In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  I thought you would leave to find them. I’m sorry.

  “Oh, man,” he said, dropping a hand on her head. “I wouldn’t have. I won’t. You don’t have to be sorry, I get it. But are you sure? It just seems like such a coincidence—”

  He stilled suddenly, looking a little sick to his stomach at whatever she wrote down next. “That sounds like her...But how did it even happen? What were you doing in Arizona?”

  Chubs waved a hand in front of his friend’s face. “Care to share?”

  “Zu...” Liam pressed a fist to the base of his throat and rubbed it for a moment. “Apparently on the way over to California, Zu crossed paths with my mom....I’ve been trying to figure out where they’ve been in hiding.”

  Zu was still pale, watching Liam closely, like she didn’t quite believe him. I sat back, the flicker of concern turning into an all-out flame. Before, we’d always made it a priority to keep the four of us together as a unit. It was rare for us to split off, and even then, no one was really ever left alone. I could understand the rush of feeling that came with being back together, wanting to make up for lost time. But this desperation I saw in her, the way she always seemed to be tracking us, making sure we were still there, made my heart feel like it was tearing itself into pieces.

  What had happened to her? Zu wasn’t normally scared or even all that anxious as a person—at least, she hadn’t been. Someone had done this to her, exposed every last nerve. Left her wide open and raw.

  “Because they caught heat from Gray’s lapdogs after you broke your stupid ass out of that camp?” Vida asked, with her usual sensitivity.

  “Why Arizona?” I asked. “Or, I guess a random choice is a good a choice as any?”

  Zu was furiously scribbling something down, looking up only to shoot an exasperated look at us when we crowded over her. Liam put his hands up. “At your leisure, ma’am.”

  When she did finish, it wasn’t at all what I was expecting. And judging by how Liam’s face lost the remainder of its color, it wasn’t what he was expecting, either.

  They’re hiding kids in their house—protecting them. She used the name you gave me, Della Goodkind, but I knew it was her because she looks and talks like you. I told her you were safe.

  “Oh, God,” Chubs said when I spun the paper his way. “Why am I not surprised? Your whole family fell from the crazy tree and hit every damn branch on the way down.”

  Zu knocked her pencil against the end of his nose in reproach before continuing in her big, looping handwriting. It was just for a few minutes, but she was really nice.

  Liam was like a starving kid stumbling across someone’s picnic basket. “Did she say anything else? Was Harry there with her? You said she’s been helping kids, but did she ask you if you wanted to stay? Or any of the other girls? Is that what happened to Talon?”

  “Which of those questions did you want answered first?” Chubs asked. “Because I think you just crammed ten into two seconds.”

  Zu shrank back against her chair. The pencil rolled off the table and into her lap as her eyes drifted down to where her fingers were busy rolling up the hem of her shirt.

  “Kylie said Talon didn’t make it to California,” I said carefully. “Did someone hurt him? Did he...?”

  “Did the kid croak?” There was a steel-cut edge to Vida’s voice. “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I supposed to act like the rest of them and treat you like you’re a baby? You need me to coat everything in cotton candy? Or can you be a big girl?”

  Liam flushed with anger. “Enough—”

  “You have no idea what you’re even talking about!” Chubs growled.

  “That’s not fair—” I began.

  The only one who didn’t seem bothered by it—who didn’t seem to be showing much of any emotion—was Zu. She stared at Vida for a moment, meeting her hard gaze with one of her own. Then she returned to her sheet and began to write quickly again. Both Liam and Chubs were silently fuming in Vida’s direction.

  Zu held up the paper again, this time angling it so even Vida could read the words there. We got run down by skip tracers and he died when we crashed. A friend helped me get to California when I got separated from the others.

  I let out a soft sigh and closed my eyes, desperately trying not to picture it. God...Talon. No one deserved that.

  “Friend?” Chubs pressed. “Another kid?”

  She shook her head, but didn’t elaborate.

  “An adult? An adult drove you?” Liam ran both hands over his face. “Oh my God, I’m scaring the crap out of myself picturing this. We never should have split up. Never. Never. Oh my God. Weren’t you scared he was going to turn you in?”

  Zu was so still, so pale, I wasn’t sure she was breathing. She looked up toward the ceiling, blinking rapidly, like she was trying to fight off rising tears.

  “She’s a good judge of character,” I said, putting an arm around her shoulders. Still so small. Little bird bones, made that much sharper by hunger and stress.

  “And you came to that conclusion how, exactly?” Chubs asked, pushing his glasses up. “Based on the fact that she let you into the van instead of locking you out?”

  “Exactly,” Liam said. “I seem to recall someone trying to vote her out.”

  “Yeah!” I said. “Thanks a lot. Trying to dump me off on some random road...”

  “Excuse me for trying to look out for the group!” Chubs huffed.

  Zu started to write something down, but Vida ripped the paper out of her hands, held it in front of her face, and tore it straight down the middle. “If you want to say something, fucking say it.”

  Her chair screeched as she shoved herself back from the table, and swiped her plate from it. I saw the strain of keeping it together in how stiffly she held her neck up and her shoulders back. For one strange second, all I could think about were those old cartoons they used to show on the weekend, the way they’d show a spark burning its way up the fuse of a pile of dynamite.

  I should have known better than to follow her.

  “Vi,” I called, and had to jog to catch up to her. She was stalking down the hall, all lean muscles and furious power, down the stairs to the lower level. Where was she even going? “Vida!”

  I grabbed her arm, but she threw me off—hard enough that I hit the nearby wall. A burst of pain rocketed through my shoulder, but I didn’t back down. Her top lip had been curled into a snarl, but the second she registered what she’d done, it lost most of its ugliness.

  “You’re gonna want to walk away,” she told me, and for the first time I realized she probably didn’t know where she was headed, either. She was just trying to get away from that room. From us.

  “Not like this,” I said. “What’s going on? Talk to me.”

  Vida turned and started down the hall again, only to spin back on her heels. I had misdiagnosed the situation—badly.

  “Jesus Christ, you can’t let anything sit, can you?” she snapped. “You can’t ever just let anyone be to work their shit out. Hilarious, seeing how you can’t even handle your own crap.”

  “I’ll try to work on caring less,” I said. Zach was coming down the hall toward us, his eyes looking everywhere but at the corner we’d drawn ourselves into. I turned my back on him at the same moment Vida did. She waited until his footsteps faded before releasing a harsh breath.

  “You know, I really thought you and me—” Her voice choked off. When she laughed, there was a strained quality to it. “Never mind. What do you even care?”

  “You just told me I care too much and now I don’t care enough?” I said. “Which is it?”

  “Both—neither! Jesus, what does it matter?” she snapped, running her hands back through her short hair. The ends were still bleached, with only the barest hint of blue still clinging to the strands. “I’m happy for you, oh-so-fucking happy for you that you get to have this beaut
iful reunion with your real friends. You get to stay with these people and shoot the breeze about how great it was when it was just the four of you. You get to have all of your stupid inside jokes. But what I can’t stand—what makes me sick—is how you—”

  “Is how I what?” It was a struggle to keep my voice down. “What else? Lay it on me. Come on. Clearly something else is pissing you off if you’re picking fights with a girl who’s clearly been through hell and back. I can’t fix it if you won’t tell me what’s going on!”

  The spark finally hit the pile of dynamite, but the explosion wasn’t what I was expecting. Vida’s expression shattered, and she ripped air into her lungs with short, jagged breaths. “You just replaced him—in your head, you just traded Jude for that little girl, like he was nothing, like we were nothing to you! I get it, okay? But don’t—don’t pretend to act like you give a shit when you clearly don’t!”

  She was crying, really crying, and I was so stunned by it that I just stood there. She spun away from me, anger and humiliation coming off her in waves, backing herself farther into the corner.

  You just replaced him.

  Like we were nothing to you.

  Was that really what she thought? A deep, echoing pain ripped through me. That I’d never...that I’d never cared about them? That I wasn’t committed? I was cold to them in the beginning, I know I was, but it had only been to protect myself. Letting people in, dropping the walls from around your heart—I couldn’t risk being vulnerable like that in the League, not when I needed to survive.

  It had seemed crucial to learn to bury every feeling, good or bad, at Thurmond—to fold every wild emotion back before it got away from me and someone wearing black noticed. There, if you were still, you were mostly invisible; if you couldn’t be provoked and punished, you were left alone. I’d fallen right back into that strategy at the League, functioning from moment to moment, Op to Op, lesson to lesson, numbing every stray feeling to avoid exploding with how unfair it all was, how terrifying, and how crushing. So no one, even for a second, would question my loyalty to their cause. For a long time, it had been the only way I had of protecting myself from the world and everyone in it.

  But Jude...Jude had burrowed right in, either oblivious to what I was doing, or trying in spite of it.

  Did she blame me for all of this? If she had been Leader, would any of this have ever happened? Would we all...I closed my eyes, trying to black out the images that stormed in my mind. Jude on the ground. Jude suffocating on his own blood. Jude’s broken back, twisted legs. The look in his eyes, like he was begging me to help him—to kill him and end the suffering.

  That damn nightmare. Chubs told me again and again that it would have been instantaneous...that his...why was it so hard to say the word “death”? He’d died, not passed away. Jude hadn’t passed anywhere. He hadn’t slipped away. He’d died. His life was over. There would never be another word from him; he’d come to an end the way all stories eventually did. He wasn’t in a better place. He wasn’t with me. Jude was buried with all of his hopes under cement and dirt and ash.

  “God,” Vida raged, her voice raw, “even now, you can’t even fucking deny it, can you? Just leave me alone—go away before I—”

  “You think I don’t know that it was my fault? That if I had kept him close...if I hadn’t let him come at all...” I told her quietly. “I imagine how it was for him, how in the end, he must have suffocated under all that weight. I wonder how much pain he must have been in, and if Chubs is lying to my face every time he swears it would have been too quick for him to feel anything. My mind keeps circling back to it, over and over. He must have been so scared—it was so dark down there, wasn’t it? And he just fell behind. Do you think he realized it? That he was waiting for us to come back and...” I knew I was babbling, but I couldn’t stop myself. “...he shouldn’t have been out at all...he was only fifteen, he was only fifteen...”

  Vida backed against the wall, sliding down it, openly sobbing, both hands pressed to her face. “It was my fault, why don’t you fucking see that? I was in the back, you weren’t even close to him! I should have heard him, I should have made him walk in front of me, but I was so damn scared I wasn’t thinking at all!”

  “No—Vi, no.” I crouched down in front of her. “It was so loud down there—”

  This wasn’t her fault at all. I felt a fierce surge of protectiveness go through me at the thought of anyone else walking by and seeing her so vulnerable. Later, when she pulled herself back together, it would make her mortification about this that much worse. I rearranged myself as I sat down, trying to block the view of her from anyone coming down the hall. When I reached out to her, she didn’t stop me.

  “You and Cate, you won’t even say his name,” she said, “I want to talk about him, but you keep trying to box him up and put him away.”

  “I know you think I don’t care.” My chest felt unbearably tight. “It’s just...if I don’t hold these things in, I feel like I’ll dissolve. But you, all of you...the only thing I’ve ever wanted was to keep us all together and safe, and I can’t ever manage to do that.”

  “Them, you mean.” Vida hugged her knees to her chest. “I get it. They’re your people.”

  “And you’re not?” I asked. “There’s no ranking of who I care about most. I couldn’t do it even if I tried.”

  “Well if the building was on fire, who would you save first?”

  “Vida!”

  She rolled her eyes, wiping her face. “Oh, calm down, boo. I was just kidding. Obviously it wouldn’t be me. I can take care of my own damn business.”

  “I know,” I said. “I don’t know who I’d try to save first, but if I had to pick someone to back me up on the rescue, there wouldn’t be any question.”

  She shrugged and after a while said quietly, “The thought of going back into that room makes me...I know this is going to make me sound like I’m on crack, but I keep walking into rooms and I keep looking for him like he’s going to be there. It’s like a punch to the goddamn throat when I catch myself.”

  “I do that, too,” I said. “I keep waiting for him to come around each corner.”

  “It is a stupid, fucking awful place I’m in,” she said, “to be jealous of that little girl and you and all of them, that you get to all be together when it’s never going to be that way again for us. You can’t even look at Nico—God, Ruby, what’s it going to take for you to stop punishing him? When do you start listening to his apologies?”

  “When I have a chance of believing them.”

  She gave me a hard look. “Jude was his only friend. Nothing you could do to him is worse than what he’s doing to himself. Cate’s not going to be able to pull him back from this again. This is worse than when they first brought him into HQ, after he got out of that research program where they did all of that shitty experimenting on him.”

  I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I left you to tell Cate alone...”

  “No,” she said, holding up a finger, “be sorry that you’ve been too chickenshit to really talk to her about it. I don’t understand—I don’t get why everyone I care about is in fucking pieces and none of you will even try to help each other because it hurts too much to face it head-on. Jude would never have let this happen. He wouldn’t have. He was the best of us.”

  It was amazing, you know, how Jude had pinned us all down, how deeply he had read into who we were and what we wanted. There were people in the world whose purpose seemed to be to serve as points of connection. They opened us up to each other, and to ourselves. What was it that he had told me? That he didn’t want to just know someone’s face, but their shadow, too?

  “He was.” There would never be another person like him. There was the loss I felt, and the loss that the rest of the world would never realize. Both sat like stones on top of my chest.

  “I’m not good at huggy shit,” Vida warned. “
But if you want to talk like this again...I’m there. Okay?”

  “Okay.” And I don’t know why that moment about did me in, when every moment before had been just as gutting. I leaned my shoulder and head against the wall. Maybe because I knew how proud of us he would have been for coming this far, and saying this much.

  “Talk to Nico, please,” Vida said. “Don’t make me beg. Don’t treat him like he’s not even goddamn human.”

  “I think I hate him,” I whispered.

  “He made a mistake. We all did.”

  I leaned back on my hands, fingers curling against the cold tile.

  “Did they mess with her?” Vida asked suddenly, holding out an arm to stop me. While she didn’t whisper the question, the fact she wasn’t asking directly in front of Zu seemed to indicate some newfound sensitivity. “Scramble some eggs up here or something?”

  Or not.

  “No,” I said quietly, watching as Liam settled in next to her, running a hand over her hair. “She doesn’t want to talk, so we don’t make her. It’s her decision.”

  Vida nodded, absorbing this. “Must have seen some shit then. Some real bad shit.”

  “Stop pushing her on it, okay? She’s had every other choice taken away from her. She at least gets to choose what she wants to say, and when she says it.”

  I turned at the sound of soft footsteps padding up behind us. Zu hung back, her hands tucked into her pockets until Vida waved her toward us. She waited until Zu was looking at her before saying, “My bad, Z. I shouldn’t have gone bitch on you. We cool?”

  Some of the strain on the girl’s face faded. She stuck her hand out to shake, but Vida gave her a little fist bump instead.

  “All right,” I said, forcing my stiff body up off the floor. “Should we go back? The boys are probably wondering where we are.”

  “Let ’em wonder,” Vida said. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”