Never Fade

by Alexandra Bracken

  I heard Vida swear under her breath, slamming a hand down on Chubs’s arm to keep him from trying to jump in. There was no one there to check me.

  “Stop it!” I said. “Listen to yourself—”

  “You—” A flush of red swept up Liam’s neck, and he was visibly struggling to keep his face in check. “You have no idea…”

  “Oh, don’t cry about it,” Cole said, standing. “Haven’t you already embarrassed me enough? Just…go. Jesus, just go already if you want out so damn bad. Stop wasting my time!”

  “Guys—” Jude’s voice went high, cracking on the word. “Guys!”

  “Please,” I tried again. “Just—”

  Jude leaned over the table and grabbed my arm, turning me back in the direction of the television. “Shut up and look!”

  President Gray had exited his car and was looking around at the crowds, lifting his hand in a well-practiced wave. His hair was grayer than I remembered it being even a few months ago. Heavier bags rimmed his dark eyes. But it was still Clancy’s face, a glimpse of what he’d look like in thirty or forty years, and for that alone I wanted to look away.

  “What’s—” Vida began, just as the camera panned to a small hooded figure shoving his way past the pretty blond broadcaster, leaping over the police boundaries.

  The president was slowly making his way up the pristine white steps of the Capitol, his hand outstretched toward the governor. Behind him, both the American and Texas state flags were swaying with the breeze. He didn’t seem to notice something was wrong until the men in suits beside him pulled their guns, and the governor’s face went white as bone.

  The police officers that lined the steps were thrown to each side, shoved through the air with such force that they smashed through the lines of cameramen and photographers. He hadn’t needed to touch them, only slash his arms out in front of him, like he was throwing open a heavy curtain.

  “Christ!” Liam said behind me. “That’s a kid!”

  He was slight, all lean muscles and tan skin, like a runner who’d spent his summer out on a high school track. His hair was long, tied back with a small elastic to keep it out of his face; it gave him a clear view as he swung the small gun up from his sweatshirt’s pockets and calmly fired two shots into the president’s chest.

  The TVs, each tuned to a different station, erupted at the exact same moment, catching the scene from every angle.

  “Oh my God, oh my—” the newscaster was moaning. She’d dropped to the ground; all we could see was the back of her head as she watched the police and Secret Service pile on top of the kid, burying him under a sea of uniforms and coats. The crowd behind her was screaming; the camera shook as it swung around to capture their escape from the scene. Every look of terror. Every look of disgust. All turned now from the president himself to the kid who’d just killed him.

  “Did you do this?” Liam snarled, swinging back toward his brother. “Did you order that kid to do that?”

  “He’s not one of us,” Vida said. “I’ve never seen that piece of shit in my life!”

  Cole spun on his heel, diving headlong into the stunned silence in the atrium. No one was moving aside for him, and I had no idea where he was going. Vida grabbed the remote and turned the volume up.

  “Ladies—ladies and gentlemen—please—” The broadcaster was still on the ground, trying to protect herself from the stampede of bystanders fleeing the scene. The picture cut away to the horrified faces of the anchors back in the studio, but they were there for only an instant before the screen clicked to black and bold words appeared there.

  EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM

  THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT HAS ISSUED AN EMERGENCY ACTION NOTIFICATION

  DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR TV AT THIS TIME

  IMPORTANT INFORMATION WILL FOLLOW

  But the message stayed on the screens, and the only thing that did follow was the low wailing tones of the emergency alert system, the same ones we’d all heard a thousand times as they’d run the tests on televisions and radios.

  There was a muffled bang that came from somewhere above us, almost inaudible under the sound of panicked voices in the atrium and the blaring television screens—two of them, three, four, all firing off in rapid succession like the crackling Fourth of July fireworks we used to watch at home from my backyard. They were too far away to be truly frightening. For a moment I wondered if they were fireworks. Were people really crass enough to already be celebrating President Gray’s apparent demise?

  It all washed away with the overpowering sound of rushing water—no, more like static. A ferocious wave of noise, cracking, snapping, hissing like a rolling hurricane.

  And then it all cut out with a low, mechanical whine—the kind an animal might make as it took its last breath. The lights, the TVs, the air-conditioning, everything switched off, throwing us back into the same impenetrable darkness we’d just left.

  If Jude hadn’t still been gripping my arm, I would never have been able to catch him as he swayed toward the ground.

  “Whoa,” I began.

  Vida was instantly at our side, helping me lower him back into a seat.

  “It… Something just happened…” The agents around us were snapping on glow sticks, illuminating the room in that small way. I could see his hands clenched in his hair—the expression on his face was dazed, drunk almost. “Something bad.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, letting Chubs in closer to look.

  His eyes were still slightly unfocused. “It was a big…a big burst. Like a flare, and then it was gone. Everything is so quiet…nothing’s talking anymore.”

  I scanned the room, searching for the team of Yellows. They were in the exact same dazed state, limp and unresponsive to the other kids’ efforts to get them on their feet. I could see their faces in the faint, dying light of the glow sticks.

  “What the hell?” I heard Chubs say. “Another rolling blackout?”

  I shushed him, trying to listen as an agent quickly ran down the situation for Cole as they made their way back over to us. “Backup generator is still up and running, no cell or radio connections available. The cameras on the streets have shut off. Bennett is trying to get them restarted—”

  “Don’t bother,” Cole said calmly. “They’re most likely fried.”

  Fried? But that would mean…

  It was too much of a coincidence for the power to have gone out at that moment. But what Cole was suggesting wasn’t that someone had tampered with Los Angeles’s power grid—he thought someone had disabled every single piece of electronic equipment throughout the city.

  “You think it was some kind of electromagnetic pulse?” another agent pressed.

  “I think we better get our asses moving before we find out.” Cole cupped his hands around his mouth, shouting over the panicked whispering. “All right, I know you’ve drilled this. Take what you can carry from this room and go straight for the hole. Nothing else. Keep to your lines. Mandatory evac starts now!”

  Vida gathered Jude to her side, leaving me to haul Nico up from his seat.

  “It could just be another blackout,” an agent protested. “It can’t have been in response to the assassination. Our best bet is to go down to level three and ride it out.”

  “If this is an attack,” another one put in, “then the safest place for us to stay is here!”

  “The safest place for us is out of this—”

  There were three loud knocks, like someone was standing directly above us, politely asking to be let inside. I don’t know why I did it, or what I even thought the noise was, but I tackled Nico to the ground and, a moment later, felt Vida do the same with Jude beside me.

  “Cover!” someone screamed, but the word disappeared in the white-hot flash of light.

  Then the world rained down fire over our heads.

  THIRTY-ONE

  I DIDN’T FEEL THE PAIN RIGHT AWAY, only the heavy pressure against my spine.

  I woke in total darkness with Nico shouting my
name, gripping my shoulders. There was a single blessed moment where my brain was in tatters, and it couldn’t connect what I was seeing, and smelling, and feeling with the reality of what had just happened. Everything was filtered through darkness.

  “No! I have to find her first—”

  “Dammit, Liam, move!” Cole roared. “Go with the others!”

  “They’re here,” I heard Vida say. “Help me with this—”

  The weight pinning me on top of Nico lifted, and smoky, dust-stained air flooded into my lungs. I coughed, my hand sliding across the floor until I found what felt like a glow stick.

  It wasn’t. It was someone’s finger, and it wasn’t attached to his body.

  I was hauled up and onto my feet, held there until my knees solidified. “Everyone—” I started to say.

  “Bunker busters,” Vida said. “We gotta go.”

  “Jude—”

  “I’m here,” he said. “I can’t see you, but I’m here—”

  “Everyone’s here; we’re all okay,” Chubs cut in. “Tell us where to go.”

  “Down—” I coughed, clearing the thick dust coating my tongue and throat. My eyes were adjusting now, and I was realizing that the dull orange glow surrounding us wasn’t from the glow sticks but from the fires caused by the explosions. Everything else rushed at me with the force of a bullet to the head: wires were hanging down from the partially collapsed roof, along with pieces of the roof itself. And the sound of distant thunder—it was still there, louder now, firing off on a driving beat.

  They’re bombing the city. It didn’t matter who “they” were, not then. I wiped at the slick rush of warmth running down my jaw, glancing over to make sure Nico was okay. He and Jude were huddled together, their arms wrapped around each other.

  I turned on my heel, counting them off as I went. Chubs stood, watching the dark shapes of kids and agents limping out of the west exit of the room. Liam was trying to get back to us, shoving at Cole, who was trying to force him to line up behind the others. And Vida—she was staring at the still bodies strewn across the floor, some half buried where the ceiling had actually caved in. The whole room smelled like scorched meat and smoke. Sneakers and boots were scattered, thrown off bloodied, unmoving feet.

  “We can’t leave them,” Jude cried, starting to reach toward Sarah, one of the Blue girls. Sarah stared back up at him, her chest caved in by the scaffolding that had fallen on her. “We—It’s not right; we can’t leave them down here! Please!”

  “We have to,” I said. “Come on.”

  We’d run evacuation drills a total of two times since I’d been with the League, both using a different exit to leave HQ. One was out through the elevator and tunnel, the way we would have normally come in. The other was an enormous stairwell that twisted and curved its way up to the surface, a short distance away from the factory that was supposed to serve as our shield. Neither of them was an option now. I could see that just by looking at Cole’s face.

  “Move, move, move,” he was telling us, shoving each kid and agent through the door. “Down to level three; we’re going out the way you came in. Follow Agent Kalb!”

  I tried to count the heads as they passed, but it was too dark and the smoke was too thick. The whole structure shook, throwing me forward toward Liam, who was waiting for us at the door.

  “Are you okay?” he asked in a rush of breath. “He grabbed me; I didn’t want to go—”

  Cole took him by the collar and hauled him out into the hallway before us. It was clear they’d been aiming for the dead center of the building. We stumbled after, a line of us, trying to navigate through the concrete, flaming rubble, and the hissing, spitting steam pipes that had burst. Still, it was some small miracle it hadn’t been damaged the way the atrium had.

  The stairwell down to level two was clogged with more smoke and steam. My shirt was drenched through with sweat. I started to strip my jacket off, automatically feeling for the flash drive that wasn’t there.

  Cate, I thought. Where’s Cate? What’s happening to Cate?

  I was thrown forward into Liam’s back with the next impact. One of the kids up ahead of us screamed, but all I could hear was Jude behind me, whispering, “Oh, God, oh my God,” over and over again. I don’t know what he was picturing in his head, but if it was anything like my image of being crushed under ten tons of cement and dirt, I was surprised he could even function at all, let alone keep moving forward.

  The line slowed as we rounded down to the second level, clogging with some problem we couldn’t see. I slipped around Liam and grabbed Cole’s arm to get his attention.

  “What about the people in the infirmary?”

  “If they couldn’t get up and walk themselves out, we’re not doing it for them,” Cole said with a note of finality.

  “What about Clancy?” I asked, though a part of me already knew the answer. “Did they let him out?”

  “There was no time to clear the floor,” Cole said.

  I glanced back over my shoulder, wishing I could see Liam’s face in the dark. I felt him instead, hands on my waist, gently pushing me forward. Then his voice was in my ear saying, “What would he do if it were you? Me?”

  It didn’t make it any easier to swallow the bile in my throat. It was one thing to bring a person in as a prisoner, and another to sentence him to what was very likely death.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Vida snarled as she and Chubs gripped a panicking Nico and kept him going. I could see Jude’s pale face behind them, looking on in horror.

  “I’ll get him,” Nico said. “I can get him!”

  “No!” Jude cried. “We have to stay together!”

  The aftershock of the next explosion tossed us all to our knees. I smacked my head against the wall, spots bursting in front of my eyes. I hauled myself up and then we were all running down the steps, through the dark hall, jumping down into the interrogation block. Sections of the wall to my right were already partly collapsed.

  “Stay right behind me,” Cole said, glancing back at us. “Come on, we need to be at the front.”

  He was able to edge his way up through the line, but everyone was bottlenecking as they reached the door to the tunnel. I could only imagine what the response would have been if the six of us tried to cut to the front of the line and follow him.

  We were finally close enough to see what the problem was. On the other side of the door, each kid and agent had to carefully climb over the pipes and cement that had been shaken free from the tunnel’s ceiling.

  My blood was beating hard inside of my head, but my limbs felt hollow with panic as we waited, and waited, and waited for it to be our turn. Liam was bouncing on the balls of his feet, like he was gearing up to bolt forward at any moment.

  Once we were at the door, I stopped and stepped aside to let the others go in front of me, but Liam was having none of it. He all but lifted me up and over the debris, then climbed over himself, his body the wall that kept me from turning back.

  I heard Vida curse behind me and Chubs’s labored grunt. The tunnel felt hot and humid with so many bodies crammed into it. The blasts from above had collapsed sections of it, slowing our progress again and turning what had been a simple path into an obstacle course.

  I felt the thundering vibrations before the sound of the crashes actually reached my ears. It was a series of four low bangs, each louder and worse than the next. Vida shouted something up to us I couldn’t hear over the vicious wave of noise that followed. My stomach, my heart, everything inside of me seemed to drop, like the tunnel had given out under me. The seconds passed at half their speed, giving me just enough time to turn away from the explosion that blew out through the door we’d just come through.

  We threw ourselves to the ground as a blast of gray dust and chunks of cement and glass came shooting out of the doorway. The tunnel shook so hard, I was convinced it would cave in. The kids, the agents, everyone was shouting now, but I heard Cole’s voice amplified over everyone’s: “
Move, move, move!”

  But I couldn’t. I was only able to push myself up onto my knees, drag myself up using the wall. I could hear Vida and Chubs talking, complaining about the dark, how they couldn’t see each other.

  “That was HQ,” I whispered. “Did it collapse?”

  “I think so,” Liam said.

  “The tunnel back in is totally blocked off now,” Chubs called up, coughing. The kids in front of us passed the news up through the line of people ahead of them. We heard the shock and tear-stained responses all the way from the back of the herd.

  Those agents…the kids…their bodies that we had to leave behind, whose families would never know what happened to them, who didn’t get a chance to escape, who might have still been clinging to life when—

  The sob stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t cough it free. I wasn’t crying, but my body was shaking violently, hard enough that Liam wrapped his arms around me from behind. I felt his heart racing against my back, his face as he buried it against my neck.

  He was solid and here; all of us, alive. Alive, alive, alive. We had made it out. But still, I couldn’t stop seeing it, the way the ceiling must have caved, the falling glass, the floor that suddenly wasn’t there, the darkness sweeping down.

  Focus, I commanded myself. There are still kids behind you. You’re still not out of this. Don’t let it take you, too. Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Jude. Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Jude.

  “Just breathe, just breathe,” Liam said, his own voice shaking.

  The steady pattern of it, the rise and fall of his chest beside me, was steadying enough that my grip on his side relaxed. He pressed his lips against my forehead, more out of relief than anything else, I thought.

  “We’re okay,” I said. “We’re okay. Just keep going.”