Never Fade (13 page)

“Beta Team is a good group,” I said finally. “They’ll treat you right as long as you follow their orders. Alpha doesn’t give a damn, so try to make sure you’re paired with another kid who can watch your back. Delta’s run by Farbringer, and he likes kids.”

“Yeah?” Jude said, but the life had gone out of his voice. He was studying the stretch of black fabric clinging to his knees. “Ruby,” he said, so softly I almost didn’t hear him over the roar of the plane. “Did Rob pick me for this Op so he could kill me?”

I met Rob for the first time right after Cate had gotten me out of Thurmond. The two League agents had planned to rendezvous at an abandoned gas station, both bringing with them any kids they’d managed to free. He had claimed he couldn’t get his batch of kids out and had to escape alone to avoid being detected by the camp controllers. Cate, who was so tangled up in him, had believed it instantly. But one slip, one careless touch, and his mind had opened to mine. I had seen the truth of it.

On the nights I didn’t stay awake terrorized by thoughts of what had happened to Liam and Chubs and Zu and the girls I had left behind at Thurmond, Rob’s memories came slithering in. I would see the hooded boy in the ground, his entire body convulsing as the agent shot him at point-blank range. I saw the girl’s face, saw her lips move to beg for mercy, and the way the Dumpster had rattled when Rob had thrown her body into it. And by the end, I would wake up feeling sick, not just for the loss of life, but because it had felt like I had killed them myself. Talk about knowing someone’s shadow—try
being
his shadow.

“I can’t stop thinking about Blake. I think about him every day, all the time. We should have told someone,” he said. “Jarvin and the others would be kicked out—the League would go back to the way it was before…before all this happened. They’re the bad ones. If you get rid of them…”

That wasn’t always how infections worked. Sometimes the rot spread too far to be removed with one single cut. Rob and Jarvin and the others might only be a few of many. I was so tempted to tell him the truth then, everything Cole had told me, but panicking him just to make a point was by far the stupidest course. If this was going to work, he couldn’t know what the plan was in advance. I couldn’t give him any chance to slip up and give us away to Rob and the others.

“You’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll be there the entire time.”

He was shaking; I don’t think he heard a single word that left my mouth. “How could they do this? What did we ever do to hurt them—why do they hate us that much?”

I closed my eyes at the sound of Rob’s booming laugh cutting through the air.

“Why don’t you try to sleep?” I said. “We’re going to be flying for a few more hours. There’s no reason we both have to be tired.”

“Okay,” he said. “I just wish…”

“You wish what?” I asked.

“Can we keep talking instead?” He confessed it to his knees, awkwardly drawing his feet onto his seat.

“You really can’t stand sitting in silence, can you?” I asked. “It actually kills you a little bit, doesn’t it?”

It was a long time before he replied, as if he were trying to prove me wrong. “No,” he said. “It’s just that I don’t like the quiet. I don’t like the things I hear there.”

Don’t ask. Don’t ask. Don’t ask.
“Like…what?”

“I hear them fighting, mostly,” he whispered. “I hear him screaming at her and the way she used to cry. But it’s…I hear it through closed doors. My mom, she used to put me in her closet, you know, because his temper was better when I was out of sight. I don’t remember what she sounded like normally, just the way she sounded then.”

I nodded. “That happens to me sometimes.”

“Isn’t that so weird? It’s been, like, eight years, and I hear them, and I think of how dark and tight it was, and it feels like I can’t breathe. I hear them all the time, like they’re chasing me, and I can’t escape them, not ever. They won’t let me go.”

I knew he was exhausted, and I knew firsthand what exhaustion did to your mind. The tricks it played on you, just as your defenses were dropping one by one. Ghosts don’t haunt people—their memories do.

“Will you talk until I fall asleep? Just—I mean, just until I fall asleep. And can you maybe never tell anyone about it, like, ever?”

“Sure.” I leaned my head back against the seat, wondering what on earth I could say to calm him down.

“There’s this story I used to really like as a kid,” I began quietly, just loud enough that he could hear it over the roar of the plane’s engines. “About these rabbits. Maybe you’ve heard it before.”

I started at the beginning, the escape. Fleeing through the forest, meeting a new danger at every turn, the desperation that came with trying to protect everyone when you could barely take care of yourself. The boy with the bottomless dark eyes, the betrayal, the fire, the smoke. And by the time I realized I had told him my own story, Jude was fast asleep, tucked firmly into dreams.

Here’s the thing about places like Boston: no matter what they were before, no matter the look of the population, no matter what businesses had flourished once, no matter what great person was born there, the city that people knew was gone. It was the loved one you saw in a rearview mirror, growing smaller and smaller the more time and distance you put between you, until even its shape became unrecognizable.

Red brick buildings remained firmly rooted in the ground, but their windows had been bashed in. The grass on the Common was dead in patches, overgrown in others, and scorched to ruin where there had once been trees. Grand townhouses were locked and shuttered, ice and old snow clinging to their dark stones. There was a crowded lane open on each road for cars and bikes to inch their way down, but many of the old, overlapping streets were filled with makeshift tents and the people huddled inside of them.

It was bizarre to see the bright, colorful bursts of old umbrellas and children’s bedsheets propped up as makeshift shelters. Some of the worse-off folks were exposed to the freezing air with nothing more than a sleeping bag or a wall to lean against.

“I don’t get it,” Jude said, staring through the tinted windows. None of the streetlights were on, but there were enough fires burning that we could see the scene—and the first flurries of snow—from the back of the ambulance a hospital had oh-so-helpfully exchanged for the Leda Corp supplies we had dropped off.

“A lot of people lost their homes and housing when the markets crashed,” I said, trying to be patient with him. “The government couldn’t pay off its debt, and because of it, these people lost their jobs and couldn’t afford to keep what they owned.”

“But if everyone everywhere is like this, why didn’t the banks just let everyone stay where they were until things got better? Isn’t there something we should do to help?”

“Because that’s not the way the world works,” Rob called from the driver’s seat. “Get used to it.” He was wearing a dark blue EMT uniform, and he seemed to relish his ability to flash the lights and sirens when people in the streets didn’t move out of his way fast enough. Sitting up front with him was the one member of Beta Team who had been assigned to serve as support on our half of the Op—his name was Reynolds, and I only had to take one look at Jude’s face as Reynolds and Rob slapped each other’s backs to know he had been one of the agents Jude had overheard plotting against us.

The rest of Beta Team were three blocks ahead of us, all seven crammed into the back of an old pickup truck. They were dressed as protesters of some kind—street clothes, ragged hair, Red Sox caps, jackets thick enough to hide the weapons tucked underneath.

This professor we were looking for lived in Cambridge, just over the Charles River. Harvard’s medical school, where he was conducting his research, was happily situated in the middle of Boston proper. Rob had decided, in his questionable wisdom, to divide the Op into a two-prong simultaneous assault. Beta Team would handle “disabling” the lab, and Jude and I would break into the target’s house and “pull” him in for questioning.

At least, that’s what Rob thought.

We backtracked to the Longfellow Bridge, crossing the river to the sound of Jude’s eager questions about baseball, the river, what the sticky substance was on the floor of the ambulance, how we were getting home, until Barton finally buzzed the comms in our ears.

“This is Leader in position, ready to commence Op at twenty-two thirty. What is your status, Minder?”

“Five minutes out from the Goose’s nest,” Rob answered, and I felt the ambulance accelerate under me. My anxiety took that exact moment to wake up. I sat a little straighter, bringing my knees to my chest and wrapping my arms around them.

“Are we connected to Home Front?”

“Home Front here. Line is secure, tracking both units now. Okay to proceed at twenty-two thirty. Satellite feed shows minimum interference at Target Two. Minder, we’re showing considerable activity in your sector.”

I’m not sure who was more disgusted to hear him referred to as “Minder,” Rob or me. He didn’t have a team of kids like Cate, but anyone who supervised a freak kid on an Op was slapped with that title.

“There’s a protest in the Old Man’s Yard,” Rob said. I looked up, scrambling on all fours to get to the back window. He was right. We were passing by the university’s tree-lined park, with its crisscrossing paths. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bodies clustered around a large bonfire, ignoring the sleet falling around them. Signs and drums littered the nearby patches of snow, the only thing between the protesters and the small ring of disgruntled police officers that had them surrounded. People seemed to be hovering at the edge of the small park, as if looking for a way to break through the line of uniforms and guns.

“What are they protesting?” Jude whispered, his breath fogging up the glass. I didn’t answer, just motioned for him to get down. I began counting the blocks we passed—one, two, three, four, five.

The ambulance came to a shuddering stop a short distance away from the professor’s pleasant little white house with a slanted gray slate roof. Rob unhooked his seat belt and stood, stretching slightly as he climbed into the back.

“We’re in position,” he said, pressing a hand to his ear. I felt his eyes slide over to me, but I kept mine fixed firmly on Jude, who had started shaking again.

This kid is going to get himself killed,
I thought, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“
You have the all clear,”
said the agent monitoring the Op at HQ.
“Goose Egg is a go.”

“Roger,”
Barton said, and Rob echoed him.

He was looking a little ragged, a dark beard coming in along the edge of his square jaw, but Rob’s eyes were alert. He tossed the boy the other EMT jacket and a cap—like that could hide the fact that Jude looked about two years younger than he actually was.

“Don’t say a word, don’t fidget, and follow my lead exactly, then get your ass back here,” he told the boy. Then, turning to me, he added, “You know what to do?”

I met his dark eyes straight on. “I do.”

Rob needed Jude to disable the house’s alarm system and man the gurney to get the professor out on the chance that any neighbors got nosy and opened their curtains at the wrong moment. We were supposed to take him around the city in a long fifteen-minute lap so I could work him into a state of cooperation, then dump him back on a sidewalk, his memory erased of the encounter. If he proved to be too hard to crack, Rob had a safe house we could bring him to for more…painful methods of persuasion, I guess.

Rob opened the back door, letting in a freezing draft of air. He and Reynolds pulled the gurney down, along with a duffel bag. Jude was wringing his hands again.

I grabbed his arm just before he jumped down after Rob. “Be careful.”

Jude gave me a little salute and clenched his teeth in a way that made me think he was trying for a reassuring smile or trying not to puke all over himself. “Later, gator.”

The door slammed shut behind them.
In an hour, sunflower
.

In all of the wild daydreams I’d had about the day I’d finally pack it up and leave, none of them had come close to resembling this moment. I didn’t expect to feel as calm as I did. The first time I had escaped from Cate and Rob, the fear had flamed up fast and true, moving my feet before my brain could catch up. I hadn’t known where I was going or how I was going to get there. I had just run. It was only dumb luck that I had found Zu and the others.

I couldn’t rely on luck this time. I didn’t have time to feel afraid of what would happen if I were caught. The steady composure I felt made me feel so much stronger than any of the wild, raw emotions I had surrendered to in the gas station. I had something to accomplish and people to protect, and no one—especially not Rob Meadows—was going to keep me from it so long as there was breath in my body.

The porch light flipped on as the three of them passed under it. Jude threw one quick glance back over his shoulder at me, then disappeared around the side of the porch to the little power box that controlled the house’s electricity.

When the porch light switched off and Rob bent over the gold door lock, I shrugged out of the League’s heavy black coat, pulling out a lighter and the Swiss Army knife I had stashed in one of the pockets and tucking them in my boots. Liam’s old leather jacket wouldn’t keep the cold out for long, but it didn’t have a tracking device in it.

I climbed up to the driver’s seat and popped the door open. My boots had just landed in the snow when Jude came around the back of the ambulance.

“What are you—?”

I bolted forward, clapping a hand over his mouth. His eyes went wide in panic until I pressed a finger to my lips. Jude was too confused to process what was happening. I had to take his wrist and drag him behind me, letting the ambulance’s bulk block us from view.

“We’re inside,”
came Rob’s rough voice in my ear.
“Status, Leader?”

“On schedule, Minder.”

I glanced up at the street sign—Garfield Street—and tried to get my bearings. I had to put as much distance between Rob and us before he realized we were gone; I could outrun him on foot, but I couldn’t outrun a car…especially not with Jude. If we could make it back to the protest, we might be able to lose him and Reynolds in the crowd. Rob wouldn’t think to look for us in the one place we had a decent chance of being caught. He was a brute, and a vicious one at that, but he wasn’t very imaginative.