In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  “I’m trying to think of what comes after—how we’ll move on with our lives when this is all over. It’s what we talked about before. I don’t want any of these kids to live their lives stained with pain and regret and blood. I don’t want that for you, either. We can do good work—we can make the whole damn world see that we’re good kids in a shitty situation. Please—Ruby, please. Cole is going to walk you right over a cliff, and he’s going to be holding your hand the entire time.”

  I held his gaze a moment longer, letting the words expand, filling the parts of me that were crumbling. Think of the girls, I thought, Cabin 27. Sam. All of those thousands of kids who’d been left behind as I got out. Ashley’s face, the dead eyes staring up at me, the accusation I’d read in them. Where were you? Why didn’t you come sooner?

  “If I’ve hurt you half as bad as you’re hurting me,” he said, his voice ragged, “then, God, just kill me. I can’t stand this. Say something. Say something!”

  I could sacrifice this, the thing I wanted most, for them, and the trade would never balance out, not fully. I owed them more than my love. I owed each of those girls my life. They needed to know what I’d felt today as we pulled out of Oasis. We would find the cure, if it was the last thing I did on this earth, and it would be waiting for them when they got out. They would know true freedom—not because they’d be able to shed their terrible abilities, the thing that marked them as freak. Because they’d be able to make every choice that had been denied to them for years. They could go anywhere. Be with the people they loved.

  In the end, it didn’t matter what happened to me—I understood what Nico had meant now, when he talked about making amends. I couldn’t go back and change the things that had happened to them, but I could sure as hell put them in charge of their own futures. It would be worth it. Losing this...it would feel worth it. One day.

  But now, it only hurt. It felt like tearing myself into pieces. The end came with silence, and I knew Liam felt it, even if he was too stubborn to admit it to himself. There was nothing left to say. I turned and started back up the stairs.

  “I’ll be around,” he called after me, “when you decide you want to find me.”

  Swallowing the painful lump in my throat, I kept my back to him and said, “Don’t bother waiting.”

  I was at the top of the stairs, pushing the door open, when he said, “Maybe I won’t.”

  The door swung shut behind me, clicking quietly back into place. I let my body seize up, the pain tearing through me as I went into the nearest bunk room and collapsed down onto one of the beds. I clenched my fists, released them, clenched and released, trying to work out the unbearable tightness, to set some kind of rhythm for my breathing instead of the horrible, rough gasping. Laughing voices drifted down the hall from the big room, at odds with the screaming inside of my head.

  I don’t know how it happened, only that my vision blurred. By the time it finally cleared, I was standing inside Alban’s office with no memory of getting there. When I turned, there were two figures standing in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder, wearing mirrored expressions of concern. They seemed to communicate a whole conversation in a single look.

  “So...” Vida began. “What did we miss?”

  “WHEN DID YOU GET IN?” The question bounced off the walls of the tunnel as Vida, Chubs, and a newly arrived Cole and I all walked toward the bar. “Why didn’t you let us know you were so close? You do actually have Lillian, right?”

  “Oh, we have her,” Chubs said, his gaze drifting over to Vida. “And an explanation for not calling.”

  She let out a huff, crossing her arms over her chest. “It was an accident!”

  “Yes, well”—he pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose delicately—“the burner phone we had accidentally fell out of the car, and someone accidentally backed over it. Because someone was in a rush after she accidentally alerted some skip tracers we were nearby when she accidentally used her abilities to move a light pole out of the road after she had accidentally backed into it.”

  “Someone better shut their mouth before I accidentally slam my fist into their teeth.” She punched his shoulder, and it was almost...playful.

  “Shut his mouth, fist into his teeth.”

  “Really? A grammar lesson?”

  As we climbed the ladder, I let Cole explain what had happened during the Oasis hit. I felt too newly bruised to articulate what I needed to say, and, worse, the heaviness in my skull made me feel like I was trapped underwater. I couldn’t look Chubs in the eye, no matter what he did to slyly get my attention. Liam would tell him the whole story and he would side with his friend and I just couldn’t. I couldn’t with anything that didn’t directly relate to Lillian Gray or Thurmond.

  Vida led the four of us out of the bar’s back room and into the main one. Everything had been boarded up, the useful things like plates and glasses brought down into the Ranch. The shadows were so pervasive, I almost missed the small form cowering in the far back corner booth.

  She wore jeans that were clearly too big for her and a button-down shirt that must have belonged to a man. All of her blond hair was tucked up into a Braves baseball cap. She took in her surroundings with a lethal stillness, alert and assessing. The hardness in her eyes, her stance—they were all in her son, too. The sight was enough to halt my steps, turn my blood to ice. I’d always thought that Clancy physically resembled his father, but the details, the tapping of her finger against her crossed arms...She didn’t say a word, but I heard her voice all the same, the echo of what I’d picked up in her son’s mind. Clancy, my sweet Clancy...

  I sucked in a sharp breath.

  “They weren’t keeping her inside of Kansas HQ,” Vida said. “She was in one of the smaller perimeter buildings. We only knew how to find her because we picked up on radio transmissions between the agents talking about the arrangements to trade her for the agents Gray’s men picked up—they kept the agents alive specifically to get her back. So you were wrong, asswipe,” she informed Cole, “and this better be damn well worth it, because I could have had Cate back and not Looney Tunes over there.”

  Cole nodded and stepped forward, approaching the woman with all the care and cautiousness afforded to a spooked animal. “Hi, Dr. Gray. You’re safe here.”

  She either didn’t understand, or she didn’t care—throwing his hand off her, she turned to bolt toward the door. The way she pounded her fists against the worn wood made my own hands ache. “Pale...ah...out...car...more...now—now—one, two, three, four, five—”

  The words barely sounded like words—they were emphasized and accented strangely, the way someone would talk around a full mouth, or if their tongue was clamped between teeth.

  I turned back toward Vida, who only gave a tired sigh. “For someone who can’t talk or understand for shit, she is a major pain in the ass.”

  “She’s talking, though—” I was interrupted by her guttural cry as Cole lifted her up and tried to pin her arms to her side.

  “She doesn’t understand anything—we tried writing, speaking slowly, different languages,” Chubs said, rubbing his chin. “If there’s anything left inside of her head, she can’t get it out.”

  There’s a difference between broken and ruined. With one, you can hope to piece the object back together, but the other—there’s just no coming back.

  I pressed my face against my hands, giving up on trying to meet Lillian Gray’s dark eyes as they roved around the senior quarters we’d given her. She’d come into the Ranch yesterday afternoon terrified, and she’d spent the whole of the morning exactly that way, shaking like we’d dunked her into the Atlantic in the middle of January. It was a wonder she hadn’t passed out from exhaustion yet.

  Inside her mind...I couldn’t describe it. There was actually nothing to describe. The first time I’d slipped into her memories, I’d immediately yanked myself back out, dizzy enough th
at I almost threw up. It was so cluttered, bright flashes of images flashing in no order, speeding by in a quarter of a second—too quick for me to latch onto anything. The intensity of it all was like sitting in a car that jumped from zero to a hundred. It threw me back against my seat, even as I wondered if she was doing it on purpose.

  “Dr. Gray,” I said sharply, trying to drag her attention back to me. “Can you tell me what your first name is?”

  “Naahhmmeee,” she muttered, hands cupping the rim of the baseball cap. “Don’t...good...pale...shade...”

  “God,” Senator Cruz said, covering her face with her hands. “How can the two of you stand it? This poor woman...”

  Cole pushed himself off of where he’d been leaning against the opposite wall. “I think that’s enough for the day, Gem.”

  “But I haven’t made any progress.”

  “Maybe there just isn’t any progress to make,” Senator Cruz offered, a hand on my back. The former First Lady had been the only thing important enough to drag her out of the senior agent quarters she’d been given, away from Rosa. I almost wished she hadn’t come, because it was bad enough feeling disappointed in myself—it was gutting to think I was disappointing her, after all she’d done for us.

  “I haven’t even been trying for two full days,” I insisted. “At least give me another afternoon.”

  Lillian Gray repositioned herself so she was lying down on the small bed, her face turned into the pillow. I could feel the frustration pouring off her, and didn’t try to catch her hand as she slammed it into the plastic-covered mattress over and over.

  I sighed, rubbing my forehead. “All right. We’ll take a break.”

  “How much should we tell the others about her condition?” Senator Cruz asked.

  Vida and Chubs had promised to be tight-lipped, to claim the woman was exhausted and needed rest, if pressed by any of the kids. It only bought me a little time to figure out how to help her.

  Being up-front with the others wasn’t an option that was in the cards for me. If they saw that Lillian Gray, their one shot at deciphering all the research and data we had about the cure, was like...this...it wasn’t going to do anything other than swing them more firmly to Liam’s side. The side that seemed like it was actually doing something.

  From the moment we’d left Los Angeles, Cole and I had banked on having information about the cause and cure of IAAN to prove ourselves to the kids. But three weeks later, we had nothing to show that we’d delivered on our promises. Even the kids we’d pulled from Oasis spent more time in the garage than they did in the Ranch proper. The only time I saw them was when they came to the kitchen to pick up their meals, and even then they brought their food back into the garage to eat.

  “I’m going to turn the door handle around so it locks from the outside,” Cole said. “If we tell the kids to leave her alone, they will.”

  If they ever bother leaving the garage.

  “I’m worried about the agents—Cate,” I said. “What’s the reaction going to be when they realize that the League doesn’t have her to barter with anymore?”

  “The League will keep up appearances as long as humanly possible,” Cole assured me. “And I told you what Harry said. He and a few others from his old Special Forces unit are going to investigate the reports of a black site prison near Tucson. Dustin’ off the green berets, apparently.”

  How Harry had managed to find out about a black site—which by its definition didn’t exist in any formal records—was beyond me. I didn’t want to press Cole on it in front of Senator Cruz.

  “That’s promising,” she said, giving me a faint smile. I shook my head. It was barely anything at all.

  I removed Lillian’s hat and dirty tennis shoes and tried to ease her under the blankets. Her face was gaunt as she looked up at me, but there were still traces of the rare beauty she had been.

  Her eyes narrowed, and suddenly I wasn’t seeing her, but her son.

  “Alban would want you here with us,” Cole told the woman gently. “You have friends here. Friends. Safe.”

  “Alban?” Lillian sat straight up, her legs tangling in the blankets I’d carefully arranged for her. “John?”

  Cole and I exchanged a sharp look, but, just as quickly, she fell back into muttering nonsense beneath her breath. “Hap...the...ang...moh...”

  He moved to the small desk just to the right of the entrance, opening the drawer. “Dr. Gray, we have some things for you to look at after you get some rest. I’m just going to leave them here. They might be a little, uh, difficult. There’s a chart—”

  “Chaaaahrts.” He held them up so she could see and the woman—the reaction was instant. She sat straight up and reached for them. “Cerebellum, pineal body, thalamus, interventricular foramen—”

  The quality of her voice completely changed—it was sharp, almost aware. There was a refined edge to it, too, as if she molded each word on her tongue before she said it.

  “Okaaay,” Cole said, stretching the word out. “That was...unexpected.”

  And then the woman turned over on her other side, and promptly passed out.

  Cole started to move toward the door, but I stayed exactly where I was, staring at her prone form. I’m not sure what made me want to try, only that I’d had enough of a chance to process what I’d seen in her head to suddenly be curious about it.

  “What?” Cole asked, sounding further and further away as I slipped into her mind. The touch was as gentle as I could manage, and instead of trying to navigating the gleaming scenes that popped up behind my eyelids, I let myself be taken along their flow. I saw textbooks stacked high on a desk, young people in clothing decades out of fashion, movies flickering on screens in the dark, test grades; a bouquet of white roses that matched the dress she wore—that I wore—a younger, handsome version of the president waiting for her at the end of a long aisle strung with ropes of flowers; hospitals, machines; playgrounds, baby clothes, a child with black hair sitting at a kitchen table, his back toward me—all of these small moments of memory were cohesive, flowing as smoothly as if I had been guiding them with my own hand. It shifted, then, all of these glimpses into her life—splotches of rainbow color exploded over the scenes, and I was falling backward through white mist, nothing above or below me.

  A dream. She was deep enough in sleep now to relax both her mind and her body. When I pulled back out of her mind and away from her bed, she didn’t stir at all.

  “What?” Cole asked. “What did you see?”

  I saw a mind that worked, that had whole, cohesive memories. And I was more confused than ever.

  “I think...” I began, rising up from my knees, “I need to talk to Chubs.”

  Either anticipating the need, or just by virtue of his own curiosity, Chubs was in the computer room, sitting at one of the empty desks near the front of the room. Tall stacks of thick, intimidating books were piled around him like fortress walls. A few of the Greens had taken the laptops down into the garage to work on Liam’s and Alice’s projects, but Nico was still there, as he always was. He saw me before Chubs did, and by the expression on his face, I knew I needed to talk to him first.

  “Three things,” he said. “First, it’s done.”

  “What we talked about?” I asked him.

  He held up a plain black flash drive on a string around his neck. “All I need is to find a smaller size—one I can use to modify and work into glasses frames.”

  “You’re the best,” I said, meaning it sincerely. Cole had been right—Nico was our man, and not just because he had something to prove.

  He flushed a bit, squirming at the praise, then lowered his voice drastically. “The second thing—the other thing we talked about.”

  “We’ve talked about a lot of things,” I reminded him.

  Nico clicked around, bringing up the now-familiar server log.

  �
�Someone sent something? Again?”

  “An email, two days ago, the night before you left for Oasis—this IP is from one of the laptops, while it was still here in this room,” he continued. “It went to an address that’s now been deleted.”

  “Maybe someone was making contact with Amplify?” I asked, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

  He shrugged. “Again, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

  My eyes narrowed slightly. “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

  “It’s just...suspicious. Liam made it sound like they only interacted with Amplify in person, so I’m not sure who would be leaking files to them now, or why. This one only stuck out to me because it was a simple message. Do you think it could have been Cole?”

  “I’ll ask,” I said. “I don’t know how he’s been contacting his stepfather.”

  “This is a pretty secure way of doing it,” Nico said approvingly. “And Liam and the others didn’t hide any of their activity when they sent the media package out last night.”

  “They got it together that fast?” I asked flatly. “Did any of it take with the press?”

  “Well...that’s the third thing.” He clicked into a folder on the desktop, bringing up yet another new window. “All of it is offline now—Gray’s censors shut the major news sites down until they stripped the story, but the photos and video have been popping up on hundreds of message boards, as well as several of the flash sites that Amplify feeds out to the net. They throw up hundreds of versions of the exact same site with different domain names and search terms embedded in the coding, so that at least one of them will pop up depending on the keywords that people are inputting. I did screenshots of everything I could find in case you wanted to see it.”

  He put up the screenshot of CNN’s homepage as an example. The feature not only was on the main page, it took up half of it: tiled photos of the exterior of the camp, the children with their faces blurred coming out of the bunks. Our backs as we ran down the hallway in those last moments, heading for the door. The largest of the photos was of the wall, the dozens of red handprints that, if you were only scrolling by, could have been mistaken for blood. The headline under which everything fell was NO OASIS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT A ‘REHABILITATION’ CAMP.