In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  There it was, the now-daily sensation of being the biggest asshole in the world. I hadn’t even tried to talk to her about this last night. I’d promised her that we would talk about these things, work through them together, and what had I done? Gone off alone to run my head clear.

  “Are we still going to talk to Clancy?” he asked.

  “Wait—how did you—?” I didn’t remember mentioning it to him, but that was exactly why I’d come out to catch him.

  “We talked about this yesterday afternoon, when you were going to lie down for a while,” he said.

  I gave him a look that must have registered how blank my mind felt. “We did?”

  “Uh, we did. For at least ten minutes. You nodded. That’s generally a sign that you, you know, understand and agree.”

  “Oh...you’re right. Sorry.”

  “You are exhausted,” he said, poking my forehead. “Impaired judgment and forgetfulness are both symptoms.”

  I nodded, giving him that. “Do you mind coming now? I have a feeling this might take a while.”

  “And miss the chance to spend another day hauling around filthy, broken crap? Lead on.”

  Cole hadn’t had the thought, or likely the time, to prepare Clancy’s meals for the day. I listened to Chubs complain about Vida and Vida’s language and how Vida’s “reckless history with firearms” was going to get us all killed as I did my best not to take Clancy’s water bottle, dump it out, and fill it with bleach.

  The pantry had been nothing but bones a week ago, but the humanitarian rations had managed to flesh it out to the point that it was starting to look like a healthy stash. I glanced at the clipboard posted outside of its door, feeling a faint smile stretch across my lips at Liam’s neat, careful notes about what we’d already used, and what was on the menu for the rest of the week. Food allergies were noted at the very bottom of the chart—of course. Leave it to Liam to be thoughtful enough to kill himself to try to find almond milk and gluten-free pasta for the two whole kids that needed it.

  “Ready?” Chubs asked once we were standing in the file room. I punched in the code, bringing him into the small hallway that connected it to the cells. The door at the other end of the hall had a small window he could observe us through.

  “You have to stay here the whole time,” I said. “You can’t come in. I know you think he can’t affect you, but I’d rather not test the theory.”

  “Hell no, I’m not coming in. If he takes over your head, I’m going to lock you both in there together and go get help.” He shot me a sharp look. “That’s not allowed to happen. Make sure you don’t put me in that position.”

  I nodded. “One more thing. No matter what happens, I don’t want you giving Liam specifics of what I’m going to do. Good or bad. Promise me.”

  “What exactly are you planning on doing? Using your body to get him to talk instead of your—wow, I can’t even finish that sentence, my brain is already trying to purge it.”

  My fingers tightened around the sack of food. “Nothing like that. I’d just rather not have this serve as a reminder of how far I can go.”

  “Ruby...”

  I pushed by him, stepping through the door and shutting it firmly behind me. I glanced back over my shoulder and met his gaze through the glass. Then he stepped back, just out of my line of sight.

  “Taking time out of your busy schedule of sitting around, doing nothing to come for a quick visit? I’m honored.” Clancy sat in the middle of his cot reading, back against the wall. Blanket and pillow were neatly stowed beside him, both requests previously granted by Cole in the vain, stupid hope it might butter the kid up to be more loose-lipped. As I opened the door’s flap to throw his brown-bag meals in, Clancy flipped to the next page in his book, marked it, and set the book down on top of the pillow.

  He might as well have thrown the copy of Watership Down at my face.

  “Oh,” he said, all innocence. “Have you read it? Stewart brought it in for me since I’ve been such a good boy. I was hoping for War and Peace, but beggars can’t be choosers, et cetera et cetera.”

  It was an old edition of the book—the cover was wrinkled by mistreatment and there were ancient-looking library stickers on its spine. The pages had yellowed, curved under too many rough grips. But I had a feeling if I brought it up to my nose, it would have that scent—that one indescribable fragrance that no amount of cleaning could ever scrub from libraries and bookstores. A few more books had been stacked neatly beneath the cot—battered copies of To Kill a Mockingbird, Sons and Lovers, a book called A Farewell to Arms. And a copy of a blue book—Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers—that had been torn to shreds and tossed across the cell.

  Typical Cole. I wondered who he’d picked to watch his back last night.

  “What did you give him for it?”

  “Some crumbs of information he was desperate for.” Clancy glanced inside the bag as he sauntered back over to his cot. He combed his dark hair back off his forehead, grabbing the book again. “It’s only by virtue of everyone’s sheer stupidity here that they haven’t figured out what he is. He telegraphs it so obviously. Gets so pathetic when he asks about them—”

  “Why that book?” I interrupted, well aware that Chubs was listening. My mind was jumping from memory to memory, trying to remember when I had told him about loving the book. The way he was holding it, pressed against his chest, made me want to go in there and rip it out of his hands before he tainted that, too.

  “I remembered you mentioned it at East River,” he said, sensing the unasked questions. “You said it was your favorite book.”

  “Funny, I don’t remember it ever coming up.”

  Clancy returned my tight-lipped smile. “Must have been one of our more private conversations, then.”

  Private conversations? That’s how he rationalized all of those invasive lessons, when I let my guard down and let him inside my mind—all on the grounds of him trying to “teach” me how to control my abilities?

  “‘...your people cannot rule the world, for I will not have it so. All the world will be your enemy, Prince with a Thousand Enemies,’” he read, “‘and whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first they must catch you, digger, listener, runner, prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks and your people shall never be destroyed.’” He snapped the book shut and leaned back against the wall. “Never thought I’d find a story about rabbits fascinating, but even they have their appeal, apparently.”

  “Do you even understand what you just read?” I asked, angry all over again. In the story, the lines had been spoken by Lord Frith, the rabbits’ god. He was addressing El-ahrairah, a prince of his kind, who’d let his warren’s population spiral out of control, too proud of their strength. In retaliation for his arrogance, Lord Frith turned the other animals of the forest into the rabbits’ enemies and natural predators. But, at the same moment, he had gifted them with the traits and skills they’d need to have a fighting chance of survival.

  Leave it to Clancy to mentally cast himself as the hero in every story.

  “I do, though I think I prefer this one to make my point: A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.”

  I shook my head. “Stop. Just stop. This is low, even for you.”

  “Oh, believe me, this isn’t even close to how low I’m willing to sink to get you to understand what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

  “The issue isn’t that I don’t understand, it’s that I don’t agree.”

  “I know,” he said, “God, do I know that. There have been so many times I wished you could—that you hadn’t let them crush you the way they did at Thurmond. You’re so unkind to yourself, and you can’t even differentiate the actual truth from the warped version of it that they fed to you.”

  I was so sick
of these speeches that if I hadn’t come in here with a purpose, I would have left before he could get started. But this was my price of admission. I had to listen to his bullshit excuses for why he treated everyone around him with as much thought as the grass beneath his shoes.

  “Never once, in the whole time I’ve known you, have you ever referred to what we can do as a gift. You snarl and snap your teeth if the word gifted is so much as whispered in your direction. There’s a stubbornness in you I just don’t understand, no matter how much thought I put toward it. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to use your...what do you call them? Abilities. You punish yourself if you fail to control them, and you punish yourself if you succeed. One of the things I find most fascinating about you is that you’re somehow able to mentally separate your gift from yourself—like it’s a whole separate entity that you can beat back into submission.”

  He stood up and came toward me, his arms crossed over his chest in a mirror of my pose. The air conditioning clicked on overhead, breathing out a hiss of cold air. The chill stroked its icy fingers over my bare arms, my neck, my cheeks. It was a caress. For a moment I was sure I was standing somewhere else, the smell of evergreen and spice filling my nose.

  “Stop it.” I didn’t know how he was doing it, but I wasn’t the same Ruby I’d been at East River. I wasn’t blind to his tricks; this is how he consistently wormed his way into my head, by unsettling me.

  His eyebrows rose. “I’m not doing anything.”

  I let out a small noise of disgust, and made a show of starting to turn back toward the door, testing how desperate he was for me to stay. How hard it would be to play this little plan of mine out.

  “Don’t you wonder why it’s so easy for Blues to control what they can do?” he called. “It’s because each time they move something, it’s a natural manifestation of their will—something they want to happen. It never turns off for the Greens, because their gift is like a net over their minds; they see it as their mind working and nothing more.”

  Whereas, for someone like Zu, a Yellow, or me, or even Cole—we had to know we could turn it off, and completely, other wise we’d destroy everything and everyone around us. We used our minds like weapons clenched tightly in our fists, struggling to return them back to their holsters without injuring ourselves in the process.

  “It must be torture for you to be around those three Blues constantly, to have them tell you everything will be all right and that you can control what you do—and then see them lift a finger and have it work perfectly. You spent six years at Thurmond, scared to so much as breathe the wrong way in case it made them give you a second look. You know what they’ll do if they ever catch you and bring you back to that camp. They’ll keep you there long enough to run their tests and confirm what they already know. You saw how quickly and quietly they took the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows out. The Reds, they went to Project Jamboree. The Yellows, to one of the new camps built specifically to keep their abilities at bay. But what happened to the Oranges? Where did those kids go?”

  My throat had closed up on itself. What little courage I had left was draining out of me as fast as the familiar dread was rolling in.

  “Do you want me to tell you?” he asked, his voice quiet as he leaned his shoulder against the glass.

  I surprised myself with a breathless, “Yes.”

  “Some of them went to Leda’s research program, the one that Nico and I were brought into after they closed the first one at Thurmond,” Clancy said. “The others, if you believe the word of some of the PSFs stationed there at the time, are two miles north of the camp, buried a few hundred feet away from the railroad tracks.”

  “Why?” Why kill them, why waste their lives, why do it like they were animals that needed to be put down, why—why them—

  “Because they couldn’t be controlled. Period. It was the neatest, easiest solution to their headache. And because they also knew, if the kids were to ever be released from the camps, they could explain it simply by saying that IAAN was the root of it, that they were susceptible to a non-existent second wave of the disease. Our gift manifests in few enough kids that it won’t raise many, if any, red flags.”

  The birth rate was low enough these days—few people would take the risk of a child being claimed by IAAN—that it seemed impossible to guess.

  His dark eyes slid toward me. “I’ve seen the military orders—the explanations for how to do it ‘humanely’ so the child only registers the smallest amount of pain. I’ve never been able to reach any of them in time to save them.”

  “You don’t save anyone,” I said bitterly. “You only help yourself.”

  “Listen to me!” he snapped, striking a palm against the glass. “You are your abilities and they are you. I can’t put it to you more plainly. Do you know why I hate this cure? It’s a statement that what we are is inherently wrong. It’s a punishment for something that isn’t our fault—all because they can’t control their fear about what we can do, any more than they can control their resentment that there are people out there stronger and more powerful than they are. They want to strip you of yourself—your ability to protect and enforce your right to make decisions about your life. Your own body. Mark my words: in the end, it won’t be a choice. They’ll decide this for you.”

  “The cure is not a punishment if it saves the lives of the kids born after us. They should never have to experience what we went through. Did you ever stop and think about them before you tried to burn the research?”

  “Of course I did! But this cure you keep talking about? It’s not a cure—it’s a painful, invasive procedure that only helps the kids who have gone through the change. It doesn’t do a damn thing for the others who were never going to survive.”

  “Try again,” I said. “I’ve gotten much better at detecting your bullshit.”

  He ran an angry hand back through his dark hair in frustration. “You need to be focusing your energy on finding out the cause—it isn’t a virus, that much Leda figured out. It has to be something in the environment, something that was tainted...”

  Whether or not he realized it now, he’d walked right into the trap I’d hoped he would. I needed him to be talking and thinking about the cure. It would naturally lead to thoughts of his mother—what he had done to her, where we could find her.

  “Now isn’t the time to change yourself to fit into the world,” Clancy said, his voice raw with whatever thoughts were storming beneath his skin. “You should be changing the world to accept you. To let you exist as you are, without being cut open and damaged.”

  This was it—I felt the opening in the conversation as though the air had parted around us. He’d always been able to get what he wanted out of me by plucking and plucking and plucking at painful memories until I was too distraught or emotional to ward his advances off. I knew he was capable of losing his temper—I’d seen it too many times to think it was a rare occurrence—but I didn’t want anger. I wanted anguish, the kind I had seen on Nico’s face the instant he opened the photo of his younger self. When he reconnected with what they had done to him, Clancy would be as malleable as wet sand in my hands.

  “If everything you say is true—that the cure is cruel and will change us—prove it.”

  That brought him up short. “How?”

  “Show me. Prove it to me that it’s as terrible as you say. I have absolutely zero reason to take your word for it, considering your stellar record of telling the truth.”

  The look of hope on his face turned sour. “Years of research and information isn’t enough for you? I already gave you everything I had.”

  “Yes, on Thurmond. On the Leda research program. Not about this.”

  “Ah.” Clancy began to pace, running his fingers along the glass wall separating us. “So you want to see for yourself? If you can’t take my word, how can you trust my memory? Even those can be faked, as you yourself know.”


  “I can tell the difference,” I said, realizing with a shock of awareness that I actually could.

  The memory from the other day. The one he’d used to show me how to log into his server and pull all of those files. It had felt different because it was different. It was pure imagination on his part. That was why I’d been able to step into it, interact as myself with what was happening rather than reenact what had happened as the person I was reading. There’d been a different texture to the whole experience.

  “You did figure it out. Well done.” Clancy sounded pleased. “Memory and imagination are two different beasts, processed and handled in different ways by the mind. All of those times you replaced someone’s memories, planted an idea in their head—you didn’t realize you were doing several different things at once, did you?”

  Was I? Until now, I’d taken everything I could do in stride, done what had felt natural. Maybe it was pointless because hopefully I’d one day be rid of them and the terror they held for me, but...shouldn’t I at least make more of an effort to understand exactly what I was doing and how?

  “You’re stalling,” I reminded him.

  “No, just waiting for you,” he said quietly. “If you want to see it, if this is the only way to prove it to you, then...it’s fine.”

  I tested his defenses with a brush of my mind against his. But he was waiting, and the moment I closed my eyes and tried to touch his mind with mine, it was like he’d reached out a hand to guide me in. I was pulled through the gauzy layers of stained memories, catching a face here, a sound there. Clancy possessed a highly organized mind. It was like running down a winding hallway of windows, each offering a tantalizing look inside. Or walking down the aisle of a library, searching for the right book, and only glimpsing the other titles as you quickly passed.

  The images began to smear, dripping down like ink on a wet page. The colors morphed and merged and then, with the force of a blow to the chest, settled. I was thrown into a memory so solid I could feel the cold, metal table biting at my already stiff skin. Blinking several times to clear the halo of light around my vision, I felt myself try to strain up, only to be jerked back down by the black straps pinning my wrists and ankles. There were no layers of fabric covering me, not even a blanket—only wires and electrodes, exploding out of my head and chest like a bursting cocoon.