“I think this is yours?” I said, holding up her shoe. She let me try to wipe the mud from her bare right foot before I slid it back on and tightened it. It must have fallen off as she ran toward those trees. They’d heard us coming and panicked.
“Zu?” Liam came toward us so fast he slid through the last few feet of mud, landing on the ground with us. “Zu?”
All she had to do was turn her head and the elation on his face faded to panicked concern. He took her hands when she reached out to him, studying every inch of her for bruises, cuts, anything to explain why she was looking at us like we were back from the dead, why she was holding onto us like we might vanish with her next breath.
“Is it her?” Chubs called desperately, stumbling toward us. “I can’t see—”
“Here—slow your roll—” Vida turned back and retrieved him from behind the car door, guiding him around. He patted his front pocket, reaching in for one of the lenses.
“Hey, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” Liam asked, letting her small hands run over his wet hair, cup his face.
Chubs dropped to his knees, sending a spray of mud over all of us. He held out his arms in what he must have thought was her direction. “You’re not alone, are you? You know what happens when you try to travel by yourself, there’s—”
Zu tackled him to the ground. The mud smacked against his back at the same moment the air went out of him.
“Well…all right,” he murmured, carefully tucking her against his shoulder. “You are freezing. We need a blanket before she goes into hypothermic—”
Zu reached up and put a hand over his mouth, making Liam laugh and laugh. The smile she offered back was trembling, small, but still there. I felt like crying myself, seeing it.
I studied her, trying to align this new vision with the image I had tucked safely away in my memory. Her hair had grown back in long enough to curl around her ears. Everything else about her had changed, too. She was taller, but thinner. Painfully thin. The skin on her cheeks had sunken in. And even in the dark, I could see the same was true for the others who came out from behind the trees. They stumbled toward us, blinking against the cars’ lights. I counted twelve in all, different heights, different shapes, but all kids. All kids.
Kylie and Zu’s cousin Hina came out of the trees next. It only took seeing Lucy for me to remember the dozens of times I’d taken food she’d spooned out at all of East River’s meals. She made me think of fire smoke, of pine, of the sunset reflecting on the nearby lakes. And the three of them—all of the kids, really—looked at us like we were blinding them.
“I’m sorry,” Kylie said. “I didn’t realize it was you, otherwise I wouldn’t have fired, we just…the skip tracers and the soldiers and everything—”
Behind me, I heard Cole let out a long sigh.
“We’re going to need to find another car,” he said. “Aren’t we?”
FOR ALL THE HOPE I HAD THAT WE’D FIND HER, I’M NOT SURE I EVER THOUGHT ABOUT WHAT WOULD ACTUALLY HAPPEN TO ZU IF WE DID. But it became clear, from the moment Liam saw her, that it was the only thought running through his mind.
“I thought you’d be at her uncle’s house,” I said. “What happened? Why did you leave?”
“He wasn’t there. We would have stayed anyway, but there was…an incident just after we got there,” Kylie was explaining as we walked. The trees pulled back to reveal a small clearing, ringed with darkness. When they heard our cars coming, they’d smothered the fires, but the clearing was still filled with the smell of smoke.
“What kind of incident?” Liam asked.
“A bad one. There was a guy, turns out a good guy. He…never mind, it doesn’t matter.” Kylie shook her head of dark curls, smoothing down the front of her ripped shirt. “We’ve been moving from town to town since then. When I saw the trail of road code I picked it up, hoping we’d find some other kids, but they’re not having an easy time of it, either.”
I felt my eyes widen at the sight of the soaking-wet makeshift tents they’d strung up using bed sheets, and the old food cans and buckets they’d left out to catch water.
“You drove in, right?” Liam asked. “Where did you stash the car?”
“Behind the shed at the back of the house.” Kylie tried to wring her shirt out, without much luck. The others standing around her had introduced themselves in a blur. I didn’t recognize any of them. Lucy had been quick to specify that two of them, Tommy and Pat, had left East River a few months before we’d ever arrived. The other three members of their tribe had split when the going had gotten too rough for them, and they hadn’t heard from them since. The other ten teenagers, all about fifteen, were strays they’d picked up as they moved across the country.
Tommy was as long and narrow as the tree flanking him, his shocking head of copper red hair mostly hidden under a beanie. Pat was about a head shorter, and walked and talked with a frantic, bumbling energy that made it almost impossible to keep up with him.
“Well…” Cole said, looking at the sad camp set up around us. “Y’all tried.”
“I’m just wondering…” Lucy stepped out in front of us, her braided blond hair swinging over her shoulder. She was wearing an oversized 49ers sweatshirt and black leggings that were shredded at the knees. “What are you guys doing here? When did you leave East River?”
Oh, damn—of course they wouldn’t know. They couldn’t have found out. I glanced over to Liam, but he was looking down at where Zu clung to his hand.
“Save story time for later,” Cole said. “Pack up whatever you guys want to bring with you.”
“Wait, what?” Liam said. “Hold on—they don’t even know what they’re getting into.”
Cole rolled his eyes and turned back to the other kids, clapping his hands together. “I’ll break it down for you. We used to be part of a group called the Children’s League. Then the president decided he wanted to destroy us, the Federal Coalition, and all of Los Angeles. Now we’re heading up north to set up shop and figure out new, fun ways to kick his ass. Are there any questions?”
Tommy raised his hand. “They destroyed Los Angeles? Like, literally?”
“I don’t think we speak figuratively anymore?” Cole said. “It’s a flaming heap of rubble. You guys are welcome to park yourselves here, but the military has control of the borders and freeways, and they’ve likely got a new stranglehold on what gas and food is out there. Meaning life is about to get a hell of a lot harder if you don’t find yourselves a safe place.”
I think the kids were actually too shocked to cry. They traded stunned glances, clearly struggling to process this.
Starvation doesn’t help much on that front, either, I thought, looking at the way the rain made Kylie’s shirt cling to her sharp hip bones.
“And where we’d be going, that’s a safe place?” Pat asked.
“Tell them the truth,” Liam said sharply. “It may be a safe, secure location, but we’re always going to have targets on our backs. You’ve never done anything just out of the goodness of your heart, so what’s the catch, Cole? They come with us and they have to fight? They have to work for their food and beds?”
“Well, realistically, we’ll probably all be in sleeping bags,” Cole said, irritation simmering under each word, “but no, no catches. If they want to be trained, then we’ll train them. If they want to fight, then who the hell am I to stop them? But I have a feeling they’re just as invested in finding out what caused IAAN and learning more about this so-called cure. And I also have this here little feeling that they’ll be hard-pressed to find another group willing to help them get back to their parents.”
“Don’t manipulate them into thinking this is—”
“This is what?” I asked quietly, pulling him aside. “A way for them to survive? Liam…I get it, fighting is dangerous, but this kind of life is dangerous, too, isn’t it? Being sick and starved and constantly on the run? They don’t have to stay at the Ranch forever. We can get them out once we f
igure out a safe system for it, if that’s what they want.”
He looked pained; if he had struggled with the idea of me being trapped with the League, what were the chances he would ever accept this for Zu? No matter how much he wanted to see the camps freed, to see a real cure out there, his first instinct was always going to be to take the road that was safest for the people he cared about the most.
“When all of this is over,” I said, my eyes sliding over to where Cole was helping the other kids eagerly pack up their things, “we can go anywhere we want. Isn’t that worth it? Having her come with us now is the only way we can guarantee she’s safe. We can take care of her.”
We should never have let her go in the first place.
He let out a rush of breath. “Hey Zu, how would you feel about helping us start a little war?”
She looked up at him, and over to me, her eyebrows drawn together as she considered this. Then Zu shrugged, like, Sure. Got nothing better to do.
“All right.” Liam released the words on the tail end of a sigh, and I felt the tension escape my body with it. With one arm around my shoulder, and his other hand on Zu’s, we started back through the trees to where the others were waiting. It was grounding, the familiarity of it—like I was finally tethered back to the world again. “All right.”
By the time we made it back to the cars, Chubs and Vida were there, leaning against the side of the truck. But while Chubs was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, firing off a hundred questions to Zu that he had no chance of getting answers to, Vida took one look at her, crossed her arms over her chest, and came toward us.
“Hey, Vi, this is—”
She didn’t stop, not to let me finish, not to take Zu’s hand when she held it out to shake. Vida’s eyes flashed as they met mine, and the accusation there was as silent as it was baseless. Her jaw clenched with the venom she was clearly fighting to keep back. “Can we get out of this fucking dump now?”
And just like that, the feeling of security was gone. A sick unease crept in, tearing my attention in two. Half of me wanted to go after her into the woods and the other half, the louder, more demanding one, wanted to stay exactly where I was, happily caught up in my love for the three people around me. My heart was swollen with it as Zu wrapped her arms around Chubs’s narrow waist again and he patted the top of her head in his usual awkward way.
Liam had turned to follow Vida’s shape as it disappeared into the darkness. When he turned back, I saw the question there; my own confusion, reflected back.
But I had no idea why she was angry.
It was hours past midnight by the time we reached Lodi, and the moon was already beginning its downward glide toward the western horizon. I’d slept on and off for a total of four hours, but felt absolutely no better for it. Sticking to surface streets, winding up California’s spine at a leisurely pace, had added an extra four hours to an already long trip—and the extra hour it took to find one more car, and enough gas to keep us all going, rounded it out to an even ten hours. We seemed to be caught in some kind of reality in which time was simultaneously stretching and shrinking; minutes flew by, but in endless numbers. The rushing tides of anxiety and fear washed in and out of me, and I caught myself sending up desperate, silent prayers that we’d find Cate and the others waiting for us. The day had already gone too well, and I knew better than to expect some kind of pattern to form. Life had the nasty habit of lifting me up just to throw me back down.
The town was more rural than I was expecting, at least the fringes of it. There were a number of barren fields that might once have been vineyards, but they’d been left to wither and die in the shadow of a series of long, silver warehouses.
“There it is,” Cole said, lifting his hand from the wheel to point. I was surprised he could tell the difference between each, given that they looked identical to my eye, especially in the dark.
“Are they here?”
“We’ll know in a second.”
The sky had blossomed into pale lavender by the time we entered the edge of town, our little line of cars like a parade through the empty streets. Cole’s mood was shifting again, ticking higher and lighter as the car slowed and turned into a used-car dealership. He guided the car into one of the empty, covered spaces—next to what was most definitely an old exterminator’s van and an electrical company’s truck.
Not a used-car dealership, I thought. At least not anymore.
“Okay, Gem.” Cole took a deep breath and glanced up at the roof of the car, muttering something I couldn’t hear. “You ready?”
“What about him?” I asked, nodding toward Clancy’s limp form.
“Leave him for now. I just gave him another dose. I’ll come back out for him after we make sure everything’s secure.”
It didn’t seem like the best idea, but I was so tired I found myself nodding anyway, too tired to fight. Besides, the kid was still breathing low and even, bent over at the waist and out of sight. This time, I was the one to double-check that his hands and feet were still zip-tied. It was the last complete, coherent thought I seemed to have.
My whole body ached with exhaustion as I climbed out; I could taste it at the back of my throat, feel it in the watery consistency my eyes had taken on. Liam found me immediately and cast a questioning look in the direction of the truck. I waved him off and leaned into his arm when he wrapped it around me. I kept trying to count the kids off, starting each time with Zu and Hina, but I couldn’t seem to get past ten without forgetting my place and needing to start again. Focusing on one thing, Chubs’s voice as he fired question after question to Vida about the blurred shapes around him, helped keep me alert, but it still took my brain far too long to process why we were standing outside of some kind of bar, hovering at the door.
Liam followed my line of sight. “She didn’t say a single thing to Zu,” he said quietly. “I know she’s not a cuddlebug, but is this normal? Because if it keeps going the way it is, I’m going to have a problem with it.”
I looked over at Vida again. “It takes her a while to warm up. I’ll talk to her.”
Cole peered in through one of the windows, ignoring the unlit electric OPEN sign. Letting out a deep breath, he tested the door to Smiley’s Pub. Locked.
“Is this a bar?” Chubs whispered behind me. “Are we allowed to go in? We’re not twenty-one.”
“Oh, Grannie.” Vida sighed. “I can’t even.”
I looked through the front window. There was a lot of pale, polished wood, empty shelves behind the bar itself, and red vinyl wherever there was seating. Old classic-rock tour posters were tacked up between all of the pictures of bikini-clad women lounging on sports cars.
“Do we have to break in?” I asked Cole.
“Nah. I was just checking to see if they were still using the joint as a front. The entrance to the Ranch is behind the bar.”
For a second, I was confused, thinking he meant behind the counter inside the bar. Instead, he stepped down from the curb and jutted his chin toward the small alley between Smiley’s Pub and the empty store beside it. We fell in place behind him, stepping around garbage cans and empty, stacked crates until we reached a back door. Cole went right up to it and pressed six numbers into the electronic keypad there. It flashed, beeped, and the door popped open, revealing what looked like a typical back room. There were shelves along each wall, most of them bare.
“It’s a long way down,” Cole said over his shoulder. “Anyone afraid of heights? The dark? Nah, of course not. You guys are champs. Just be careful, you hear?”
Long way down. God—another underground tunnel? A long one, I’d bet, based on the fact that we were far enough away from the Ranch’s main building that I hadn’t been able to see it from out in front of Smiley’s. We’d had a similar setup for accessing HQ down in Los Angeles. The entry point had been a parking garage, which brought you down via elevator to what we called the Tube. That tunnel had been so hellish in its sewer stink and mold-slick walls, you half expec
ted to find the devil waiting for you at the other end of it.
To access the trap door that opened to the Ranch’s tunnel, we all had to cram into the small bedroom set at the back of the bar, and lift the bed and rug that had been placed over it. A cold, stale burst of air rushed up to meet us as Cole kicked the door open.
“Cool,” Tommy and Pat said, leaning to look down into the dimly lit space. Kylie made a face in Lucy’s direction, but was the third one down after Cole. Most of the teens went next, too tired to really question what was happening or where they were being taken. It was worse for the younger kids. Zu and Hina were mirror images of complete and total fatigue. They swayed on their feet like they’d snuck a few glasses back at the bar, and they couldn’t focus their eyes on Liam, even as he was helping to navigate them over the lip of the ladder. He and I both had to help Vida get a half-blind, incredibly grumpy Chubs down next. Then, it was his turn.
I knew it was irrational, the way that fear seemed to walk up behind me and press a blade to my throat. I knew that we were not under attack, that there were already kids down on the path and they were fine, that I’d have to walk it if I ever wanted to get to the Ranch. I knew all that. But I still couldn’t move.
Liam caught my expression and brought a reassuring smile to his face. Even with all of those unspoken words between us, he could still read my every fear. One of his hands wove through my hair and cupped the side of my face as he kissed my temple.
“Different tunnel, different destination, different end,” he promised. “Okay?”
I swallowed and forced myself to nod as he started down the ladder. The moment his head of pale hair disappeared, I felt my skin shrink back against my bones and my stomach flip. Different end. I turned the words over in my head. An end.
This was just the beginning of it.
I straightened, smoothing my ponytail back over my shoulder and took the first step. The second. The third. I tried not to think of the way the darkness seemed to well up around me, swallowing me down. At the exact moment I was sure I’d be climbing down forever, I finally found solid ground.
In the Afterlight (Bonus Content) Page 8