Never Fade

  “Ruby, you have to hit the button for the door,” he said. Just standing close to him made the hair on my arms rise.

  “What are you doing?” I asked again. He seemed to be splitting into two in front of my eyes. I blinked, but the halo of light around him didn’t vanish with it.

  “Trust me,” he said, his voice carrying that unnatural calmness. “I got this one.”

  He counted down from three, forcing the Blues to scramble into the line he had ordered. Jude took care not to touch anyone at the very center of the line; the others seemed to curve around him, responding to his charge and the shift in mood.

  No, I thought, biting the word back. No, not there. Not where they can hurt you—

  “One!” Jude’s voice rang out. My hand slapped against the button.

  The snow had changed to a heavy rain while we were inside. It fell in sheets, distorting the lights the soldiers had set up. The white beams flooded in at our feet and traveled upward over our legs as the enormous door continued to rise. Jude waited until the light hit him square in the chest, and then he clenched both fists.

  They weren’t floodlights, I realized. Just the headlights of the four trucks that had parked in a half ring around the hangar’s door. Most of the soldiers had taken up behind the green vehicles, bracing their guns over the hoods for a steadier aim. A good two dozen soldiers knelt on the ground in front of them, rifles raised, helmets strapped on.

  The door came to a screeching stop overhead.

  A few of the soldiers in camo sat back on their heels or pulled back from the sights of their guns. Surprised, I’m sure, to see nothing but a small cluster of freaks. One of the men in front turned and shouted something back to the others, but the rain swallowed his words.

  A burst of whining static cut in. Someone had retrieved a megaphone for one of the older men in the back. “You are to come with us,” he said, “on authority of the Psi Special Forces commander, Joseph Traylor. If you do not cooperate, we will respond with force.”

  “Yeah?” Brett called. “You can tell Joseph Traylor that, on our authority, he can suck it!”

  That was the cue, whether he had meant it to be or not. The Blues took one single step forward and threw up their arms. Even the soldiers who recognized what was happening were too slow to fully respond. The pop-pop-pop of an automatic weapon was swallowed by the startled screams as the whole cluster of the soldiers and their trucks were lifted and thrown back, as if by an invisible tidal wave.

  And then, Jude stepped out into the rain.

  It was both horrible and beautiful to watch—familiar, somehow, to see the roaring electricity he had collected from the hangar hover around him like a blue sun. The light swelled out, bursting past the walls of his skin and raced out along the pooled rainwater on the pavement in rivers of searing light. Jude’s shape became a shadow, a simple silhouette, as the electricity billowed out in front of him, growing like a silent, blinding explosion.

  The night lost the fresh smell of rain, carrying a new stench of burned skin, and hair, and the unmistakable gut-churning odor of white-hot rubber instead. The electricity sizzled as it lashed out. It jumped up past the rubber-soled boots. It lit clothes and bones and skin, heating the metal canisters of pepper spray until they exploded. The soldiers that hadn’t been knocked out by the Blues’ hit began to writhe on the ground. One managed to lift his gun, aiming in the general direction of Jude, only to be shoved farther back by Brett.

  Jude stayed on his feet as long as he could, shaking and trembling like a wet rabbit in the blistering cold. Then he collapsed, knees to pavement, chest to pavement, face to pavement in such a boneless way that I screamed, pushing past the others to get to him.

  I flipped him over onto his back, ignoring the sharp pricks of static stabbing my fingers. His face felt burning to the touch, even under a blanket of freezing rain. When he had fallen, so had the charge, the popping blue rivets of electricity evaporating like steam.

  Olivia’s group came out next, scrambling for whatever guns they could reach, kicking aside prone soldiers to get to them.

  “Olivia!” Brett shouted. I looked up as he and the others came rushing out after the first group. She stopped, her feet sliding against the pavement as she turned. He had one hand around her upper arm, another in her loose braid. He drew his face down to her scarred one and kissed her. It lasted no longer than a heartbeat. A firm, exact message.

  “Now run!” he said, pushing her toward the others.

  I struggled under Jude’s awkward length, trying to lift his prone form. Brett shoulder-checked me aside, not having the patience or, clearly, the time to waste on trying to rouse the kid out of his exhausted stupor. He hoisted Jude up onto his back. The pack he had carried out was kicked to another Blue, who scooped it up mid-stride.

  “This way!” he called.

  The running was so much worse, so much harder than I expected. Car engines came rip-roaring alive behind us. I saw more speeding down the nearby road, but only the last two in that caravan saw us quickly enough to turn off into the field before entering the small airport. The headlights bounced as the SUVs took each hill and pit. The trees, though, the trees were up ahead, their dark, thick line lit—

  A hand closed around my wrist, wrenching me back. I fell hard, my feet slipping out from under me with the combination of mud and frost and ice. An explosion of gray spots bloomed behind my eyelids as my head slammed back against the ground.

  The soldier shined a flashlight in my face, close enough to my eyes that I had to shut them again to escape the brightness. Her knee came down on my chest and pushed that last breath of air out of it. I twisted and kicked, a frustrated scream ripping out of my throat.

  Then the light dropped away and I could open my eyes again. She was young—but, more importantly, she was furious. The soldier tugged an orange object off her belt and held it directly in front of my face. She shouted something I couldn’t hear. The rain—it was only rain, filling my mouth, my nose, my eyes, my ears. The orange device swam in my vision again, disappearing in another burst of white light.

  I knew the moment the device pulled up my profile. The PSF’s face went slack with horror, her eyes drifting back down to my face.

  I turned my head and sunk my teeth into her wrist’s burned pink flesh. She shrieked, but I was already in her mind. A car’s bright headlights slashed through the dark, highlighting the shapes running toward us, heading into the woods.

  “Get…off!” I kicked one last time, with enough force that even Instructor Johnson would have approved.

  The soldier slumped off me, landing hard in the dirt. Her eyes were open and vacant, staring at me. Waiting for an order.

  I didn’t bother unhooking my mind’s claws from her. I didn’t care. Every part of my body felt slow and heavy. It took all my focus to get to the trees without falling, and more than even that to haul my limbs through the crunching underbrush and ice. The land was rising; every hill seemed to set me back from the pack that much farther.

  I ran. Or I tried to. I tried everything I could to push myself past the haze settling over my mind and the trembling that started in my legs and rose steadily with each drop in the landscape. I thought of Liam, of Chubs, of Vida, of Jude. We had to get back and tell the others; we had to move them in case any of the soldiers traced our path.

  “Jude…” I mumbled, my foot slipping out from under me. Something boiling hot raced down over my hip. “Jude…Vida…Chubs…Liam…Jude…”

  Brett had taken him, hadn’t he? If he could navigate through the twisted tree branches with the kid’s full weight on his back, I could do this. I could stand back up.

  You did this. We were done. They would take us, and I would never see any of them again.

  I breathed out their names until there was no air in my chest. I walked until my legs disappeared from under me. I watched as the last trace of the kids up ahead faded at the crest of a hill, bleeding into the deep dark of the woods. I didn’t remember fa
lling, only the sensation that I had somehow lost half my body and left it behind under the cover of the trees.

  I pushed myself onto my back, my hand flopping around my waist, looking for a gun that wasn’t there. Accept, adapt, act. With a sob of pain, I hauled myself back up against a tree trunk, propping my back up. I’d be able to see anyone coming. I could rest now.

  I could look up through the bare bones of the old trees around me and watch the rain tear the sky down piece by piece, until there was nothing left but darkness.

  TWENTY-ONE

  I WAS BORN IN THE DARK HEART of a fierce winter.

  My parents’ and my Grams’s words, not mine. She and Dad loved to pull out the story of the death-defying trip home from the hospital when I wouldn’t settle down at night or I got fidgety and bored at family dinners. The blizzard got me every time. I’d let myself be wrapped up in the way their words seemed to drip with danger, how they used their hands to try to show how high the snow rose. I could barely keep up; each time, I tried to absorb every word, take the words in so deep I’d dream about them when I finally fell asleep. Now, there was just an overwhelming sense of embarrassment. I hated how stupid I’d been to think that surviving it meant I was somehow special. That I ever thought it was undeniable proof there was something I was supposed to live to do later.

  “The sky was the color of ash,” Dad would say, “and the minute I left the parking lot, the clouds seemed to drop. I should have turned back right away, but your mom wanted to get home to Grams. She was throwing a whole welcome-home shindig for us, you know.”

  They had made it as far as they could, Dad in the driver’s seat trying to force his way through a suffocating curtain of white, Mom in the backseat with me, yelling at him to pull over before he drove us off some nonexistent cliff. He liked telling that part of the story the best—Dad was the only one who could nail the high, breathy quality that Mom’s voice got when she was hovering at the edge of a meltdown.

  The car’s headlights were no match for the snow, but there were still people fighting to get down that stretch of highway. Dad did pull over, but someone coming from the complete opposite direction jumped lanes and smashed into the front of our car. I don’t know where they were going or why they were speeding blindly through high winds and no visibility, but they totaled our car, forcing us off the shoulder and into an ever-building snow bank. They killed the engine and the battery.

  There was no cell phone reception—they couldn’t even pick up the radio. Mom always told that part of the story in a tight voice, her imagination fixed on everything that could have happened to us if the storm had gone on much longer than it did. The three of us huddled in the backseat together for three hours, trying not to panic, pressing together for warmth. I slept through the whole thing.

  I think Grams liked the story because she got to play the hero. She’d mobilized the neighbors into a search party and used her truck to haul my parents’ car back onto the highway.

  “It’s just life for you, Little Bee,” she told me years later. “Sometimes you’re the one speeding along in a panic, doing too much, not paying attention, wrecking things you don’t mean to. And sometimes life just happens to you, and you can’t dodge it. It crashes into you because it wants to see what you’re made of.”

  Despite how terrifying the story was to me as a kid, I still loved winter growing up; the cold didn’t bother me, because I knew that in the span of months, weeks, days, the season would change again. It’s easy to ride out the coldest of days with nothing more than that promise and the warmth of the people around you.

  But this chill, the one I felt now, sank down to my bones; it was a numbness that wasn’t about to be shaken off. There was no escaping it.

  The ground slid under my back, patches of mud gave way to ice, and then again to rocks that dug into my tailbone and ripped up the length of my spine. I heard the crackle of frostbitten leaves as they passed by my ears, felt the sharp tugging as my hair caught on something. One hand tried to close around a passing root, to anchor myself against the river of dirt, but I was moving too quickly. The sun flashed red behind my eyelids, stabbing through the pounding pain inside my skull. I couldn’t feel my right leg—I actually couldn’t feel much of anything on my right side. It wasn’t until the light receded and I could open my eyes that my mind finally made the connection that I was moving, not the ground.

  The sky overhead was blue behind the patches of towering white clouds. I could just make it out through the naked gray arms of the trees. I drew my brows together, taking in the sharp stink of body odor. There was a grunt of effort as a large, rough surface passed under my back. Then it was smooth earth, a dip that came quickly, without warning, like the initial dive of a descending airplane. My stomach and eyes shifted down.

  The man wore a deep red puffer jacket, one that had been worn and frayed by the decades. The hem by his hip was torn, the white stuffing pushing through the hole. His jeans were too tight. They protested every time he turned to get a better grip on my leg.

  “D-Don’t—” My voice was gone. I tried to bring my other leg up to kick his grip off, but none of my limbs were responding.

  The man must have felt me strain, because he glanced back over his shoulder. “Awake, are you?”

  I was seeing two of him, then three, then four. Focus, I ordered myself. The guy looked about as threatening as a mall Santa—he wore his beard long and patchy, but the gut was there. Dad used to read me books that talked about the twinkle in Santa’s eye and his rosy red cheeks. Well, this one’s eyes were glinting, all right. With dollar signs.

  “Try anything funny and I’ll snap that neck of yours. You hear me?”

  Move. I tried to lift my hips. Instructor Johnson had taught me how to break out of a hold like this, several times over. I tried feeling for a rock I could throw at the tender spot where the base of his skull met his neck, for the Swiss Army knife that was no longer stashed in my boot. My body wasn’t responding. I had hit my head—not that hard, right? The night before was cast in shadow. I remembered the long walk, Jude resetting the security system, all of those boxes and crates stamped with flags and strange languages. And Knox. Knox had been there, hadn’t he?

  The headache exploded behind my eyes, and I squeezed them shut again. The sun was shining—why was I so, so cold?

  “There’s someone here who’ll be super interested in meeting you,” the man continued. “Came nosing around this morning askin’ questions ’bout whether or not we’d seen any kids. Said there was a big bust up by the airpark, a few might have gotten away. And I thought to myself, Joe Hiddle, this man could be crazy or he could be right. So I went out hunting, like usual, and what do I find!”

  I dropped my hips, trying to create as much drag as possible going down the next hill. Maybe I couldn’t fight back, but I wasn’t going to make it easy on him.

  “What,” he began, twisting my ankle at an unnatural angle, “did I just say?”

  I used what little mobility I had in my neck to crane it forward as we came down that last hill. Tents, more than I had even seen back at the warehouse. Most were white or printed with the words PROPERTY OF THE U.S. ARMY. A jolt of terror went through me, powering one solid kick to the back of the man’s kneecap. The burst of pain that ripped down my right side was nothing compared to the man kicking me square in the ribs.

  I went quietly because I had to. That barest hint of energy I had felt dripped out of me, and I could almost imagine it trailing behind us like a smear of blood.

  “Sandra!” the man shouted. “Sandy, that guy still here?”

  There were feet and faces around us from the moment we entered the line of tents. The smells here came in bursts—smoked meat, dirty laundry, stale water. It was all mud around the entrances of the tents, but inside were rugs and candles and piles of old mattresses and bedding.

  “Joe, is that…?” someone began.

  “Back off, Ava,” Joe warned. “I found her. Sandra!”

 
“He just left,” came another woman’s voice, her accent almost undecipherable. “I’ll go see if his truck is still on the highway. You—you just keep that one here.”

  My sweatshirt had pulled up in the back, and the mud there felt as slimy as it was freezing. Something—someone—touched my left hand with the side of his foot. “Is she… Is that kid…”

  A middle-age woman’s flushed face leaned down close over mine. She pulled one of her mismatched gloves off and started to put the back of her hand to my forehead. Joe all but growled at her, forcing her back a step. My eyes drifted shut again, and by the time I had worked them open, there were other faces in place of hers. It was a gallery wall of unrestrained emotions. Portraits of weary fear, landscapes of sadness, miniatures of curiosity. I tried shifting again, but I couldn’t ease the gripping pain in my head.

  “She’s shaking,” one of the men said. I saw his yellowing Nikes, not his face. “Let me get her a blanket.”

  “Is she sick? She’s so pale!” A woman this time. “God, she can’t be older than sixteen—look at her, Joe. You’re going to give her to that man?”

  Here’s the thing about guns—they were like the talking stick my first grade teacher used to pass around during class. Whoever held it was the only one allowed to speak. “Get back to your damn tents.” Joe’s gun was a shiny silver revolver, and no one was willing to test to see how many bullets were left in the cylinder.

  A woman—Sandra—let out a shriek of “Here he is! Here he is!” and it was carried straight to us by the wind. The unmistakable sound of a car engine followed, the growl of its engine louder and louder as it drove around the sunken perimeter of the tent city.

  I licked my chapped lips, trying to drag in a deep breath that wouldn’t come. This man, whoever he was, was like a stone thrown into a lake of still water. Even the people who had questioned Joe scattered. My leg was dropped back to the ground. The blood that rushed back into it felt like it was filled with glass.