Fire coats his hands, races up his arms. I’m caught in its glow. I bang on the crate in horror. Why did he get out? Why did he—“Lucas!”
I am still screaming, still beating on the crate’s lid, trying to break out, when the tint of the sky warms to a horrifying red-gold, and the panicked outrage outside turns deadly.
“No!” It was working—it was working—we were getting out—the mud—the rain—
If it had been clear skies—
There are never clear skies here.
The world explodes with White Noise. It spikes into my temple like a ratchet, and for the first time, I’m able to ignore the pain in my leg because everywhere else hurts that much worse. There are shadows closing over me. I can’t keep my eyes open. I turn my face against the crate as the monsters in black rip the lid off the crate and iron hands clench my arms, dragging me out. Freezing rain slaps my skin, my eyes burn with tears at the intensity of the White Noise and the overcast light. I smell burnt skin. There are PSFs on the ground, screaming, rolling in the mud. There are more pouring out of the gate—the gate—God, we were almost through, the rear of the truck only needed to move a foot more, and we would have been past it. The truck sits low in the mud, half the wheels hidden by the black, grasping earth.
I’m dropped into the watery earth like a bundle of dead limbs. I force my eyes open, searching, but my vision is splitting in too many ways.
“Sam!” The sound of his voice tears at my heart. It’s ragged, lanced with the same desperation that’s pumping through me. “Sammy!” At first I think there are ten PSFs surrounding Lucas, but they seem to duplicate the longer I search for him.
I have to get him out of here. I have to save Lucas. He can’t die here. He can’t die for me.
He’s on the ground at their feet, his hands pressed against his skull as though they’re the only things to keep it from splitting in two. I recognize one of the PSFs—the woman who must have recognized him, shouted for him. She’s the one that put me in the cage. Who hit me over and over again in the Factory, in front of everyone. Cut my hair. Don’t act like I want it. There’s a White Noise device in her hands, pointing down toward Lucas, and of everything she’s done or said until now, nothing makes me hate her more.
“Sam!” He is still calling for me, still fighting against the sound blistering his mind, even as they drag him away.
This can’t be it. This can’t be the last time I see him. Hear his voice. Not Lucas, please, God, not him.
I try to push myself up out of the mud. Water is collecting in the deep wells feet have left behind. I’m going to drown in an inch of water. I try to reach for him, but it’s too far, he’s too far away, and everything, every last hope burns out inside of me. Under the carriage of the truck, I can see the road we would have taken, the wild, open road ahead of us, I can see Lucas smiling as he takes my hand, and all of these things, all of these precious pieces of dreams become as insubstantial and cold as the air I’m trying to grasp in my palm.
SIX
LUCAS
THERE is no gunshot.
There are no hands around my throat.
There are restraints that cut deep into my wrists and ankles.
There is darkness. Sleep. Nightmares. Blood, hot blood, a pale face—Sam.
There are four white walls where there once were electric fences and trees and cabins.
There are printouts of my parents’ old IDs, the names blacked out. Who are they? The answer becomes razor and agony.
There are the hands that throw me down, the hands that haul me up, the hands that strike—strike-strike-strike—
There are lights that never go out, voices that never stop, screaming obedience is the key, you are wrong, tell me you are wrong so we can fix you—I try to slip away, wrap myself in layers of memories and stories and songs, but every time I try to go, the Trainer is there, and he cuts at each one with his blade. He drags me out. He digs into my skin. I feel electricity snapping between my teeth. Drills screech. It does not stop hurting until I stop trying. Until I can’t remember where I was going to begin with.
There is hunger—
Thirst—
Pain—
The door opens, but it is not the man in black who comes in. It is a piece of bread. They show me photos, a smiling man, smiling woman, but I can’t remember their names and it hurts too bad to think. Another piece of bread. Yes, they are no one. A warm cup of water. You are no one.
I am a shadow. I am weak. They will fix me.
There is a girl with sunshine hair who turns my world to shreds. She burns my eyes, breaks my thoughts to pieces. There is a glow around her like the sky at noon, but it narrows, the image, it shrinks, and the pain eases its grip into numb nothing. It shrinks and shrinks again until it becomes a pinprick of light in the dark.
A spark that fades to nothing at all.
SEVEN
SAM
AFTER WEEKS of rain and darkness, he’s there at the edge of the Garden one morning.
Just...there.
The morning fog curls around his crimson vest as he stands as still as a statue, like he has always only ever been there. The color is gone from his skin, his face shaded by shadows and new scars. My memory of him alters sharply, a new snapshot to add to the box, another one I can’t touch in case one day it cuts too deep and takes me to a place I can’t recover from. Every part of me is shaking as I limp forward through the white fence.
I have been in the Infirmary for weeks, my fingers curled around the edge of a cliff I know we only fall over once, unwilling to let go. They knew the real punishment would be living. That’s the only reason I could think of why they gave the female nurse the medicine, even after they made the male one disappear. The harder I tried to give up, the tighter they strapped me down to this place. They fed me with tubes when I would not eat. They made me sleep. My leg will never be the same; they treated it, I’m sure, because they know it will hurt me the rest of my life. It will be a reminder of what happens when you try to run.
And this is what happens to boys who dream.
There’s a fist around my throat. I know I shouldn’t look, but I can’t help it, I have to see if it’s like before. Even with his mask on, I saw the soul beneath the stone.
He turns as I slow.
He looks at me. Through me. There is nothing, not even a flicker of life in his face. My knees buckle and I’m falling forward, stumbling through the gate into the black, soft dirt. The wind carries the last traces of mist away as Lucas turns back toward the camp spreading open in front of him. And I know.
He has gone to a place I cannot find him.
I cannot sing him home.
PROLOGUE
BLACK is the color that is no color at all.
Black is the color of a child’s still, empty bedroom. The heaviest hour of night—the one that traps you in your bunk, suffocating in another nightmare. It is a uniform stretched over the broad shoulders of an angry young man. Black is the mud, the lidless eye watching your every breath, the low vibrations of the fence that stretches up to tear at the sky.
It is a road. A forgotten night sky broken up by faded stars.
It is the barrel of a new gun, leveled at your heart.
The color of Chubs’s hair, Liam’s bruises, Zu’s eyes.
Black is a promise of tomorrow, bled dry from lies and hate.
Betrayal.
I see it in the face of a broken compass, feel it in the numbing grip of grief.
I run, but it is my shadow. Chasing, devouring, polluting. It is the button that should never have been pushed, the door that shouldn’t have opened, the dried blood that couldn’t be washed away. It is the charred remains of buildings. The car hidden in the forest, waiting. It is the smoke.
It is the fire.
The spark.
B
lack is the color of memory.
It is our color.
The only one they’ll use to tell our story.
ONE
THE SHADOWS grew longer the farther I walked from the center of the city. I headed west, toward the sinking sun that set the remainder of the day on fire. I hated that about winter—night seemed to reach earlier and earlier into the afternoon. Los Angeles’s smog-stained sky was painted with dark strokes of violet and ash.
Under normal circumstances, I would have been grateful for the additional cover as I navigated the easy grid of surface streets back to our current base. But with the debris from the attack, the installation of military stations and detainment camps, and the congestion of now-useless, abandoned cars fried by the electromagnetic pulse, the face of the city had been altered so dramatically that to go even a half mile through the wreckage was enough to become completely lost. Without the city’s light pollution casting its usual foggy glow, if any of us scouted at night, we had to rely on distant lights from military convoys.
I cast a quick glance around, pressing a hand against my jacket pocket to make sure the flashlight and service pistol were still there; both were courtesy of one Private Morales, and would only be used in absolute emergency. I wasn’t letting anyone pick me up, spot me running through the dark. I had to get back to base.
An hour ago, Private Morales had had the unfortunate luck to cross into my path, coming off her patrol of the freeway alone. I’d been there since before sunrise, positioned behind an overturned car, watching the elevated roadway shimmering like an electric current under a constant flood of artificial light. Every hour, I’d counted the number of tiny uniformed figures moving along the section nearest to me, weaving in and out of the trucks and Humvees lined up bumper to bumper like a secondary barrier. My muscles cramped, but I fought the urge to wait it out somewhere else.
It had been more than worth it. One soldier had been enough to arm me not only with the tools I needed to return to base safely, but also with the knowledge of how we could finally—finally—get the hell out of this damn city.
I looked back and forth twice before climbing over the fallen heap of brick that had once been the face of a bank branch, and let out a hiss of pain between my teeth as the side of my hand scraped on something jagged. I kicked the object—a metal C that had fallen from its logo—in irritation, and immediately regretted it. The clattering and grating noise bounced off the nearby buildings, almost masking the faint voices and shuffling steps.
I threw myself into what was left of the building’s interior, dropping down into a crouch behind the nearest stable wall.
“Clear!”
“Clear—”
Twisting around, I watched the progress of the soldiers moving along the other side of the street. I counted helmets—twelve—as they broke off to investigate the different smashed-glass entryways of office buildings and stores. Cover? I looked around, quickly taking stock of the overturned, singed furniture, my body moving toward one of the dark wood desks and sliding beneath it. The scrape of loose debris against the outside sidewalk overpowered the sound of my own ragged breathing.
I stayed where I was, nose burning with the smell of smoke and ash and gasoline, tracking the voices until they faded. Anxiety kept a grip on my stomach as I edged my way out from under the desk and along the floor toward the entrance. I could still see the patrol unit weaving through the wreckage halfway down the avenue, but I couldn’t wait, not even a few minutes longer.
When I’d dug through the soldier’s memories, stitched together the information I needed, it felt like a block of cement had finally rolled off my chest. She’d shown me the gaps in the freeway’s defenses as surely as if she’d handed me a map and marked them in thick, black strokes. After that, it had just been a matter of washing myself out of her memory.
I knew the former Children’s League agents would be pissed that this had actually worked. Nothing they tried themselves had succeeded, and in the meantime, the hauls from their food scouting had dwindled. Cole had pushed and pushed them to let me try, but the other agents only agreed on the condition that I go alone—to avoid any additional “risks” of capture. We’d already lost two agents who’d been careless while walking out in the city.
I wasn’t careless, but I was getting desperate. It was time to make a move now, or the military would starve us out of hiding.
The U.S. Army and National Guard had created a virtual barrier around downtown Los Angeles using the elaborate freeway system. The snaking cement monsters formed a tight circle around the inner city, choking us off from the outside world. The 101 was to the north and east, the I-10 to the south, and the 110 to the west. We might have had a chance of escaping if we’d left immediately after climbing back up to the surface from the wreckage of HQ, but...there was that word that Chubs always used: shell-shocked. He said it was amazing any of us were capable of movement at all.
I should have. I should have forced us to go, instead of falling apart at the seams. I should have—if I hadn’t been thinking about his face trapped down in the dark. I pressed the back of my hand against my eyes, steeling myself against the nausea and stabbing pain in my skull. Think about anything else. Anything. These headaches were unbearable; so much worse than the ones I used to have after trying to control my abilities.
I couldn’t stop. I pushed through the hollow feeling in my legs to a steady jog. I felt the ache of exhaustion at the back of my throat, the heaviness of my eyelids, but adrenaline kept me moving, even as parts of me felt like they were on the verge of shutting down. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d fallen into a deep enough sleep to escape the waking nightmare around us.
The roads were blistered with peeling asphalt, strewn with piles of cement the army had yet to clear. Here and there I passed bright dots of color—a red high heel, a purse, someone’s bike, all dropped and forgotten. Some objects had blown out of nearby windows; the heat from the nearby blasts had charred them black. The wastefulness of the destruction was sickening.
As I ran across the next intersection, I stole a look up Olive Street, my eyes drawn to the glowing field of light that was Pershing Square three avenues over. The former park had been transformed into an internment camp; hastily thrown together, while the rubble of the city still smoldered. The poor people inside its fences had been working in the nearby buildings when President Gray launched his attack against the Children’s League and the Federal Coalition, the small band of former politicians united against him. He’d supposedly retaliated because one or both parties had played a role in his most recent assassination attempt. We’d kept watch on each of these camps, searching for Cate and the others, watching as the numbers inside swelled as more and more civilians were picked up and held against their will.
But no Cate. If she and the agents who left HQ before the attack hadn’t made it out of the city, they were hiding themselves so well that we couldn’t find them—not even with our emergency contact procedures.
Another small military convoy—the buzz of radios and growling tires tipped me off two blocks in advance. I bit back a noise of frustration as I took cover behind the shell of an SUV until the soldiers passed me by, their boots kicking up a cloud of chalky gray dust. I stood up, brushed myself off, and started running.
We—the League, or whatever was left of us—moved locations every few days, never staying in one warehouse long. When we ventured out to find food and water, or went to watch the camps, if there was even a hint of suspicion someone could have followed us back—we moved. It was smart, there was no denying that, but I was starting to lose track of where we were at any given time.
The silence, thicker now that I had crossed into the eastern half of the city, was so much more unnerving than the symphony of machine-gun fire and weapons discharging that had filled the air close to Pershing Square. My hand clenched around my flashlight, but I still couldn’t bring mysel
f to take it out, even as my elbow scraped against the stucco wall I stumbled into. I glanced up at the sky. New moon. Of course.
A feeling of unease, the same one that had been perched on my shoulder whispering dark things in my ear for weeks, became a burning knife in my chest—sinking slowly, tearing everything in its path. I cleared my throat, trying to get the poisonous air out of my lungs. At the next intersection I forced myself to stop, and ducked into an old ATM alcove.
Take a breath, I ordered myself. A real one. I tried shaking out my arms and hands, but the heaviness remained. Closing my eyes, I listened to a distant helicopter slice through the air, moving at a furious pace. Instinct—insistent, baiting instinct—was nudging me to swing an early right on Bay Street, not stay on Alameda Street until I hit its intersection with Seventh Street. The latter was a more-direct route to our current base on Jesse Street and Santa Fe Avenue; the quickest way to give the others the details, form a plan, and get out.
But if someone were watching or tracking me, I’d be able to lose them on Seventh Street. My feet took charge and pushed me east toward the Los Angeles River.
I got a block and a half before I saw the shadows moving up Mateo Street toward Seventh Street. My punishing pace came to an abrupt stop—my hands flew out to catch myself against a mailbox before I spilled out into the middle of the street.
A sharp breath blew out of me. Too close. This is what happened when I didn’t take the time to slow down and actually make sure the street was clear. I felt the echo of my racing pulse behind my temples and reached up to rub them. Something warm and sticky smeared against my forehead, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.
I kept my head and body low as I moved, trying to see which direction the troops were headed in now. They were already way too close to our base—if I doubled back, I might be able to outrun them to the warehouse and warn the others to bail.