In the Afterlight (Bonus Content)

by Alexandra Bracken

  I wasn’t tired in the slightest anymore, and I had a feeling he wasn’t either, not really. I kissed the scar at the corner of his lips, running my hands up his neck and burying them in his hair. His pale blue eyes seemed to darken as he leaned down to meet me halfway.

  Someone coughed behind us.

  And coughed again.

  Liam said something uncharacteristically vulgar under his breath as he pulled back, his face flushed and his eyes a bit too wild. “Yeah?”

  It was the girl who’d been working at the table—she was a Blue who’d come in with Zu’s ragtag group. Elizabeth. That was her name. Liza.

  “I finished, but I’m not sure it looks…I think it might look more like a white banana?” She held up a black helmet for the two of us to inspect. Painted along one side was what looked to my eye like a crescent moon. Liam’s arms tensed around my waist.

  “It looks great,” he said.

  “Well, you know what it’s supposed to be, but what if she can’t?” Liza said.

  “She?” I repeated.

  “Our contact,” Liam said quickly. “Senator Cruz’s, I mean. When I go to pick up supplies, she wanted something to identify me.”

  “But won’t you be driving a car or truck?” I asked. “Not the bike?”

  He hesitated, standing up and away from the bike. I saw the effort of his concentration as he turned a smiling face back on me. “Sometimes the bike, depending on the situation. We’ll paint one of the doors of the trucks, too.”

  I don’t know what it was, exactly. The odd tone of his voice; the way Liza all but bolted, her face pale; how quick he was to take my hand and start guiding us back toward the tunnel. Every thought that passed through his head had always registered on Liam’s face, good or bad. Seeing his carefully blank face, half-hidden by the shadows in the tunnel, I pieced together the realization.

  He was keeping secrets, too.

  Vida and Chubs left the next morning, long before the sun came up. Liam, Zu, and I were all there to see them off at the tunnel’s entrance. Regardless of whether or not we’d been planning on it, the two of them had been bickering so loudly from the moment the alarm on Liam’s watch went off that none of us had any chance of falling back asleep. Nico and Cole showed up a few minutes later, both pale and drained with an exhaustion that hadn’t come with waking up at that ungodly hour, but staying awake to meet it. It set me on edge the way they wouldn’t make eye contact with any of us. When I asked Cole what was going on, he only said, “We’ll talk about it after.”

  As Vida went over the map one last time with Liam and Cole, I pulled Chubs aside and walked him a short ways down the hall. I could see him fighting inside himself for some composure; Chubs was so ruled by his head, by logic, that he didn’t have a coping mechanism for when powerful emotions threatened his careful process. I don’t think he was afraid for himself, so much as afraid of what could happen while they were gone.

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” he started. “Be safe. Make sure that you seek out proper medical attention—”

  “Isn’t that the lecture I’m supposed to be giving you?” I asked.

  “Yo, no time to chat and hug it out,” Vida called. “Let’s get cracking.”

  Chubs held up a finger to signal to the others that we needed a minute. Vida let out an impatient snort, then turned a very different finger in his direction.

  “I have no doubt you guys are going to pull this off,” I began, “but how are you going to get through it without one of you strangling the other?”

  “Well, we’re pretty evenly matched,” he said reasonably. “She has the brawn, I have the brains. Either both of us will come back, or neither of us will because we’ll have clawed each other’s throats out.”

  “Don’t even joke about it,” I whispered.

  “I have to joke about it, otherwise I’ll probably start crying.” Chubs’s face suddenly looked as drawn as I felt.

  “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to,” I said quickly. “It’s not too late.”

  “Isn’t it? Besides, I have to pull my weight, too.” He shrugged with a nonchalance that looked unnatural on him. His voice sounded strained, filtered through a lump in his throat.

  “You and Vida will both be fine,” I said, planting both hands on his shoulders and forcing him to look down and meet my gaze. “You have everything under control. You’ll both be careful, and quick, and back in one piece.”

  Chubs turned back toward Vida, who was the only person I knew who could make pacing look like prowling.

  “Well,” he amended with a long-suffering look, “hopefully no more than two pieces.”

  Despite what Vida had said, she waited patiently as Chubs knelt to talk to Zu and gave Liam a good pounding on the back. Cole unlocked the door, letting a draft of cold air into the hallway, and stood back as Chubs took the first few steps down.

  As much faith as I had in them, I did have to fight off the urge to throw myself in front of the tunnel out and block their path. I pressed a hand against my chest, trying to stamp the feeling of panic out. But Zu had no such reservations. She bolted out of Liam’s grip and pushed past Cole, who was shutting the door after them. By the time we caught up to them, she was gripping their packs, her heels digging into the unfinished floor, crying in that silent, heartbreaking way. Crying harder than I’d ever seen; she shook her head, her lips moving with silent pleas. Chubs looked back at us, startled.

  Zu had been the toughest of our group in many ways, the one quickest to bounce back after terror or sadness knocked her flat. Whatever walls she’d built up to keep the feelings from cresting, they weren’t high enough now to stop the desperate fear. And it devastated me. My throat ached with the need to cry, too.

  Vida dropped her pack and knelt down in front of her. “Hey girl, none of that. It’s like what we talked about, yeah?”

  Zu pressed her face against Chubs’s backpack.

  “What happened to you with that guy—the one who drove you to California, that was some—” I saw her catch herself, modify her word choice—“that was some messed-up stuff, and I’m sorry, I’m really sorry that it happened to him. But me and Charlie Boy? We’re coming back. None of us are going to leave you here alone. We take care of our family, right?”

  I didn’t realize Liam still had a hand on my shoulder until it tightened. His face was ashen.

  That calmed Zu down, at least enough to release her grip on Chubs and turn toward Vida fully.

  “You can trust me, Z. I won’t let you down. Okay?”

  She nodded, scrubbing at her face with her sleeve. Vida held up her fist for a bump, but Zu one-upped her, wrapping her bony arms around the older girl’s neck. Vida said something too low for any of the rest of us to hear, but when Zu pulled back she was nodding, a look of fierce determination on her face. With no other warning she turned and hugged Chubs, too, looking back to point a finger toward Vida as if to say, Be nice.

  “I told you,” Vida said as she stood. “I keep my promises.”

  Liam stepped forward to guide Zu back into the hallway so she didn’t have to watch the door shut and lock behind them. I saw her straighten herself out, her fists clenching at her sides and her chin lifting up—the same way I’d seen Vida prep herself for battle.

  “Let’s go get something to eat, okay?” Liam said. He looked back over his shoulder. “Coming?”

  I shook my head. “Have to shower and take care of a few things. I’ll catch up with you later.”

  Liam waved and started walking with Zu back down the hall, heading to the kitchen in the lower level.

  “Okay, what’s going on?” I asked before either Cole or Nico could speak. “What happened last night?”

  “It’s easier to show you.” Cole started past me, heading the same way his brother had taken, toward the stairs. I followed him silently, watching Nico watch the floor, my stomach clenching. It was getting too hard to pretend like I didn’t care.

  It was the first time I’d
been down in the computer room since the supplies had come in last night. Where there had once been only one laptop, there were now five desktops. Another three silver laptops were spaced out along the desks, which were still pushed against the walls, leaving an empty space at the center of the room for planning. I spotted a printer and a scanner near the old laptop. Nico had picked a seat at the far back corner of the room, as usual. Cole brushed aside printouts of indecipherable code from one of the nearby seats and offered it to me.

  Nico keyed in some kind of a password and brought up a window of more code.

  “Somehow this doesn’t feel ‘easier,’” I said. “What are we looking at?”

  “This is our server log,” Nico said. “It seemed like it was lagging last night, so I was trying to troubleshoot what the issue was. This right here—” He pointed to the screen. “That means someone sent one of the files saved there, transferring it via FTP to another encrypted server.”

  “What file?” I asked.

  “It was one of the videos from the Thurmond testing,” Cole said.

  “But there’s more,” Nico scrolled up. “There are gaps in the server’s activity log, all between the hours of midnight and four A.M. on two other days.”

  “It’s not because no one was awake to use the computers?” I asked.

  Nico shook his head. “We’ve been leaving the computers on overnight to transfer everything to remote backup servers in case ours fail. There would have been huge spikes of activity—but look.”

  The huge spikes of activity were there, beginning at eleven o’clock in the evening, but abruptly cutting off at two in the morning, only to resume four hours later, right around the time Nico or another Green would first roll in to start the day’s work.

  “Is there really no way to tell who did it?” I asked, squinting at the screen.

  “It was a Green,” Nico said.

  “It might have been a Green,” Cole said.

  “No,” Nico insisted, “it had to have been a Green. How many kids actually know how to erase server activity?”

  “Okay,” I said. That made sense, unfortunately. “But if they went to such great lengths to hide the other instances, would they have left this blip for someone to find?”

  Nico shrugged. “Maybe they were interrupted? Or they were in such a hurry they didn’t have time?”

  Cole asked another question that disappeared beneath the rush of blood in my ears as I stared at the screen, blinking to clear the blurriness that turned it into nothing more than a glowing square.

  “…think?” Cole touched my shoulder to get my attention, making me jump.

  “Sorry,” I said quickly, avoiding their stares. “I’m tired. What did you just ask?”

  “My theory is one of the computers just glitched, or there’s a problem with the server,” Cole said, his eyes soft with concern.

  “Occam’s razor,” Nico said. “Make the fewest assumptions. The simplest solution is usually the right one.”

  “I don’t know anything about a razor, but who the hell would kids be sending the intel to?” Cole asked. “Who’d be stupid enough to try to sell information at the risk of getting their asses caught and hauled into a camp?”

  “Could it be someone from Kansas HQ accessing files remotely?” I asked Nico.

  He shook his head. “It’s someone here.”

  Damn. I shared a look with Cole.

  “I want to believe it’s a one-off thing,” he said, “but keep digging. Let me know if they try anything again, okay?”

  There was a knock on the windows running along the side of the room—Kylie, dressed in all black, her hair tied into a poofy bun. “Ah,” Cole said. “That’ll be the groups leaving this morning to try to track down those tribes in Montana. You two figure the camera situation out, okay?”

  “Wait,” I said. “They’re leaving this morning? Where did the cars come from?”

  “They’re taking the SUVs Lee rounded up for yesterday’s haul,” he said, stretching as he stood. I followed him to the door, listening to him rattle off instructions about training and which weapons to pull from the locker for training the next day, but when I reached the door, I didn’t follow him out into the hall.

  I stepped back into the computer room and caught sight of the white board out of the corner of my eye. Someone, likely Cole, had started scribbling information on it—coordinates, camp populations, number of PSFs assigned, anything and everything the League might have had in its files. Peppered through were details from Clancy’s documents—I saw tidbits about the camp controllers tossed in like afterthoughts.

  The basic outline of the Oasis plan was there, too. I found my name written next to influence camp controller in charge of communications.

  “You don’t have to stay,” Nico said. “I can do this myself.”

  “I know.” I picked up the dry erase marker from the ledge, and started to fill in additional information about Thurmond, fleshing out sections of the plan where I could.

  “It was your strategy,” Nico said over the warm purring of the machines around us. “Right? It seemed like you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A little reckless. Smart, but not giving attention to the details.”

  “Really,” I said dryly, turning back to face him.

  He kept his back to me the whole time, shoulders bunched up with tension. I’d really been a monster to him, hadn’t I? There seemed to be a five-foot radius around me that Nico was too frightened to cross. I fought to keep from cringing at the thought of how badly I’d mistreated him.

  “How would you do it?” I jerked my chin in the direction of the blank space under the word Thurmond, trying to ignore the way it seemed to be taunting the both of us.

  He stared at me and sixty full seconds of awkwardness passed before he took a tentative step closer. “It doesn’t matter what I think.”

  “You said I wasn’t paying attention to the details,” I prompted. “What did you mean by that?”

  Nico looked down at the floor, running his shoes over the tile. I had a fleeting thought of how Vida used to call the Greens “squeakers” because of the way they all seemed to shuffle their feet as they walked. “The Oasis plan is okay,” he said finally. “The way we have it now makes sense. Based on the size of the camp, there’ll only be two or three camp controllers, and it’ll be easy for you to figure out who is in charge of security and sending the status updates to their network. It won’t work that way at Thurmond.”

  I watched him wring his hands, still unable to look at me. “There’s going to be, what, two dozen camp controllers in the Control Tower? That was the estimate in…in Clancy’s files. Its position at the center of the camp means that anyone forcing their way in through the gate is going to have to fight through all of the rings of cabins to get to it to subdue the PSFs and controllers inside, and by then the camp controllers will have called for reinforcements. Even if you found a way to subdue all of them, it would still be too late. All they’d have to do is turn on the White Noise and we’d be done. The power generator and backup generator are all on the camp premises, and I have a feeling cutting the power would automatically trigger an alarm on the military’s network.”

  In the space of two minutes, he’d managed to chisel my confidence down to dust. “So we’ll need a bigger attack force. One that can work faster, get them in and out.”

  “Liam’s idea about trying to get the parents to storm the camp might work,” he offered, “but its success depends half on us being able to inspire civilians to revolt and come after the camps, and half on whether or not the PSFs would fire on civilians or figure out some other way to deter them.”

  “He has an actual plan?” I asked.

  “Not in the technical definition of the word. I just heard some kids asking him about what he would do.” Nico shrugged. “His option isn’t perfect, either.”

  “Is there a third option?” I asked.

  Finally Nico stood up and, with tentative
, halting steps, walked beside me. I tried to offer him the marker, but he didn’t take it. “Are you sure you want to know?”

  “Try me.”

  “The only way I can think of to disable the camp controller’s access to the camp’s systems—not even disable or disarm the system itself, but lock them out and keep the system running so no one outside notices anything amiss—is to install a Trojan horse program in their system and control it remotely. They’ll be so disoriented that the tactical team will have an easier time of it.”

  “Is that something we could upload into their server?” The League had given us a limited education on technology and the way viruses worked, but this was out of my depth.

  “No, the programs don’t install automatically like a virus. Someone has to install it,” he said. “And with all of the security safeguards in place, I don’t think one of them would carelessly download any kind of email attachment.”

  “So someone would have to go into Thurmond and install it before the assault,” I said. “But the camp has been closed to new kids for years.”

  “They take escaped kids back into the camp they were originally processed in,” Nico said quietly. “I already started coding the Trojan horse. Cole told me to…”

  I held up a hand to cut him off. “Cole approved this already?”

  He nodded, eyes wide. “He said he’d talk to you about it. I can have it ready in a week. They’ll be powerless to stop it once the program is installed.”

  I felt every last drop of blood drain out of my head in horror.

  “No,” I said, horrified. “No way—”

  “I meant me,” Nico said quickly. “Not you. I could bring the Trojan horse program in on a flash drive, the same way we’re bringing the cameras into Oasis. Glasses frames. Have you seen them?” Nico crossed the room, retrieving a pair of glasses with black plastic frames.

  I had to lean against the desk to stay vertical. “Nico—no.”

  “It’s already installed—right there,” he said, ignoring me and pointing to one of two shiny silver screws that looked like they were holding the frames together. “This is the camera, and this is just a screw the frames don’t need. We had to make them seem as real as possible. Tommy said they’re fine, so he’ll get this pair. For Thurmond, maybe I could take one of the thicker frames—break up one of the arms that hooks behind the ear and replace a piece of it with a small flash drive? It’s either that or embedding it under my skin, but they still do strip searches, don’t they? The cut would be too obvious.”