Never Fade

  Only one of the kids was able to answer. Yes, she had whispered, yes. To every question, an aching, soft yes.

  A sharp cough drew my eyes across the way to where a familiar head of shaggy hair was struggling to escape from the baby blue blanket over him. He was attempting to get up onto his elbows, his chest heaving with the effort. It was his fluttering, shallow breaths that worried me—the way his arms shook supporting his weight.

  “Stop,” I said, making my way over to him, “please—it’s all right, just lie back—”

  Liam’s eyes were wide, rimmed with red and bruises still fading. His arms gave out under him, and without any thought to it, I caught him by the shoulders and carefully lowered him back down. His eyes never left my face; the blue was paler somehow, brighter and glassy with fever.

  “Careful,” I murmured. After touching his burning skin, my hands felt as cold as they were empty when I pulled them away.

  “What’s going on?” Liam whispered, struggling to swallow. “What’s…happening?”

  “Chubs just went to get something,” I said softly. “He’ll be right back.”

  Liam nodded slightly, closing his eyes with a soft sigh. I started to reach over to brush the curling ends of his hair off his forehead when he turned toward me and forced his lids open. “You’re…awfully pretty. What’s your…name?”

  The words wheezed and whistled out of him in a heart-stopping way, but I was caught so off guard by how coherent he was, it took me several precious moments to respond.

  “Ruby,” he repeated in the warm, caressing tones of his Southern lilt. “Like ‘Ruby Tuesday.’ That’s nice.”

  Then Liam’s expression dissolved completely. His brows drew together in a look of intense concentration, his lips repeating that one word over and over again, soundlessly.

  Ruby.

  I knelt down next to him, sliding the bucket over. I braced one hand on the ground beside his upturned palm.

  “Ruby,” he repeated, his light eyes cloudy. “You… Cole said… He told me we had never met, and I thought…I thought it was a dream.”

  I brought the rag up to his face and began, with gentle strokes, to clean the dirt and soot away from it. It was okay like this, I reasoned. I wasn’t touching him directly. The stubble on his chin rasped as I brushed the rag against it. I focused on the small white scar at the corner of his lips. I focused on not pressing mine to that spot, no matter how much it felt like I was fading into him.

  “A dream?” I pressed, hoping to keep him talking. “What kind of dream was it?”

  It wasn’t… No, it wasn’t possible. I had seen people become confused after I’d messed with their memories, a bit muddled on the details, but I had gone through and picked every instance of me clean from Liam’s mind. I had replaced myself with thin air and shadows.

  A faint smile formed on his lips. “A good one.”

  “Lee…”

  “I need… Are the keys…?” His voice was getting softer. “We’ll go get… I think Zu is—She’s in the aisle with—The one with—”

  Aisle?

  “I don’t want those guys to…to see her. They’re going to hurt them, both of them—”

  I pulled back, but Liam’s hand somehow found mine on the ground, and his fingers latched onto it, pinning me there. “What guys? Zu’s safe; no one is going to hurt her.”

  “The—Walmart…I told her, I told her to go with… She went with—No, where is she? Where’s Zu?”

  “She’s safe,” I promised, trying to pull my hand back. His grip was persistent, like he was trying to force me to understand something, and the more he struggled, the harder it was for him to catch his breath. I took my free hand and pressed it to his cheek, leaning over his face. “Liam, look at me. Zu’s safe. You have to—you have to relax. Everything will be all right. She’s safe.”

  “Safe.” The word sounded hollow. He closed his eyes on it. “Don’t go again,” he whispered. “Don’t go…where I can’t follow, please, please, not again…”

  “I’ll stay right here,” I said, rubbing a thumb along his cheekbone.

  You have to stop this. You have to leave. Right now.

  “Don’t lie,” he mumbled, at the edge of sleep. “This is…a place we don’t have to…”

  My vision blanked out with an array of spots and a pounding rush of blood as I shot up onto my feet. I pressed a hand to my mouth, waiting for my sight to clear, trying not to trip over the kids nearby. I knew what he had been trying to say. I had heard those words before, had said them myself, but there was—It wasn’t possible—

  This is a place we don’t have to lie.

  “Ruby?”

  Vida and Chubs were standing in front of the fire barrels, watching me with twin expressions of concern. How long had they been standing there listening? Chubs took a step toward me, but I waved him off. “I’m okay, he just…”

  I crouched down, putting my head in my hands, forcing in two deep, steadying breaths.

  Not possible.

  “Are you sure?” Chubs repeated, his voice sounding colder than before. “Are you finished playing this game?”

  I nodded, keeping my eyes on the ground at his feet. My stomach rolled and heaved. I could hear Liam struggling with the blanket twisted between his legs, my mind suddenly stirring.

  “You think it’s okay to be all sweet to him like this now and confuse him even more? The plan is still to take the flash drive and dump us for the League, right?” he demanded. “What’s going to happen when he wakes up?”

  “She’s going to mope around and pretend like she’s never met him before in all the sad, pathetic years of her life,” Vida said, sitting down a short distance away. “Because this is a grab-and-go operation. Ruby knows that’s all this is, doesn’t she? She said she wouldn’t let her feelings get all mixed up and twisty about this, didn’t she?”

  I swallowed hard. “I know. Can you… Will you tell him why we’re here?”

  “The truth?” Chubs challenged, his voice sharp.

  It started as a single cough, but I recognized the first sharp gasp behind me for what it was. Liam struggled against his blankets, trying to get his hands up to his throat as he fought for the next breath. He sucked at the air, trying to twist onto his side, but he couldn’t get himself over onto his shoulder. There was no way to tell which of us moved first. By the time I reached Liam’s side, Chubs was there, too, propping his friend up to keep him from choking.

  “It’s okay,” Chubs said, leaning him forward so he could pat his back. He sounded calm, but a sheen of sweat had broken out on his forehead. “One breath at a time. You’re fine. You’re okay.”

  He didn’t sound okay. He sounded like…

  He’s going to die. My hands twisted in my hair. After everything, he was going to die here, like this, fighting and failing and drifting away to a place I couldn’t reach him.

  “Water?” Vida asked as she hobbled over with a plastic bottle in her hand. I hated the hard glint to her eyes. The judgment I saw her pass on Liam’s condition and the look of pity she sent my way.

  “No,” Chubs said, “it might obstruct his airways. Ruby. Ruby—he’s going to be okay; I’m going to keep him awake and make sure he moves around. I need that medicine. I need fluids, heat packs, anything. Quickly.”

  I nodded, fisting my hands in my hair, forcing in one damp breath after another.

  “Roo!” Jude’s voice floated over to us a moment before he appeared at the edge of the fires, holding up a familiar black jacket. “I found it, I found it, I found it!”

  The three of us shushed him.

  “Come here!” I waved him over, taking the jacket before he could accidentally light it on fire. I had only gotten a quick look at the coat in Cole’s memories, and even then, it had been half hidden by the shadows swirling there—but this looked close enough, even if it wasn’t black. The jacket was dark gray, waxed canvas with a flannel interior, and even after being separated from its current owner, it still sme
lled like him. Pine, fire smoke, and sweat. I felt both Vida’s and Chubs’s eyes on me as I ran my fingers along the seams, until they found the hard, rectangular lump that Cole had stitched into the dark lining.

  “He’s right.” I passed the jacket over to Vida. “Leave it in there for now; we’ll cut it out after we go.”

  My eyes drifted back to Liam’s ashen face. It screwed up with the effort of the next cough, but it sounded stronger to me somehow, like he was clearing out the blockage. Jude hovered behind me, taking all of this in, too. The pride beaming from his face drained away. His hand closed tightly around my shoulder, either to steady himself or me. Both, I guess.

  “Can you go tell Olivia I’m ready when she is?” I asked. “And—hey—” I caught the back of his shirt. “Find yourself something warmer to wear, will you?”

  A clumsy salute was all I got in exchange for that. Vida raised her brows as he bounced away, a smug Good luck with that one! look stamped across her face. Maybe Vida was right and I should have forced him to stay behind, but there was no telling what kind of tech we were going to encounter. He might not have been able to hit a target a foot away or run more than a hundred feet, but as a Yellow, Jude had been specifically trained to handle electronic locks and security systems.

  I helped Chubs lower Liam back onto the ground, but he caught my hands before I could pull back. His eyes slid from his friend’s pale face to mine.

  “Is this really better than it would have been if you’d just stayed together?”

  I flinched.

  “You think you maybe overestimated his ability to take care of his own sorry ass without us?” Chubs asked. “Just a little?”

  It wasn’t better, but it wasn’t necessarily worse. Chubs could pick at this scab all he wanted, turning and pointing every single time the wound started bleeding again, but he didn’t understand. The Liam in front of us was a reflection of the world we were forced to live in, and as cruel and harsh as it was…at least it wasn’t the Liam the League would have turned out: a violent, unforgiving reflection of how they thought the world should be.

  “I’m not happy about this.”

  “I know,” I whispered. I leaned across Liam’s prone form to wrap my arms around Chubs’s neck. If he was surprised by my burst of affection, he didn’t show it. Instead, he patted me gently on the back before turning to finish his work with Vida. “You make me as crazy as a bag of cats, but if anything happens to you, I’m going to lose it. Are you sure…are you a hundred percent positive you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yeah,” I said. Unfortunately. “I’ve had training, remember?”

  His mouth twisted into a humorless smile. “And to think, when we found you…”

  Chubs didn’t have to finish. I knew what I’d been when I’d found them: a terrified splinter of a girl who had been shattered a long time ago. I had nothing, and no one, and no real place to go. Maybe I was still broken and would always be—but now, at least, I was piecing myself back together, lining up one jagged edge at a time.

  NINETEEN

  WE ONLY WAITED LONG ENOUGH for the sun to go down before heading out. The quick sunset was one of the few blessings of a rapidly approaching winter. I tried to calculate, in a distracted kind of way, exactly how much time had passed since I set off looking for Liam. Two weeks, if even? It was December; I remembered the digital display in the train station in Rhode Island. I counted back.

  “We missed your birthday.”

  We were hovering at the back of the pack, drifting there almost naturally while Olivia and Brett had taken charge in front.

  Whatever Springsteen song Jude had been humming under his breath was bottled back up, mid-note. “What?”

  “It was last week,” I said, reaching out to steady him as he jumped over a fallen tree. “Today’s December eighteenth.”

  “Really?” Jude crossed his arms over his chest and began to rub them. “Feels like it, I guess.”

  “Fifteen,” I said with a low whistle. “You’re getting up there in years, old man.”

  I started to unwind the wool scarf from around my neck, but he waved it away and marched on, his EMT jacket crinkling as he moved. For such a large group, we were moving quietly through the undergrowth—snapping a few twigs here and there, breaking through pockets of ice. We were still too deep into what Brett had called the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area to attract much attention anyway.

  “Oh! You found it?” I asked when I caught the flash of silver gripped in Jude’s palm.

  Jude held it out for me to see. It was a circular, nearly flat disc. The silver coating glinted in the single strand of moonlight that cut through the tree branches. I plucked it out of his hand and put the warm metal at the center of my palm. The compass’s glass had cracked in two places.

  “Yeah,” he said, taking it back. “For a second there…never mind.”

  “Never mind?” I repeated in disbelief. “What’s wrong?”

  “It’s just that, for a second, I was really happy I found it, you know? And then I started to think that maybe I shouldn’t take it with me.”

  “Because…?”

  “Because Alban gave it to me,” he said. “A few days after I came to HQ. He kept saying how proud he was that I was part of the League, but it’s like…now I don’t think I’m so proud of being part of it.”

  I let out a long sigh, trying to find the right words. Jude only shrugged again and slid the string over his head. The compass disappeared under his jacket, and I thought, That’s the difference. That was the fundamental difference between the two of us. Once I woke up to reality, I couldn’t go back to the dream—but Jude was still able to hold out hope in his heart that it would be there waiting for him when he was ready to return. After everything, he still believed that the League could be different, better, healed.

  I wasn’t out of shape by any means, but hiking over hill after hill, fighting through the thick mulch of newly dead leaves on an empty stomach, all the while trying to keep my brain from circling back to Liam, was beginning to weigh on me. Jude’s stomach had growled no less than four times in the past half hour alone, and while he seemed immune to getting cranky like the rest of us, I felt him start to sag next to me.

  “Almost there,” I assured him, shooting a dirty look at the back of Brett’s head. It wasn’t his fault; we didn’t have cars to transport everyone. There’d been some discussion about trying to navigate down on the Cumberland River, but even months after the flooding, Brett felt like its current was too unstable for their rafts. So we were walking, using fabric cut from the tents as makeshift bags for the supplies.

  We were walking ten miles, eleven, twelve. My fingers were frozen stiff; not even pressing them up under my armpits could get the blood flowing back through them.

  Jude pursed his lips together, reaching up to adjust his cap. With it pressing down at such an awkward angle over his curly hair, it bent his ears out, making them look bigger than they actually were. For a bizarre second, I felt my heart swell just the smallest bit at the sight.

  “Annnnnnyway,” said Jude, master of awkward transitions. “This is going to be so great. So, so great. We’ll be in like this”—he snapped his fingers—“swipe the meds and some food, and out, like, bam!” He clenched both fists and flashed his fingers out. “They won’t even know we’ve been there until we’re gone. We’ll be freaking legends!”

  Jude kept saying “they” this and “they” that, but that was the problem—we didn’t know who was in charge of the airport or why they were hoarding supplies. I’d tried to send a follow-up message to Cate and Nico to ask, but they hadn’t responded before we left.

  We were still heading east, toward Nashville’s center, but the river didn’t follow a straight path. It had looped down again, directly in front of us.

  I nudged my way up to the front of the group. My outstretched hand eventually found Olivia’s shoulder, and she reached back, pulling me to the edge of the Cumberland River.

&nb
sp; “Whoa,” was Jude’s only comment.

  Until we hit that first barrier, I hadn’t really understood why, months after the floodwaters receded, the city was still closed. But it was like with any disasters; the cleanup was almost always worse than the stress of the disaster in progress. No wonder the ground had become little more than a swamp under my boots, no wonder the river was still flooding out. The initial storms had been powerful enough to carry whole sections of homes back into the river, to upend massive river barges and leave them stranded and rusting under the sun. It was like a terrible drain clog. The water couldn’t flow naturally down toward the city, which meant it was still bleeding out into the nearby fields and forests.

  “It’s right over there,” Brett said, pointing to distant white shapes. As if on cue, a red light on one of them began to pulse slow and steady. “Nice to see Gray and his boys got around to cleaning this mess up like he swore he would.”

  “Are we…swimming?” I asked, trying not to grimace.

  Olivia turned toward me, holding up our one lone flashlight. The scarred half of her face stretched into a genuine smile. “Nope. We’re going to play leapfrog.”

  It turned out that “playing leapfrog” with a bunch of Blues essentially meant resigning yourself to being flung from floating object to floating object like a rag doll. The system they’d worked through was impressive; the river was too wide for the Blues to lift another kid with their abilities and send him cruising the whole way across it. Instead, Brett took advantage of the flood’s wreckage, lifting Olivia and setting her down, with impressive accuracy and care, on the upturned corner of a half-sunk barge. She, in turn, sent the next Blue a little farther, onto the roof of what looked like a large mobile home. With the three of them in position, they were able to pass each of us along without much trouble at all. I landed on my knees, finally on the other bank.

  We cut another path through a thicket of trees, emerging muddy and slick with the fresh rain falling overhead. The runway was shorter than the ones I’d seen at bigger airports, jam-packed with planes of all sizes and shapes. Mixed in between the helicopters and one-seaters were green-and-tan military vehicles. The airport wasn’t in use after all, then—and if the planes and trucks were out here, it meant there really was a good chance that Cate and Nico’s intel was good, and something else was being stored in the hangars.