Текст книги "Never Fade "

Автор книги: Alexandra Bracken

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Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

All of the lock pads and retinal locks were on the backup power generator, and normally they would have been enough to keep even Clancy out, had they actually still been attached to the door. Someone had taken something—a crowbar, an ax, a small explosive—and blown them off that way.

I slid forward, nudging the door open farther as I slid my gun out of the waistband of my jeans.

Clancy made a small, triumphant noise as he ripped a bulging red folder free from where it had been trapped among a hundred others. He wasted no time flipping through the pages as he turned back around to Alban’s desk. Someone had flipped it onto its side as he or she ransacked the place. He used one of its wide, flat legs to lay the folder out and free up his hand to hold the flashlight. The look on his face was so painfully eager I felt a twinge of apprehension.

“Found what you were looking for?”

Clancy’s head shot up at the same moment his hand slid the folder back, off the desk, into a metal trash can. For a moment, anger fought with exasperation on his face, but Clancy settled on a devastating smile as he stared down the barrel of the gun.

“I did, but…don’t you have more important things to worry about?” His voice had taken on the quality of smoke. “Other people more important than me?”

He inclined his head toward the other end of Alban’s office, and even before I turned, the metallic scent of warm, sticky blood was everywhere. Just past my initial line of sight, I saw the two of them on the floor. Chubs had crumpled, curling in on himself the way a leaf would just before it fell from the tree in autumn. Liam was slumped over him, his face the color of ice. And he was looking at me, watching with unblinking eyes that had faded from a pale blue to a dull gray. His arm had been thrown out over Chubs, like he had tried to shield him, and now those same hands that had held my face so gently between them…they were in the pool of dark liquid gliding along the concrete floor.

The gun slipped out of my hand.

Clancy skirted around Alban’s desk, watching me with that same faint smile. He dropped what looked like a lighter into the trash can.

Not real. I forced the words through my mind. Not them. I forced myself to look again. Really look, no matter how horrifying the image was. Chubs’s glasses were gold instead of silver. Liam’s hair was longer than it was now—Clancy clearly hadn’t made as close of a study of the way his hair curled at the ends as I had.

It was a painfully close, near-flawless imitation. But it wasn’t them.

I let Clancy come up beside me and allowed him three seconds of thinking he’d be able to slip by me, distracted as I was by my own grief. He was murmuring something in low, husky tones. He was close enough now for me to feel his warm breath on my cheek—which meant he was also close enough for me to punch him in the throat.

I threw my mind at him in the same blow, drawing it down like a knife and shredding the image of Chubs and Liam he’d pushed there. Clancy stumbled out into the hallway, clutching his head, gasping for breath. The image of the woman in the white lab coat filtered through our connection again, but I forced myself to push it away for now. There was a line of smoke rising from the trash can; I tipped it over, scattering the burning pages onto the ground, stamping out the flames under my boot. If he wanted these pages gone, I wanted to see them.

“Dammit.” He was panting when I met him again in the hallway, heaving in a deep breath, falling to his knees. There was some thin, fraying line of connection between our minds. I seized it before it could snap completely, flooding his brain with the illusion of heat. I couldn’t see him in the dark, but I could hear him frantically slapping at his arms and legs—at the limbs his mind was telling him were burning down to the bone.

Then, his hands slowed to a stop.

“You…” Clancy began, “you really want to play this game?”

There was a kiss of cold metal against the back of my neck—so suddenly that I had already convinced myself it was another one of his mind games. But when you lose a sense like sight, it’s true what they say: the rest of them are sharpened to ruthless efficiency. I felt the warm breath, heard the squeak of additional boots, smelled his sweat. Agents—they’d found us.

Clancy twisted away to run; I didn’t see it happen, only heard the sickening crack as something hard connected with his head and sent him crumpling to the ground.

And there was Jarvin’s voice in the dark saying, “I knew you’d be back.” There were his hands, as one closed over the back of my neck and roughly shoved me down to my knees. The barrel slid down to the sweet spot where my skull met my spine. “Rob said all we’d have to do is wait.”

In their fatigues, he and the other League agent behind him were a shade lighter than the air around them.

The safety switched off.

“You don’t want to do this,” I warned, feeling the invisible hands inside of my mind unfurl. I felt anxious but not afraid. Controlled calm.

“No,” Jarvin agreed. “I’d rather do this.”

There was a faint click—the only warning before the White Noise flooded the hallway and drowned me alive.

It was possible to forget that kind of agony after all.

There was a time in my life, a few months into my stay at Thurmond, that they had turned the White Noise on nearly every day. Back when there were Reds to control and Oranges to punish, a single wrong look would have a PSF radioing in to the Control Tower. It was a given part of my life; maybe I had just grown so used to it, the actual impact dulled over time.

But it had been months, and the onslaught of pain twisted my stomach to the point of sickness. I collapsed onto the floor, close enough to Clancy that I could see the cut across his forehead seeping blood. There were thoughts in my head; there was a voice that said, You can take Jarvin; you can take him; you can ruin him…but even that was silenced as the White Noise rose and fell over us like a wave, crushing down on my chest.

And it was amazing—everything we could do, the kind of power we could have over others—it all meant nothing. It all came to nothing.

At Thurmond, we would have heard two warning blares, and a heartbeat later, the noise would explode from the camp’s loudspeakers. It wasn’t something that could be easily described—it was shrieking static, cranked up, sharpened to drill through the thickest part of your skull. It passed through us like an electrical current, making our muscles jump and twitch and sing with pain until the only thing left to do was to try to drive your head into the ground to escape it. If I were lucky, I wouldn’t pass out.

I wasn’t so lucky. I felt myself fade, drift back into the darkness of the hallway. I couldn’t move my arms out from where they were pinned under my chest. My legs had turned to air. Finally, seeing that I couldn’t so much as lift my head, Jarvin switched it off. I drifted from one moment to the next, my ears ringing. The blackness of the hall pulled me in, pushing my head under its murky surface.

When I came to again, someone had a grip on my arm. I could hear Jarvin talking to the others around him, only because he was shouting now. “Get the damn lights on! I don’t care what you have to do—switch them on, dammit! Something’s going on. Can someone just give me a damn light?”

It was a warm Southern voice that answered him. “Sure, brother. I got you covered.”

There was a snap, just one, and the tiniest flame appeared in the dark, illuminating Cole Stewart’s furious face.

I thought, at first, he’d struck a match, but the fire at his fingertips bloomed, swallowing his hand, devouring the arm he sent flying toward Jarvin’s face. There was screaming, so much screaming, as the fires around us grew, catching the soldiers behind him and engulfing them in a wave of heat that sent them running down the hall, stumbling over one another until they finally collapsed. The smell of burned skin made my stomach convulse. I couldn’t escape it.

“Holy shit, you’re—!” one of the agents began to say.

One of us, my mind finished, shutting down at the sight of the fire between Cole’s fingers again, the way he threw a ball of it at the agent who had spoken. How he stoked it, letting it rip over the screaming man’s body until I could only see the dark silhouette trapped in the flames dancing over his skin.

Red.

No—no, he was—Cole was too old, he wasn’t—

“Hey—hey!” The fire was gone now, but Cole’s hands were still hot to the touch as he tried to haul me to my feet. My legs still weren’t there. He tried lightly slapping my face. “Shit…kid, come on. You can do this; I know you can.”

“You…” I tried to say. “You just…”

He let out the breath he’d been holding, relieved. Cole lifted me over his shoulder, smacking the back of my thighs in irritation. “Dammit, Gem, making me worry like that. I heard the Calm Control from down the hall, but I had to wait until he turned it off. I couldn’t get close. I’m sorry; I’m so sorry.”

He kicked the door open to Alban’s office, dropping me to the ground behind the desk, rearranging my limbs so I was at least sitting up, and un-holstered one of his handguns to press into my limp fingers.

Then, he gripped my face between his palms. “You can’t tell, you hear me? No one else can know, not even Liam, especially not Lee—okay? Nod your head.”

Jesus—Liam didn’t know? No one else knew about this?

“You, me, Cate, and Alban,” Cole said, as if reading my thoughts. “That’s it. And we’re now a party of three. You tell, and it’s over for me.”

I nodded.

“…other one…” I said weakly, tilting my head toward the hall.

Cole grunted. “I don’t do the damsel-in-distress thing with dudes.”

I shot him what I hoped was a glare and not a cross-eyed look. He sighed and stood, squaring his shoulders in the way Liam always did when he was set on something. Cole disappeared for a second, ducking back out to grab Clancy. I doubted he even looked at Clancy’s face before he dumped him next to me.

“The Greens sent us the message you were here, so we decided to start the party early,” he explained. “Couldn’t wait one more day to see this handsome mug, could you?”

I coughed, trying to clear whatever was lodged in my throat.

“If you know what’s good for you, you’ll stay in here,” he snapped. “Leave this room before we give the all-clear, and I’ll skin your ass!”

When he turned for the door, it was like his confidence and control clicked back into place. His movements were smooth, assured.

I don’t know how much time passed before the sound of the firefight reached us—five minutes, ten, maybe even fifteen. Feeling was returning to my limbs in hot rushes of pins and needles, but I preferred the pain to limp uselessness. When I could, I pushed myself onto my knees and began to shove Alban’s old desk against the door. I knew it wouldn’t provide much cover or pose much of a challenge to anyone hell-bent on getting in, but it felt better than doing nothing. And, if I were being honest, it was a visual block for me, too. A reminder that I needed to wait and let Cole and the others clean out Jarvin’s infestation before I went to find the others.

They’re all right; they’re all right; you’re all right…I crawled back over to the filing cabinets, drawing my legs up to my chest and wrapping my arms around them, trying to cage in the feelings that felt too big to keep inside.

They are okay.

Clancy shifted beside me, a stray lock of dark hair falling into his eyes. As much time as we had spent together at East River, I’d never seen him sleep before—he would never, I realized, ever let someone else be around him while he was so vulnerable.

My eyes drifted over to the trash can and the papers I’d spilled out of it. I crawled over to them on my hands and knees, scooping up the flashlight Clancy had dropped. There was so much shouting happening outside of that dark room that I couldn’t understand what any one voice was saying.

I took a deep breath as the shooting eased off and the doors to the staircase slammed open and shut repeatedly. They are okay; you are okay.

I aimed the flashlight away from the door, down at the scorched pages I’d gathered into my lap. A quarter of the pages or so were unreadable—sizeable holes had burned through the photographs and pages. Aside from the smears of soot and smoke stains from the top sheets, the bottom of the stack was in much better shape. Most were charts and graphs, all in that same strange scientific language that would have tripped up even Chubs. These were medicines—medical terms. They had the same sort of complicated names as the list of medicines Chubs had given me in Nashville. Every now and then my eyes would catch a few stray words of plain English.

Subject A is free of symptoms following the procedure and routine…

Showing signs of passive behavior…

Conclusive results are pending…

But at the top of them all, printed in bold black text, were two words I did recognize: Project Snowfall.

I only stopped flipping through the pages when I reached the photographs. The one that showed the woman’s face.

It was one of the unexpected drawbacks to living almost half of your life locked away in a camp with no access to any kind of media. You got the feeling that every face you encountered on TV or in the papers was somehow familiar, but the name would slide away from you before you could grasp it. I felt it now, staring at the familiar blond woman.

The shot itself was strange—she was glancing over her shoulder but not into the camera itself. There was an unmarked brick building behind her that seemed oddly run down in comparison to the neat, classic navy dress suit she was wearing. The look on her face wasn’t afraid so much as nervous, and I wondered, for a second, if she rightfully thought someone was tailing her. The next photo was smaller, torn in a way that made me think Alban had started to rip it up, only to change his mind. In this one, she sat between the former leader of the League and a much younger President Gray.

The connection stole my breath.

Clancy, no, please, Clancy—

“Holy shit,” I whispered. The woman I’d seen in his mind…this was…

The First Lady of the United States.

I reached for the other scattered pages, gathering them back up in a pile. Out of their proper order, the documents and reports didn’t make much sense, but there were diagrams of brains with tiny, neat Xs marked over them.

I skimmed through the newspaper articles describing charity work Lillian Gray had done across the country; someone had highlighted different key phrases about her family (“a sister in Westchester, New York,” “parents retired to their farm in Virginia,” “a brother, recently deceased”) and her different school degrees, including the PhD she’d earned in neurology from Harvard. She’d also given a “touching” eulogy at the vice president’s funeral, “flanked by the smoking wreckage of the Capitol,” and had refused to comment on the president’s reluctance to immediately replace him.

The last article I found was focused on her disappearance from public life shortly after the attack on Washington, DC. In it, the president was quoted as saying, “My wife’s protection and security is my number one concern,” with no other details given.

And that was her legend. Not the dozens of award ceremonies she’d attended, not her groundbreaking research in systems neuroscience, or any of the parties she’d hosted on her husband’s behalf. Not her treasured only son. According to the Time article Alban had slipped into the folder, there were rumors that she’d been killed or abducted by a hostile country shortly after the outbreak of IAAN. It became especially alarming when Clancy went out on the road alone on his father’s behalf to praise the camp rehabilitation program, showing himself to be its first successful subject.

It had been nearly ten years, and she had yet to show her face publicly.

But here she was in this folder, her face, her research…her handwritten notes. I clenched my hands into fists and released them several times, trying to force them to stop shaking.

There were three notes mixed into the mess of documents, each only a few lines long. There were no envelopes, but the sheets were still sticky with whatever they had been sealed with. Someone must have passed this to him by hand, then, rather than risk sending it digitally. Alban’s clear cursive had filled in the dates at the top, likely for his own recordkeeping. The first, from five years before, read:

No matter what’s become of us, I need to get out of his reach if I’m going to save him. If you help me disappear, I’ll help you in return. Please, John.

The next, two years later:

Enclosed are the most recent findings of our work; I’m feeling incredibly optimistic this will all be over soon. Tell me you’ve found him.

And the final, from only two months before:

I’m not going to sit around waiting for your approval—that was never our deal. I’m leaking the location onto the server tonight. If he doesn’t come looking for me, then I’ll find him myself.

Clancy was still out cold, his head lolled to the side. I watched the steady rise and fall of his chest, something sharp twisting low in my gut.

“You sad son of a bitch,” I whispered.

This was why he’d come here. This was the task he couldn’t entrust to anyone other than himself.

I combed through the pages again, trying to decipher exactly what she’d been working toward. A part of me had suspected it had something to do with us when I saw the diagrams, but why would she be secretly running her own experiments about the cause of IAAN at the same time Leda Corp was? There was that mention she made in her first note of needing to get out of “his reach”—was it possible she thought her husband would tamper with the results of what Leda Corp would find and that the misinformation would jeopardize Clancy’s life?

But then…why would he want to destroy this? I flipped back to the pages of charts and graphs, and there, at the bottom of each page, were the initials L.G. I combed through the pages again, making sure I was looking at each and every one. Why had he wanted to destroy this? To protect his mother’s whereabouts? To destroy proof that she was somehow providing information to Alban about her research?

None of this made sense to me. Her final note said she was leaking “the location”—her location?—onto a server. That was in line with Nico’s earlier explanation that the word Professor, one that Clancy had asked him to watch for, came up on the server. But she only leaked it when she was ready. Only after Project Snowfall was complete.

She didn’t want him to know what she was working on, I realized. But why go find him? Why let him find her, when it was obvious that he was the one she truly needed to be protected from?

THIRTY

THE LIGHTS AND MACHINES around Alban’s office came back on in an explosion of noise and static, and I was up and off the ground before the radio scanner clicked on, blasting the room with a rousing choral rendition of “O Come, All Ye Faithful.” I drew my hand up in a weak attempt to block the glare as I stumbled toward the corner of the office. My eyes were watering and I couldn’t see any of the radio dials, so I settled for slapping and turning them all until the sound finally dropped to a bearable level. After the White Noise, even a faint scratch against the door would have sounded like thunder. For a long, terrible minute, I forced myself to stay still and readjust to the world of light—just as long as it took Clancy to let out a low moan and start to shake his head.

And for me to realize my window for being able to control him was slamming shut.

The fighting outside had faded into a lone spray of bullets firing one floor up. It was a risk to assume that they’d already cleared this level of rogue agents, but reason had overridden my fear. Most of the agents would have been on the first level, in their quarters, asleep when Cole and the others had entered the building, with a few, like Jarvin, on patrol.

I would be fast. If the hallway was clear, I could go down to find the others after taking care of this. Make sure Liam and Chubs were tucked away with Jude and Vida in the safety of the barricaded sleeping room. I just couldn’t leave him in here, not with the locks already busted.

I circled my arms around Clancy’s chest from behind, trying to get a good grip on him and tearing off one of his coat’s gold buttons in the process.

“You are…” I gasped, feeling the stitches in my back pull, “officially the biggest pain in my ass.…”

I had to drop him to shove the desk out of the way again. I took one more step out, taking a deep breath to steady myself against the sight of Jarvin’s and the other agents’ bodies—but the hallway was empty. As I dragged him out into it, I had a thought, a brief one, of pulling him into the infirmary, but I could see figures moving in there behind the curtains and I wasn’t sure I was willing to take the bet it was someone from Cole’s team. There were any number of doors along the hall, most of them leading into rooms I had never been allowed to see. But there was only one closet that was open, and the rack of guns in there had been picked clean—leaving enough room for a human body to be shoved in.

I had just angled Clancy into the tight space when I heard my name shouted for the whole damn base to hear.

I whipped around, searching for the source. Cate was suddenly there, rushing out of the infirmary, pulling the rifle strap off her shoulder. She ripped the black ski mask off her head and let it fall behind her. I was in her arms, in her warmth, before I had the sense to brace myself for the impact. A relief I didn’t expect passed down through me as I leaned into her.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

And I was honestly still so shocked at her appearance, I actually told her the truth. “Locking Clancy Gray in a closet.”

She pulled back sharply, looking down at the prone form at our feet. And Cate, for the first time in her life, didn’t ask me if I wanted to talk about how I was feeling. I didn’t need to explain why we couldn’t leave him in the infirmary or in one of the rooms where he might escape. She knew what he was and what he was worth.

“Okay. I’ll go get the keys.”

“Cate,” I said, catching her arm. “Is it over?”

She smiled. “It was over ten minutes ago.”

“Really?” My voice was small in my own ears. I felt five years old, the way I had after getting lost in a mall and suddenly finding my dad’s hand again after frantically searching for him. I knew it was stupid to cry, but exhaustion had brought me to the breaking point, and the sudden, unexpected release of fear and pain pushed me past it.

Cate stepped toward me, taking my face between her hands. It was like staring into a full moon rising as it cut through night. “I knew you could do this.”

I squeezed my eyes shut and a white tent bloomed behind my lids. There was Mason, taking his last breath. The smell of a stiff leather muzzle. Rob screaming, screaming, screaming… I wanted to tell her everything, to unload it on her and let her share the crushing weight of it. She had offered to so many times, and every single instance I’d shot her down, thrown it back in her face. Even now, I felt that same reluctance wrap around my chest, trying to protect the weak, beating muscle there.

“It was horrible,” I whispered.

She smoothed a stray tear away from my cheek. “And you were stronger.”

I shook my head. “I wasn’t…I was…”

How could I put it in a way she’d understand?

“That’s not what Jude and Vida told me.”

I opened my eyes, searching her face for any sign of a lie. “Are they okay?”

“They’re fine,” she promised. “Worried about you. I can take you up to them, but first, I think we need to take care of our little problem.” She nodded toward Clancy. “All right?”

“Yeah,” I said, taking a deep, shuddering breath. “All right.”

Cole and Cate’s team had moved the kids into the atrium and shut the doors, blocking the steady flow of bodies that were being lifted out of the residence hall and brought down to the infirmary. They were the agents that overthrew Alban, all of them. A part of me thought it was ridiculous they were trying to keep us from seeing it. Another part of me felt grateful.

I took a breath, shaking the tension out of my shoulders, then reached for the door.

They’d pushed most of the tables to the outer edges of the room, leaving the center of the room open for cots. Some of the kids and agents were being treated by the medical staff for bumps and scrapes. It seemed insane that they were ignoring the fully stocked infirmary in favor of hauling gauze and antiseptic up here—until I remembered that same infirmary was currently functioning as a makeshift morgue.

“Are all of them dead?” I asked quietly. In addition to the twenty-odd League kids huddled at the center of the room, eating whatever it was they’d dug out of the kitchen store for breakfast, there were something like forty agents ringing the perimeter of the room in clusters of black. But these were the faces that I had expected to see: agents who were in charge of Psi teams, instructors, the ones who looked at us with sad, longing eyes when they thought we weren’t looking.

“The ones who wouldn’t stand down,” Cate said carefully.

So—all of them?

“I know it must have felt like they were all against you, but there were a number of agents who were blindsided by Alban’s assassination and only stayed because it was too late to get out without retribution from Jarvin. They didn’t put up a fight when we swept the sleeping quarters and were free to leave if they didn’t want a part of this.”

My eyes didn’t stop scanning the room until they’d found them all. Chubs and Liam stood in front of one of the televisions, their backs to me as they watched news coverage of some kind of white domed building. Jude and Vida were near them, crouched on the floor in front of Nico, who looked like he was making a real effort to curl up into a ball and disappear forever.

Cate followed my gaze. “We’ll talk about that later.”

“Talk about what?” came the drawl behind us. I felt a heavy arm drop over my shoulder. “Could it be about little old moi?”

I tried to tug myself free, but he held me there, ruffling my already disastrous hair. I couldn’t keep myself from flinching when I smelled the smoke on him. Red.

Psi.

Impossible.

It just… I rubbed the back of my hand against my forehead. He was so together, when Mason had been crumbling from the inside out. And it wasn’t that Cole wasn’t intimidating—he was, in a way that disarmed you and left you flustered. It was that every other Red I had come across at Thurmond acted like an animal that had been caged by his own skin. They refused to meet anyone’s eyes, walking around with these vacant looks, listening to a voice in their mind, I think, that the rest of us couldn’t hear. Every once in a while, they’d come back to themselves, a hunger darkening their faces. You’d catch them staring at another kid, these little, twisted smiles tucked into the corner of their mouths, and you knew—knew—what would come next.

But Cole not only had kept himself in check, he’d flourished.

Red.

The two of them shared a look over my head. “He mentioned that you’ve been…trusted. With a very important secret.”

I didn’t say anything, not because I couldn’t think of a response but because I couldn’t pick one out of the thousands of questions billowing through my mind. Finally, I turned to him and settled on, “How long have you known?”

“Since I was twelve,” he said. “Late bloomer compared to the rest of you. Scared me shitless. Mom and Harry always thought I was sneaking in matches or lighters—burning things to act out. It’s not the kind of thing you talk about if you don’t want to get bused to some god-awful camp, you know?”

“Why not tell Lee?” I asked. “Why keep it from him?”

Cole’s eyes narrowed. “I have my reasons, none of which is your business. You gave me your word you wouldn’t—”

“I won’t,” I said, hating him for it. Another thing to keep from him. Another lie. “I just… How is this even possible? You’re too old. Are there…more like you?”

No wonder Alban had valued him—a Psi who could move among the adults, never detected, just because he missed the supposed age cutoff.

Cate glanced around, making sure there were no prying ears nearby. “Far, far, far fewer. A few hundred age outliers. But it’s not the time to talk about it. We have bigger concerns right now.”

“Speaking of which.” Cole lowered his voice as he leaned down. “You couldn’t have mentioned Damsel-in-Distress Number Two was the president’s kid?”

“Let’s see how many words you can get out after having your brain scrambled.”

“Fair.” He glanced at Cate. “Is he going to be a problem?”

“He’s in closet B-two,” she said, raising her brows in what looked to me like a challenge.

“Okay, okay,” he said. “This first, that…later. There weren’t any guns left in there, right?”

I don’t know who looked more irritated at the suggestion, Cate or me.

Cole was still smirking when he asked, “You bring back the big prize along with my jerk-ass little brother?”

I patted my pockets, feeling for the small plastic rectangle. I held it out to them, suddenly eager for someone other than me to carry its weight for a few minutes. Cole glanced at Cate. “All yours. You’re still heading out soon, right?”

“In a minute. I need to tell my kids where I’m going.”

“Because they won’t know what to do with themselves without Mommy fussing over them every two seconds?”

At that, I really did wrench myself away from him, feeling my temper spike dangerously. Cole held up his hands and backed away a step. “Take a joke, Gem. Smile. Today’s a good day, remember? Solid win.”

“Where are you going?” I asked Cate.

“Out with a few agents to try to find some kind of transportation for all of us.”

“But…”

“I’ll be back in a few hours, I promise. I think you know that…it probably wouldn’t be right to stay here after this.”

“Where are we going?” I asked. “Kansas? Or Georgia?”

“Roo!”