Текст книги "In the Afterlight"

Автор книги: Alexandra Bracken

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Текущая страница: 13 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

Leave it to Clancy to mentally cast himself as the hero in every story.

“I do, though I think I prefer this one to make my point: A rabbit who does not know when a gift has made him safe is poorer than a slug, even though he may think otherwise himself.”

I shook my head. “Stop. Just stop. This is low, even for you.”

“Oh, believe me, this isn’t even close to how low I’m willing to sink to get you to understand what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“The issue isn’t that I don’t understand, it’s that I don’t agree.”

“I know,” he said, “God, do I know that. There have been so many times I wished you could—that you hadn’t let them crush you the way they did at Thurmond. You’re so unkind to yourself, and you can’t even differentiate the actual truth from the warped version of it that they fed to you.”

I was so sick of these speeches that if I hadn’t come in here with a purpose, I would have left before he could get started. But this was my price of admission. I had to listen to his bullshit excuses for why he treated everyone around him with as much thought as the grass beneath his shoes.

“Never once, in the whole time I’ve known you, have you ever referred to what we can do as a gift. You snarl and snap your teeth if the word gifted is so much as whispered in your direction. There’s a stubbornness in you I just don’t understand, no matter how much thought I put toward it. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to use your...what do you call them? Abilities. You punish yourself if you fail to control them, and you punish yourself if you succeed. One of the things I find most fascinating about you is that you’re somehow able to mentally separate your gift from yourself—like it’s a whole separate entity that you can beat back into submission.”

He stood up and came toward me, his arms crossed over his chest in a mirror of my pose. The air conditioning clicked on overhead, breathing out a hiss of cold air. The chill stroked its icy fingers over my bare arms, my neck, my cheeks. It was a caress. For a moment I was sure I was standing somewhere else, the smell of evergreen and spice filling my nose.

“Stop it.” I didn’t know how he was doing it, but I wasn’t the same Ruby I’d been at East River. I wasn’t blind to his tricks; this is how he consistently wormed his way into my head, by unsettling me.

His eyebrows rose. “I’m not doing anything.”

I let out a small noise of disgust, and made a show of starting to turn back toward the door, testing how desperate he was for me to stay. How hard it would be to play this little plan of mine out.

“Don’t you wonder why it’s so easy for Blues to control what they can do?” he called. “It’s because each time they move something, it’s a natural manifestation of their will—something they want to happen. It never turns off for the Greens, because their gift is like a net over their minds; they see it as their mind working and nothing more.”

Whereas, for someone like Zu, a Yellow, or me, or even Cole—we had to know we could turn it off, and completely, other wise we’d destroy everything and everyone around us. We used our minds like weapons clenched tightly in our fists, struggling to return them back to their holsters without injuring ourselves in the process.

“It must be torture for you to be around those three Blues constantly, to have them tell you everything will be all right and that you can control what you do—and then see them lift a finger and have it work perfectly. You spent six years at Thurmond, scared to so much as breathe the wrong way in case it made them give you a second look. You know what they’ll do if they ever catch you and bring you back to that camp. They’ll keep you there long enough to run their tests and confirm what they already know. You saw how quickly and quietly they took the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows out. The Reds, they went to Project Jamboree. The Yellows, to one of the new camps built specifically to keep their abilities at bay. But what happened to the Oranges? Where did those kids go?”

My throat had closed up on itself. What little courage I had left was draining out of me as fast as the familiar dread was rolling in.

“Do you want me to tell you?” he asked, his voice quiet as he leaned his shoulder against the glass.

I surprised myself with a breathless, “Yes.”

“Some of them went to Leda’s research program, the one that Nico and I were brought into after they closed the first one at Thurmond,” Clancy said. “The others, if you believe the word of some of the PSFs stationed there at the time, are two miles north of the camp, buried a few hundred feet away from the railroad tracks.”

“Why?” Why kill them, why waste their lives, why do it like they were animals that needed to be put down, why—why them—

“Because they couldn’t be controlled. Period. It was the neatest, easiest solution to their headache. And because they also knew, if the kids were to ever be released from the camps, they could explain it simply by saying that IAAN was the root of it, that they were susceptible to a non-existent second wave of the disease. Our gift manifests in few enough kids that it won’t raise many, if any, red flags.”

The birth rate was low enough these days—few people would take the risk of a child being claimed by IAAN—that it seemed impossible to guess.

His dark eyes slid toward me. “I’ve seen the military orders—the explanations for how to do it ‘humanely’ so the child only registers the smallest amount of pain. I’ve never been able to reach any of them in time to save them.”

“You don’t save anyone,” I said bitterly. “You only help yourself.”

“Listen to me!” he snapped, striking a palm against the glass. “You are your abilities and they are you. I can’t put it to you more plainly. Do you know why I hate this cure? It’s a statement that what we are is inherently wrong. It’s a punishment for something that isn’t our fault—all because they can’t control their fear about what we can do, any more than they can control their resentment that there are people out there stronger and more powerful than they are. They want to strip you of yourself—your ability to protect and enforce your right to make decisions about your life. Your own body. Mark my words: in the end, it won’t be a choice. They’ll decide this for you.”

“The cure is not a punishment if it saves the lives of the kids born after us. They should never have to experience what we went through. Did you ever stop and think about them before you tried to burn the research?”

“Of course I did! But this cure you keep talking about? It’s not a cure—it’s a painful, invasive procedure that only helps the kids who have gone through the change. It doesn’t do a damn thing for the others who were never going to survive.”

“Try again,” I said. “I’ve gotten much better at detecting your bullshit.”

He ran an angry hand back through his dark hair in frustration. “You need to be focusing your energy on finding out the cause—it isn’t a virus, that much Leda figured out. It has to be something in the environment, something that was tainted...”

Whether or not he realized it now, he’d walked right into the trap I’d hoped he would. I needed him to be talking and thinking about the cure. It would naturally lead to thoughts of his mother—what he had done to her, where we could find her.

“Now isn’t the time to change yourself to fit into the world,” Clancy said, his voice raw with whatever thoughts were storming beneath his skin. “You should be changing the world to accept you. To let you exist as you are, without being cut open and damaged.”

This was it—I felt the opening in the conversation as though the air had parted around us. He’d always been able to get what he wanted out of me by plucking and plucking and plucking at painful memories until I was too distraught or emotional to ward his advances off. I knew he was capable of losing his temper—I’d seen it too many times to think it was a rare occurrence—but I didn’t want anger. I wanted anguish, the kind I had seen on Nico’s face the instant he opened the photo of his younger self. When he reconnected with what they had done to him, Clancy would be as malleable as wet sand in my hands.

“If everything you say is true—that the cure is cruel and will change us—prove it.”

That brought him up short. “How?”

“Show me. Prove it to me that it’s as terrible as you say. I have absolutely zero reason to take your word for it, considering your stellar record of telling the truth.”

The look of hope on his face turned sour. “Years of research and information isn’t enough for you? I already gave you everything I had.”

“Yes, on Thurmond. On the Leda research program. Not about this.”

“Ah.” Clancy began to pace, running his fingers along the glass wall separating us. “So you want to see for yourself? If you can’t take my word, how can you trust my memory? Even those can be faked, as you yourself know.”

“I can tell the difference,” I said, realizing with a shock of awareness that I actually could.

The memory from the other day. The one he’d used to show me how to log into his server and pull all of those files. It had felt different because it was different. It was pure imagination on his part. That was why I’d been able to step into it, interact as myself with what was happening rather than reenact what had happened as the person I was reading. There’d been a different texture to the whole experience.

“You did figure it out. Well done.” Clancy sounded pleased. “Memory and imagination are two different beasts, processed and handled in different ways by the mind. All of those times you replaced someone’s memories, planted an idea in their head—you didn’t realize you were doing several different things at once, did you?”

Was I? Until now, I’d taken everything I could do in stride, done what had felt natural. Maybe it was pointless because hopefully I’d one day be rid of them and the terror they held for me, but...shouldn’t I at least make more of an effort to understand exactly what I was doing and how?

“You’re stalling,” I reminded him.

“No, just waiting for you,” he said quietly. “If you want to see it, if this is the only way to prove it to you, then...it’s fine.”

I tested his defenses with a brush of my mind against his. But he was waiting, and the moment I closed my eyes and tried to touch his mind with mine, it was like he’d reached out a hand to guide me in. I was pulled through the gauzy layers of stained memories, catching a face here, a sound there. Clancy possessed a highly organized mind. It was like running down a winding hallway of windows, each offering a tantalizing look inside. Or walking down the aisle of a library, searching for the right book, and only glimpsing the other titles as you quickly passed.

The images began to smear, dripping down like ink on a wet page. The colors morphed and merged and then, with the force of a blow to the chest, settled. I was thrown into a memory so solid I could feel the cold, metal table biting at my already stiff skin. Blinking several times to clear the halo of light around my vision, I felt myself try to strain up, only to be jerked back down by the black straps pinning my wrists and ankles. There were no layers of fabric covering me, not even a blanket—only wires and electrodes, exploding out of my head and chest like a bursting cocoon.

The men and women in white coats swarmed the table I’d been laid out on, their voices buzzing around my head. They pulled wires off my skull, replaced them with new ones, touched everywhere—everywhere—forced my eyelids open roughly to shine a blinding light there. I could hear their quiet jokes and murmurs, see the outlines of their smiles behind their paper masks.

He had shown me a memory like this once, back when we were at East River. It had been horrifying to watch, even more so to realize that it was taking place in a part of the Infirmary I recognized by sight. But the simple truth was, the stronger the memory—the stronger the feelings associated with it—the clearer everything became. I knew now that when I heard something, smelled something, felt something in a memory, it was because it had been burnt so deeply into that person’s mind, it had left a scar.

This wasn’t a memory about the cure research—that had been under his mother’s control, far away from him. This was what they had done at Thurmond, before he’d been able to get himself out. They were studying him like a specimen, the way they had studied that Red. Nico.

A plastic mask was lowered onto my face, and sickly sweet air came flooding into my lungs. The overload of sensation dampened at the first touch of drugs to my system.

He’d told me once that they kept the kids sedated but awake during procedures, so the machines could better monitor their normal brain functions and map the way the Psi abilities rippled through them. Thurmond’s blue tiles echoed the machines’ screeching, making it sound like they were everywhere, all of them drawing in closer, waiting for their turn. I couldn’t swallow around my dry, heavy tongue; saliva dripped past cracked, swollen lips into the muzzle they’d secured over my head.

The jolt of fire came without warning, zigzagging down my spinal column, a ripping sensation that left me breathless with pain. It was—it was like a static shock had been cranked up to a thousand levels higher. I couldn’t control myself as my body seized up, relaxed; seized; relaxed.

“Try it again, this time—” A stocky researcher let out a cry of disgust, jumping back from the table. The stench of bleach was replaced by piss and blood and burnt flesh. I would have emptied my stomach, too, if there’d been anything in it. In that moment, I would have given anything to have choked on my own vomit and died. Humiliation seared through me as one of the researchers waved a nurse over to clean me up so they could start again.

I’m going to kill you—I’m going to kill you, all of you—The words were lost as my brain was overloaded with a crackling sheet of pure, burning white.

My gaze dropped from the U-shaped fluorescent light over me before its glow overtook the room and blinded me completely. I was surrounded by white coats and clipboards again, the clatter of metal instruments against metal trays, the goddamn beep, beep, beep of a heartbeat that wouldn’t give out. The woman in front of me stepped to the side, flicking something on—music, the Beatles, singing, I want to hold your hand, I want to hold your hand, their bright voices perfectly in sync with the cheerful music. One researcher began to sing along, off-key, as another bolt of white-hot lightning tore through my skull.

When my vision cleared, the black at the edges retreating, my body was still throbbing, but it was dark around me, sweetly dark, and the surface under me was cloth, not steel. Done.

“—will give a good report of progress—”

“—carefully adjusting treatment—in good hands—treatment—working—”

The stocky, balding doctor shook hands with a man in a jacket...what color was that? Not-blue...not-blue...Panic rose up, gripping my brain as it grasped for the word. The man in the jacket pulled his mask away. I see beard. I see nose. All familiar. Head hurts—no name, only face. Face next to Father. Phone. Report. Report me to him. Help. Help. Help.

Lift hand—lift hand—trying. No go, not without—without me. Words broke and crumbled in my mind, leaving sounds. Letters. Tongue stuck. Arms stuck. Pain—burning, everything burning—

A small shape appeared, the cot next to mine groaned. He came forward now. It was safe. Nico. Nico, help.

A cold cloth on my face, cleaning. My hands. Neck. Careful. Careful, Nico. Aching head, soft touches, soft fingertips. Nice. I was lifted, arms put into sleeves, shirt down over my head. Held. Warm heart. Dark eyes burning. Safe. “It’s okay. I’m here.” Cup to lips. Water. Metal to lips—not-fork...not-fork...what is...spoon. Spoon. Sweet. Meal.

Nico. Ni-co-las.

Crying.

Warm Nico.

Crying—

12

I RIPPED MYSELF OUT OF THE MEMORY, shoving against it. The exit was worse than the entry. I couldn’t tell which direction I was going, couldn’t navigate. Forward meant seeing that horrible moment again, Nico’s shaved head and gaunt body, the heart-wrenching expression I recognized on his face. I didn’t want to see it again, but I couldn’t escape it, the simple truth. So I went the other way, only to find it was like passing through a field of barbed wire backward. No matter which way I tried to pull out of the memory, I was cut up, I was in pain.

When I came to, safely back inside of my own mind, I was on my knees, my forehead resting against the glass. I gulped down one breath after another.

“Was that enough for you?” Clancy snarled. His skin had taken on a clammy quality, and he was trembling, shaking almost. “Are you satisfied?”

I don’t know how I did it. I don’t. I just disconnected my mind from everything I’d seen, scrubbed every ounce of feeling from my voice. “No.”

He wheeled back around.

“I already knew what the Thurmond testing was like.” Oh God—oh my God. I felt like I was going to throw up all over again. What they’d done to his mind, even temporarily...“You’re supposed to be proving to me the cure itself is cruel.”

“She adapted the cure from that research! From the shocks. You think I don’t know what you’re really trying to do?” he said. “That I’d be stupid enough to show you the actual cure procedure or where my mother is—”

He knows. He knows where she is.

He stalked over to his cot. There was enough of a link still left between our minds for me to be momentarily stunned by the resentment billowing through him. He needed to stop, I wanted him to stop—I stilled completely and reached deep into his mind, letting the intention steer me past his memories altogether into the part of his mind that was sparking with heat and drive.

He froze: muscles, limbs, expression like stone. Clancy didn’t move until I did, and then it was only as a mirror of my actions. It was like plucking strings; each touch against this part of his mind produced a different response in him. I arranged him like I would an action figure, ignoring the pressure of his own mind trying to fight me off.

This is it—this is what he felt each time he played with one of us. Lightheaded, dizzy with the possibilities.

I wasn’t where I needed to be, not really—somehow, I needed to redirect myself back into his memories, only I didn’t know how to remove myself from this part of his mind. It was dark, and gripping—

Mirror. The word sprang into my ears. Clancy’s voice, assertive, forcing me to listen—he knew I couldn’t get out on my own, and he must have been afraid of what damage I could do inside him if he was actively trying to help me. Mirror minds.

I understood.

My own thoughts shifted; I squeezed my eyes shut, hands clenched at my sides, as I forced the memory of me walking into the room to rise to the surface. I pulled free from the dark, feeling every bit like I was being physically dragged back by the hair. I was in the hallway again, watching as one by one the windows into his memories were slammed shut. I only had a second, just one, before he recovered—

“Lillian,” I said, “mother—”

The trick worked the way it always had. Hearing the words redirected his thoughts, drawing up the one memory he’d been thinking of most recently—the one he wanted to protect.

I knew what I was looking for, having seen a glimpse of the memory before. At the first appearance of the beautiful woman, her face framed by blond hair, a plea on her lips, I dove in, driving harder than I ever had before. Lillian Gray’s lab took shape around me—objects clicking into place like a puzzle. She’d tried to trick her son in order to bring him in to perform the procedure. She’d leaked her location in Georgia, knowing he’d be able to find her—and he did. I tugged harder on the image, forcing it to pass faster. Her hands were up, pacifying, the words Calm down, it’s going to be okay tumbling out of her. I remembered the splatter of blood on the lapel of her white lab coat, how she’d ended up begging Clancy, no, please Clancy from the floor as he set the world around her on fire, trashed her machines.

What I hadn’t seen was the way he gripped her neck between his hands. I could actually feel her racing pulse beneath my fingers at the slightest pressure. Oh God—he was going to—

But instead, my hands drifted up, gripping either side of her face. There were no words to describe what I saw next—reading a mind within a mind, an explosion of memories within a memory. The heat at my back was unbearable, but I was working, holding her still as I twisted, bent, broke every thought the woman had.

A gunshot broke the connection, pain tearing across my right shoulder. I turned away from the woman’s blank face, letting her crumple to the floor, as two dark figures burst through the door. The glass around her caught the winking light of the fire. The strange, entrancing beauty of it was the last thing I remembered before I ran.

I was thrown out of his head so hard that I fell back, cracking my skull against the wall behind me. Clancy was on the floor, as far away from me as he could get. His face was turned into the wall, his whole body heaving for breath. The cot was on its side, a barrier between us.

“Get out,” he snarled. “Get out!”

This time, I ran. My hands fumbled with the first lock, Clancy screaming those two words at me the whole time. The door opened from the other side and I collided with the person there, struggling to get out of their grip as the door was kicked shut behind me.

“It’s me, it’s just me—” Chubs hauled me down the short hall, into the old file closet. I clung to his arm, my mind a mess of thoughts and feelings that weren’t even mine.

My legs gave out before we were in the hall. He jammed the key into the lock and turned it, stopping only long enough to rattle it once to make sure it was secure.

“Ruby?” he said, his face splitting into two, three, four...We walked briskly toward the end of the hallway, me leaning on him the whole time, trembling with the effort it took to stay vertical. He opened one of the bunk room doors and pulled me inside.

I slid down the nearest wall, trying to purge the sound of Clancy’s voice with each exhale. Chubs crouched down in front of me, watching me intently. How much of that had he heard? How much of what he’d seen had he actually understood?

You out-Clancyed Clancy. I never even thought there was a chance I could do that with my abilities. To beat him, I’d managed to become him. And even with all of my promises to do whatever it took to find out about Lillian, I’d somehow never imagined...this. That I was capable of it.

Don’t think about it. I had what I’d come for. I got the confirmation I needed.

“She’s still with the League,” I said before he could ask me the question I saw in his face. “They came and took her away at the end.”

“The First Lady? He definitely didn’t kill her, then?”

I shook my head. “He did something much worse.”

By the time I went looking for him, Cole was already gone. Senator Cruz delivered the news when I passed her in the upper-level hallway.

“He went to meet with a friend who’s still associated with the League to see if they have information about the agents who were arrested,” she said. “He told me to tell you not to worry and that he’d be back tonight.”

Of course he hadn’t taken a burner phone with him—there was no way to contact him to see if he could pump information about Lillian Gray’s whereabouts from this same “friend.” If she was still with the League, where were they keeping her? She’d been running her research near Georgia HQ with only a few agents assigned for her protection. Would they have brought her to Kansas HQ with the others when they closed the other location?

I passed by the gym and did a double take at the sight of Zu, Tommy, Pat, and a number of the others trying to fuss around with the exercise machines.

“Sorry,” Pat ventured, stepping away from the weights. “We were just...doing nothing. And we wanted to do something. Since, you know, we’re going—me and Tommy.”

“Going?” I repeated.

Tommy popped up next to him, bright red hair glowing under the bare lights overhead. “We volunteered. For Oasis. Sorry, we voted after you, um, left.”

Ah. I looked at the two of them, sizing them up. When Tommy squirmed under the scrutiny, Pat smacked his side to get him to stop, forcing his chin up higher. I smiled.

“Do you want to learn some self-defense?” I asked.

I’m not sure if their reaction could have been more enthusiastic if I’d offered candy. The other kids abandoned the machines, darting over to the mats, where I instructed them to line up. I led them through stretches, taught them how to break out of different holds someone might have on them, and demonstrated—repeatedly—how to flip someone over your shoulder if you weren’t a Blue. And hours later, when we were finished, I couldn’t say who was happier with how the day had turned out—me, or them.

Finally, Cole announced his arrival with three bangs against the tunnel door. I came barreling out of Alban’s old office, abandoning the ancient Op files I’d been looking through, and unlocked it. He gave a guarded, uncertain smile as he came up the stairs.

“The others are back, too,” he said. “I told them to bring everything around to the garage’s loading dock. Can you gather up the kids to help haul the stuff in? I’ll go ahead and cut the chain so we can get the damn door open—”

“Cole,” I said sharply as he started to walk away.

He shuffled to a stop, turning his head slightly. “I’m sorry, Gem. They’re looking for the agents, but they don’t know either. Liam must have contacted Harry behind my back, because he got in touch with me this morning to say he’d ask around. He’s ex-Special Forces and still has a number of buddies in different branches of the military and government.”

The mention of his stepfather brought a flash of the memory I’d seen in Cole’s mind, and pain stirred in me. The man from his memory, his biological father, smiling down at their mother that way...

“Okay,” I said quietly. “Thanks for trying.”

He let out a shuddering breath and forced himself to shrug. “You...okay?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Let me go get the others. I’ll meet you down there.”

Cold night air filled the warehouse with a crisp, clean scent that reached us in the tunnel. The door at the other end was already open, waiting for us. But the moment I stepped through, I stopped dead in my tracks.

The whole place looked as though they’d power-washed it for hours on end. They hadn’t been able to actually remove the junk from the building—it might have attracted too much unwanted attention—but they’d somehow fit everything together, using the four walls as the frame of a puzzle. They’d lined up all of the shelving units, made some new shelves out of the broken bunks, and created a workstation with the tools they’d found. The car lift and frame were still at the center of the expansive space, but it looked like they were piecing even that back together. Someone had outfitted it with wheels, at least.

Two large SUVs and one white van had come up the loading ramp and were parked inside. I jogged over to Liam and Vida as they used their abilities to lift boxes out of the trunks and set them aside.

Liam looked up as I came over, a familiar smile on his face. He waved the group coming in behind me over. “We’re organizing by type. Set computers and electronics over there—”

There was an actual, blissful sigh from one of the Greens, which made him chuckle.

“Food and water goes here. There should be a few bags of clothes, bedding—no, no, leave the stuff in the white van,” he said, jogging over to shut the door. “It’s—Cole’s going to take care of that stuff.”

Meaning, I’d guess, weapons for our locker.

Vida was...blank. Her expression didn’t so much as flicker with annoyance as Chubs pelted her with a series of endless questions. I wasn’t sure she was even aware of what she was doing, there was that much of a visible, numb disconnect.

Zu came to stand beside me, her dark gaze meeting mine in question. I wanted to tell her not to worry about this, that I was coming to see the heavier your heart got, the stronger you had to be to keep carrying it around. But the truth was, all I wanted to do was risk a punch in the face and hug Vida. So, I tried.

And she let me.

Her arms stayed down around her sides, pinned there by my tight grip. Slowly, her hands rose and pressed against my back. I smelled dust and the salt of ocean water on her skin, mingling with the exhaust from the cars, and I wished like hell I had thought to volunteer to go instead, so she could have had the day to recover.

“We are going to f**king get her back,” Vida said fiercely. “I will burn Gray’s house down over his head. If she’s not all right, I’m going to rip out his heart and eat it.”

I nodded.

“You really shouldn’t eat raw meat,” Chubs said somewhere beside us. “It can carry pathogens—”

We both turned to him slowly. He lowered the computer box he’d been holding down to the ground and backed away.

“The Canadians came through, didn’t they?” Senator Cruz looked around at the haul, strolling between the piles.

“What are they going to want for this stuff?” one of the kids asked.

“Don’t worry about it,” Senator Cruz said. “The reparations are still quite a ways off yet. This is what we’d call a favor. Oh—did they not provide gas?”

“They sent a fuel tank,” Liam said. “We hid it behind the bar, since it wouldn’t fit through this loading dock. I also did not, um, feel super comfortable having a ton of explosive material in here.”

“Fair point,” Senator Cruz said with a faint laugh.

“They seem really invested in this. We established a drop site so they can bring things down when they find openings. They gave me this—” He pulled a sleek silver phone out of his pocket. “To make contact when the supplies are ready.”

“Spray paint?” Chubs asked. “Did you remember to grab that?”

“What for?” I asked.

“When we send the cars out to pick up the tribes,” Liam explained, using his hands to add emphasis, “they’re going to mark the safe routes they take with the road code. That way, we can get back in one piece and there’s a chance other kids we don’t know about will catch on and follow the route in.”