In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  Chubs moved quickly, shoving past me, Vida, and Alice, who’d started to rise to her feet to reset the camera, and all but slammed into Zu. His face as he hugged her was a portrait of pure joy, and he didn’t bother trying to hide the evidence of the tears that were beginning to track down his face.

  “I’m t-trying to do an interview,” Zu complained, her voice muffled by his shirt. After a moment, she relented, patting his back.

  “Okay, Charlie,” Vida said. “Let the girl finish before you try to drown her in tears. Come on.” She carefully extracted him from the interview space, guiding him back around to where I stood, where the rest of his embrace was transferred to me. And I was more than a little glad for the excuse to look away from Zu to deal with the tears that were starting to well up behind my own lashes.

  “Why is everyone acting like c-crazy people?” she said, and already her voice was getting steadier, stronger. “Can we start again?”

  Liam stood up, about to drag his chair away when she grabbed his hand and said something quietly to him. I couldn’t see his expression at first, not with his back to us, but I caught a glimpse of it as he pulled his chair over to the other side of the camera, and my throat ached with the pride there, the happiness. He sat back down and Zu immediately reoriented herself so she was angled toward him instead of the reporter. Her whole posture changed, relaxing enough for her to start swinging her legs back and forth.

  “This okay?” Liam asked, both to her and Alice.

  The reporter nodded, merely crossing the next two questions off her list.

  Her next questions were about Zu’s color classification and what she could do. It led naturally into a bigger question. “Were you sent to a camp by your parents, or were you picked up?”

  “I made my father’s car—I killed its engine by mistake. It was an accident. Up until then I had only ruined a few lamps. My alarm clock. They were talking about...terrorists, I think, they were saying that they thought IAAN was because of terrorists and that they should leave as soon as possible to go back to Japan. I got upset and—I didn’t have a good control. I fried the engine, and cars hit us. My mom’s pelvis was broken. After she got out of the hospital, she insisted I go back to school that next Monday. It was the first Collection.”

  The Collections were a series of pick-ups kept secret from children. If parents felt threatened by their children, or thought they were a danger to themselves or to others, they sent them to school on specific days and the PSFs picked them up.

  “You mentioned you can control your abilities now. How did you learn to?”

  Zu shrugged. “Practice. Not being afraid of them.”

  “What would you say to people who feel that letting Psi kids learn to control their abilities endangers others?”

  She made her patented Are you kidding me? face. “Most kids only want to control them so they can feel normal. Why would I want to fry every light switch or phone I touch? Every computer? There are kids who abuse it, maybe, but most of us...we’re more dangerous if we can’t control it, and everyone can learn if you give them time.”

  “How did you feel when you realized you were being picked up by the Psi Special Forces at school that day?” Alice asked.

  “I thought it was a mistake,” she said, looking down at her hands. “Then I felt stupid and small—like trash.”

  The reporter’s questions had clearly been designed to bleed Zu’s old wounds for every last terrible detail. A question about her daily routine at Caledonia turned into how the PSFs treated them on an average day, and then on days they misbehaved. It was excruciating to try to imagine it happening to her—beyond that to hear Alice ask, “You mentioned before that you only got out of Caledonia because you escaped. Can you talk about what happened?”

  Zu turned, leaning slightly so she was looking at Liam. He’d been watching with his arms crossed over his chest, struggling to keep the emotion off his face. Now he gave her a small nod, this heartbreaking little smile. Go ahead.

  “It was planned for months by my friend—he wasn’t my friend then, but he was so nice to everyone. So smart. We knew we would only have one chance to get out, and he was it....” She moved into the finer details of the escape, how they had communicated the details to each other leading up to that night. “Then it was happening...it was working...it snowed the day before, and there were piles of it everywhere. It made it hard to run, but we could see that some of the older kids were already in the booth—the guard box at the electric fence’s gate. They were trying to disable it—get the gate to open. I don’t know what was wrong. The camp controllers must have somehow blocked them. Then we just got...”

  Alice let her have a few moments to collect her thoughts before pressing, “You got what? How did the PSFs and camp controllers respond?”

  Zu couldn’t bring herself to say it. I remembered the scene so vividly and I had only seen it secondhand in her memory. To have actually experienced it...I snuck a glance at Liam. He hadn’t moved from his rigid pose, but his skin had taken on an ashen quality.

  Finally, Zu lifted her hand, made a gun using her fingers, and fired in the direction of the camera. Alice actually flinched.

  Why is that surprising? I wondered. Why would they feel any shame in mowing us down? How had they never even considered that possibility when they’d turned their kids over to a branch of the military?

  “Are you saying they opened fire on the escaping kids? Are you certain they were using real rounds of ammunition?”

  She said in a flat voice. “The snow turned red.”

  Alice stared at her notebook in her lap, as if unsure of where to go next with this.

  “I don’t think people see us as human,” Zu said. “Otherwise I don’t know how they can do the things they did. You could always see that the PSFs were a little afraid, but also very angry, too. They hated having to be there. They called us all different names—‘animals,’ ‘freaks,’ ‘nightmares,’ bad words I’m not supposed to say. That’s how they could do it. If we weren’t human in their minds, they could treat us that way and not feel bad about it. That night we were like animals in a pen. Most of them shot at us from the windows of the camp’s building. They’d wait until one of the kids got real close to the gate and then...”

  I didn’t realize she’d attracted a crowd until I heard someone let out a faint gasp, and found the remaining kids and Cole standing a short distance behind us. Most were focused on Zu’s pale face as she explained this, but Cole was watching his brother.

  “How did you escape that same fate?” Alice sounded genuinely invested—engaged.

  “My friend—the one who’d planned it? They got the gate open. He came and picked me up and carried me out. I fell and couldn’t force myself to get up and run. He carried me for hours. We found a car, this old minivan, and just drove for days to get away. We’ve been looking for safe places ever since.”

  “How did you survive out on the road? How did you find food and shelter?”

  “We...I don’t want to say,” Zu said. When Alice sat up in surprise she added, “because there are so many kids who are still out there searching for those things, and I don’t want to tell people where to look for them, or how to wait for them to show up. There were a lot of ways to do it. You just had to learn how to stay invisible—not take bad, big risks.”

  “By ‘people looking for them,’ are you talking about skip tracers?” Alice asked. “I looked up your listing in their network. The reward for ‘recovering’ you and returning you to PSF custody is thirty thousand dollars—did you know that?”

  Zu nodded.

  “Does that make you angry, knowing that someone is profiting off you that way?”

  She took a long time for what should have been a very easy answer: Yes, I’m angry, it makes me furious.

  “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Sometimes, yes, it makes me very upset. The p
rice isn’t a reflection of how much my life is worth—how could you calculate that? They take a flat amount, ten thousand dollars, and they increase it based on your abilities and how much potential they think you have to fight back. I think I’m okay with that price, because it shows them I won’t give up and just go with them. It says I’m going to fight to protect myself.”

  The screen on the back of the camera showed Alice zooming in for a tighter shot of Zu’s face as the girl continued.

  “There are some men and women out there who live for it now, not because they need the money, but because they like it, or they think they’re good at it. It’s messed up. They act like it’s hunting season. But I think...more of them have been forced into it. They need the money to survive. The PSFs have to do it because of the draft. I think if they stopped long enough to think about it, they would see that they’re not really angry with us for what happened. Maybe they’re afraid, but they’re angry at the people who didn’t protect them—the government, the president. They have no power to remove those things from their lives, so they transfer the blame. They act like IAAN was our fault, not something that happened to us. So the economy crashing? Us. Losing their houses? Us.”

  Alice started to ask another question, but Zu wasn’t quite finished yet.

  “I knew someone like that. He was a good person. Great person. The best. The thing is—if you want to be a skip tracer, you have to prove it. You can’t get into their system or get any of their tech until you turn your first kid in,” Zu explained in an avalanche of words. She twisted the notebook in her hands. “I was driving to California with a group of kids and we were being chased by these two skip tracers—real ones, the hungry ones I was talking about. They made our car flip and crash so bad that one of my friends...he died. They were going to take me, but another skip tracer came in and got me out of the car instead—I was trapped by the seat belt. I should have said that before. I couldn’t get out and run like the others.”

  Liam swore loudly. I was too numb by the account to do anything other than listen.

  “Was he one of the ones you mentioned before—he needed to turn one kid in to start? Can you tell us about him?”

  Zu nodded. “He was old—not old-old, but definitely in his twenties. Maybe twenty-seven?”

  Alice gave a faint laugh. “Twenty-seven’s not so old.”

  She shrugged before continuing. “We were in Arizona...I think he must have been from Flagstaff or Prescott, I’m not sure. He was really angry. Something really sad happened to him, I could tell, but he didn’t talk about it. He was someone who just wanted to get out of his life, but he couldn’t do it without money. No matter how many times he told me he was going to turn me in, I knew he wouldn’t.”

  “How could you tell?” Alice asked.

  Yes, I thought, how on earth could you have trusted this person?

  “I told you, he was a good person. He was...really struggling. It ate him up inside. No matter how many times he tried to treat me like I was a freak, he always gave in. There were two chances to turn me over to the PSFs, but he couldn’t do it. Not only did he save me, but he helped save another kid and got him back to the people who were caring for him. He was the one who got me to California.”

  The pieces of this were coming together for me now—those people she was talking about were Liam’s parents. That must have been the moment that she crossed paths with Liam’s mom.

  “What happened to him?”

  “He...his name was Gabe, did I say that? His name was Gabe, and he was...he was really kind.”

  “What happened to him?” Alice asked again.

  “Gabe died.”

  Chubs released the breath he’d been holding, and scrubbed his face with his hands. I’d known how the story ended, but it was still devastating. Seeing her face, hearing those two words...

  “What happened to him?” Softer this time, more hesitant. Alice looked back at Liam, as if to ask if it was all right to continue to head down this path. He nodded; he understood too. She wanted to talk about this. I had a feeling she agreed to this specifically so she could talk about Gabe and what he’d done for her.

  “The kids I was traveling with before? They beat us to California and were waiting at my—at the meet spot we agreed on. We didn’t know that, though.”

  Oh, God...

  “Gabe made me walk behind him as we looked around. It was really, really dark—we could barely see anything. When we opened the doors to—to one of the nearby buildings, the other kids were hiding in there. They saw him and recognized him from Arizona, and they thought he had followed them. One of the girls panicked and shot him.”

  I looked at Liam the exact moment he looked at me, absolutely stricken.

  “He was a good person, and he was just trying to help—it was a mistake, but there was nothing we could do. They thought he was going to hurt them. They didn’t know what I did. He died because he helped me instead of helping himself.”

  “That’s terrible,” Alice said, still looking for the right words. “That’s...”

  “Everyone is so afraid of each other,” Zu continued. “I don’t want to look at a grown-up and assume they’re thinking of how much they can get for me. I don’t want them to look at me and think of how badly I could hurt them. Too many...too many of my friends are in pain. They’ve been hurt very badly by what they’ve been through, but they’ve taken care of me. That’s the other side of everything. Because there are people who are afraid, and then there are people who are so brave. We only survived being hungry and scared and hurt because we had each other.”

  Alice let the camera keep recording for several more seconds before finally switching it off and sitting back. “I think that’ll do for today.”

  Zu nodded, standing up and setting the notebook down on her chair, and came straight toward Vida. “Did I do okay?”

  Vida held out her fist for a bump. “You killed it, girl.”

  Liam was half listening to whatever Alice was saying to him, half listening to hear what was passing between Zu and Vida—he caught me watching him, and instead of looking away, he offered up a small smile. I felt myself return it, but the moment passed as quickly as it had arrived. What was important here was Zu; the small blip of happiness I’d felt at that small cease-fire was nothing compared to the joy soaring inside of me as she talked to Vida, her hands moving to emphasize her words. And as I listened to the sweet way the pitch of it rose as she got excited, a thought began to stir at the back of my mind.

  I touched Chubs’s arm to get his attention. “What part of the mind controls speech?”

  He came out of his daze like I’d thrown a pitcher of ice water in his face. “It’s a whole system, remember?”

  “Right, I understand that. I guess my question is, is there something in your mind that could leave you silent or unable to process words, even if everything else seemed to be working fine?”

  Now he just looked confused. “Zu didn’t talk by choice.”

  “I meant Lillian,” I said. “Like all of the lights are on in the house, but she can’t get the door unlocked—she can pick up a few words here and there, but she can’t understand us and we can’t understand her. Have you heard of anything like that?”

  He thought about it. “I can’t think of the medical term, but it’s been known to happen sometimes with stroke patients. My dad had someone come into his ER once who’d been in the middle of teaching a lesson on Shakespeare and then, two minutes after stroking out, couldn’t communicate at all. It’s...expressive...aphasia? Or is it receptive aphasia? I’m not sure, I need to double-check. One indicates damage in the Wernicke’s area of the brain.”

  “Inglés, por favor,” Vida said, catching the tail end of this. “Unfortunately, you’re the only one here fluent in Geek.”

  He snorted. “Basically, we form what we want to say in the Wernicke’s area of th
e brain, and then that planned speech is transferred to the Broca’s area, which actually carries out the speech. I wonder...”

  “What?” I prompted.

  “Maybe Clancy managed to...shut down, or somehow numb those parts of her mind? Or depressed them, maybe, so they’re not functioning at full capacity.” He turned a shrewd look on me. “When you restored Liam’s memories, what exactly did you do?”

  “I was thinking about...I was remembering something that happened between us,” I said. “I was—” Kissing him. “Reaching out to him somehow, it was kind of...instinctive. I was trying to connect to something in him.” I was trying to find the old Liam I had given up.

  Mirror minds.

  “Oh,” I said, pressing both hands to my mouth. “Oh.”

  “Share with the rest of us,” Vida said, hands on Zu’s shoulders. “Your half is the only half of the conversation I understand.”

  “I need to jumpstart her,” I said.

  “Excuse me?” Cole said, joining the conversation now. “Who are we giving the shock treatment to?”

  “You think you can reset that system in her mind,” Chubs said, understanding. “But...how, exactly?”

  “Clancy said something to me the last time I was in his head,” I said. “Mirror minds. I think that’s what happens when I enter someone’s head. I’m mirroring what’s in their mind with my own. When I’m tampering with memories and searching through them, it’s like I’ve set up a mirror between us, and all of those changes I’m imagining into existence are immediately reflected in the other mind.”

  “Okay?” Cole said. This was going to be nearly impossible to explain—they had no idea what any of this felt like, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to articulate it.

  Thank God for Chubs, though. “So you think that if you engage that part of your mind, it’ll engage that part of her mind, too, and reset it?”