This was what I knew about the state of Rhode Island: it was south of Massachusetts. Therefore, we were going to Providence. And then I was going to look for a sign for Hartford, the only city I knew in Connecticut, and then one for New Jersey. And that was how my fourth grade education was going to get me down the eastern seaboard, at least until I found myself a goddamn map and a goddamn car.
“Wait…” Jude sputtered, gasping for breath. “Wait, wait, wait…”
“We need to move faster,” I warned. I’d been dragging him along behind me, but I’d carry him if I had to.
“Hey!” He let his body go limp, dropping to his knees. I jerked back with the suddenness of it, almost losing my balance.
“Come on!” I snapped. “Get up!”
“No!” he cried. “Not until you tell me where the heck we’re going! Barton’s probably been searching for us all night!”
The highway was lined on either side by hills and pockets of dense trees, but we were still far too exposed. Every time a passing freight truck bathed us in white headlights, I had to steel myself all over again.
I took a deep breath.
“Do you have your panic button?” I asked. “Jude—look at me. Do you still have it?”
“Why?” he asked, patting around his pants pockets. “I think so. But—”
“Toss it.”
His thick brows were drawn together, the tip of his long nose red and running with cold. He used his free arm to swipe it against his coat. “Ruby, what’s going on? Please, just talk to me!”
“Toss it,” I said. “We aren’t going back to LA. At least not yet.”
“What?” Jude sounded small, far away. “Are you serious? We’re…ditching?”
“We are going back—eventually,” I said, “but we have another, special Op first. We need to keep going before someone comes looking for us.”
“Who assigned it?” Jude demanded. “Cate?”
“Agent Stewart.”
Jude didn’t look convinced, but I had him on his feet now.
“I have to recover information from one of his sources,” I explained, trying to make it sound as mysterious and dangerous as I could. And it worked. The nervous look he’d been wearing changed to one of interest. And a small, fizzing excitement.
“It’s vital to the mission of the League, but I couldn’t let Barton know the real reason for leaving. I had to figure out a way to make sure that Rob was gone by the time we get back.”
“You should have told me!” Jude said. “From the beginning—I could have handled it.”
“It’s classified. A need-to-know Op,” I said, adding, “a dangerous one.”
“Then why the heck are you taking me?” he asked.
“Because if you go back now, they’ll kill you just like they killed Blake.”
I felt ashamed—the feeling snuck up on me, gripping me by the throat. I’d taken him without giving him any kind of choice, and then simplified the truth to make this reality go down that much easier. Hadn’t I hated Cate for doing the exact same things to me? Had she felt as desperate to get me to agree as I did with Jude now?
Jude slowed again, looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “I was right,” he whispered. “That is why he picked me. I was right.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “You were.”
Jude nodded, working his jaw back and forth, trying to get the words out. Finally, he reached into his EMT jacket and pulled out the familiar black button, tossing it aside.
“It was dead anyway,” he muttered, pulling back out of my grip. “I fried that car and everything in it, remember?”
Right. Of course. The trackers in his clothes would be dead, too.
“All right,” he said, his voice sounding stronger. This was the Jude I had been counting on—the one who thought all Ops would be as cool as the video games he played with Blake and Nico.
I reached over and brushed the snow powder from his hair and shoulders. “You have to follow what I say exactly, understand? We’re going completely off the grid, and no one can know where we are. Not Cate, not Vida, not even Nico. If they find us and bring us in, we ruin every shot we have at this Op—at making sure the League is a safe place.”
As quickly and simply as I could, I laid the Op out for him. Everything, from where we were headed first to what Rob and the others had been planning. I gave him a sliver of the truth: that I had been traveling with Liam for a while, but we’d split up before Cate brought me in and I’d lost track of him.
Would it really be so awful to just tell him the whole truth? I was surprised there was a part of me that was even tempted to talk about those last few precious moments in the safe house. It just…didn’t make sense to complicate everything by letting him into that moment of good-bye. I was the only one I wanted living in it, thinking about it, dreaming of it. And, to be honest, I needed him to trust me absolutely now, more than he ever had, if this was going to work. If I told him what I had done to Liam, every look Jude would give me from that moment on would be tainted by the fear I could do it to him, too. If he could even bring himself to look at me at all.
This was the kid who had sat with me for every meal, when half of the League was too afraid to look me in the eye. He didn’t flinch when I touched him; he waited for me to get back from Ops to make sure I was safe. As annoying as it had seemed to me then, I had never thought about what it would be like to lose it. Him.
Jude listened to it all, strangely calm for him. He didn’t react at all when I told him what was on the flash drive Liam was carrying. At first I thought he had stopped paying attention, but at the end of it all, he nodded and simply said, “Okay.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I was fully aware of how stupid that question was. What wasn’t wrong? “Are you feeling okay? Nothing bumped, bent, or broken, right?”
“Oh, uh, no, I’m fine, all in one piece, at least.” He knocked on the top of his head. “It’s just I was wondering…”
“About?” I prompted.
“About before. Before-before, I mean.” He turned to look at me. “Did you have to deal with the PSFs a lot at your camp? It’s just—you were so calm. Don’t get me wrong, when you were all, Get lost! it was pretty epic, but you didn’t seem, you know, scared.”
My brows rose. “You think I wasn’t scared?”
“I wasn’t scared, either!” Jude added quickly. “It just made me wonder about before you came to HQ.…”
“Are you trying to ask me what I was doing before Cate brought me in?”
“Well, yeah!” Jude said. “We all wondered—there were rumors, but they seemed really hard to believe.”
“Really.”
“Really.” Seeing that his line of questioning was a one-way road into Silenceville, USA, he changed the subject as awkwardly as he could manage.
“Do you really think the scientists discovered what caused it?” Jude asked. “Idiopathic Ado-blah-blah-blah?”
“Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration,” I supplied. Otherwise known as the reason most of us died and the rest of us turned into freaks. How could he ever forget what those letters stood for?
“Right, whatever,” Jude said. “Oh man, can you imagine what the League could do with that?”
I could hear the hope underlying his voice and felt my heart break, just that little bit. How could I tell him it would be a miracle if we actually found Liam, let alone found him still in possession of the flash drive?
“I think about it a lot,” he said, “don’t you? There’s a lot I don’t understand, and Cate and the others don’t really give me anything to work with, but it’s sort of cool to think our brains somehow mutated. I mean, it would be slightly cooler to know how and why that happened, but still cool.”
I used to think about it, when I was at Thurmond and there was very little else to focus on outside of my own misery. I spent countless days staring up at the bottom of Sam’s bunk, wondering how and why any of this had happened to us. Why some of us
were Green and others Orange and others dead. But almost from the exact moment Cate got me out, I forced myself not to dwell on it. There were more important things to focus on—like surviving. Not being recaptured. Liam, and Chubs, and Zu.
“I know it’s dumb, but I’ve been trying to puzzle it all out. Sometimes I really do think it’s a virus, and then other times…I mean, how could it be a virus or disease if it barely spread outside of the US?” Jude was saying. “What was different about us from those other kids, the ones who died?”
All fair points. All distracting points. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We have to find Cole’s brother first.”
Jude nodded. “Man, that’s going to be so…weird. Meeting him, I mean. I remember when he ditched. No one even noticed he was gone until they did the headcount at the end of the simulation.”
I glanced over. “You knew Liam?”
Jude glanced up, his amber eyes widening slightly. “Oh, no, not, like, personally. Knew of him. He was training at Georgia HQ, and Vida and me have always been in LA. Liam’s the reason they moved all of the Psi training to California, though. Less chance for people to go missing when everyone is underground, I guess.”
Right. Of course. Liam wouldn’t have been in California. I was surprised at how much better the thought made me feel, knowing that he hadn’t been forced to live in that dank hole in the ground.
“Is Liam one of the people you search for on the PSF network every week?” Jude asked. “Nico mentioned it once. Are we going to look for them, too?”
I felt my patience snap like the icy layer over the snow we were crunching through. I don’t think it ever stood a chance against tonight.
“Because it’s none of your business!” I hissed. “You wouldn’t even be here if you hadn’t waded into such deep shit!”
“I know, okay? I know!” Jude said, throwing his hands up. “You don’t like us, you don’t like the League, you don’t want to be Leader, you don’t want to talk about yourself or Cate or training or your favorite food or your family and friends. Fine. Fine! Wait—what are you doing?”
I thought I had imagined them as we were walking; they’d been little more than distant, unidentifiable shapes. But as I guided us down the crest of the next hill, the woods suddenly pulled back, revealing a small, cramped neighborhood street.
I heard Jude slide to a stop at the edge of the icy street when he saw that these houses had lights on. That there were cars in the driveways and people moving behind the window curtains, ready to mark another Wednesday as finished.
A man with a beat-up truck was trying to plow the street, struggling through the thick blanket of snow. I nudged Jude back behind me again, eyes on the house directly across the street, an idea worming its way up through my haze of exhaustion. There was a small silver sedan parked in the driveway, but, more importantly, I had seen a blurry shape through the little window of the house’s front door.
Sure enough, as soon as the plow passed, a woman stepped out and turned to lock the door behind her. Her hair was an ashy blond, shot through with strands of silver. It peeked out between the emerald knit cap and black coat she was wearing. I saw a flash of her dress as she buttoned her coat up over it. The cut and design made it look like something a waitress in a diner would wear.
She swung her keys around her fingers as she walked, glancing up at the night sky and the snow falling in soft breaths around her. I waited for the beep beep of the doors unlocking before I moved.
“Come on,” I said, grabbing Jude’s arm.
The woman heard us coming. Her back went rigid with panic when she saw my face reflected behind hers in the car’s dark window. I saw fear chase confusion in her eyes and took the opportunity to slip one of my cold hands up the sleeve of her coat to her warm, bare flesh. She smelled like pineapples and sunshine, and her mind was just as bright. It was a quick touch; it had to be—so fast I didn’t even experience the usual flood of memories. I wasn’t even sure I had her until she blinked slowly at me, her eyes going glassy.
“Get in the car,” I said to Jude, looking over my shoulder to where he stood, mouth agape. “We have a driver.”
The benefits of coercing someone to drive us were twofold: she couldn’t report the car stolen and phone in the plates, and, even better, she could pay tolls and get us waved through security stations set up at town borders by the National Guard or police. After taking two seconds to really think it through, I compelled her to take us to whatever was the nearest transportation hub. In a perfect world, Amtrak and all of its many lines would still have been around, but the economic crash did such a bang-up job exposing its many flaws, it lasted only a year before collapsing. Now the government ran two electric trains up and down to the major cities on the eastern seaboard each day, mostly to shuttle National Guardsmen, PSFs, and senators around. The Elite Express, they called it, and tickets were priced to match its name.
Train jumping would be a lot riskier than driving a car, but I couldn’t shake the nightmarish image of us having to stop and siphon gas every ten miles. It would eat away every valuable hour we needed. We could luck out and get a nearly empty train, at least for a few cities. If it looked too dangerous, or the train started to feel too crowded with unwanted eyes, we could always bail early. I had a way of making us disappear.
“Turn on the radio, please,” I said. “One of the news stations.”
Jude and I were crouched behind the two front seats, nestled in the hollow of space between them and the backseat. It was awkward to sit that way and still be reaching around to touch her to maintain the connection. I took a deep breath, slowly pulling my hand away, but focusing on that shimmering line of connection between our minds. Maybe this was how Clancy worked his way up to not needing a physical touch to establish a mental connection with a person—by letting go for a little longer each time.
The woman obeyed, and the speakers behind my head burst to life with the sound of a catchy commercial jingle. Amazing—they were still advertising pool supplies, even though a good portion of Americans had lost their homes.
She flipped through the channels, skipping over music and static until she reached a man’s droning voice.
“—the Unity Summit, as it is being called, will be held on neutral ground in Austin, Texas. The state’s governor, who recently denied allegations of aligning with the Federal Coalition in California, will moderate the talks between several key members of President Gray’s staff and the Coalition to see if common ground between the rival governments can be reached in time for the completion of the construction on the new Capitol building in Washington, DC, on Christmas day.
“President Gray had this to say about the possibly historic event.” The voice changed abruptly from the grave tone of the reporter to the silky, easy tone of a president. “After nearly a decade of tragedy and suffering, it is my sincerest hope that we can come together now and start making strides toward reunification. My advisers will be presenting economic stimulus plans over the course of the summit, including programs to jump-start the construction industry and return Americans to the homes they may have lost in economic calamity of recent years.”
Calamity. Right.
“Do you think Gray will finally give up the presidency if they agree to the terms?” Jude asked.
I shook my head. I didn’t know Gray personally, but I knew his son, Clancy. And if the son was anything like the father, Gray definitely had another motive for wanting this summit to happen. The last thing he would want is to lose control.
Clancy. I pinched the bridge of my nose, forcing the thought out.
The nearest Amtrak station ended up being the one in Providence, Rhode Island—an enormous concrete building that might have once been beautiful before the times and graffiti artists found it. I glanced at the clock that had been built into its lone tower’s face, but it either wasn’t working or it had been 11:32 for the past four minutes by the dashboard clock’s estimate. There were a few cars in the nearby parking
lot, but at least three dozen people piled off a city bus that rumbled up to the drop-off lane.
I touched the woman’s shoulder, surprised to feel her jump. Her mind was very quiet now, as milky white as the sky outside. “We need you to buy us train tickets that’ll get us to North Carolina—as close to Wilmington as possible. Do you understand?”
The loose flesh on the woman’s cheeks quivered slightly as she nodded and unbuckled her seat belt. Jude and I watched her stagger her way through the new snow, heading for the automatic sliding doors. If this worked…
“Why are we trying to take the train?” Jude asked. “Isn’t that going to be dangerous?”
“It’ll be worth it,” I said. “It’ll take us twice as long to drive if we have to keep stopping for gas.”
“What if someone sees us or there are PSFs on the train?” he continued.
I pulled the knit cap off my head and threw it to him, along with the thick white scarf I had wrapped around my neck. When we were seated on the train, I’d be able to cover him up with my jacket, but until then…we would just have to find a dark corner.
The woman came back faster than I expected, her eyes on the ground, something white clutched in her hands. She opened the driver’s door and slid into the seat, letting in a breath of freezing air.
“Thank you,” I said when she handed me the tickets. Then, as Jude stepped outside, I added, “I’m really sorry about this.”
I only looked back at the car once as we headed into the station. I had told her to wait two minutes, then drive back to her house. The woman—maybe it was my tired eyes playing tricks on me or the whorls of snow between us—but when the headlights of a passing car flashed through her windshield, I swear I saw the gleam of tears on her cheeks.
She had been able to get us tickets to Fayetteville, North Carolina, which could have been clear on the other side of the state from Wilmington as far as I knew. Worse, the boarding time was listed as 7:45 A.M., a good ten hours away. It was too much time to kill, too much of an opportunity to be caught.
The inside of the station wasn’t nearly as ornate as the outside of it was. There was too much concrete for it to be truly beautiful. I found us a bench in a corner, facing a wall of unplugged arcade games, and we planted ourselves there and didn’t move, not for anything. The overnight trains came and went, feet shuffled behind us, the arrivals-and-departures board clicked and spun and beeped.
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