“Do you...do you really want to see?”
“This is a bad idea! Ruby, listen to me, you don’t want to—” Chubs’s pitch got higher until it finally cracked. He leaned back against the wall, his face buried in his hands.
Nico didn’t move. His hands were limp in his lap, forcing me to reach over and click through the series of photos that had come through from the cell phone on Cole. There was a test shot in broad daylight—a distant mountain, Liam’s back as he faced it, looking out into the distance. There were three dozen of a low, squat building, all taken after sundown. He’d captured the PSFs posted outside, a ladder up to the building’s roof, a sniper in position. If there was a fence around the camp, Cole and Liam were already inside of it when they’d started snapping the photos.
“They’re going in,” Senator Cruz said. “I thought they were supposed to stay outside?”
They had gone inside. The images were fuzzy, lacking the brightness the full moon outside had provided. They were high up, looking down at tables below, the heads bent over them, eating. The kids wore dark red scrubs—the same uniforms we all had to wear in the camps, but the color—I hadn’t seen that shade in years—
The next image was of one of those kids in uniform looking up, eyes locking on the phone. My finger hesitated over the mouse before clicking again. Nico made a small noise at the back of his throat, his hand closing over mine. “Ruby, you don’t want to...”
I pressed my finger down.
There was a moment where my mind couldn’t make sense of what it was seeing. The photos were taken inside of a dark room, the walls painted black, the lights lining the floors rather than the ceilings. The figure at the center of the room was slumped forward in a chair, the weight of his body straining against the restraints around his chest. Blond hair fell over his face, masking it. My hand gripped the desk as I clicked forward again. A metallic taste flooded my mouth when I noticed the splatters of blood on his neck and ears. The angle made it impossible to tell, I needed another photo—
Click.
“Who took these photos?” Senator Cruz demanded, though no one seemed to be able to respond.
“My guess is the people who caught...” Alice wasn’t sure if it was a him or them. I pressed back against the question, focusing on the screen. Someone had hung a sheet of paper over his neck. Two words had been scrawled there in thick, uneven writing: TRY AGAIN.
In the corner of the shot was a sliver of deep red cloth, and even though my brain knew what was coming, knew it sure enough for the screaming to start inside of my head, I moved to the next photo.
Fire.
The image, the whole of it, was flooded with white flame.
Fire.
Fire.
A screen of gray smoke, and—
Senator Cruz tore herself away from the computer, walking to the far corner of the room, trying to escape the sight of the charred remains. “Why? Why do it? Why?”
The dispassionate, cold creature the Children’s League had been careful to nurture in me clawed its way back up inside of me. And for a second, one single second, I was able to look at the burnt, mutilated corpse in the careful, distant way a scientist would have studied a specimen. In the small section of his face I could see, what skin remained was burnt, dark and rough, like a scab.
I moved back through the shots of the fire. The sick assholes—those goddamn sick fucks who took these pictures. I’d kill them. I knew where to find them. I would kill each and every one of them. I held onto the cold fury with everything I had because it froze out the pain, it didn’t let me shut down the way I wanted to. The burn of tears was at the back of my eyes, my throat, my chest.
“I can’t tell,” Chubs said, edging closer and closer to full-out hysteria, “dammit—”
I scanned through the earlier photos, my stomach as tight as a fist. If I started crying, the others wouldn’t be able to stop. I had to focus—I had to—I stopped on the second photo of the figure in the chair, when they’d put the sign on him. His head lolled to the left, but I saw it. I hadn’t imagined it. I knew who it was.
“It’s...” Vida leaned forward again. Her nails dug into my shoulder. “I can’t...”
Alice had spun away from the gruesome image, overcome by her own retching. But Nico—Nico was looking at me. I felt the words leave my throat, but I didn’t hear them.
“It’s Cole.”
“What?” Vida asked, looking between me and the screen again. “What did you say?”
“It’s Cole.”
A thousand needles flooded my veins, shooting toward my center. I doubled over against the desk, incapable of speech, of thoughts, of anything other than seeing the body—Cole’s body, what they’d done to it. I sucked in a shallow breath, trying to push the pain down. I wanted the numb control back. My head was spiraling faster, harder than even my stomach. Because I knew what would matter to Cole, I knew what he would be asking. Where is Liam? If Cole was—if Cole was—
“Are you sure?” Chubs asked, when no one else seemed able to.
Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Lillian come in and, for a heart-stopping moment, thought the blond hair belonged to Cate, that somehow she and Harry were already here. I heard the murmured explanation Senator Cruz gave.
“Harry...we have to tell him...and Cate, God, Cate...”
“I will,” Vida said, her voice as tight in her throat as Chubs’s arm was around her shoulder. “I’ll do it.”
“Is Liam—” Chubs began, “is there...can we check to see if they took him into custody? If there’s some update to the networks?”
If he’d been killed and they positively ID’d him, then they would update his profile in the PSF network and remove him from the skip tracer listings to reflect as much.
“I’m trying to get into the PSF network,” Nico said, “I’m trying—it’ll be faster to go in through the skip tracers’. Can you give me your login information?”
“Here, I’ll put it in,” Chubs said.
“Is the phone still on?” I heard myself ask as I was drawn back away from the computer, still in my chair. I didn’t trust my legs to try standing. Are we going to get more pictures? And we would just have to sit there, sit and do nothing other than wait for them to come. I choked on my own rage.
“Reds?” Dr. Gray repeated. “You’re sure? Can I see the photos, please?”
Nico pulled up the screen again and shifted to the computer next to him to work. Dr. Gray moved through the photos, skipping around until she found what she was looking for. The violence and horror of it registered only in her frown.
“He was dead when it happened,” she said. “He would have bled out almost instantly from the gunshot to his neck.”
I could have told her that. Cole would have fought to the death. He wouldn’t have let them take him into their program. He would have fought until he flamed out completely.
She shook her head, turning to look at me. “This is why. This is why we need the procedure. These children shouldn’t be able to do this and harm themselves and others.”
My anger blew up, swallowing me in a cloud of blistering incredulity. “No, this is why no one should be fucking with our heads in the first place!”
“There’s nothing on the network,” Chubs said, “not yet...any changes to the PSF’s would take an hour or two to feed into the skip tracer network.”
“We—let’s give him some time, he might still be trying to get away.” Vida shook her head, raking her hands back through her hair. “The last photo came an hour ago. They would have sent something else if they had Liam...right?”
Senator Cruz looked over at me. “Where’s the phone that he’s been using to contact his father? I’ll make the call.”
“Upstairs. The office.” Nico stood up so suddenly that he knocked his chair over behind him. “I’ll get it. I need to...”
Get out of this room, my mind finished, away from the pictures.
He returned less than a minute later, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. He held the small silver flip phone out to the senator—only to drop it when the screen lit up and it began vibrating.
For a moment, no one moved. The phone rang. It rang, it rang, it rang.
Chubs lunged for it, scooping it off the floor before it rang out completely. “Hello?”
His whole body sagged in relief. “Lee—Hey—hey, Liam, where are you? You have to—”
Senator Cruz was beside him before even I was, ripping the phone out of his grip and silencing his protests with a wave of her hand as she put the phone on speaker.
“—took him, I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t—”
That voice I knew as intimately as my own skin, the one I’d heard laughing, pitched in fear, furious, flirting shamelessly, wasn’t the one coming through the small phone. I almost didn’t recognize it at all. The connection made him sound distant, at the other end of a highway, beyond our reach. The words came out of his chest so ragged, so raw, it was almost unbearable to listen to him.
“Liam, it’s Senator Cruz. I need you to take a deep breath and before anything else let me know you’re safe.”
“I didn’t—I don’t know if this is okay—this was the only number I could remember, I know it’s not secure, not really—”
“You did exactly the right thing,” Senator Cruz said, her voice soothing. “Where are you calling from?”
“A pay phone.”
Vida stepped up beside me, eyes sliding my way. I couldn’t speak. An unnatural numbness settled at the center of my chest. I could say a single word.
“I couldn’t get him out—we got inside, we were taking pictures, one of them saw us and we couldn’t get away—they shot him. He fell down and I couldn’t get him out, I tried to carry him, but they saw us and they opened fire—I didn’t want to leave, I had to—have you heard anything about it on the news? Would Harry be able to find out where they’re keeping him? There was so much blood—”
He didn’t know.
I looked at Chubs. He looked like he had glanced up and seen a speeding car coming straight for him. I took the phone from the senator, switching it off speakerphone.
“He...Liam,” I choked out, “he didn’t make it. They sent us proof.”
Until that moment, I think shock and panic for news about Liam had shut off the part of myself that would have let me think through specifics of what had happened. If Cole had been alive when they brought the Red in. If he knew what was going on, if he had been afraid, if he felt the pain. But something shattered in me at delivering the news; the flimsy door keeping the pain out bowed in and then exploded into a shower of splinters that cut through every part of me. I couldn’t breathe. I had to press my hand against my mouth to keep from sobbing. My friend—Cole—how could this—why did it have to be like this? After everything, why did it have to end like this? We were going to do something—for the first time, he had a real future—
Chubs stepped forward, reaching for the phone, but I tore away from him, twisting out of his reach. I felt wild with anger and pain, like someone had thrown acid on my skin. I had to keep this connection to Liam. I had to stay with him. This would destroy him—the agony of knowing that was as sharp as the loss itself. I couldn’t lose Liam, too.
“What do you mean, proof? What did they do to him?” Any coherency was gone. Liam broke down with each word until he was sobbing. “I couldn’t get him out....”
“No,” I said, voice hoarse, “of course you couldn’t. There was no way and he wouldn’t have wanted you to try if it meant they got you, too. Liam, it doesn’t—it doesn’t feel this way now, but you did the right thing.”
The sound of him crying finally did me in, too. My grip on the phone relaxed as my hand lost feeling, allowing Chubs to finally pry the phone away from me.
“Buddy. Buddy, I know, I’m so sorry. Can you make it back here? Do you need us to come get you?” He smoothed his hand back over his hair, squeezing his eyes shut. “Okay. I want you to tell me everything, but you have to do it in person. You have to let us take care of you. Slow down, it’s okay—”
Chubs cast a helpless look my way. I held out my hand for the phone.
“I’m not coming back, I can’t—it’s—”
I interrupted him. “Liam, listen to me, I’m going to come get you, but you have to tell me where you are. Are you hurt?”
“Ruby—” He sucked in a harsh breath. I could imagine him then, exactly as he must have been. Still in his Op blacks, his left forearm braced against the pay phone’s aluminum shell, his face flushed and wild. It broke my heart all over again.
I gripped the phone so tightly I heard its cheap plastic shell creak. Spinning so I was facing the corner and not the gallery of faces looking at me, I dropped to a crouch in the far corner of the room. “It’s going to be okay—”
“It’s not okay!” he shouted. “Stop saying that! It’s not! I’m not coming back. I have to tell Harry and—and Mom, oh, God, Mom—”
“Please let me come get you,” I begged.
“I can’t come back to there, to you guys....” The feeling of nausea that had been growing, twisting my stomach, rose like a cresting wave. His voice seemed to click in and out. “The line is cutting off, I don’t have any more money....”
“Liam? Can you hear me?” Panic hit me like a swarm of wasps in my head.
“—I knew this would happen....dammit...you...sorry...Ruby...sorry...”
I don’t know when or how she’d managed to slip by so many people, or if she’d made herself so small and silent she’d been here the entire time without me noticing. Zu—she took the cell phone away, I tried to get it back, but she had it to her ear, and she was saying, over and over again, in a voice as sweet as little bells, “Don’t leave, please don’t leave, come back, please...”
I heard the dial tone. I heard that sound, saw the phone slide out of her fingers, and I knew it was over. Chubs reached for her and she clung to him, burying her face against his shoulder. “Come on, let’s get some water. Some air. Some...thing.”
“I want to go out and find him,” I said.
“I’ll go with her,” Vida added quickly. “Nico can trace the call.”
“You can’t,” Chubs told me gently. “You have a responsibility here.”
So? I wanted to shout. I felt like tearing at my hair, my shirt—but I couldn’t, I couldn’t do any of those goddamn things because Cole had wrested that stupid promise out of me. Take care of things, Boss. Take care of things. Cate and Harry wouldn’t be here for another two days. I needed to...I had to tell everyone.
He trusted you with this. He thought you could do it. You have to do this.
I had to. If Cole wasn’t here, if Liam wasn’t coming back, then I was in charge, and I had to tell the others. I had to stay here and keep it together.
“Give me a minute,” I said. I only needed one. I walked briskly toward Cate’s old quarters and shut the door behind me. I found the edge of the small bed in the darkness, the same one Liam and I had slept in the night before, and sat down hard. My hands reached along the coarse sheets until they found the soft fabric of the hooded sweater he’d left behind. I buried my face in the fabric, dragging in the scent of him, until finally I released it all in a silent, throat-burning scream.
Why did you have to go in? How am I supposed to do this? Why hadn’t I pushed back harder, knowing where the information had come from?
And there was no answer, just the terrible silence, just the darkness pressing in.
Clancy.
He’d known this would happen—had banked on it. He’d shown Cole the camp, planted the images of it in his mind knowing that Cole was the kind of person who wouldn’t be able to let it go, seeing ot
hers like him treated so damn badly. He would obsess over it, stop thinking about the odds of an actual rescue. After all, how many times had he beaten the odds?
He never had a chance.
The words blistered over my mind. I swayed with the force of the hot, singeing rush that ran from my temples to the base of my neck. My vision flashed, splitting the door in front of me into two, then four. I saw, rather than felt, my hand rise up and reach for the handle. The closer I got, the further back I seemed to be; someone dragged me back and back and back...
It was the last thing I remembered before the blurring dark turned to a gray static, washing over me, hooks and needles running through my veins.
When I surfaced again, there was a cold gun in my hand, and it was pointed at Lillian Gray’s head.
“—DOING? STOP IT, STOP—”
“—Ruby, wake up!”
“You can’t do this—stop—Ruby—STOP!”
I was floating underwater, deep enough where there was nothing but sweet, cool darkness. I didn’t need to move, I couldn’t speak—there was a gentle current, and it was taking me where I needed to go. It was urging me forward and I went willingly, giving myself over to the feeling. This was better than the pain.
“—look at me! Look at me! Ruby!”
The voices were distorted by the waves, stretched into a long, continuous drone. The words filled the spaces between heartbeats, the steady ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum in my ears. I didn’t want them to find me here.
Gem. Hey, Gem.
I turned, looking for the source of the words, forcing my stiff muscles to move.
Take care of things, Boss.
There was no one there. The black currents around me were swirling harder against my freezing skin. There was nothing there.