In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  I snapped.

  I glanced back up the steps we’d come down and shifted my gaze toward the next set, until it finally landed on the black camera watching overhead. Once we were out of its line of sight, turning the corner to start down the next flight of stairs, I bent my arm, threw my elbow up into Laybrook’s throat, and held it there. I glared up through the inches that separated his stunned face from mine, and slammed into his mind. His rifle clattered against the wall, the strap sliding from his shoulder. The man had decades on me, and at least a hundred pounds, but in the end it didn’t matter. We’d be going at my pace from this point on.

  O’Ryan had been right about one thing, at least—I did remember the way back to Cabin 27. My fear remembered it, too, and I had to fight to keep myself from swaying as the camp spread open in front of me.

  It was just that some things had changed in the months I’d been gone.

  The lower level of the Infirmary had been little more than a hallway of beds and curtains, but all of those were gone now, replaced by stacked, unlabeled boxes. As we moved across the tile, the plastic in my shoe clicking with each stride, I saw PSFs bringing more up from the back rooms and offices. Their curious gazes followed us all the way outside into the pouring rain.

  Gunmetal-gray skies always drew out the vibrant green of the grass and the trees surrounding the fence. The curtain of water falling around us in sheets didn’t dampen the effect in the slightest, nor did it drive away the earthy smell that immediately sent my senses into an overload of visceral memory. I bit my lip and shook my head. It’s different now, I reminded myself. You’re in control. You are getting out of here. I tried to reach for the old, familiar numb nothing I had lived inside while in this camp, but couldn’t find it.

  The soggy ground shifted under my feet as I found the muddy path. I looked down, and my eyes caught on the sight of the white slip-ons on my feet. The number 3285 stared back, splattered with filthy water and wilted grass.

  I took a steadying breath and forced myself forward. You’re here for a purpose. You are going to get out of here. This was another Op. I could be hard and certain and fight here, too. There was no falling apart now. No giving into fear. Not if I was going to save the others.

  Rings of cabins curved in front of me, looking darker and smaller than I remembered. I saw holes in the roofs patched over with sheets of warped plastic. The wood paneling along the sides was warping, peeling as the remnants of the last snowstorm dripped down from the roofs. The cold ran like needles over my skin, pinching and stabbing until I finally gave in and started to shiver.

  The red brick Control Tower at the center of the cabins had darkened under the rain’s touch, but there were still multiple PSFs out on the upper ledge, their guns following the paths of each line of drenched kids trudging up the paths from the Garden. Their Blue uniforms clung to their shoulders, the hollows of their stomachs.

  Most of the kids kept their heads down as they diverted around us, but I caught a few curious glances, all lightning-fast, under the watchful eye of their PSF escort. No—not PSF—

  I spun on my heel, watching as the soldiers at the end of the line marched on, backs straight, movements choreographed and stiff. They wore crimson vests over their black fatigues.

  I guided Laybrook off the path with the slightest bit of pressure on his arm, letting the next group pass by us to reach their cabins. Again, walking alongside them at the front and back of the two straight rows were the soldiers in crimson vests. No guns. No weapons of any kind. A warning trill sounded in my mind as the last group came toward us, and terrible suspicion solidified into shock.

  The red vests were keeping track of the kids, devoid of any emotion. They were young, faces still round and full. My age maybe, or a few years older. They were inserted in the places where the dwindling PSF force should have been.

  They were Reds.

  THERE WAS AN HOUR BETWEEN the last work shift, whether it was in the Garden, the Factory, or cleaning in the Mess Hall or Wash Rooms, and when they served dinner. The kids would be returned to their cabins, and each group was allotted a specific time to walk the distance between the buildings. It was a song that only worked if the camp hit each note exactly right. The kids were streams of blue and green, so deeply entrenched in playing their parts that they never stepped out, not even once, to dare interrupt the pace.

  Reds. God, the others had no idea. I had no way of warning them, and the closer I came to Cabin 27, the more it felt like this was already over.

  Laybrook followed me up to the cabin, unlocking the door and holding it open for me with a forced politeness. I stepped inside, my eyes meeting his pale ones for the last time. I plugged memories in over the truth, dropped in scenes of him roughing me up, dragging me around, and made him think he was as tough as he wanted to be. The door shut automatically as he turned and walked back into the rain.

  I knew, by the silence that had greeted me when the door opened, that the girls weren’t back yet. They would have switched, just recently, from Factory to Garden duty, and likely were still trudging back through the mud, or waiting at the low fence for permission to move.

  The cabin—my cabin—was small enough to take in with a single turn. Brown upon brown, broken up only by the yellowing white sheets on the bunk bed. The smell of mildew mixed with a natural body odor, covering even the bland hint of sawdust from the wood. Patches of silver light streamed in through the cracks in the paneling. The wind whispered through the cabin, drawing me around the first few sets of bunks, toward the back wall.

  I stared at my bunk, a familiar hopeless despair crashing over me. I bit my lip again to keep from crying.

  Rain had come in through the nearby wall, slanting in to dampen the mattress. I moved toward it like I was underwater, barely feeling it as I sat down. My breath caught in my throat and stayed there as I looked up at the bottom of Sam’s mattress. My fingers traced the shapes I had peeled off at night when I couldn’t sleep.

  You left them here. A hand rose up, pressing against my chest, making sure my heart was still beating. You left them here, to live in this hell.

  “Stop,” I whispered. “Stop.”

  There was no way I could ever make up for it. There was no way to go back and change the decision I made that night to swallow Cate’s pills. The only way out was forward.

  I am going to walk out of here. I am going to take every single one of them with me.

  The door to the cabin popped open. They were silent as they came in, lining the narrow space between the nearby bunks.

  The PSF came in, counting them off. Then, with a faint smirk, she turned and added me to the tally. The others knew better than to move before the uniform left and locked the door behind her, but nothing could have surprised me more than seeing Sam whirl around, something like hope on her face.

  Her honey-blond hair had been hastily braided back, and her face was streaked with black dirt. She looked tired, pushed past the point of exhaustion; but her stance, the hands on her hips, the expectant tilt of her head—that was Sam. That was all Sam.

  “Oh my God.” Ellie, one of the older girls. She and Ashley had always tried the hardest to take care of the younger girls. Without her best friend standing shoulder to shoulder with her, I barely recognized her. There was a beat of stillness and then she was rushing toward me, climbing over the bunks that separated us. A good thing, too. I’m not sure I could have moved if I’d wanted to. How was it possible to be bursting with happiness at the sight of them, and still terrified about what they’d think?

  “Oh my God.” Those three words over and over again. Ellie crouched down in front of me, her green shirt splattered with rain. She took my face between her freezing hands, a light touch that turned into a fierce grip once she seemed to accept I was real. “Ruby?”

  “I’m back,” I choked out.

  The other girls bottlenecked the path between the b
unks, and some, Sam included, simply crawled over the mattresses and frames that stood between them and me. Vanessa, Macey, Rachel, all of them, reaching out, touching my face, the hands that were limp in my lap. Not angry. Not accusing. Not afraid.

  Don’t cry, I told myself, smiling even as my eyes burned behind my lashes.

  “They said that you died,” Ellie said, still kneeling in front of me. “That it was IAAN. What happened? They took you away that night, and you never came back—”

  “I got out,” I told them. “One of the nurses planned the whole thing. I met other kids like us and...we hid.” The abbreviated truth would have to do—for now. I’d never bothered to ask Cate if the cameras could record sound in addition to video, but the sight of them gathered around me would be dangerous enough. We weren’t supposed to touch each other.

  “But they found you?” This from Vanessa, dark eyes still wide with disbelief. “Do you know if they took Ashley, too? Have you heard anything about her?”

  “What happened?” I asked, careful to keep my tone measured.

  “They pulled her in to work in the Kitchen...maybe two months ago?” Ellie said. That wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. If there were specific, small tasks, or if they needed an additional hand somewhere like the Kitchen or the Laundry, they would pull from the older Green kids, thinking they were trustworthy, I guess. “That night, they wouldn’t let us eat in the Mess. And then she just didn’t come back. Do you know if someone got her out?”

  They were all staring at me, and the hope in their eyes was unbearable. What would the truth do to them? I don’t know if it was kindness or cowardice that made me say, “I don’t know.”

  “What was it like?” one of them asked. “Outside?”

  A faint laugh escaped my lips as I looked up. “Strange and so...loud. Terrifying, violent...but open, wide open and beautiful.” I looked up into each of their faces, starving, desperate for something outside of the fence. “Almost ready.”

  “For what?” Ellie asked.

  “For us.”

  After we ate the bread and tasteless soup they served in the Mess Hall for dinner, we made our way back to the cabin again, a Red shadowing our every step, arms swinging at his side. They’d shaved his hair down to dark fuzz beneath his uniform cap, let his tan skin go sallow. There was nothing in his eyes, not a trace of emotion in his face. During dinner, I’d had to look away to keep my heart steady and caught Sam doing the same. He’d stopped behind her at one point. She’d dropped her spoon into her bowl and stopped pretending she wanted to eat. But afterwards, I saw her look at his back, eyes devouring his shape...and I wondered.

  Up until that moment, I had managed to clear my thoughts of what was happening to the others. What they were doing. If they were safe. Whether or not they were actually coming. I couldn’t let it distract me from what needed to happen here. Just thinking of Liam out there alone, trying to find his parents to tell them what had happened...

  As we walked, I shifted my thoughts to sweet, small memories instead. Laughter at dinner. Firelight on Zu’s smiling face. Jude falling over himself and Nico when one of their handmade toy cars worked. The way Pat and Tommy had worshipped the ground Vida walked on. Seeing Chubs in North Carolina for the first time in months, and knowing he was alive. Cole’s easy smile as he reached over and smoothed down my hair. Liam. Liam in the driver’s seat, singing along. Liam kissing me in the dark.

  I am going to walk out of here.

  I am going to live.

  Sam was tracking me now out of the corner of her eye; the skin tightened around her lips, pulling their corners down. There was still a hooked scar, a faint pink line curving to connect the chapped upper lip to her nose; but that, like the rest of her, had faded. And when I turned to meet her gaze, she only looked away.

  I knew Sam, though. A year apart, three years since I’d blanked out every memory she had of me, and I still could read her face like it was my old, favorite book. She got braver as time went on, less uncertain about my presence. The thoughts were working behind her light-colored eyes, and she watched me from the moment the morning alarm went off at 5:00 A.M., through the entire ten minutes we were allotted to eat oatmeal in the Mess Hall, and then next to me, as we made our way through the damp, freezing morning air to begin the day’s work.

  I’d noticed her slight limp the night before as we moved to and from the Mess Hall, but her right leg was clearly stiffer that morning, and the movement was more pronounced.

  “What happened?” I whispered, watching her catch herself on the edge of her bunk. The moment she slid over the side of her bed and down to the ground, her ankle collapsed under her. I leaned over to help her make up her bed, since no one had bothered to give me sheets to use on mine, and tried to see what had caused it.

  In their typical casual cruelty, the PSF in the Infirmary had given me a summer uniform set, shorts and a shirt, but the others wore their winter ones—long-sleeved shirts and pants. The loose fabric hid whatever was it was that was bothering her.

  “Snake bite,” Vanessa answered as Sam pushed past me to line up. “Don’t ask. She won’t talk about it.”

  The Garden was all the way at the far end of the camp, opposite the entry gate. The electrified fence sang to you when you got this close to it; when I was younger, I used to imagine that the hum came from families of bugs that lived in the trees surrounding us. I don’t know why that made it feel more bearable.

  Our Red escort was the same boy we’d had the night before: hair shaved, eyes dark and almond-shaped. Beside me Sam cringed, her hands balled up tight at her sides, and limped along.

  They took the life out of them, I thought, stepping through the low white fence and taking the small plastic shovel that was handed to me. I knew so little about how they had been—what had Clancy called it? Reprogrammed? Reconditioned? Mason had been shattered by what they’d done to his mind. Maybe they’d made a mistake with him, or he hadn’t been strong enough to take what they’d dealt him.

  How many Reds were involved in Project Jamboree? Was it possible that—no. Stop it, I ordered myself, think about anything else but that.

  A PSF was passing out heavy work coats, which they allowed us to have while we were out here. He looked down at the number across my chest and skipped me completely. The ten-year-old me would have accepted the punishment, mind fixed on the cruel smile the soldier offered in exchange instead. But I didn’t have to accept anything now. His mind was like glass, and all I had to do was pass through it like a ray of light. I shuffled back, taking the coat from him.

  I followed my line down to the mounds of earth they’d turned up yesterday and knelt down. The dirt gave way under the softest touch, packing beneath my nails as I used the shovel to ease the buried potatoes up from the ground. I brushed the dark dirt away.

  The shade of burnt skin.

  I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth, instinctively looking up at the three red vests standing near the entrance. They stoically watched as each cabin of kids filed in and accepted their assignments.

  Are they the same Reds?

  My fingers flexed, tightening around the shovel. I glanced sideways, to my right. Sam was only miming work, smoothing dirt away. Still, after all this time, they forced us into alphabetical order.

  “How long have they been here?” I asked in a low voice. “The Reds?”

  At first, I wasn’t sure she’d heard me. I pulled the next potato up and dropped into the plastic tub between us.

  “Three months, maybe,” was the reply, just as quiet. “I’m not sure.”

  I sagged slightly, blowing out a soft sigh. They weren’t Sawtooth Reds. But that meant more camps, more reconditioning facilities.

  “Don’t you...don’t you recognize some of them?” Sam whispered, leaning over as if to help me. “A few of them used to be here.”

  I couldn’t risk another glanc
e back to confirm this; I’m not sure I would have been able to, anyway. The Reds at Thurmond had always lived in my memory with shadowed faces. All of the dangerous ones did. But I knew for certain that I didn’t recognize the Red that Sam kept searching for; every time she found him, she shuddered and oriented herself away from his gaze. But, like clockwork, she’d look up at him again.

  “Do you know him?” I whispered.

  She hesitated so long, I didn’t think she would answer. But finally she nodded.

  “From before? Before-before?”

  Sam swallowed hard, then nodded again.

  Sympathy swept through me, leaving me at a loss for what to say. I couldn’t imagine. I couldn’t begin to imagine what this felt like.

  A PSF passed behind us, whistling without a tune, making his way up the rows between each patch of vegetation. The Garden was enormous, at least half a mile long, and required the most supervision. The handheld White Noise machine clattered against his supply belt, swaying in time to his slow steps.

  I risked another glance up, realizing why my skin had crawled the moment he came into sight. This was one of the PSFs who oversaw work in the Factory—the one who liked to press himself up against the girls, hassle them to get them flustered, and then punish them for reacting in any small way. It hadn’t made sense then what he was doing to me, to Sam, to the other girls, and we’d just stood there and taken it silently. Now, though—now I had a pretty good sense of what he’d really been doing, and it lit my fury. He strolled by us and Sam stiffened. I wondered if she could smell him, too—a salty, sharp tang of vinegar, mixed with cigarette smoke and aftershave.