alarming when Clancy went out on the road alone on his father’s behalf to praise the camp rehabilitation program, showing himself to be its first successful subject.

  It had been nearly ten years, and she had yet to show her face publicly.

  But here she was in this folder, her face, her research…her handwritten notes. I clenched my hands into fists and released them several times, trying to force them to stop shaking.

  There were three notes mixed into the mess of documents, each only a few lines long. There were no envelopes, but the sheets were still sticky with whatever they had been sealed with. Someone must have passed this to him by hand, then, rather than risk sending it digitally. Alban’s clear cursive had filled in the dates at the top, likely for his own recordkeeping. The first, from five years before, read:

  No matter what’s become of us, I need to get out of his reach if I’m going to save him. If you help me disappear, I’ll help you in return. Please, John.

  The next, two years later:

  Enclosed are the most recent findings of our work; I’m feeling incredibly optimistic this will all be over soon. Tell me you’ve found him.

  And the final, from only two months before:

  I’m not going to sit around waiting for your approval—that was never our deal. I’m leaking the location onto the server tonight. If he doesn’t come looking for me, then I’ll find him myself.

  Clancy was still out cold, his head lolled to the side. I watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, something sharp twisting low in my gut.

  “You sad son of a bitch,” I whispered.

  This was why he’d come here. This was the task he couldn’t entrust to anyone other than himself.

  I combed through the pages again, trying to decipher exactly what she’d been working toward. A part of me had suspected it had something to do with us when I saw the diagrams, but why would she be secretly running her own experiments about the cause of IAAN at the same time Leda Corp was? There was that mention she made in her first note of needing to get out of “his reach”—was it possible she thought her husband would tamper with the results of what Leda Corp would find and that the misinformation would jeopardize Clancy’s life?

  But then…why would he want to destroy this? I flipped back to the pages of charts and graphs, and there, at the bottom of each page, were the initials L.G. I combed through the pages again, making sure I was looking at each and every one. Why had he wanted to destroy this? To protect his mother’s whereabouts? To destroy proof that she was somehow providing information to Alban about her research?

  None of this made sense to me. Her final note said she was leaking “the location”—her location?—onto a server. That was in line with Nico’s earlier explanation that the word Professor, one that Clancy had asked him to watch for, came up on the server. But she only leaked it when she was ready. Only after Project Snowfall was complete.

  She didn’t want him to know what she was working on, I realized. But why go find him? Why let him find her, when it was obvious that he was the one she truly needed to be protected from?

  THIRTY

  THE LIGHTS AND MACHINES around Alban’s office came back on in an explosion of noise and static, and I was up and off the ground before the radio scanner clicked on, blasting the room with a rousing choral rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” I drew my hand up in a weak attempt to block the glare as I stumbled toward the corner of the office. My eyes were watering and I couldn’t see any of the radio dials, so I settled for slapping and turning them all until the sound finally dropped to a bearable level. After the White Noise, even a faint scratch against the door would have sounded like thunder. For a long, terrible minute, I forced myself to stay still and readjust to the world of light—just as long as it took Clancy to let out a low moan and start to shake his head.

  And for me to realize my window for being able to control him was slamming shut.

  The fighting outside had faded into a lone spray of bullets firing one floor up. It was a risk to assume that they’d already cleared this level of rogue agents, but reason had overridden my fear. Most of the agents would have been on the first level, in their quarters, asleep when Cole and the others had entered the building, with a few, like Jarvin, on patrol.

  I would be fast. If the hallway was clear, I could go down to find the others after taking care of this. Make sure Liam and Chubs were tucked away with Jude and Vida in the safety of the barricaded sleeping room. I just couldn’t leave him in here, not with the locks already busted.

  I circled my arms around Clancy’s chest from behind, trying to get a good grip on him and tearing off one of his coat’s gold buttons in the process.

  “You are…” I gasped, feeling the stitches in my back pull, “officially the biggest pain in my ass.…”

  I had to drop him to shove the desk out of the way again. I took one more step out, taking a deep breath to steady myself against the sight of Jarvin’s and the other agents’ bodies—but the hallway was empty. As I dragged him out into it, I had a thought, a brief one, of pulling him into the infirmary, but I could see figures moving in there behind the curtains and I wasn’t sure I was willing to take the bet it was someone from Cole’s team. There were any number of doors along the hall, most of them leading into rooms I had never been allowed to see. But there was only one closet that was open, and the rack of guns in there had been picked clean—leaving enough room for a human body to be shoved in.

  I had just angled Clancy into the tight space when I heard my name shouted for the whole damn base to hear.

  I whipped around, searching for the source. Cate was suddenly there, rushing out of the infirmary, pulling the rifle strap off her shoulder. She ripped the black ski mask off her head and let it fall behind her. I was in her arms, in her warmth, before I had the sense to brace myself for the impact. A relief I didn’t expect passed down through me as I leaned into her.

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  And I
was honestly still so shocked at her appearance, I actually told her the truth. “Locking Clancy Gray in a closet.”

  She pulled back sharply, looking down at the prone form at our feet. And Cate, for the first time in her life, didn’t ask me if I wanted to talk about how I was feeling. I didn’t need to explain why we couldn’t leave him in the infirmary or in one of the rooms where he might escape. She knew what he was and what he was worth.

  “Okay. I’ll go get the keys.”

  “Cate,” I said, catching her arm. “Is it over?”

  She smiled. “It was over ten minutes ago.”

  “Really?” My voice was small in my own ears. I felt five years old, the way I had after getting lost in a mall and suddenly finding my dad’s hand again after frantically searching for him. I knew it was stupid to cry, but exhaustion had brought me to the breaking point, and the sudden, unexpected release of fear and pain pushed me past it.

  Cate stepped toward me, taking my face between her hands. It was like staring into a full moon rising as it cut through night. “I knew you could do this.”

  I squeezed my eyes shut and a white tent bloomed behind my lids. There was Mason, taking his last breath. The smell of a stiff leather muzzle. Rob screaming, screaming, screaming… I wanted to tell her everything, to unload it on her and let her share the crushing weight of it. She had offered to so many times, and every single instance I’d shot her down, thrown it back in her face. Even now, I felt that same reluctance wrap around my chest, trying to protect the weak, beating muscle there.

  “It was horrible,” I whispered.

  She smoothed a stray tear away from my cheek. “And you were stronger.”

  I shook my head. “I wasn’t…I was…”