In the Afterlight

by Alexandra Bracken

  The room shushed itself into silence as the first people walked out onto the stage. All were men, some military, some clearly politicians—those were the ones who remembered to turn and smile for the cameras before sitting down. I released a deep breath as Senator Cruz appeared, followed by Dr. Gray, and then, surprisingly, Cate. Liam’s hand found mine as Chubs walked out, shoulders back, eyes forward. He wore a beautiful navy suit and a striped tie, finishing off the look with new, thin, wire-rimmed glasses.

  “Nerd,” I heard Vida mutter, but she had this pleased little smile on her face.

  I glanced at Liam and found an expression as grim as mine. It was a fine package Chubs had wrapped himself in, almost enough to distract me from the look on his face. I’d seen it a dozen times—the chin jutting out, the eyes sullen. It was the look of someone who had just lost a vote.

  “Damn,” Liam murmured. “This is going to be bad.”

  And it was.

  “Thank you for coming here today,” Senator Cruz began, speaking without the sheet of notes someone leaned over and placed in front of her. “The last five days have been a true test of American fortitude, and I believe I speak not only for my former Congressional colleagues, but also for our foreign allies, when I thank you for your cooperation as we begin to roll out our recovery phases. The good news is, we’re already eight days into the first.”

  Cameras click, click, click-ed.

  “I’d like to take the time to walk you through the agreement that we signed this morning. Please save your questions until the very end, when we’ll have a few moments to address them.” She took a breath, shuffling her papers. “The four peacekeeping zones we established will remain in place for the next four years. Reconstruction in cities and towns that were decimated by this struggle, or by natural disasters for which the government failed to provide aid, will be handled by the peacekeeping coalition of countries in each zone, the details of which will be covered in subsequent, separate press conferences.”

  She let the audience absorb that before continuing. “Each zone will also be responsible for overseeing the neutralization of Agent Ambrosia in groundwater and wells found within its boundaries, as well as the destruction of any stockpiles of the chemical. Any further use of it throughout the world, as well as any use of Psi-afflicted youth as soldiers, clandestine agents, or government officials in this nation or others is explicitly forbidden by this agreement, and will be condemned.”

  Lillian’s eyes scanned the room, almost catching mine. She sat up a little straighter, and looked pained, clearly knowing what was coming next.

  “Children remaining in rehabilitation camps will be returned to their families over the course of the next month. We will be providing a searchable database to locate where each child is currently residing, but parents will not be allowed access to the camps. As part of our agreement, they will be destroyed.”

  Shock hit me like a blow to the face. The room began to rumble with voices—low conversations, shouted questions, everything in between. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Grams trying to gauge my reaction, but I couldn’t bring myself to tear my eyes from the stage.

  “The life-saving operation developed by Dr. Lillian Gray will be provided, free of charge, for as long as this terrible mutation exists in our society. Any Psi-afflicted person over the age of eighteen will be allowed to decide whether to opt out of the surgery, but will be required to carry special identification. Whether or not a child under the age of eighteen receives the treatment will be left to the discretion of their parents or guardians.”

  Lillian’s eyes fell back to the table.

  “We have set aside several miles of land on which to build a community for any unclaimed child, or any child who feels as though they cannot return home safely. We will require that all Psi-afflicted citizens who choose not to undergo the procedure live out the remainder of their lives in one of these communities.”

  I must have made some noise of disgust, because my family turned to look at me.

  At that same moment someone on the stage let out a low, furious, “That is bullshit.”

  And that someone was Chubs.

  “Hold your tongue—” One of the men in uniforms was on the receiving end of a glare that would have melted a lesser man into a quivering puddle. Cate looked down at the table, biting her lip in an effort to hide her smile.

  Senator Cruz coughed, shuffling her papers. Before she could begin speaking again, Chubs was already midway into his next sentence.

  “Let’s lay this out fully, shall we?” he began.

  “Oh Jesus,” Liam said, looking upward for strength.

  “As an eighteen-year-old,” Chubs said, “I finally have the right to choose what I want for myself, but, if I make the wrong choice, I’ll still be punished for it?”

  “Please save your questions for the end.” But even as she said it, Senator Cruz made a small, almost imperceptible motion with her hands, as if to encourage him.

  “I’m not finished,” Chubs said. “If I were to choose to not have someone, potentially an incompetent someone, cut into my brain—the most important organ in my body—to ‘fix’ it, then I’m stuck in yet another camp, this time for the rest of my life?”

  “Oh, I like him,” Grams said, delighted.

  “It’s not a camp,” one of the men in uniform said impatiently. “It’s a community. Now can we move back to—”

  “A community with barbed-wire fences? Armed guards? You realize that by doing this, all you’re accomplishing is reinforcing in America—throughout the world—that the word different means bad, ugly, dangerous. There’s no rehabilitation in that; you just want to sweep us under the rug and hope time takes care of us. I’m sorry, but that’s pretty damned terrible, and clearly you know it’s pretty damned terrible, because you’ve spent a total of two seconds laying out a plan that affects thousands of lives which have already been ruined by another group of people—some of them probably in this room.”

  “Psi-afflicted humans have abilities that are dangerous and cannot be controlled,” the man reasoned. “They can be used as tools for individuals to commit crimes, gain unfair advantages, and harm others.”

  “Yeah? So can a pile of money. It’s what a person chooses to do with their abilities that matters. By locking someone up for making a choice about their body that they have every right to make, what you’re essentially saying is that, no, you don’t trust us. Not to make good choices, not to treat others well. I find that incredibly insulting—and, by the way, I seem to be in pretty good control of my abilities now, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You believe children as young as eight, nine, ten, should be allowed to make a life-altering decision?” Senator Cruz was feeding him a counterargument to play off of—I sat back slightly, relieved my opinion of her hadn’t been far off-base. She might have been overruled by the panel she sat with now, but she had found a creative way of getting her point across.

  “I’m saying that the kids who’ve had years of their lives stolen have had time to weigh what they would choose if the opportunity came to be cured of it,” Chubs said. “They’ve had time to think about what they would choose, and can make an educated decision. Trust me, that’s all any of us ever thought about, as every hour of every day was controlled down to the minute, or when we had to struggle every day for food and water and shelter, while men and women literally hunted us. You’re going to set the mark at eighteen, knowing that eighty percent of all kids previously interned at a camp can’t meet that benchmark? I, at eighteen, was in a camp for a year. One of my best friends was in hers for six years, but she’s only seventeen. She has to subject herself to a decision made by the same people who sent her away in the first place?”

  I grimaced, fighting not to look over at my parents. I didn’t need them feeling any guiltier than they already did.

  “We need to move on from this topic,
” another one of the men said, “otherwise we won’t be able to take questions—”

  “I agree,” Dr. Gray said suddenly, then clarified. “With the young gentleman. Unless they’ve committed a crime, or the psychological toll of their experiences has impacted their decision- making abilities, or they’ve harmed someone, I believe the children we take out of the camps should be able to choose. However, parents of children who haven’t reached the life-or-manifest threshold should be allowed to make the decision and will need to do so before their child’s seventh birthday.”

  Her voice was strained to the point of fraying, beyond tired. The reporters ate up every single word she offered, jumping to their feet to launch a volley of questions at her, all of which could be summed up as: Where is President Gray?

  Senator Cruz stared at her notes, then asked casually, “Do you believe you could figure out a better system, given what we have to work with?”

  “Yes,” Chubs said without a hint of arrogance. “And I think if you proceed with this option, you’ll not only be ignoring the mental and emotional health needs of the children coming out of the camps, but you’ll be condemning them to a life of fear and shame. And if it’s going to be that way, then you might as well have left them in the camps.”

  “Good,” Senator Cruz said, “We’ll reconvene our discussion on this point following the conclusion of this panel. Should any other Psi-afflicted youth like to join us, please speak to me.”

  In the midst of all of this, someone had disappeared from the front row of seats—a young man in a baseball cap. He’d faded to the outer edge of the room, and was moving quickly toward the exit. With his face turned down and his arms crossed over his chest, he could have been anyone.

  But I knew exactly who he was.

  I slipped away, waving off Liam’s and Vida’s questioning eyes, and held up a single finger. I had a feeling this was going to take far longer than a minute, but with Senator Cruz talking again, this time about future congressional and presidential elections, their attention was drawn back to her.

  The hall outside was ten degrees cooler than the stuffy sweatbox the ballroom was becoming. I had a feeling he had come out here for the silence, though, more than the cool air. He’d walked nearly to the end of the long hall, and taken a seat across from a window overlooking the hotel’s parking lot.

  “Come to laugh, have you?” Clancy asked, his voice hoarse. He never turned his head, only kept his eyes trained on the window. “Enjoy it.”

  “I’m not here to laugh,” I said.

  He snorted, but said nothing. Eventually, his hands tightened in his lap, clenching and releasing. “I keep losing feeling in my right fingers. They said they’d never seen the complication before.”

  I bit back the reflexive I’m sorry. I wasn’t.

  “I told you this would happen, didn’t I?” Clancy said. “That the choice all of you were stupidly chasing ended up in the hands of the people who put you away in the first place. It didn’t have to be this way.”

  “No,” I said pointedly. “It didn’t have to.”

  For the first time, he turned and looked directly at me. The recovery from the surgery had drained some of the meat from his bones and the color from his skin. I had a feeling that if I were to lift off the baseball cap, I’d find a newly shaved head and fresh scars hidden there. “What happened to Nico?”

  Well. I hadn’t expected that. “He’s here. Didn’t you see him?”

  His shoulders rose and fell with the next deep breath he took in.

  “Did you want to talk to him about something?” I prompted. “Maybe about something you regret?”

  “I only regret losing control of the situation. But...it doesn’t matter. I can figure a way around this, how to deactivate the device she planted there. How to get everything back. I can do it. I’m closer to the right people than ever. I can find my father, wherever he’s hiding. I can do it.”

  And, somehow, I’d known that would be his answer. Because this is who Clancy was at his core: someone who’d always had everything, and still needed more. Still wanted the one thing he’d never, ever be able to achieve.

  But when he looked at me, his dark eyes sunken back into his skull, it told me something else—that maybe what he really wanted, what he couldn’t admit out loud, was the exact same thing his mother had wished for all these years. Pride played a dangerous game in his heart, warring with exhaustion. I felt myself hesitate, fingers curling into fists as I thought of all of the lives he’d played with so callously, the good ones that had been lost, so that he could find ways to survive.

  And there, too, at the back of my mind was the boy on the examination table, scared and alone and boiling with helpless hatred.

  The one with the sweet smile that now lived only in his mother’s memory.

  I knew what he would have done if our situations had been reversed, and I couldn’t deny the small voice telling me to do exactly that—walk away, let the pain and humiliation grow in him like a cancer until they devoured him. And that alone was a reason to reconsider. Because no matter how many times he’d tried, he’d never successfully molded me in his image. And now he never would.

  It wasn’t to free him of his guilt.

  It wasn’t to punish him.

  It wasn’t anything other than an act of mercy.

  There were no barriers between us, no blocks. His life spilled through my mind, whirling in colors and sounds I’d never been allowed to see, I’d never been strong enough to find. I took what I could and replaced it with something better. He had never been tested on, never been an Orange, never at East River, or in California. There were things I saw, secrets so horrible, I’d never wish to inflict on another person by sharing them. I focused on the brightness. I left him with only that—the simple story that he had been with his mother this entire time, that he had helped her all of these years, that the love he still felt for her was a good, pure thing to hold on to.

  And when I turned to go, releasing his mind for the last time, he looked out the window again at the blackbirds diving and rolling around each other, fluttering across the blue sky, and he smiled.

  I started back down the hall again, eyes down, thoughts a mess. I didn’t see the woman coming out of the ladies’ room until I collided with her, and ended up with a mouthful of her bright red curls.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, untangling myself. “I’m sorry—I wasn’t paying attention.”

  “Lucky for me,” the woman said, her voice low and smooth. “I’ve been trying to track you down for days. How’s the leg, kid?”

  At that I looked up, finally realizing who this was. Alice. She’d pulled herself together today, traded the scrubby jeans and coat I’d seen her in at the meeting point for a full suit that didn’t quite fit her. Her hair was a loose, wild mane around her shoulders, held back by a pair of thick-framed glasses and a pen she’d probably stuck there and forgot about.

  “It’s been better,” I said, eyeing her warily.

  Seeing that I didn’t return her smile, she sighed. “Look, kid, if this is about me running your story, I’m not going to apologize. I have a duty to report the facts, the truth...and the truth here is that it’s a hell of a story. There are a few pieces of information you could fill in for me, if you have a second...”

  “I don’t.”

  Alice shifted uncomfortably, as if just remembering what I was and what I could do. She lowered her voice and glanced around to make sure that no one was listening. “I got a tip that Senator Cruz spoke to you and a few others about some kind of program—top-secret stuff. Ballsy of her, considering she just told that whole room that every nation is banned from using you all in any kind of military or clandestine services.”

  I schooled my reaction, keeping it neutral. Not yet. But I didn’t doubt that the conversation was coming.

  I stepped to the side, and she followe
d me, blocking the way again. If I hadn’t been in the mood for this before, I was even less so now. “I have to warn you. I really don’t respond well to being cornered.”

  Alice held up her hands. “All right, all right.” Her hand disappeared into the purse looped over her arm, fishing around for something—a business card.

  “If you ever want to talk,” she said, “you call me any time. I’m all ears.”

  I waited until she disappeared back into the ballroom, then ripped the card in two and let the pieces flutter to the floor. I turned back to the ballroom just in time to see Zu and Vida come dashing out, holding hands as they ran toward the elevators. A moment later, Liam and a harried-looking Chubs appeared.

  “Ah!” Chubs started to come toward me, his expression narrow. “You should be resting that leg—”

  Liam released his shoulder and grabbed my hand. “Let’s go, let’s go—”

  “What’s happening?” I asked glancing into the ballroom as we passed it. Someone was up at the podium making a speech, but the room was otherwise exactly as I’d left it.

  “Jail break,” Liam said, his eyes bright as the elevator opened and he drew us inside. “Trust me.”

  Fear released its grip on my throat as we rode the elevator all the way down to the underground garage, Liam bouncing on his heels the entire time. Chubs eyed him warily as we were dragged back out.

  Liam freed a set of keys from his pocket and held the black plastic fob up, listening for the sound of the lock. Vida and Zu appeared from behind one of the rows of cars and ran toward the beeping, flashing, dust-splattered SUV with Arizona plates.

  “You are ridiculous,” Chubs informed him as he walked toward the car, loosening his tie; but he went anyway, the smallest hint of a smile on his face.

  I caught Liam’s arm, hating the way his expression fell when he saw mine. “What’s this about?”

  I knew what denial looked like, and this had shades of it—the stubborn unwillingness to acknowledge that something was wrong. Something had overturned inside of him that could never be fully righted.