In the Afterlight

  Normal. Happy. Crazy. For him.

  It was a half hour later, after hearing him call for me repeatedly from down the hall, that Cole finally strolled into the kitchen and started banging around in the large, beat-up refrigerator. It gave me a second to disentangle myself from Liam and pull myself back together before going out to meet him.

  “The animal needs to be fed,” Cole said, filling a paper cup with water. “Or did you forget about him?”

  And just like that, the weightless, wonderful happiness evaporated under my feet and I crashed back down into reality.

  “I never forget about Clancy.” My words were sharpened by irritation. “Was I not supposed to trust you to take care of it?”

  “No, you weren’t,” Liam called from the pantry.

  Cole grinned. “He’s going to have a bitch of a headache after the drugs we loaded him with. The kid was only starting to come around when I secured him in his little cage. Looked like he was mad enough to shit a brick.”

  “All right. Let’s get it over with.”

  Rather than taking us back upstairs, Cole led the way down the hallway of the lower level, passing several bunk rooms before reaching a door marked FILE STORAGE. He pulled out a small key ring and passed it to me. The lock gave me some resistance as I slid the key in. I took a quick glance around to make sure no one was watching, and rattled the handle to make sure it would stay locked. We slipped inside. Cole reached up to tug on the string for the lone light bulb overhead.

  There were those simple, utilitarian metal shelves, stuffed with random boxes and piles of paper—archived Ops files, supposedly, if you believed the lie that had been etched onto the door. It was convincing enough at first glance. My eyes roamed the library of folders and binders, all neatly lined up on the shelves, as Cole moved to the two shelves that were flush against the back wall.

  “This one,” he said. “With the red storage box. Give it a tug.”

  I reached over the top of the letter-size box. The dust on the lid had been recently disturbed by hands reaching to get to the hidden latch on the shelf’s back support bar. My fingers curled around it and yanked up. There was a loud, satisfying click as the entire bookshelf swung out toward me. The automatic lights in the hallway beyond it clicked on, flooding the small storage room with blinding, ultra-white light.

  It was a short walk down the bare hall to yet another locked door. Here, I had to insert the key and punch in an access code—4-0-0-4-0-0-4—before the door sprang open with a hiss.

  “I’ll be here,” he said quietly. “Signal if you need me.”

  Another part of the deal—he wanted someone to watch my back from behind the door when I came to bring the little pest food. My choices were him, Cate, or Vida, but I’d added Chubs to the list since he had always been resistant to Clancy’s influence.

  I stepped inside the second hall, letting Cole shut and lock the door behind me.

  There were two holding cells in the hall, both of them about ten feet wide and four feet deep. Each had been outfitted with a cot, a plastic toilet, and a bucket of water for washing and brushing teeth. As cells went, these were certainly an upgrade from the damp, musty spaces that had been carved out for the interrogation block at HQ. Better lit, too—almost blinding with all the ultra-bright-white walls and the exposed fluorescent light bulbs overhead. Hardly up to Clancy Gray’s usual standard of living, though he seemed comfortable enough sprawled out on the cot, his arm thrown over his eyes. Cole must have hosed him down before bringing him inside, changed him into clean sweats. It was more than he deserved.

  He didn’t stir as I moved toward the door. The metal flap built into it had another lock; I assumed my key would work on it, and was right. It squealed as it opened, but still, no response from our prisoner. I dropped the bag of food inside, set the glass of water on the small ledge on the other side, and took extra care in relocking it. Clancy waited until I had already turned to go to speak.

  “Move-in going badly?” His voice was unsettlingly curious as he turned around to face me. “Your thoughts are so loud I can hear them through the glass.”

  It was irrational, but for a moment I was worried he meant that literally. But I could feel him when he was trying to poke around inside of my head. There was always a tingling rush that raced down the back of my skull and neck.

  Clancy dragged his food over to his cot with his foot. He made a face as he pulled his sandwich apart. “What, there’s no steak anywhere west of Texas? What is this meat?”

  I started to roll my eyes, only to realize he was actually serious. “It’s bologna.”

  He sniffed at it, his lip curled in disgust, then rewrapped it in the plastic it’d come in. “I think I’d rather starve.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “In any case,” Clancy said, ignoring this, “I’m disappointed by your lack of smugness. I would have thought you’d be in here first thing, gloating about being reunited with your little flash drive again. What’s got your mood so sour?”

  “I’m looking at him.”

  He let out a light laugh. “I overestimated how much you’d be able to figure out in these first few hours. Does the flash drive even work, or was it erased by the EMP? How are those crispy research pages you rescued from the fire? You probably haven’t even found out what they’re doing to Thurmond yet, have you?”

  An invisible hand seemed to wrap around my throat, forcing me to lean forward. Thurmond? What was happening at Thurmond that would have him looking so damn gleeful at my blank look?

  Don’t say it, I commanded myself, fighting against the panic that spiraled up inside me at that one word. Don’t react.

  Clancy tore off a piece of the sandwich’s bread and popped it into his mouth. When I didn’t demand answers, the corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk.

  “If you want to know, you’ll have to look and see for yourself.” He tapped his temple—a challenge or an invitation?

  “I know you’re angry,” he began, “about the way it all went down in Los Angeles—”

  Thurmond, I kept thinking. That word was an infection—exactly as he’d hoped, if I had to guess. He’s been trapped with us for weeks, there’s no way he could have new information—unless it wasn’t new information at all, just a card he’d been holding on to, waiting for the exact right moment to play it.

  It took me a few seconds too long to answer. “Angry doesn’t begin to cover it.”

  He nodded. “One day, though...one day months or even years from now, maybe you’ll see that destroying that research was a selfless act, not a selfish one.”

  “Selfless?” I whirled back toward the glass wall, cutting off my own retreat to the door. “Taking away the chance for kids to survive and never face the change? Robbing them of their only real chance to be reunited with their families and returned home is selfless?”

  “Is that what you want? I thought liberating Thurmond in time would take precedence,” Clancy said, inspecting one of the grapes. “Are these organic?”

  I spun on my heel, crossing the distance between his cell and the door as quickly as I could without running.

  “Ruby—listen to me. The cure is another way to control us, take decisions out of our hands. What happened when you brought the research here? Have they even let you see it? Do you know where it is right now?”

  My fingers curled into fists at my side.

  “It’s not some magic bandage that’s going to heal all wounds. It’s not going to erase the stigma of what we are in their minds. If there aren’t side effects, they’ll always be waiting, watching, praying that we don’t relapse. Tell me,” he said, drawing his legs up, crossing them on his cot. I watched, silently, as his fingers drummed against his knees. “Does knowing there’s a cure change the way the agents here treat you?”

  Silence stretched between us. He smiled. “What they’re trying to do here i
sn’t about you at all. They may have told you things to get you to come along, to surrender your trust to them, but they won’t see their promises through. Not even Stewart.”

  “The only person I have to worry about not trusting is you.”

  “Whatever you’re trying to accomplish by being here,” he said in a low voice, “bring all the kids you can to back you up. They’re the ones that’ll follow and trust you, not any of the adults. You’ll be lucky if they ever see you as anything other than a useful weapon.”

  “Because it’s so easy to find kids in hiding scattered around the country?”

  “I can help you track down the tribes roaming around. You can train them, teach them to defend themselves. We’re heading toward the endgame, and if you don’t find them, they’re going to be collateral damage in the war.”

  I gritted my teeth, but he was talking again before I could fire off any retort. “Forget the adults, Ruby. Make sure you’re out in front of the kids. Make them love you, and you’ll have their loyalty forever.”

  “Make them love me,” I said, my anger coming back in a surge.

  “Not everything at East River was fake,” he said coolly.

  But everything that had been important—every memory I had of that place—was tainted by the creeping black touch of his mind. Just the thought of the way he had studied me across the camp fire...the way he’d slid right through every one of my last mental defenses...the way those kids, the Cubbies, had looked at him in total adoration. A shudder ripped down my spine. The room had grown too small and too cold for me to keep standing there and listen to every last trace of bullshit he wanted to spew.

  I turned back to the door, unlocking it, and made sure I switched the lights back off. And still, Clancy’s voice floated to me through the darkness. He contaminated the air, made it sound like he was everywhere at once.

  “When you’re ready to be in charge and actually do something, let me know. I’ll be here, waiting.”

  And judging by the last look I’d had at his face, that was exactly where he wanted to be.

  COLE DIDN’T SAY A WORD to me until we were back out in the hall, with several doors between us and the president’s son. Even then, he seemed distracted, pale brows furrowed, arms crossed over his chest.

  “Could you hear what he was saying?” I asked.

  He nodded. “Through the small grate under the observation window.”

  “Before the attack, did you hear any intelligence chatter about Thurmond?” I asked. “Were there any rumors floating around HQ?”

  “I was hoping you’d have some idea of what he was talking about,” Cole said as we headed down the hallway. “I’ll look into it.”

  I was headed to the large former rec room just to the left of the stairwell for dinner, but he was clearly escaping into Alban’s old office. I caught his wrist as he brushed by me. “When are we going to firm up a plan for the camps?”

  “Not tonight,” he said. “We’re still waiting on two more cars, and I want to try making a few calls to old supply contacts. Outfitting this place has to be priority number one. No one is going to believe we can do anything if we can’t even get the kids clean clothes and a few warm meals. I asked some of the Greens to start thinking about how they would stage a camp assault. In the meantime, take a breather. We’ll be working soon enough.”

  I returned his wave as he crossed through the doors connecting the hallways, and followed the smell of spaghetti sauce into the rec room. Someone had assembled folding tables and chairs in neat lines, brought in a small radio, and propped it on the scuffed-up pool table the agents had oh-so-graciously left behind. Next to that were two large pots with serving utensils, and a dismally small stack of paper plates.

  It had taken me a few hours to notice that the Ranch was reassembling itself into something that seemed kind of...clean. The silent downstairs halls were punctuated by the banging of washers and dryers, which seemed to be going at all hours of the day. I finally saw that the floor tiles were more white than yellow. And when I went to splash some water on my face in the bathroom, there were no drizzles of rust-stained water streaking across my skin. I smelled bleach. Detergent. It was almost...homey.

  I passed by two sheets of paper tacked onto the door, stopping to examine them. I recognized the handwriting immediately as Liam’s, but it took me a moment to understand what the charts were, why there were stubs of pencils attached to each one with string. They were sign-up sheets, divided up by chore: laundry, cleaning, organizing, food preparation. Under each of these headers were the names of kids. Everyone had to help, but they could choose their chore. That was Liam’s style.

  I spotted Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Zu sitting at their own table, heads bent close together. Vida saw me first and instantly shut up, pulling back and casually picking up her fork again. I finished spooning some pasta onto my plate and moved toward them.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, taking the open seat and turning to poke Liam’s side. “I saw the chore charts—you should have told me earlier so I could have signed up for something.”

  Liam glanced up from his notebook. When he moved his hand, I saw a string of numbers—equations he seemed to be untangling. “It’s all right. You’re busy with other things.”

  Other things that were, unfortunately, not spending time with him alone in the pantry.

  “What’s this?” I asked, leaning over to get a better look at what he was doing.

  He shot me a rueful smile. “Trying to figure out when, exactly, we’re going to run out of food. I’ve been looking at the nearby towns, and I think I have a few we could hit for supplies where there’s minimum contact with the population.”

  “Cole said he’s handling it,” I said.

  He snorted.

  Something about that rankled me. “It’s too dangerous to leave the Ranch right now. He’ll take care of it.”

  Zu turned to study me, her expression troubled. I pointed to her plate of pasta, but she still didn’t touch it.

  “We could go out,” Liam pressed. “You, me, Vi. Hell, I’d bet Kylie would come—it’ll be like old times.”

  Zu reached across the table, gripping his forearm, holding it down against the table. She kept shaking her head, eyes wide. He wasn’t allowed to go. She wasn’t going to let him leave. And secretly, I was glad she was the one telling him so, because I was right there with her. I wanted him here, where he was tucked safely out of harm’s way.

  “I’ve done it a hundred times,” he told her softly. “What’s got you like this?”

  She released his arm, shrinking back in a way that was very unlike her. I started to ask her what was wrong, only to be interrupted by a frustrated groan.

  “Oh, never mind! I’m not even hungry,” Chubs exploded, shoving his plate away from him. There was more sauce down the front of his shirt than there was left on his plate. It turns out it’s fairly difficult to get a fork full of slippery noodles up to your mouth when you were missing the eye part of hand-eye coordination.

  When Vida didn’t go in for the kill on that one, I shot a sideways glance in her direction. The whole room vibrated with happy chatter, laughter. Which made Vida’s silence that much more unnerving.

  “You shouldn’t have thrown the old lenses away. They weren’t cracked that badly.”

  “What was I supposed to do?” Chubs snapped. “Tape them to my face? Walk around holding one up to my eye like a magnifying glass?”

  “Wouldn’t that have been better than sulking around and blindly bumping into things?” I asked. He’d gone off earlier and pitched them into a trash can in hopeless frustration. I’d fished them out and brought them back to the sleeping room for when he calmed down and started thinking rationally again. “We can ask Cole about getting glasses added to our supplies list,” I said.

  “The lenses are prescription,” Chubs said sharply. “I don’t h
ave the information, even if he could get them made. Reading glasses aren’t strong enough, and they give me a headache when I wear them too long—”

  Vida slid something across the table, never once looking up from her plate of pasta. Chubs must have thought it was some kind of utensil, otherwise I have no idea why he didn’t immediately snatch the glasses up.

  The frames were about the same size and shape that his old ones had been. The lenses stuck out, not by any means a perfect fit, but close enough. I opened them and slid them onto his face and Chubs practically reared back in surprise, patting them in disbelief.

  “Wait—what—this—these are—”

  “Don’t lose your shit,” Vida said, casually raking her fork through her spaghetti. “Dolly had an extra pair of reading glasses and helped me switch out the lenses for yours. They look just as stupid as the other ones did, but you can at least see, yeah?”

  Chubs and I both stared at her, stunned.

  “Vi...” I began.

  “What?” Her pitch rose slightly on the word, coming out as a bark. More insecure than angry. “I got tired of being his seeing-eye dog. It made me feel like an asshole for laughing every time he tripped or walked into something—and I don’t like feeling like an asshole all the time, okay?”

  “It’s so hard to go against our nature—” Chubs started.

  “He means thank you,” I said, cutting him off. “That was really thoughtful, Vi.”

  “Yeah, well.” God, she was embarrassed. I took another bite to hide my smile. “I didn’t save the starving children of Africa or anything. He breaks this pair, he’s SOL.”

  “Wait, what?” Liam’s startled voice broke clean through our conversation. He slid the paper Zu had been scribbling messages on closer to him. “Are you sure? I mean, positive? Why didn’t you tell me before?

  Zu reached across the table and took the paper back out of his hands. He was too impatient to let her finish writing the words out and awkwardly leaned across the table, his eyes scanning the words as fast as she could put them down.