“That’s right,” Jude said, “you get him, Mary. Don’t let him change the subject!”
“I believe the FC would like to modify…the program—” Static again. It couldn’t begin to disguise how uncomfortable Bob sounded on this subject. “We would like to continue to have five-year-olds monitored for a year’s time in one of the facilities, but if they show no…dangerous side effects of IAAN, we would like to see them sent home, rather than automatically graduated to one of these rehabilitation camps—”
The line went silent with a harsh click. The newscaster was repeating his name, “Bob? Bob? Bob?” over and over again, like she could somehow draw his voice back through the dead air.
TWENTY-SIX
THE SIGNS HAD BEEN PAINFULLY HONEST in calling that part of the country NO MAN’S LAND. It would have felt like a bigger relief when we finally passed out of Oklahoma’s panhandle and into Kansas if we could actually tell the two apart. For hours, it was nothing but once-green tall grass beaten down by ice and snow. Small towns that had had the life and people slowly strangled from them. Rusting cars and bikes left along the highway. Open, empty sky.
I had seen desert in Southern California, but this…this stretch seemed endless and achingly open; even the sky seemed to bow lower to meet the highway. We stopped only twice, both times to search the abandoned cars lining the road for gas. There were functioning stations along the way, but at nearly twenty dollars for a gallon, it somehow didn’t seem all that pressing for us to fill our tank the legal way.
For the most part, traffic came in slow drizzles. The lone highway patrol car blew past us, in an awful hurry to get wherever it was going. Still, Chubs drove the entire first five hours with his hands clenched on the wheel. The next time we stopped for a bathroom break, Vida stole the driver’s seat and locked the door, forcing him into the front passenger seat and Liam into the back, next to me.
We left the flat plains, heading toward mountains blanketed by darkness. That was the only warning we had that we were coming up on Colorado. It would be hours more before we actually hit Pueblo, but the knots in my stomach didn’t seem to care. Ahead, lines of lights gave shape to distant cities that only grew larger and brighter as we descended into the valley. I was too anxious to sleep like Jude and Vida. I kept one hand clenched around the Chatter and flash drive in my coat pocket, trying to keep my thoughts focused on what was ahead, visualizing all of the different scenarios and how we would play them through.
Vida and I would scope out the location; if it was one person, Jarvin or one of the other agents, we could take him easily. She would attack him in her way, and I would overwhelm him in mine. If a group of armed agents was there waiting for us, we’d make a clean getaway without being detected. This would work. This will work, I told myself. The only real question was, what would we do if it were no longer safe to bring the flash drive back to HQ? If Cole or Cate were gone. Dead.
Liam’s eyes were closed, and his breathing was easier than it had been in days. Now and then, a lone passing truck’s headlights would fill the window he leaned against, lighting his golden blond hair. And in those few precious seconds, I couldn’t see the cuts or bruises on his face. Not even the dark circles under his eyes.
The Beatles song drifting from the radio gave way to a softly strumming Fleetwood Mac, which faded, finally, into the cheerful opening riffs of the Beach Boys’s “Wouldn’t It Be Nice.”
I don’t know that, until that moment, I really understood that this was the end. That in a matter of miles, hours, I would leave that car and shut the door behind me one last time. It had been hard enough to let go before, and now…this. Maybe that was my real punishment for the things I’d done—being trapped in a world where I had to leave them again and again and again until there wasn’t enough left of my heart for it to break.
I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed to cry then. Better to get it out while the others were asleep and Vida was concentrating on the dark road. I let myself, just this once, sink deeper into the pain. I let myself wonder why this had happened to me—to all of us—until I was sure the shape of the flash drive would be cut into my palm.
At least now, hopefully, we’d know who…what…was responsible. I’d have something to blame for the mess that was my life, other than myself.
And that song, it wasn’t ending. It kept on playing, that stupid, upbeat swing of voices and plucked strings, the promise of a future that would never be mine.
The touch was so hesitant at first, I thought for sure that he was still asleep, shifting in dreams. Liam’s hand came down next to mine on the seat, his fingers inching over one at a time, hooking over mine in a way that was as tender as it was shy. I bit my lip, letting his warm, rough skin engulf mine.
His eyes were still shut and stayed that way, even as I saw him struggle to swallow. There was nothing to say now. Our linked hands rose as he guided them to rest against his chest, and they stayed there, through the song, the mountains, the cities. Until the end.
Pueblo—HOME OF HEROES! or STEEL CITY OF THE WEST, depending on which sign you believed—was close to abandoned, but not quite empty enough to ease my mind as we drove past a line of flickering streetlights and empty car dealerships. It looked like much of what we’d seen so far, with mountains circling from all sides, rising up from otherwise flat, dry landscape. I had always pictured the state to be one giant mountain, I guess, covered in a thick skin of snow-dusted evergreens and ski slopes. There was snow, all right, capping the distant Rockies, but here in the daylight, there were no trees to provide cover, no blooming flowers to lend some beauty. Life in a place like this felt unnatural.
Vida parked the SUV across the street from the address “Cate” had sent us, letting the car roll to an anticlimactic stop.
“Are you sure this is right?” Chubs asked, glancing down at the tablet again. He had a point. Meeting at a deserted Dairy Queen did seem strange—it seemed in line with what I had seen of Cole’s sense of humor, I guess, but the randomness of it all made me doubt myself.
“I don’t see anyone in there,” Chubs said for the tenth time. “I don’t know…maybe we should circle around it again?”
“Grannie, chill—you’re giving me an ulcer,” Vida said, shifting the car into park. “She’s probably waiting in one of those cars.”
“Yeah,” Liam said, “but which one?”
Most were smaller sedans in a variety of colors and shapes. The one thing they had in common, aside from the beating their paint had taken from the sun, was that every inch of them seemed to be coated with dust. The roofs, the windows, the hoods. The only exception was a white SUV—the wheels and lower half of the car were caked with grime, but the rest of it was otherwise clean. It hadn’t been there long.
“She said to meet her inside,” I said, unbuckling my seat belt. “We’ll start there.”
“Wait,” Chubs began, a note of panic underlying his tone. “Can’t we just…wait a few more minutes?”
“We can’t keep her waiting,” Jude said. “She’s probably worried sick.”
I met Vida’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Why don’t you stay here and pack a bag of supplies,” I suggested, keeping my voice casual. “Vida and I will get the full picture from her. We’ll see what her plans are and if it’s safe for you guys to travel with us.”
“Okay,” Jude said, “I’ll meet you in there in a second!”
“Take your time,” I said, stepping over his long legs. “Think about what we’re going to need.”
“But Cate will probably have everything we need,” he protested. “And anyway, I want to see her. It feels like it’s been forever.”
Vida took her cue from me and unbuckled her seat belt.
I shut the door behind me, careful not to look at Liam’s face as I walked around the back of the car to meet Vida. There was a faint click as she checked the magazine of the gun in her hand.
“We don’t go inside unless we confirm we’re not going to walk into a wall of guns, ca
pisce? In and out only long enough for you to do brain voodoo and see if the others are all right,” she said. “How long until Judith gets whiny and impatient and comes after us?”
“Ten minutes, max.” Maybe twelve if Liam distracted him.
We kept to the street’s shadows, weaving in and out of the cars. I hadn’t felt nervous until that very moment, when I thought I caught a flicker of light and movement in one of the restaurant’s windows. But Vida was gripping my arm, dragging me around the enormous garbage Dumpsters and their rotting, forgotten innards. The back door was propped open with a small rock. Vida wasted only one second to look at me, then ducked into the Dairy Queen’s dark kitchen. The door slipped shut behind us, and I turned the lock as quietly as I could.
Vida’s reflection flashed in the stainless steel refrigerator on the other side of the room, and I turned to see her crouching, moving along the silver fryers and empty shelves. I met her at the door leading out to the service counter and dining room.
Switching the safety off my gun, I ducked low, moving along the front counter and the empty spaces where the ice-cream machines should have been. No—despite the lights, the faintly sweet smell still clinging to the air, this wasn’t an operating restaurant.
And the only soul alive in that dining room aside from us wasn’t Cate.
He was sitting in the one white plastic booth not in the line of sight of the large glass windows, idly flipping through an old ratty paperback of a book called The Collected Works of Friedrich Nietzsche. He wore khakis, and a gray sweater over a white button-down shirt with the sleeves of both neatly rolled up. The dark hair was slightly longer than I remembered; it fell into his eyes every time he leaned forward to turn the page. And still, the strangest part of this picture of Clancy Gray wasn’t the fact that he was here, in the desert, in a Dairy Queen under a faded sign advertising some kind of new waffle cone—it was the fact he was relaxed enough he had propped his feet up on the other side of the booth.
He knew I was there—he must have—but Clancy didn’t move as I came up behind him and pressed the barrel to the back of his head.
“Can you at least wait until I finish this chapter?” he asked, his voice as pleasant as ever. I actually felt my stomach heave just that tiny bit. I felt something else, too—the all too familiar trickling at the back of my mind.
“Put down the gun, Ruby,” Clancy said, shutting the cover.
A part of me wanted to laugh. He was honestly trying this? I let the invisible fingers of his mind brush up against mine for one single, solitary second before I threw down the razor-edged wall between them. This time, Clancy did move—he jerked forward, hissing in pain as he turned toward me.
“Nice try,” I said, keeping both my voice and hand steady. “You have thirty seconds to tell me what the hell you’re doing here and how you accessed our Chatter before I do what I should have done months ago.”
“You clearly don’t know how to bargain,” he admonished. “There’s nothing in it for me. I die if I tell you, and I die if I don’t. How is that supposed to be motivating?”
Clancy gave me his best politician’s son’s smile, and I felt the long-simmering anger inside of me boil over. I wanted to see him afraid before I ended his life. I wanted him to be as scared and helpless as the rest of us had been that night.
Stop, I thought. Calm down. You can’t do this again. Control yourself.
“Because there’s a third, worse option,” I said.
“What? Turning me over to the PSFs?”
“No,” I said. “Making you forget who you are. What you can do. Ripping every memory out of your head.”
The corner of Clancy’s mouth twitched up. “I’ve missed your idle threats. I’ve missed you, really. Not that I haven’t been keeping up with your activities. It’s been fascinating to watch these past few months.”
“Oh, I’m sure,” I said, my grip on the gun tightening.
He leaned back against the seat. “I keep track of all of my good friends. Olivia, Stewart, Charles, Mike, Hayes. You, especially.”
“Wow. You really know how to flatter a girl.”
“You have to tell me, though—why did you and Stewart split up? I read the report on the League’s servers. You both were taken in, but there was no mention of why he was let go.”
I said nothing. Clancy laced his fingers together on the table, a knowing smile stretching over his handsome face.
“Look at you, making the impossible choice,” he said. “That’s what that Minder of yours said about you in your file, you know. That was her justification for naming you as Leader of your sad little team. Ruby is fiercely protective and possesses the strong will and resilience needed to make impossible choices. I liked that. Very poetic.”
He slid out of the booth, lifting both hands in the classic pose of surrender. It was about as genuine as his smile.
“Ruby.” His voice was soft, and his hands lowered, angling themselves like he was about to step into an embrace. “Please. I am so happy to see you again—”
“Stay right where you are,” I warned, raising the gun again.
“You’re not going to shoot me,” Clancy continued, his voice taking on that silky quality it always did when he was trying to influence someone. It made my skin crawl, my hands slick. I hated him—I hated him for everything he had done, but, more than that, I hated him for being right.
My expression must have given me away, because he lunged toward me, his fingers straining toward my gun.
The shot was all lightning and thunder; the bullet ripped through the air, catching him across the arm, and the explosion of it followed a second later. Clancy howled in pain, dropping onto his knees. His left hand clutched the place where the bullet had clipped his right forearm.
I could hear Jude banging on the back door of the kitchen, his muffled yells, but it was Vida who came into view. She rose up from behind the counter, the gun in her hands aimed directly at his head.
“She told you to stay where you are,” Vida said coldly as she came to stand behind me. “Next time it’ll be your nuts.”
I realized the danger two seconds too late, when Clancy lifted his head.
“Stop—!”
Vida made a noise like a small gasp, her face scrunching with the force of Clancy’s intrusion. She shuddered, fighting it—I could see it in her eyes just before they went glassy under his mind’s touch. Her arm shook as she lifted the gun again, this time pointing it at me.
“Put down your gun and listen to me,” Clancy ordered. He had hauled himself back up so he was sitting on the edge of the booth, glancing at the line of blood darkening his formerly pristine shirt. I didn’t budge, fighting every urge in my body to shoot him dead on the spot and just be done with it. Vida was shaking behind me; I felt the barrel of the gun tremble as it came to rest against my skull. Her cheeks were wet, but I didn’t look long enough to see if it was sweat or tears.
It surprised me how very little fear I had in that moment outside of what was happening to Vida. If Clancy had gone out of his way to do this—to come here, to hack into our Chatter link, to degrade himself by waiting in a Dairy Queen of all places—then he had done it for a purpose. He couldn’t talk to me if I were dead.
“Ah,” he said softly, like I’d spoken my thoughts aloud.
Clancy shifted his eyes back to Vida. The gun pulled away, coming to rest against the side of Vida’s temple.
“You wouldn’t,” I whispered.
“Are you really going to test me?” He only raised his brows and swept his hand out to the other side of the booth. Inviting me to sit. I stayed on my feet but switched the safety back on my gun and slid it into the back of my pants.
I can break the connection, I thought, letting my mind reach out for hers. But it was like a sheet of steel had melded around Vida’s thoughts—no matter how hard I threw myself against it, I was knocked back. Shut down.
“You’ve improved a great deal,” Clancy said. “But do you honestly think y
ou could break my hold before I could have her fire?”
No, I thought, hoping my eyes would be enough to convey to Vida how sorry I was, that I hadn’t given up yet.
“How long have you been monitoring our Chatter’s link?” I asked, turning back to him.
“Take a guess, and then another, at when I actually started answering in Catherine Conner’s place.” He began drumming his fingers against the table, and Vida’s hand steadied, finger tightening on the trigger. I clenched my fists but took a seat across from him, not bothering to hide the revulsion on my face. “She’s very worried about all of you. To her credit, she figured out I wasn’t you faster than you figured out I wasn’t her. And, even better, she sent you to Nashville. I’m guessing you ran into that little poser while you were there. Did you take care of him?”
It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Knox.
“It must have killed you,” I said, “to know a lowly little Blue was parading around with the identity you built. Did you know he had one of your Reds?”
“I heard murmurs about it.” Clancy gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I knew the Red was damaged, otherwise I would have gone and gotten him myself. He would have been incredibly useful to have around, but I don’t have the time to sit around and retrain that kid, to strip all of the mental conditioning and build it back up.”
“They destroyed him—you destroyed him,” I said. “By just suggesting the program to your father. That boy was…he was like an animal.”
“And what was the other option for them?” Clancy asked. “Would it have been better to let my father’s people murder all of them the way they did the Oranges? Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?” He fingered the edges of his old paperback. “A good question from Nietzsche. I know my answer. Do you know yours?”
I didn’t know who Nietzsche was, and I didn’t particularly care, but I wasn’t about to let him derail the conversation.
“Tell me why you’re here,” I said. “Is it about the Reds again? Or are you finally bored with screwing people over? I bet it gets pretty lonely with only your ego for company.”