A heartbeat, and it’s gone.
I am taken out of Thurmond in a wheelchair. I can walk, but it is better if they think I can’t. That I am too weak. The tremor in my hands, the way my right eye blinks out of synch with my left, tells the story for me.
The spring air shifts around me, bringing the smell of clean grass and the exhaust of the nearby car’s running engine. The monsters in the white lab coats walk behind me, muttering their disappointments about the lack of photo opportunities, wondering aloud if the First Lady or the president himself is in the unmarked car. The woman wheeling me out gives a nervous little laugh, talking over my head.
“They’ll want to clean him up before they put him in front of any cameras,” she says.
I would speak, to tell her how true it is, but the words come out slurred. I stare straight ahead at the gleaming black shell of the car’s exterior. No visible scars. That had been my father’s only request in his authorization to let them run their tests, their treatments. I have no visible scars. They followed orders perfectly. Once my hair grows out, the last traces of cut and burned skin will disappear.
I blink, trying to clear the haze from my eyes. I force my fingers to curl around the chair’s arm one at a time until they clench it. The soldier walking beside me, his assault rifle tucked tight against his chest, glances up at the canopy they’ve erected between the building and the waiting car. They bring me out the same way they brought me in a year ago: like a shameful secret.
I want to grab his arm, release some of the electricity still charging through my mind, still licking at my bones, into him. But I’m saving it for my mother—for that moment she sees my face.
No. Not yet. For this to work, I need time. I need to put each piece in its right place, in the right order, and that requires patience. For now, it’s enough to imagine how good it will feel to come back to this building and tear it down with my hands. To burn it with the white coats still inside.
We’re getting out of here, right?
I shake my head, trying to let the sound of the engine drown out my thoughts.
Don’t leave me.
“Here we are,” one of the doctors says. A man in a suit—a Secret Service agent—opens the car door. I see a pair of legs, black trousers—not Mother—but another agent steps up and blocks my view. Together, the two men lift me out of the wheelchair and guide me inside the car.
“Now, Clancy, be sure to tell your father about the progress we’ve made here,” one of the white coats says. “I’m sure he’ll be interested to know how well we’ve taken care of you.”
The interior of the car smells like leather and cigar smoke. I know who is inside before I open my eyes.
Not Mother.
Not Father.
“Yes. Yes, I’m sure he will,” James Stern says. “I’ll let him know myself.”
My father’s chief of staff gives a little wave to the others, passing one of the white coats a slip of something that I can’t see. “Keep me updated on the other children, won’t you?”
We’re getting out of here, aren’t we?
“Of course, sir. Our best to the president and First Lady.”
They didn’t come.…They…
My skull feels as if it’s been cleaved in half. I try to lift a hand to keep my brains from spilling out, until I remember where I am, that the sunlight coming through the front windshield isn’t the operating table light, that the heat in my blood isn’t electricity, that the person sitting beside me isn’t Nico.
Don’t leave me.
The door shuts to my left, trapping me inside the dimmed body of the car. The front doors open as the agents climb back inside.
“Now,” Stern says as the wheels crunch against the gravel. “That wasn’t so terrible, was it? You must feel better.”
“Where…” I swallow again and again until I know the words will sound right. “Where…is…Mom? Dad?”
Stern’s eyes widen slightly. It will be days before I get my voice back. My real voice, not the one soft at the edges, dulled by pain and the heat and pressure of the last charge they ran through my skull just to be sure it took.
“Well, your father is busy, of course,” he says. “There’s much that’s happened. Many more cases of your, ah, affliction. If you need anything from him, I will ask. He’s requested you be taken to Camp David to recuperate in the meantime.”
No—I need to see him right away. I have so much work to do. I need him to see me. Feel sorry, just for a second, about what he did. Forget, just for a second, about what I can do to him. I just need a moment alone with him.
“How…long?” I ask.
Stern takes his phone out of his navy jacket’s inner pocket, types something into it, and then slides it back in. “However long it takes.”
I want to ball my fists up. Scream and scream and scream until their heads explode with the sound. A ragged, wild sound is thrashing inside of my chest. However long it takes is never—he will never trust me enough to put himself in a position of vulnerability again, not while he holds office. I swallowed every last bit of my pride to get out of that place, to play pitiful and weak well enough for them not to suspect me of altering their perception of my scan results, or the nurse I tasked with modifying the reports. For nothing.
Smart. For once in his life, my father has used his brain.
“Mom?” I ask. If not him, I’ll take the other. She deserves it after what she did to me.
Stern sighs, letting his head fall back against the seat. The car’s path smooths out as we find paved road. “She and your father are…taking a break. She will come see you when she is ready. You’re, what? Ten now? Nine? I’m sure you can be a big boy about this. I’m sure it won’t be long.”
It will be never.
I think that it should feel like the world is collapsing in on me, that my blood is roiling in me, fizzing in panic. But I feel…nothing. I tilt my head to the side, considering this, turning over the truth, letting it sharpen in my mind. If she’s hiding, it means that she is afraid. It means that it’ll be a challenge to find her.
Good.
The car’s radio jumps as it catches a station, only to lose it again before long. A newscaster’s voice leaps out of it, and all I hear is “President Gray’s agenda is—” before it hits static again.
Stern looks away from me, past my head and out of my window. I follow his gaze, unsurprised to find him fixated on the frames of the cabinlike structures being built up in the fields around Thurmond’s main building.
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “That’s not going to be enough.”
I lean against the window, my eyes sliding back over to him as he tugs his phone out of his pocket again.
We’d been forced to listen to the endless construction for weeks, round-the-clock hammering and drilling and squealing metal being bent and welded into place. I’d hoped, based on the whispers of Thurmond’s staff, that it meant there were more of us. Many, many more of us.
The splitting pain at the center of my mind eases, releasing me from its grip as soft as a sigh. Good. There’s still a way to see this through.
More of us means more Reds—easily controlled, easily broken Reds that can be bent with far more ease than the skeletal cabins at Thurmond that will eventually house them. My father is just starting his second term in office; crisis has a way of making even the worst of men seem appealing to people, simply because they are one consistent element in a world rapidly changing around them.
More of us means that this isn’t a fluke of genetics and bad luck, as the white coats had hoped. It means that it is a virus after all—that we are the plague.
For what I have planned to work, my father needs to be in power for a good long while. If there’s one thing Thurmond taught me, people can break if you take away their security and provide the hand that lifts them out of that dark place. To be the light in the darkness, all rival flames have to be blown out. Extinguished.
If there is no one left in th
e line of presidential succession, then who is to say the rules couldn’t be rewritten? That a president couldn’t stay in power—until, of course, things stabilized.
Then the plague can sweep over him and his government, too, crushing them the way they’re trying to crush us—the ones with true power.
Stern’s phone rings, the sound blaring over and over as he hesitates to answer it. Finally, he does with a “Yes, sir?” and a glance my way.
I look at the window, watching his faint reflection.
“Of course. I’ll coordinate with the Chinese ambassador on this. And yes, he’s here. Do you want to speak with him?”
I almost laugh again as Stern’s face contorts ever so slightly at my father’s undoubtedly cold response. As if he hasn’t worked for the man for over a decade—as if he wouldn’t know that my father is too much of a coward to face me now.
He’s always been stupid, yet fear has at least triggered his survival instincts. My father needs the distance to feel safe, but I have time to play this game out. I will be the son he’s always dreamed of: intelligent, well-behaved, devoted to his legacy. And if he still won’t see me as I play this charade, well, then. No matter.
I’ll only need Stern, the voice already whispering in his ear, telling him what to do.
This time I do laugh. It’s pure sound, a deep one, like the hourly bell at Thurmond that carefully keeps time in a place where it doesn’t seem to exist.
A heartbeat, and it’s gone.
The kid’s had an eye for Nico since they climbed out of the same bus. It was only a matter of time. There must be some kind of law of the universe that says all opposites spinning through it have to eventually collide. The oldest kid and the youngest. The tallest and the shortest. A red-classified and a green-classified.
The cafeteria’s lights stammer, flashing for a second as the power is diverted to the therapy rooms upstairs. I watch it happening like the reels of my father’s old family movies. The scene flickers, each second stitching together like separate frames. Nico goes to bring his empty plastic lunch tray to the window for cleaning. His feet drag from the effects of the morning’s tests. The right side of his face droops like wax sliding off a candle. He turns around, touching it.
The red-classified kid is there, shoving at him with his own tray.
Nico falls.
The boy drops the tray and its garbage on him, snarling, “Get out of my way, baby.”
Nico shakes, staring up at him, clutching at the unfeeling side of his face as the linoleum around him blackens with heat. One of the nearby soldiers keeping watch beside the room’s only window straightens, swinging toward them, rifle in hand.
I stand up.
I’m faster.
It’s like the boy’s mind is all the more moldable for the fire that’s trapped inside of him. Once I’m in his thoughts, I’m scorched. They blaze white-hot as I touch them, shoving them aside until I can find that part of him, that space in his mind that controls his movements.
I use his own arms to slam the tray up into his face. Again.
Again.
Again.
His nose bursts open, and specks of blood fly from his battered face like sparks, gleaming under the fluorescent lights. Something in my chest breaks open as I crawl deeper into his memories. Beyond the tests, the ghostly images of the staff at Thurmond, shadowy baseball fields, and empty school hallways, there’s a door—there’s a door glowing at the seams.
I want to know what’s behind it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I see the other soldiers springing forward, scrambling across the room, searching the few other orange-classifieds for the source. The others, the ones in blue, green, yellow, and red scrubs are evenly spaced out at the tables. They shrink from the sight of the boy battering himself and collapsing to his knees, even as they know to put their faces down, palms flat on the table.
The red-classified boy falls to the ground, crumpling as I reach for that door. The heat pouring from it casts a gold glow in my mind. There are bad thoughts here.
I want to see them.
The first soldier looks between the red-classified boy and Nico, who is trying to crawl away. Then she looks at me. Her eyes narrow as she reaches for the small black device clipped to her belt, just on the other side of her Taser.
“Patient Gray!” she shouts. “Stop it!”
The red-classified boy thrashes on the ground as I dig in.
“Clancy!” someone calls. “Clancy, what are you doing?”
He hurt you.
I drive forward harder, pulling at the door, searching for the way in. Finally, it cracks with a gasp of heat that washes through me.
The boy goes still, unmoving, as I search through his mind’s deepest darkness.
It would be so easy…so easy to hold on to this thread of him. Yank it around, point his fire toward those who deserve its heat.…
“Clancy!”
Nico’s voice is lost to the screeching of that little black device in the soldier’s hand. I feel myself dragged back, out of the boy’s mind, away from the table, tossed out onto the cold floor. My mind is incinerated by the pulsing, piercing static. I try to cling to the words, even as I see the other kids dragged down to the cold tile, even as one soldier brings his knee and full weight down on the center of my back.
I saw it, I saw it, I know what to do—they can’t take this away. The soldier brings his device down right next to my ear and tries to blow me apart. Every thought bursts into ash, exploding with my consciousness.
Every thought but one.
I see Nico’s face where it’s pressed down to the floor. He watches me through the legs of the benches and tables. Boots cross the path between us as blackness crawls over my mind, yanking itself over my eyes like a blanket.
Fire. They can’t take that away. Fire.
Later, with the only light streaming in from the door’s window, we lie on our cots, staring at each other across a different room, this time in silence.
“We’re going to get out of here, aren’t we?” Nico whispers.
I will, I think. If nothing else, I will. There is a thought in my head, one that won’t leave. It circles around and around, remembering how soft the red-classified boy’s mind was. All I needed was the right touch to shape him, like building a sand castle. The right command.
I’m getting out of here.
It would be too obvious to quickly convince everyone here that he and I are both “rehabilitated,” and, based on what he cries out in his dreams, I don’t know that he has anyplace to go. I can’t keep watching out for him. There are other things I need to be doing.
Nico…he could stay here. He would understand why he’d need to wait. By the time I returned for him and the others, it would all be in place. No one would hurt either of us, not without us hurting them worse.
“Clancy…” Anxiety ripples through his words. “We’re going to get out of here one day, aren’t we?”
Instead of answering, I slip into his mind, soft as a feather, and push him into sleep.
A heartbeat, and it’s gone.
The charge fires through me, lighting up every nerve in my body. I see the sparks behind my eyelids, how the crackling, snapping power surges through my veins, along the ridges of my brain.
“Keep his eyes open, I want to monitor his pupils,” a voice says.
I have no eyelashes left. It won’t hurt this time when they rip the tape off my eyelids later, when they finish. The nurse who does it smells like lemon and antibacterial soap, and she won’t stop humming the song that’s playing. Her fingers are hot, jabbing against my brows and cheeks as she applies the tape.
What hurts is the orb of the procedure room’s operating light, burning like a moon above my face. It spreads its waves out, washing through the nurses and researchers in their white coats. Their shapes fade in and out of each other. My vision blacks and reappears, blacks and reappears each time I feel a sharp jab of pressure at the back of my head.
/> “Wait, do that again,” one of the white coats says.
The jab comes again, harder. I surge up into the leather strap across my chest. It groans as I jerk around, trying to break away from the pressure, the pressure—hands curl into fists around the Velcro restraints binding my wrists together, and my legs start to drum against the freezing metal table as much as they can.
“Hold him steadier—it’s affecting the measurement—”
The nurses lean their full weight against my legs, pinning them.
“There—a dip in the scans—”
The pressure releases as quickly as it came. My eyes are looking up at the light—I know they are, because I still feel the heat of it on my face; the tape is still holding my lids open, but all I see is black.
Blind—I start to scream against the plastic bit in my mouth, clenching my teeth around it until I feel my jaw pop. They don’t want me to bite my tongue off, the way that blue-classified girl did. A shock of electricity races across my teeth, sizzling against my tongue. The smell of scorched skin is everywhere, and I start to gag.
I’ll kill them, I’ll kill them—I can’t breathe, the smell—
“His pulse is up—Patient Gray, can you hear me?”
“Yes.” I try to get the word out around the piece of plastic in my mouth. Stop.
They never stop. They won’t stop unless I make them.
My legs twitch, shaking hard enough for the metal links on the restraints to click and clack. They need to stop—
There’s a pinch of pressure in that same spot on my skull, and my vision flashes back. The release shoots through me, making my whole body twist up, then relax. I don’t even feel myself let go until the front of my scrubs are drenched, and the smell of hot urine fills the air.
“Damn it,” one of the nurses grunts out. “Unstrap him, we’ve got to clean this up.”
In the Afterlight (Bonus Content) Page 52