Never Fade (14 page)

Jude panted beside me, looking slightly frazzled but otherwise all right. The wind was knocking around his hat and tugging at mine. I pulled the black knit cap down snug over my ears, trapping my loose long hair and muffling sounds from both prongs of the Op.

The cold was like nothing I had ever felt in Virginia. It was sharp, a persistent clawing at every bare inch of skin. I tried picking up my pace into a faster run, blinking back the tears and snow flurries, but Jude was struggling to keep up as it was. Patches of ice snapped underfoot, branches hidden beneath the old snow crushed as I trampled through the trees separating the houses and buildings. South, south, south—I just needed to keep heading south, and I’d find Harvard Yard, and the protesters, and escape.

“Target acquired. Tangerine, is the perimeter clear?”

Jude jerked toward me in wild fear, but I shook my head in warning.

Rob’s voice went down my spine like a match against a matchbook. The fire it lit was small, but it was burning through the tight control I had over my voice. “Oh yeah,” I said after I pressed a finger to my comm. “The coast is all clear.”

I knew the moment Rob opened the ambulance door, the very second he found us gone. His end of the line went silent, even as HQ and Barton were requesting status updates from him. I could see his face in my mind, white, rapidly turning purple with the effort to hold back his fury. A small smile curved the corners of my mouth. He couldn’t call out for me without revealing that he had lost me in the first place. A Minder’s job, above anything else, was to mind the freaks under his care.

“Tang—”
Reynolds began to say, only to be sharply cut off.

“Hey, Rob,” I said in a low, even voice. I saw the light from the bonfire in the yard, the new orange hue of the sky. Jude caught the back of my jacket, his long fingers twisting in the leather as he struggled to keep up with me. Snow was falling harder now. I pulled the hood of the fleece I was wearing under my jacket up over my head, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and crossed the last street. “I got a question for you.”

“Roo,” Jude whispered. “What are we doing? Where are we going?”

“Tangerine, keep all non-Op transmissions off the line,”
came Barton’s voice.

Good. I wanted him to hear. I wanted all of them to hear this.

The ring of police and National Guardsmen had been busted open, and the protesters gathered there were streaming past them, signs clutched in their hands, drums beating. A midnight march, I guess, though I had no idea for what. And judging by the variety of signs I saw, they weren’t really sure what they were protesting, either. The draft that forced them into PSF service? President Gray’s unwillingness to negotiate with the West Coast government? The general state of awfulness spreading like poison over the entire country, as the pollution had over Los Angeles?

Most of the faces around us were young but not teenagers. A good portion of the country’s universities and colleges had been temporarily shut down due to lack of funding, but if a few still had money left, I guess Harvard would have been one of them.

WE ARE YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES
… read the sign next to me.

I let them get ahead of us, trailing far enough behind that the others had less of a chance of hearing the chanting over the comm. I waited until they had cleared out of the square before touching the comm again to activate the microphone.

“I just want to know—what were their names?”

“Tangerine.”
Rob’s voice was tight, and he sounded slightly breathless.
“I have no idea—”

“Tangerine, cease—”
The woman at HQ didn’t sound particularly happy with me, either.

“What the hell is going on, Minder?”
Barton was still listening, too.

“Those two kids you took out of that camp, the night before we met,” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead on a young guy with dreadlocks waving us all forward. “The boy and the girl. I’m sure you remember them—it must have taken a lot of effort to get them out, never mind to tie their hands and feet that way.”

Jude stared at me, his dark brows drawn together in confusion.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me. You got them out, and then you killed them in that alley and left them there—why? What was the point? What did they say or do to make you so angry? That girl was begging you. She didn’t want to die, but you took her out of that camp, and you executed her. You didn’t even take that boy’s mask off.”

I clenched my fists to get them to stop shaking. And in that brief second, suddenly it was Alban’s voice crackling in my ear.

“What’s all this?”
He took a deep breath.
“I need you both to meet Leader. If you don’t want to return to HQ with Minder—”

“We’re not coming back to HQ,” I said, “until he’s gone forever.”

It was a dangerous play; if Alban took the bait and booted Rob, there was still a good chance that others in his bloodthirsty pack would retaliate against the kids at HQ. But—
but
—now that Alban knew Rob was hostile, he and the agents we could trust would be on the lookout for more of that attitude, at least for the next few weeks. Jarvin and the other conspirators would feel safer knowing that Jude was away and couldn’t rat them out. And I didn’t need forever—a few weeks and I would be back with all we needed to force them out.

“Rob, listen, I just want to know their names. I want to know if you even bothered to ask before you killed them.”

“Do you think this is a game? Stop lying, goddammit! When I find you—”

“You better hope you never find me,” I said, ice edging each word. I didn’t even have to close my eyes to see that girl’s face. I felt her walking beside me, her eyes open, forever fixed on the barrel of the gun and the hand that held it steady. “Because what I’ll do to you will be so much worse than a bullet in the skull.”

I didn’t wait to hear the response to that. I yanked the comm out and dropped it, letting the feet behind me smash it and scatter the pieces. I motioned for Jude to follow me as I jogged to catch up to the protesters. We were swept into the flood of people pouring down Massachusetts Avenue’s wide berth. I was being jostled from all sides—arms were being thrust around, people were yelling and screaming, and it was the safest I had been in months. I threw a glance behind me as I surged forward, looking for Jude’s pale face—there he was, eyes wide, cheeks and nose pink with the blistering cold. I was coasting on a wave of simmering power and control. I had gotten us away, and now no one was even looking at us.

I felt Jude grab the back of my jacket again and guide us forward, flowing with the crowd. The drums up ahead rattled to life with a frantic rhythm, and for the first time, I felt a twinge of panic. I thought I heard someone calling my name behind me, but even the chanting was drowned out by the fury gripping my mind.

The crowd around me was still growing, and the farther they moved down the street, the more they seemed to work themselves into a frenzy of excitement. The same chant was singing through their blood,
More, more, more, more
. That was the only thing they had in common. The only thing they all wanted—more food, more freedom, more money, more.

I realized where we were headed almost immediately: back into the heart of Boston. The Massachusetts Avenue bridge was up ahead—and so were the familiar blue and red flashing lights of the police cars that were blockading it.

The protesters didn’t stop.

There were dozens of policemen in riot gear, National Guardsmen taking aim, and not a single one of the protesters stopped marching forward. I felt my feet slow and was shoved forward by the momentum of the crushing wave behind me.

The policeman in the center of all this, a grizzly old man staring the rest of us down, held up a megaphone. “This is Sergeant Bowers of the Boston Police Department. You are trespassing in violation of Mass General law, chapter two sixty-six, section one twenty, and are subject to arrest. You are unlawfully assembled. I demand you immediately and peacefully disperse. If you do not immediately and peacefully disperse, you will be arrested. This is your only warning.”

I didn’t see the first stone that was thrown. I didn’t even see the second or the third. But I heard the clatter of their impact against the clear shields of the riot police.

“Fire, then!” someone was yelling. “Fire! Fire!
Fire!
”

The girls around me picked up the word and began screaming it. “Shoot, shoot, shoot!” was the only rival to the chant.

I took a step back, elbowing my way through the crowd’s throbbing crush. They wanted the police to open fire on them? To make a point, or—

To capture it on video. I saw the handheld devices clutched in their stiff, frozen fingers. The snowflakes clung to the cameras’ glassy eyes, following the path of every rock, snowball, and brick that was launched toward the men and women in uniforms. I ducked, holding my arms over my head as I fought my way to the back of the herd. A stray elbow nailed the back of my head, and it was enough to knock me out of my haze.

I reached behind me, grabbing Jude’s arm as I turned—but the person holding my jacket was a short Asian girl with thick black glasses, who seemed just as startled to see me as I was to see her.

“Sorry!” she shouted. “I thought you were my friend—”

Dammit.
I whirled around, scanning the nearby crowd.
Where is he?

The gunshot was the only thing sharp enough to cut through the chanting, the only thing strong enough to silence them. The girl and I both jumped back but were roughly shoved aside by the people still marching forward behind us. Maybe the officer or soldier thought the threat of it would break up the crowd, but they had seriously misjudged the anger powering these people.

The protesters at the head of the pack were clearly used to this kind of bullying. I glanced back over my shoulder; they were struggling against the clear shields blocking their paths, clamoring over the hoods of the police cars. The unlucky ones were yanked back and beaten into the ground by batons.

“Jude!” I called, my guilt nearly cutting me down at the knees.
“Jude!”

The first can of tear gas released with a sinister hiss, but it wasn’t enough to shift the crowd. They only launched themselves toward the officers at a run. I felt someone try to grab my arm and haul me back around to face it with him, but I yanked myself free.

Bad plan,
I thought, choking on the poisoned air.
Bad, bad, bad plan, Ruby.

It was dumb luck I even saw him then; I had started turning the other way, only to catch a glimpse of a curly head of hair out of the very corner of my eye.

The blue EMT jacket was flapping in the wind, one sleeve torn with a ragged edge. Jude was standing on his toes, one hand on the nearest streetlight to keep himself upright, the other curled around his mouth as he shouted,
“Ruby! Roo!”
over and over again.

I saw now the way that fear fed anxiety and turned it into chaos. Jude’s shape went out of sight, tucked into a cloud of tear gas, hidden behind the sudden stampede of bodies trying to get away from the guns, from the smoke, from the bridge. People were screaming and the gunfire hadn’t stopped. There were new noises, too—a helicopter hovering above us, casting a light down over us. The whirring of its blades drove some of the smoke away, clearing the way for the National Guardsmen to rush toward us. For the first time, I noticed more than one black uniform in the mix.

If it had been a clear night, if my eyes weren’t streaming with tears, if I could have heard anything other than the thrumming thunder of my own heart, I would have noticed it sooner. The air seemed to vibrate against my skin, and I caught the whiff of ozone a second too late to do something about it.

“Jude, don’t!”

The line of streetlights along the stretch of road began to buzz, their orange lights bleaching to a molten white a second before they blew out together, sending a shower of glass and sparks down on the already terrified protesters.

I’m not sure anyone recognized what Jude was, not until the lights from the nearby buildings switched on after months or years of darkness.

I reached him half a second before the National Guardsman and his gun did, throwing my shoulder into his chest and driving us both to the ground. The impact blew the air from my lungs, but I scrambled up, shielding him from the butt of the soldier’s rifle. With one blow, it cracked against my skull and sent me spinning into darkness.

SEVEN

T
HE GROUND GRUMBLED
beneath my cheek, a low clattering that underscored the dull pain in my brain. Feeling was slow to come back to my limbs. I took a deep breath, trying to swallow the taste of iron and salt from my dry tongue. Matted hair stuck to my neck in clumps. I tried to reach up and brush it away only to realize that my hands were trapped behind me, something sharp digging into the skin there.

My shoulders ached as I twisted to readjust myself on the van’s grimy floor. It was dark in the back, but every now and then a flash of light would come through the metal grating separating the front seats from the rest of the vehicle. Just enough for me to see that the uniformed driver and the man sitting in the passenger seat were dressed in black.