Never Fade tdm-2

by Alexandra Bracken

  I was tired and hungry. There was a coffee cart still open by the ticket windows, the only thing standing between the clerks and sleep, but I didn’t have any money, and I wasn’t desperate enough to use my abilities on the poor guy stuck manning the cart.

  Jude dozed against my shoulder. Every now and then, the automated announcer would come over the speakers with an update on the time or delayed trains. But the silent gaps between them seemed to grow longer with every hour that we waited, and I was beginning to regret the decision more and more. Somewhere around four o’clock, right when I was teetering at the edge of exhaustion, the doubts came storming in. By the time we got down there, I wondered, would Liam still be in North Carolina? He was resourceful when he needed to be. He could cover a huge amount of distance in the time we sat here—in the time it took us to get down there.

  There had been cars in the parking lot. Maybe the smart thing to do was boost one of those and try avoiding the tollbooths and National Guard check stations set up around the bigger cities? No, because that would also mean being spotted by the thousands of highway cameras the government had installed for the exact purpose of looking for kids like us.

  It wasn’t the whoosh of the sliding doors opening that snagged my attention but the heavy steps. Now and then a few people would drift in and out of the station, and a good number of homeless had been allowed to sleep in the heated space for the night, provided they took up a corner and not a bench. But this sounded like a good number of feet; the rubber soles of their shoes squeaked as they struck the tile. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the window clerk sit up straighter.

  I just needed one glance over my shoulder to confirm it. Black uniforms.

  I grabbed Jude and pulled him down off the bench with me, putting it between us and the dozen or so uniformed PSFs pooling in the center of the station.

  “Holy crap,” Jude was whispering, “holy, holy crap.”

  I put a hand on his shoulder, keeping him firmly planted next to me. I knew what he was thinking—the same questions were flashing through my mind. How did they find us? How did they know we would be here? How do we get out?

  Well, the answer to the last question wasn’t to freak out and panic; in one of those rare, fleeting moments when I was grateful for the lessons the League had taught me, I took a deep, steadying breath and began to reassess the situation.

  There were eleven uniformed PSFs taking their seats on the benches near one of the bus gates. Two were women, and both got up to check the monitors. Their hair was neatly braided or combed back, but the men’s looked freshly buzzed. More importantly, at their feet were eleven camo duffel bags, not guns.

  A guy at the center of the group stood, laughing loudly as he made his way over to the vending machines. The others called after him with their orders of Doritos or gum or Pop-Tarts. They weren’t scanning the premises; they weren’t questioning the guy in the ticket booth. They were in uniform, but they weren’t on duty.

  “They’re new recruits,” I told Jude. “Hey, look at me, not them. They’re taking one of the buses to go report for duty somewhere. They’re not looking for us—we just need to find a quiet place to sit until our train comes. Okay?”

  I turned my back toward the soldiers, scanning our section of the open room for a door that might be unlocked or a hallway I hadn’t noticed before. I barely felt Jude stiffen again beside me, but I did feel him yank on my braid, turning my head back toward the sliding doors just as Vida led Barton and the rest of Beta Team into the building. All of them were in street clothes, eyeing the PSFs who hadn’t seemed to notice them at all.

  What’s she doing here? What are any of them doing here? There was no way…no way they could have tracked us.…

  “Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap,” Jude whispered, clutching at me. At least he understood the danger of being brought back to HQ. I didn’t have to explain again that Vida wasn’t here to help us. I looked around frantically from the arcade games, to the Amtrak kiosks, to the nearby women’s restroom. This was so much worse than even I could have imagined. Half of me just wanted to sit down and give in to the overwhelming urge to burst into full-on tears.

  I didn’t stop to break down the plan to Jude, who looked near tears himself at whatever he had just seen. There really was no plan. I dragged him after me—literally dragged him—into the small family restroom.

  The door squeaked as I pushed it open with my shoulder. There were no windows in the restroom, no vents big enough for us to climb out. There was one toilet, one sink, and no way out aside from the way we came in. I reached up and switched off the lights before flipping the lock over. No more than a second later, the door rattled as someone yanked on it.

  I sat down on the floor and I drew my legs up against my chest, trying to steady my breathing. Jude collapsed down next to me. I pressed a single finger to my lips.

  We couldn’t hide in there forever—someone, eventually, would realize the restroom shouldn’t be locked and come with a key. So I counted. I counted out four minutes in my head, stopping and restarting every time I heard someone’s boots clobbering by.

  “Come on,” I whispered, forcing Jude up onto his feet. “We’re going to have to run.”

  We didn’t even get two feet.

  Vida pushed herself up from where she leaned against the wall directly across from us, her brows rising along with the gun in her hand.

  “Hi, friends,” she said sweetly. “Miss me?”

  EIGHT

  EVERY SINGLE WORD that filtered through my mind was of the four-letter variety. “What are you doing here?”

  The triumphant smile I expected to see there never made an appearance. Instead, she gave me a once-over and snorted. “Wow, your danger instincts are set on high-fucking-alert, aren’t they? And they said it would be hard to find you.”

  I pulled the gun out of my waistband slowly and took careful aim. I let the invisible hands inside my mind unfurl, imagining them launching toward her, driving into her thoughts. But…nothing. Nothing at all.

  “How cute,” she said. “I have one of those, too!”

  For one long beat, neither of us moved; her dark eyes flicked down over me, the same way they did when we sparred in training. Sizing me up. Wondering if I’d really do it.

  Neither of us saw him move; one minute Jude was cowering behind me and the next, he had sidled up to Vida, one hand on her shoulder. “I’m really sorry about this.”

  A tiny arc of blue electricity leaped up from the walkie-talkie clipped to her belt, stroking Vida’s skin softly, like a snake’s exploring tongue. Vida must have realized what he was about to do at the same moment I did, but she couldn’t move away fast enough. Her eyes rolled back as she crumpled to the ground.

  “Oh my God,” I said, dropping down beside her to feel for a pulse in her neck.

  “I just gave her a little love zap,” Jude said, every hair on his head standing on end. “She’ll—she’ll come around in a minute, but, Roo, tell me I just did the right thing. I don’t want to leave her here. I don’t think we should go without her, but she wasn’t going to help, and we have to find Liam, and she would have told, and he’s important—”

  “You did the right thing,” I said. “Jude, thank you. Thank you.”

  “What are we gonna do now?” Jude whispered, following me down the hallway to a room marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

  A quick look around told me that the tact team had divided—half were upstairs, visible in the glass offices above us, and half were heading out onto the train platform. What PSFs weren’t sprawled out and still on the floor were bound together in an unwilling huddle of black.

  We followed the long hallway to its end, narrowly missing a station worker going into the employee break room. I kept my eyes focused on the double doors at the very end of the stretch of concrete, too scared of what I would see if I tore my gaze away.

  I opened the right door as quietly as possible, motioning for Jude to follow. It shut with a faint click. It to
ok me two precious seconds to figure out we were even looking at the bus terminal, and another two to see the old man in a navy uniform come hustling around the corner, a huge, wet coffee stain all down his front.

  Every bone in my body went hollow as I grabbed Jude’s arm and hauled him closer. The man came up short of us, his already wide, panicked eyes going just that bit wider as he gave us the once-over. For one long, terrible moment no one said anything at all. There was only the sound of gunfire from inside the station and the screech of car tires from the parking lot on the other side of the building.

  I raised a hand out toward him on instinct, but Jude caught it and pushed it down.

  “Are they…?” The man—Andy, his nametag said—was having a hard time choking the words up. “Are they soldiers?”

  “They want to take us in,” Jude said. “Please, can you help us?”

  And then Andy did the absolutely last thing I expected him to.

  He nodded.

  We rode under the bus in the luggage compartment for the first twenty minutes of the trip, until the train station and the PSFs and Vida were too distant to be caught in his rearview mirror. It was freezing and uncomfortable to be tossed around under there; we’d slide across the cold metal with every single turn, hunched over our knees and disoriented. I let Jude loop his arm through mine, adding my little bit of body heat to his.

  He was muttering something under his breath. I felt him shaking his head, his curls brushing my shoulder. Finally, when the road quieted, I heard what he was saying. “She’s never going to forgive us.”

  “Who?” I asked, my hand squeezing his arm. “Cate?”

  “No. Vida.”

  “Jude…” I began. The guilt had clocked in at record time.

  “We did the same thing her sister did to her,” Jude explained, cutting me off. “We just left her. She’s going to hate us forever.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Jude turned back toward me, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “Well, you know about Cate, right? How she was our CPS case worker?”

  Something heavy and slick rose in my stomach.

  “You know,” he said quickly, “Child Protective Services? Okay, maybe not.”

  “You and Vida both?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “You seriously had no idea about that? Cate never told you what she used to do?”

  No, but then again, it wasn’t like I had ever asked. “So she, what, pulled you out of foster homes and brought you into the League?”

  “Sort of.” He leaned back against the door, sliding against me with the next big turn. I had to strain to hear him now. “When IAAN happened, a lot of kids got turned out of their foster homes—the ones who, you know, didn’t die. It was just a bad situation all around, because there was no one to even claim them for burial or anything like that. Cate said a lot of the case workers had a hard time trying to find out what had happened to their kids. She found me before someone turned me in for the reward or I got picked up in the Collections.”

  The Collections had been a series of mass roundups of the survivors of IAAN who hadn’t already been sent to camps. Any parents who felt like they could no longer care for their freak kids or wanted them to enter the “rehabilitation” programs of the camps just had to send them to school, and the PSFs stopped by to round them up. It was the first big organized intake of kids. The next step was forcing them into the camps, whether the parents wanted them gone or not. Involuntary Collection.

  “That must have been a really scary time.”

  I felt him shrug, but he struggled to get the next words out. “It’s… Well, it’s over. It was better than being at home, anyway. Dad was a real winner.”

  I forced my eyes on the road. The way he said it, with such forced brightness…

  “And Vida…?”

  It was like I had turned a key inside of him, or he was too exhausted to try to keep it all buried. “I don’t know what the deal is with her family. She has an older sister, Nadia, who was taking care of her for a while. Cate lost track of her—I guess they were squatting in some building? Vida woke up one morning to find her sister gone and the PSFs there. She thinks that her sister called her in to get the reward money.”

  “How did Cate get to her, then?” I asked.

  “The PSFs had packed about ten kids into this bus to ship them east to the camp in Wyoming, but the League got there first. You know this story, right?”

  I did, actually. The League had found themselves in possession of five kids they had no idea what to do with, so they started the training program. I knew Vida had been with the League for a long time, but I had no idea she was one of the Wyoming Five.

  “Wow.”

  “I know.”

  I didn’t know what to say, what I could say, so I settled on, “I’m sorry.”

  Jude made a face. “What are you sorry for? You didn’t do anything. And besides, we were the lucky ones. Cate’s the one who has the hardest time. I don’t think she ever got over the kids she lost. Especially the ones who died in the fire.”

  “What?” I breathed out.

  “It was this group home she was in charge of keeping an eye on,” Jude explained. “A few of the kids started showing signs of Psi abilities and the person in charge just freaked out. Cate doesn’t know if one of the kids accidentally started it or if the woman did it herself—I guess she was really, really, really religious, but, like, crazy religious. When the police found her, she kept saying how she had done God’s work.”

  “That’s…” There was no word for how horrible that was, so I didn’t try.

  “Anyway, that’s the whole story.” Jude shrugged. “The beginning, at least.”

  I held my breath as the bus stopped at what I assumed was a checkpoint and someone, probably a PSF, boarded. We couldn’t hear their conversation, only the heavy steps as they walked up and down the length of the bus aisle over our heads. A more thorough soldier would have forced him to open the luggage compartment, too, but we were waved on and soon the only sound was the growl of the road beneath us.

  Still, he apologized repeatedly when he pulled over to retrieve us. I had every intention of wiping his memory and booking it, but there were no cars—there was nothing on that stretch of highway aside from trees and snow. It was either Andy or another fun day or two wandering around with Jude in a winter wonderland, looking for civilization.

  “Are you sure this is okay?” Jude and I had taken one of the front seats to have a better look at the road while he was driving. “Can we repay you somehow?”

  “Don’t get me wrong,” Andy said. “This is a spectacular waste of gasoline, but I don’t mind sticking it to my fine employer every now and then. They cut my benefits the hot second things got bad, so I’m not feeling too generous toward them myself. Besides, the drive down is usually pretty empty, and I have to bring the bus to Richmond whether I have passengers or not. The return trip is usually pretty full. Some folks seem to have the notion that there’s more work up north than there is in the south, and hardly anyone can afford those stupid trains.”

  Jude had proven to me about six times over in the past day just how naive he was, so it was a wonder he could still surprise me with his carelessness. After a few minutes he dropped off into an easy, trusting sleep. Like there was no danger of this bus driver using his radio to call us in or driving us to the first functioning police station he happened across.

  “You look like you’re about to roll right off that seat and hit the floor, young lady,” Andy said, glancing up at me in the large mirror over his head. “Maybe you’d consider taking a cue from your friend and getting a little rest?”

  I knew I was being rude and irrational and all sorts of sour, but I kept my eyes fixed on the bus’s radio and frowned. Andy glanced down, following my gaze, then started to chuckle.

  “You’re smart,” he said. “I guess you’d have to be in this day and age to be out wandering around. Oh—tollbooth coming up; better
get down.”

  I slipped down between the metal guard and the seat, adjusting the blanket over Jude’s sleeping form. Andy waved back to whomever had let him through.

  Finally, I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Why are you helping us?” I asked.

  Andy chuckled again. “Why do you think?”

  “Honestly?” I said, leaning forward. “Because I think you want to turn us in for the reward money.”

  The bus driver let out a low whistle at that. “That is a nice chunk of change, I will admit. Funny that the government can dig up the cash for that but can’t afford any sort of assistance for food.” He shook his head. “No, sweetheart, I have a job. I make do. I don’t need the guilty conscience or the blood money.”

  “Then why?” I demanded.

  Andy reached over with his left hand, plucking something off his dashboard. The tape around it peeled off without protest, like it was used to being lifted and then stuck back on. He held it out, waiting for me to take it.

  A little boy smiled back at me from the glossy surface of the photo, dark hair gleaming. He looked ten, maybe twelve if even that. I recognized the muted colors of the backdrop behind him—a school portrait.

  “That’s my grandson,” Andy explained. “His name is Michael. They took him from his school about four years ago. When I tried to contact the police about it, the government, the school, they wouldn’t tell me anything. Same for everyone. Couldn’t post about it online without my access being shut off. Couldn’t go on TV or write in to the papers because Gray was all over them, too. But some of the parents at his school, they said they overheard some PSFs talking about a place called Black Rock.”

  I wiped the smudged fingerprints from the photo’s surface and handed it back to him.