In the Afterlight

  “No!”

  I had the keys. I barely heard the lock as it clanged into place.

  “No, no, no,” he moaned, “Ruby, you know what they’ll do. They’ll take you back to that place, they’ll kill you—they’ll kill you.”

  Dr. Gray had moved over to her son’s side, dropping to her knees to apply pressure to his wounds. At that, she looked over, startled.

  “I won’t let them hurt me,” I said, knowing what a hollow promise it was. But in that moment, I felt so sure of this plan, wanted so badly to make sure that it wasn’t derailed in the aftermath of all this, that I felt confident I could, maybe, influence enough of the PSFs to keep my life.

  I want to live.

  “It was supposed to be me. It should be me!”

  “Tell the others March first,” I said, pressing my palm against the glass and letting the keys fall to the floor. “March first. Harry knows the plan.”

  “Ruby,” he sobbed, “don’t do this.”

  I leaned my forehead against the cool glass and said quietly, “I can see it now—the road Jude talked about. It’s so beautiful. The rain’s gone and the clouds are moving out.”

  I want to live.

  I shouldered Dr. Gray aside and reached to take Clancy under the arms, refusing to sag under his dead weight. I dragged him through the doorway, into the short hall.

  “What are you doing?” The woman trailed after me, her hands, shirt, face all stained with her son’s blood. “Where are you taking him?”

  “Shut the door!” I said sharply.

  Nico was still pressed up against the glass, slamming his palms against it, when Dr. Gray shut the door on that last image. I looked down at Clancy’s dark head as I moved, listening to his half-conscious mutterings. The coppery stench of blood filled my nose. I looked down at my hands and thought, even now, he’s staining me.

  They cut the power just as I pulled Clancy through the last door. He slid free of my hands, thumping bonelessly against the tile. I glanced back, making sure Dr. Gray had shut the last door, securing Nico safely inside. I slid the flash drive into my boot and lay down flat on my stomach, stretched out over the cold tile. I was proud of the fact that my hands didn’t shake as I put them behind my head.

  Breathe.

  I went to that place deep inside, the one Zu had asked me about. I retreated as far as I could as the first beam of light slashed through the hallway’s darkness. Fear couldn’t touch me there, not even as I was hauled up by my hair and shoulder, a device flashing in my face. The dark spots in my vision blotted out the soldier’s face, and I couldn’t hear anything over my own steady heartbeat. When the grip on me tightened and something cold and metal pressed against the base of my skull, I knew they’d identified me.

  Clancy was hidden by a circle of men in dark fatigues as Dr. Gray was dragged off to the side, clawing at the soldier who separated her from her son. One of them, a medic, stepped away long enough for me to see them lower a white plastic muzzle down over his face.

  Radios buzzed, a swarm of voices flying over my head, and I heard none of it. Both of my hands were secured, the zip ties unbearable as the soldier holding me yanked them tight and flipped me over onto my back. Something jabbed into the side of my neck and I felt the pressure of the injection being forced into my bloodstream.

  They are going to kill me. I wasn’t even going to make it out of the building, never mind the state, if this didn’t work. I should have practiced. I should have found a way to try it on a group when my life didn’t rely on someone’s trigger finger.

  The drug they’d given me turned my limbs to powder. I felt light enough to be blown away, but it couldn’t touch my mind, not yet. I fought against the drag of my eyelids, the weight that settled over them. I had one...I had one more thing to do...

  I’d spent months carefully winding my gift into a tight spool, only letting it out by inches, and only when I needed it. The strain of keeping it bound up had been a steady, constant reminder that I had to work to keep the life I’d built for myself out here. It was a muscle I’d carefully toned to withstand nearly any pressure.

  Letting it all go felt like shaking a bottle of soda and ripping off the cap. It fizzed and flooded and swept out of me, searching for the connections waiting to be made. I didn’t guide it, and I didn’t stop it—I don’t know if I could have if I tried. I was the burning center of a galaxy of faces, memories, loves, heartbreaks, disappointments, and dreams. It was like living dozens of different lives. I was lifted and shattered by it, how strangely beautiful it was to feel their minds linked with my own.

  The spinning inside my head slowed with the movement around me. I felt time hovering nearby, waiting to resume its usual tempo. The darkness slid into the edges of my vision, seeping through my mind like a drop of ink in water. But I was in control of the moment, and there was one last thing that I needed to say to them, one last idea to imprint in their minds.

  “I’m Green.”

  I woke to cold water and a woman’s soft voice.

  The smell of bleach.

  The aftertaste of vomit.

  Dry throat.

  Cracked, tight lips.

  The metallic banging and clattering of an old radiator in the instant before it let out a warm breath of air.

  “—need to run the test while subject is conscious—”

  Wake up, I commanded myself, wake up, Ruby, wake up—

  “Good. There cannot be any confusion on this, do you understand?”

  I dragged myself up and out of a haze of pain and grogginess. My eyes were crusted with sleep. I tried lifting a hand up to wipe it away, to ease the tingling at the tips of my fingers. The Velcro restraint jerked but held firm, cutting into my bare wrists with a vicious bite as I tried to rise up off the freezing metal examination table.

  The cold water hadn’t been water at all, but sweat. It dripped down into the white plastic muzzle trapping each labored, heated breath. The black spots floating in my vision cleared, adjusting to the room’s harsh artificial light. The pieces began to make sense. The poster on the wall, the one with the color chart outlining each of the abilities, Red to Green—Psi Classification System, my lips formed the words on top.

  High up in the corner of the room, a lidless camera eye was blinking like a heartbeat.

  Calm down, Ruby. The rational part of my brain was still firing, at least. Calm down. You’re alive. Calm down....

  It was sheer will and nothing else that finally brought my pulse back down. I breathed in my through my nose, out between my teeth. This was Thurmond—the Infirmary. I recognized the lemon-scented terror of it and the sounds of kids crying nearby, the rattling of carts, heavy booted footsteps, and still some part of it felt unreal to me, even as the last moments at the Ranch slammed back into me. The flash drive—my boots were still on, they hadn’t taken them, thank God. I tried twisting my foot around the restraints, but I couldn’t feel it against my ankle bone. I flexed and then pointed my toes, nearly crying in relief when I felt the sharp plastic corners under my heel. It must have slipped down.

  You came here for a reason, I reminded myself. The others need you to finish this. You have to finish this.

  I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the images that poured in from the darkest corner of my imagination. They wouldn’t have brought you here if they were just going to kill you. I saw the image of Ashley’s pale, gray face. The way her stiff hand had fallen onto the ground, dangling into the ditch they would lower her into. Maybe this was about having an official record of where my body was buried.

  And suddenly, it didn’t matter what I was and what I had been through. I was ten years old all over again, waiting in terrible silence for someone to wake me back up from the nightmare I’d let myself get caught in. Help me, I thought, someone help me—

  Gem.

  I squeezed my eyes shut aga
inst the familiar voice whispering in my ear, choked again, this time by grief. Don’t let me screw it up, please, help me, I thought. I was alone here, I knew I would be, and somehow I had misjudged how terrifying it would be. I reached for the image of Cole’s face and held it at the forefront of my mind. He wouldn’t be afraid. He wouldn’t leave me.

  You have to walk out of here. I felt the words settle in my mind. Not just for them, but for yourself. You have to walk out of here on your own two feet.

  The door cracked open, and the sounds from the rest of the building came flooding in. An old man’s face appeared there, gray hair ringing his head like a cluster of old dust. His eyes narrowed behind his glasses, but I didn’t recognize him, not until he stepped inside and I sucked in a lungful of his terrible scent—alcohol and lemon soap. Dr. Freemont, still haunting the halls of this place.

  The man let out a noise of surprise. “She’s awake.”

  Another face appeared directly behind his, a woman in gray scrubs, who was quickly pushed aside to allow two PSFs in the room. Their black uniforms were pristine, from their polished boots to the stitched red Ѱ on their chests. I saw their faces and it was like living inside of a memory. The moment took on an unreal quality.

  Focus.

  One last person entered the room. He was middle-aged, with sandy hair that turned silver under the lights. His uniform was different than that of the soldiers, a black button-down with matching slacks. I knew this uniform, but I’d only seen it once up close. Camp controller. One of the men and women who worked in the Control Tower, monitoring the cameras, keeping the day’s schedule.

  “Ah, there you are,” Dr. Freemont began. “I was just about to begin the test.”

  The man—his shirt was embroidered with the name O’Ryan—stepped up, sweeping a hand forward, a clear go ahead.

  I set my jaw, fingers curling into fists. I knew better than to ask what was happening, but I read the situation quickly enough to put together a guess. The old man pulled a small, handheld White Noise machine out of his pocket and adjusted a dial on it.

  All the times I’d envisioned this plan playing out, I had seen myself influencing the camp controllers and PSFs one at a time, planting the suggestion that I was really a Green, working my way through each of them as our paths crossed. But I saw now, as the doctor’s finger pressed down on the device’s largest button, that I didn’t have to influence dozens—just four.

  “This is Green,” Dr. Freemont said.

  The sound that came out of the device was softer than I expected, as if I was hearing it from several floors above me. The shrill pitch and blended mess of beeping and buzzing made the hair on the back of my neck stand up and my stomach tighten, but it was nothing compared to the White Noise they used over the camp’s loudspeakers.

  They’re seeing what frequency I can hear, I thought, shit—

  Our brains translated sounds differently than a normal human mind; if the adults in the room heard the sound, it was nothing more than a buzzing fly around their ears. There was a spectrum of pitches that affected us, each of them specially tuned to sing for each different color. I’d learned about it when Cate and the League had managed to embed the regular White Noise with tones meant for Oranges and Reds, hoping to root out those of us who might have been in hiding or posing as a different color. That sound, the thread of mind-blistering crashes and bangs, had drilled through me and left me unconscious.

  I strained against the Velcro cuffs, letting my eyes bulge, letting my whole body shake and thrash, as if the sound were a knife driving repeatedly into my chest. The sounds that escaped the muzzle were low, animal moans.

  O’Ryan held up a hand and the faint noise switched off. He stepped up closer to the bed, peering down at my face. I had to force my hatred into fear.

  “Successful reaction,” Dr. Freemont said. “Should I—”

  The camp controller’s face was impassive, though I saw his lip curl up in assessment. I got a good look at him now; his wide shoulders filled out his shirt and, standing over me, he seemed ten feet tall. There was something in his stance that reminded me of a knife’s blade. He stood rigidly proud, his eyes cutting through every layer of control I’d built up, and I realized, a second too late, that this wasn’t a normal camp controller. This was the camp controller.

  And I was looking him in the eye.

  I tore my gaze away, but the damage had been done. I’d shown too much will. He’d read it as a challenge. “Set it to Orange.”

  There was a lot I could withstand now, but I knew a hit of that White Noise would be like stepping in front of a speeding train. O’Ryan stood over me, staring at my face. He thought he was in control here, didn’t he? That if he looked at me close enough, he’d detect me using my abilities—that if the muzzle kept me from speaking, I couldn’t issue a command.

  I didn’t need to look at him. I didn’t need to speak to him. And, in the end, I only needed to affect one person.

  Dr. Freemont’s mind was a swamp of faceless children and computer screens. I planted the images there in the middle of them all, a neat, tidy package based on what I could remember from my first processing through the camp, and pulled back immediately.

  I pushed the image of him fiddling with the dial, pulling it back toward his chest as he turned the dial back to its original setting. He was angled away from the PSFs at the door. O’Ryan was looking at me, so smug and sure of himself, that he allowed himself a knowing smirk. I lowered my lashes, glad for the first time that there was a muzzle to keep me from returning it.

  “Begin,” he said.

  It was easy enough to float the command to Dr. Freemont to push the button—I’d seen him do it moments ago, and could choreograph the small movement the exact way the doctor had done before. The White Noise trickled out again, running along my skin like an electric current. I let my eyes flick around, but it was harder to mime fear now. A swell of cool, careful control settled my mind.

  O’Ryan looked back over his shoulder. “Turn it on.”

  It is on, I thought.

  “It is on,” Dr. Freemont said. I froze at the dull tone of his voice, risking a glance toward O’Ryan for his reaction.

  The camp controller’s lip pulled back. “I’m ordering one of the testing machines back from New York.”

  New York? Had they moved all of the big testing machines and scanners out already?

  I forced the words into the doctor’s mouth. That could take weeks.

  “That could take weeks,” Dr. Freemont said.

  This is foolproof.

  “This is foolproof.”

  O’Ryan’s gaze was searing as it moved between the old man and me. I let my control expand, snaring the camp controller’s mind. I skimmed the surface memories, the damp mornings, fog, streams of children in uniforms, but it took a forceful shove to break past them, to plant the idea. This girl is Green. She was mistakenly identified as Orange.

  I pulled back, slipping out of both of their minds, shifting my gaze to the tiled floor.

  “Fine. The Orange classification was an error.” O’Ryan turned to one of the PSFs. “Get one of the Green uniforms and shoes out of the boxes. Her PID is three-two-eight-five.”

  “What size, sir?”

  “Does it matter?” O’Ryan barked. “Go.”

  The doctor blinked. “Will she not stay here, then? I imagine it might be...disruptive to the other children if they saw her.”

  “One night is enough.” He turned to look at me as he added, “I want them all to understand, no matter how far they run, they’ll always be found. They’ll always be brought back.”

  A whole night. Jesus—the drugs they’d given me had knocked me sideways hard enough to lose a full day. The military would have flown us back east to West Virginia—they wouldn’t have risked ground transportation. Meaning...that would make it...the twenty-fifth of Febru
ary. Shit. Three days to figure this out.

  The doctor didn’t uncuff me or remove the muzzle until the PSF was back, dropping the thin, cotton uniform and laceless white slip-on sneakers on the examination table.

  “Change,” O’Ryan ordered, tossing them onto my chest. “Move.”

  The smell of black permanent marker flooded my nose as I picked them up, working my sore jaw back and forth. If it was a muscle or a joint, it hurt, but I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of limping as I stood up and moved to the corner of the room to begin stripping, aware of their eyes on my back the entire time. I began with my shoes, unlacing them quickly, tilting the right one back to pluck the black flash drive out of it. My hands felt swollen and clumsy as I slid it into my new shoe, pretending to adjust the cloth tongue. They were two sizes too big, at least, but it didn’t matter to anyone watching me. My face burned with hatred as I faced the wall and stripped out of my clothes. The uniform slid over my freezing skin like the dull side of a blade. When I was finished, I turned back and kept my head bowed.

  The PSF who’d gone to get the uniform, Laybrook, stepped up and gripped my arm.

  “Cabin twenty-seven,” O’Ryan said, the corner of his mouth twisting up in a mocking smile. “We kept your bed open for you, knowing we’d see you again. I’m sure you remember the way.”

  O’Ryan gave a small signal with his hand and I was hauled, literally pulled, out of the door and into the hall. Laybrook wrenched my arm again as we turned into the nearest stairwell. God, I could almost see it—all of those little kids trailing up the other direction, not knowing what was waiting for them. I saw myself in my pajamas, Sam in her coat.

  The pace was impossible to keep up with. I slipped, nearly falling onto my knees as we reached the first landing. Laybrook’s expression darkened with irritation as he gripped the back of my shirt and neck, bringing me back up onto my feet.

  This is how it’s going to be, I thought, with all of them. I got out, I got out and beat their system—And now what? They had to prove to me it would never happen again? That I was just as small and powerless at seventeen as I was at ten? They wanted me to stay in that shadowy corner I’d let myself be backed into, fold myself up small, cut myself off from the others. They wanted to take everything away again, strip me down to nothing.