People lie. I want the truth, the throbbing, jagged truth that others want to keep hidden. That’s where true power over someone comes from. Finding your way to that authentic fear or doubt or shame and seizing it, wrapping it around your fingers like strings. You can make just about anyone dance that way.
My father has one kind of mind. His secrets are the most powerful on the planet. They are terrible. Wonderful. Hideous. Grand. Many people have died for them, and even more would pay a king’s ransom to know the stories he’s buried along with the bodies. When I looked into his mind, I saw war, bomb blasts, rising tides, the deaths of countless people slashed across the globe like a trail of blood spatter. For years, he barely spared me a glance, but I saw everything in him. I had leashes on all of his ghosts.
My mother had the other kind, and, in the end, it was her secrets that destroyed me.
The muffled voices from the hotel’s ballroom echo down the hallway, bouncing off the frames of clichéd art reproductions until they reach where I sit on a bench. Close enough to hear, too far to be seen.
Somewhere, an elevator dings as it opens. It’s not her faint, dragging steps that announce her arrival, but the way the air charges as she approaches. The way it used to be for me.
“Come to laugh, have you? Enjoy it.” There’s still a rasp in my voice days after the procedure. My bruised face is reflected back at me in the window, darkening the sight of the sprawling parking lot below.
Even after all that she’s been through, Ruby walks with hesitation, an uncertainty that she belongs. It’s only when she comes closer that I see her reflection behind mine in the glass. There’s a walking cast around one of her legs, and her movements are labored.
I suppose I should wonder how she got it, but I don’t. My head still burns with the images of everything we could have done, if she hadn’t been so stupid. If she’d just accepted herself, rather than drowning in her own misery and insecurities. Had anyone else been given her power, anyone who wasn’t so weakhearted and sniveling about morality, I wouldn’t be here. None of us would be here, making promises that will turn into nooses, gladly agreeing to our own destruction.
Their destruction.
I’m not one of them. The words burn in me, heavy and unbreakable. There is no one else like me.
The weight of Ruby’s simpering gaze is as unwelcome as always. Her breath hitches, and it’s as if I can feel my baseball cap tightening around my skull, squeezing the sore skin, the stitches. I’m certain I can hear her hummingbird heart thrumming out a frantic pulse.
My stomach turns violently. The strength it took to walk down this hallway had been enough to force me to rest on the bench. I can’t even steel my face now, let alone sit up straight. She sees it all. I know she does.
This isn’t right.
Ruby still has the power she hated so much. That she doesn’t deserve.
And I have nothing. Nothing except this—this—
My scar will stay beneath the baseball cap until my hair grows back out, masking the place where they inserted the neutering device in my brain. I suppose I should have thanked my father before for his thoughtfulness in requesting no visible scars—Mother had no such qualms. She wanted to brand me with this; she wants the whole world to know I’m as weak and worthless as my father always said I was.
That I’m broken.
“I’m not here to laugh,” she says.
I snort, working my hands into fists. My right one doesn’t curl as tightly. It prickles before a numbness settles over it. “I keep losing feeling in my right fingers. They said they’ve never seen the complication before.”
I don’t know why I tell her this. I should know better than anyone that trying to carve out a piece of your pain for others never works, it just allows some new ache to slip into its place. But in the past, at East River, it was easy enough to use suffering to trigger her interest and compassion. Ruby feels too much. That has always been her problem. She has never hardened, or let herself sharpen enough to cut back at the world.
Even now, I can practically feel the I’m sorry bubbling in her. The line of her mouth flattens, drawing the edge of one of her bruises down, as if she has to seal her lips shut to keep the words from escaping. It’s habit now—I want to know her thoughts. But again, and again, and again, when I reach for the tendrils of power in my mind, I find nothing.
My heart bangs against my chest. The gunshot wound, neatly stitched and carefully cleaned, flares with new pain, like something is threatening to claw out of my body.
“I told you this would happen, didn’t I?” I say. “That the choice all of you were stupidly chasing would end up in the hands of the people who put you away in the first place. It didn’t have to be this way.”
“No,” she says, an edge to her voice. “It didn’t have to.”
When I finally turn toward her, she only grows, filling the hallway like a nightmare. Watching her, every hair on my body rises. It takes everything I have to hold in the scream that’s threatening to tear out of me, to reach out with both hands and wrap them around her throat.
Why did you do this? Why did you do this? Why did you do this?
For the first time in the year I’ve known her, she doesn’t flinch as she holds my gaze. I’m the one to look away, disgust stewing in the pit of my stomach. She stares at me like a child who’s bumped his head and is now sitting on the floor wailing. I hear her voice in my mind as loudly as if she had placed it there herself, and I can’t be sure she hasn’t.
You did this to yourself.
I try to clench my right hand again, static filling my ears. Ruby watches me with the cool, unflinching gaze of someone who devours and no longer fears being consumed. I can’t stay like this. I can’t just accept that she can come in and take anything she wants from my mind and I’ll never know.
I’m not powerless. I can’t be.
The question has been rooted in my mind since my mother brought me here this morning. I shouldn’t want the answer, I know. I am already stripped down in front of her. I am an exposed nerve. What does it matter, anyway, when she already knows? I have her secrets, and she has mine.
“What happened to Nico?” I ask quietly.
Ruby’s expression hardens as she crosses her arms over her chest. The silence between us is filled with the dead. They’re there, just past the corner of my eye, watching. Some accidents, some intentional, all for the future she’s gone and dismantled. I don’t care—I don’t care—I feel their icy breaths against the back of my neck and there’s nothing in me to ward them away, and I don’t care—
Ruby hesitates before answering, “He’s here. Didn’t you see him?”
My shoulders rise and fall with the deep breath I take in. I didn’t. I asked because—because—
I’m just…I need to…
“Did you want to talk to him about something?” she asks. “Maybe about something you regret?”
“I only regret losing control of the situation.” I don’t recognize my own voice. I hate it. I hate this. I just want it to end. I don’t want to be this, not in front of Ruby, not in front of anyone. “But…it doesn’t matter. I can figure a way around this, how to deactivate the device she planted there. How to get everything back. I can do it. I’m closer to the right people than ever. I can find my father, wherever he’s hiding. I can do it.”
Ruby stares at me, not with the pity or hate I expect after everything I’ve done to her. The pressure in my skull is unbearable, and the burning in my throat is there, no matter how hard I fight it.
There are security officers down the hall, watching. They’re tucked just around the corner of the emergency exit. They want me to think they’re gone. But their distance reveals the truth: I’m not a threat. Not anymore. Mother says it’s to give me space, to make sure I’m safe while letting me live, but I had freedom once. I know what it feels like to live in an illusion.
I can’t accept this. I can’t be…this. The knowing—the knowing tears at me. The h
eaviness crushes me. It drives deeper and deeper into me, until I think I’ll drown inside of myself. I am trapped.
I’m trapped.
I see a question in the tilt of her head, the way she angles her chin.
The truth is, we have never needed words to speak. We are different sides of the same coin. We were tossed in the air. She landed right-side up.
I see the question.
Please, I think.
I see Ruby in front of me, her expression blank, her eyes so bright. I see what I’m giving her. What she’ll take from me and carry forever.
A heartbeat, and she’s gone.
The agony pours out of her, muffled by the glass. She’s screaming like I’ve torn the heart from her chest as she bangs up against the cell’s wall. Screaming, and screaming, and screaming. It stirs the satisfaction in me. The payoff for countless weeks of playing innocent, of degrading myself by letting her in. All the seeds I’d planted now bloom with fire and helpless rage.
Ruby screams. I smile, flicking away the scorching tendrils of her reaching mind.
She’s lost once and for all, crashing and burning out of this game of ours in a fit of uncontrolled emotion. Ruby may have kept me in a cage, but I have held her in a net of her own making without her ever realizing it.
I have played the game, and I’ve won. It’s a matter of hours now until I’ll see things through. Days, at most.
Click, click, click.
Nico has stopped yelling at me through that same glass, and he resists looking at either of us as he unlocks the set of three dead bolts on the cell. I hadn’t needed to make him do it. Interesting.
“Leave!” Nico shouts, his chest heaving as he throws open the heavy door. “Disappear again, the way you always do! Get out of here before you ruin everything for us—call off the people you hired to get you out, just…disappear!”
I hesitate to stand up from the stiff cot, watching him.
“Don’t you get it?” Nico rages. “You haven’t hurt the people who hurt you by doing this—you never will, and you won’t admit it to yourself. You can’t even get close to them. The only thing you’ve ever done is hurt the kids who wanted to help you. We all wanted to help you!”
No one can help me.
This is my path. No one crosses into it without my permission or without being under my influence. Nico has always been the exception, and I should have known he would be a problem for me in the end. That day he came to Thurmond, I should have cut him away before I was too weak to resist him taking root in my mind.
“Then you should have stayed out of my way.”
“Why did you help the League get me out of Leda’s program?” Nico asks as I walk toward him. “You gave them the plan to extract me in Philadelphia, didn’t you? But you were the one who left me behind at Thurmond—you left all of us, even after you told us we would get out together, that we would be able to live without fear or shame or pain. Clancy…don’t you remember the pain?”
His voice is a whisper.
The memory is a ceaseless roar. A blinding agony. I can’t let it touch me. Not ever again.
“Why couldn’t you have just let me die like the others?” He breathes the words out like daggers, cutting and jagged. “You told me I had to live, but I wish I had just…I wish I had died, so you couldn’t have used me.”
I cannot move. Nico is a flame flickering in the room’s darkness. If I step toward him, I’ll catch fire. If he doesn’t stop, he’ll burn himself into nothing.
I don’t care.
My lungs squeeze. He is so stupid—he has always been so stupid—
“Why do you have to take every good thing we try to give you and break it into pieces?” Nico asks. “You let them turn you into this…”
Fury spreads like ice in my veins. After all this time, he still doesn’t see it. I made myself. I took the pieces of me that once had been broken and I created something stronger. Better. The world bows to me, not the other way around.
“This is who I am,” I snap. “I won’t let them change me. I won’t let them touch me. Not again.”
“No one is going to force you to have the procedure,” Nico says, his hands up. “You’re free to go. You can disappear. Please…please…just call off the people who are coming. Please, Clance. Please.”
“I told you to stay out of this,” I say, letting the words burn the air between us. “Why can’t you ever listen?”
I could kill him. If he stops me, I could kill him. He—Nico, he’s always been so weak. He’s always needed me.
“Please.” Even now, he’s begging. He’s begging the way he used to beg the researchers at Thurmond. Please don’t take him again, take me instead, take me—
Why would I leave when I’m on the cusp of finally seeing through everything I’ve envisioned? There is no one left who can stop me now that I’ve broken Ruby. She is still crying, the light from the cell illuminating the tearstains on her face.
We’ll get out of here, won’t we? I shake my head, trying to dislodge the voice. I need to leave this place. I need to go, let my father’s men sweep in and clear these Psi out. After I sweep in to rescue them, I’ll earn their loyalty. Soon, I’ll be able to unify us in a way Ruby never could.
Don’t leave me.
Bile burns in my throat. I swallow it back down, trying to roll my shoulders out. Maybe for now…maybe I shouldn’t leave him here with the others.
“It’s too late,” I say. “If you weren’t so stupid, you’d have realized that. Can’t you hear it? They’re on the roof. They’re here.”
“But you could get them to leave. You could make sure they go.”
I could. I won’t. I’m about to tell him as much when a voice from the nearby doorway interrupts us.
“Who’s here?” my mother asks, sounding clearer than she has since I tore through her mind and shredded her thoughts like confetti. “Who did you call to get you?”
Hatred whips me square in the center of my chest. I have to take a breath, the power in my mind crackling with anticipation of what I’ll do to her. “Hello, Mother. Were you hoping I’d leave without saying good-bye?”
The room’s light seems to feed the brightness of her blond hair, her bloodless face. She looks more like a ghost than a human. Maybe she is one. It’s her betrayal that’s haunted me more than anything my father could have done.
“Who did you call?” she repeats. I hate that calm voice she uses—the same one she used on all of her irrational patients. She still doesn’t get it. She’s not my mother now—mothers don’t abandon their sons, they don’t work against them to destroy their lives. By coming here, she’s nothing more than a willing victim.
“Who do you think?” I sneer back. “I called Dad.”
I hate her—I hate her—that unfeeling, unmoving expression on her face. The cold mask of a scientist studying a specimen. A buzzing starts at the back of my mind.
Then again, I learned everything about distance—about the unfeeling, methodical way you could cut a person again and again until their desperation bled out of them—from her.
“I told you to leave!” Ruby gasps out, panic dripping from each word.
It’s too late. All of them are too late. I can’t stop something that’s already begun. Certainty burns through me, blazing a path through my mind. I turn away from Nico.
“No, stay,” I tell her. The missing years flood the gulf between us. Some part of me would like to thank her for what her absence and neglect allowed me to become, but she’ll understand her part in this when I push her deep into that same darkness where she left me. “Clearly, last time didn’t take. We’ll have to try again, and this time Ruby won’t be there to help you.”
I’m thrown back a step as an explosion cracks overhead, vibrating through the bones of the building. It’s time.
I turn toward Nico, but he’s still facing the door, his face stiff with terror. I spin around just as my mother raises the shining gun in her hand and points it at me.
“I love you,” she says, and fires.
The pain slams through me. I choke on it.
She fires again, and the agony moves through my leg. Hot, gurgling blood bursts up from under my hand.
Nico turns away, his face covering his hands. They all turn away.
Except Ruby.
I try to hold it. That last sight of them. I want this anger as a knife, a blade I can use to protect myself. I need to protect myself. I have nothing else.
A heartbeat, and it’s gone.
Hayes is breathing heavily; the back of his shirt is striped with sweat and freckled with mud splatter. He doesn’t care that he’s spent the last week smelling like a pig that’s rolled around in its own urine. Considering I found him hiding out in a barn, I’m likely not far off.
“How much further?” he complains. His meaty neck is thicker than his head. I’ve never seen anything like it. He does not require any sort of coaxing with my mind to do what I ask of him. “You said we’d reach it today.”
The sunlight streams down through the frost-covered trees, giving the impression it should be warmer than it is. A brisk wind slices by us, cutting through my thin jacket. The leaves turned only a few days ago, their green stems suddenly flaring with the rarest shades of reds and oranges. They flutter down around us, spiraling as they fall, then, just before reaching the mud, they catch the breeze and fly again.
I know that feeling well.
But the sudden, deeper chill of autumn will sink its teeth into the trees. By tomorrow, the glowing leaves will drop. Soon enough, they’ll be crushed down into the same mulch and mud that coats my shoes now.
I shift my weight, ignoring the blister at my heel. Tugging my jacket sleeves back down, I tell him, “Water.”
My bottle has been empty for hours. Hayes doesn’t even glance back as he thrusts his out toward me. I wipe the mouth of it before drinking, then use the rest to wash my face and hands. The grime never goes away, no matter how much I scrub. I feel it seeping into my pores, trying to turn me feral.
In the Afterlight (Bonus Content) Page 50