Never Fade (26 page)

The boy I’d hit staggered up from the ground, swiping his nose against the sleeve of his threadbare coat, leaving a long, dark streak of crimson on it. The kid with the knife stepped back but didn’t put it away.

Bloody Nose held out his hand and I reached out, acting like I was about to put my gun in it. At the last minute, I dropped it and took his hand instead, driving into his mind. His body twitched under my control. I saw a flash of Jude’s frightened face in his mind, and it was enough for me.

“What did you do to those kids?” I snarled. “The boy and the girl from earlier? Where did you take them?”

Chubs had a strange look on his face as he watched me, but he stayed silent.

“The guys—” he said, his voice altered by the sickening angle of his nose. My elbow ached in response. “The guys b-brought them to the Slip Kid.”

Of course.

Those were the first words that sprang to mind, that chipped through the ice that gripped me in place.
Of course.
Clancy’s system had worked so well the first time—why wouldn’t he try it again?
Of course.
It wouldn’t matter who the kids were, only that they’d be willing—or easily swayed by his abilities—to go to war with President Gray.

Of course.

I had to release the kid from my grip when four other figures appeared in the woods around us, closing in to investigate what had happened. I could control one person, but I wasn’t Clancy; any more than that was impossible, and any attempts to try would have revealed the only upper hand I currently had. I stepped forward, showed them I was unarmed, and motioned for Chubs to do the same.

“We want to see the Slip Kid,” I said. “We won’t give you trouble.”

“That a fact?” one of them asked, glancing down at the dazed kid at my feet. “Michael, you hear that, or did that hit knock your screws loose?”

Blood Nose—Michael—shook his head in an obvious attempt to clear it. A head injury was a decent cover for what I had done to him, but it was taking his little brain so long to recover I was worried the other boys around us would get suspicious. They didn’t seem willing or able to do anything without his permission.

“We’re taking them,” Michael said. “Make it fast. Two of you stay on this post. I’ll send someone back for you.”

This guy is the leader? I thought. It wasn’t unreasonable. His size alone would have inspired fear, if nothing else.

They pushed Chubs toward me as we made our way back to the stream. I looped one arm around his waist to keep him close. They took our bags and hauled them up onto their shoulders.

“Well,” Chubs muttered, “shit.”

We were out in the open again, near the frozen stream—and, more importantly, in the line of sight of the gunman in the tree.

There were hands on me, patting me down, feeling around the insides of my boots. I tried not to react as one took my Swiss Army knife from my boot. The freezing air stung my face, but it was the thought of what they might find in Chubs’s pockets that made me go cold to the bone.

Chubs must have read the question on my face, because he shook his head ever so slightly. The kid searching him only found his knife and a pocket full of candy wrappers. He had been with it enough to dump his skip-tracer ID in the woods during the attack or leave it behind in the car, then. Thank God.

I turned to look across the river, narrowly avoiding Chubs’s kicking feet as he was lifted off the ground and out of my reach.

He thrashed into the air in the half second it took for the kid with the outstretched hand to lift him up and, using nothing more than his freak abilities, toss him onto the opposite bank.

I felt the warm tug at the pit of my stomach and recognized the sensation. I didn’t have the chance to protest before I was hauled up and over the stream, too, dropped onto Chubs with a total and complete lack of kindness.

The other kids burst out laughing, floating one another over the frozen stream with all the gentleness of calming breezes. Other than that, they didn’t speak, didn’t offer up a single explanation or confirmation of where they were taking us. Two stayed behind to snuff out our tracks in the soft white powder.

We walked in silence. Snow began to fall, catching on my hair and lashes, and cold crept in through the leather of Liam’s coat. Chubs tensed, rubbing his bad shoulder absently. I caught his gaze, and I could see my anxiety mirrored in his dark eyes.

“I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “Again.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I said quietly, looping my arm through his.

“Since that worked so well last time?”

“Hey!” Michael held up his silver handgun. “Shut the hell up!”

We were on foot long enough that I began to wonder if we were ever going to reach the encampment or wherever they planned on taking us. It didn’t occur to me until the large river came into sight that we were moving toward Nashville.

I understood straight off why they had originally closed the city; though the river must have surged past its banks months before, most of the water had yet to freeze or pull completely back to its normal level. The water’s edges were bloated, drowning the nearby landscape. The river was a monster that only grew larger the closer we came. It was the only thing that stood between us and a looming white warehouse across the way.

Waiting for us on the bank were three small, flat rafts that looked like nothing more than crates and spare planks stitched together with bright blue vinyl rope. A kid in white stood on each of them, gripping a long pole. With the group of us spread out over the three rafts, the kids with poles pushed and navigated us through the shallow, muddy water in slow, methodic movements.

My fists clenched at my sides. One of the loading docks of the warehouse was open and waiting. With a steadiness I didn’t expect, the raft floated the rest of the way to the curled silver door and the dark room inside.

The loading platform was raised enough that the rafts were no longer necessary. I was lifted up by the waist and deposited into the arms of another kid waiting there. The girl who caught me was a skinny, pale thing, her green eyes jutting out of the blunt bones of her face. She let out a wet, rumbling cough that came up from deep within her chest, but she didn’t say anything as she took my arm and forced me inside.

The walls and floors were cement, cracked and tagged within an inch of their lives with old, faded graffiti. The warehouse was roughly the size of a high school gymnasium, and it still held a few clues about its past life—signs marking where cables and wires could be left. The back wall, the one we were walking toward, had been painted a light robin’s-egg blue, and though someone had tried to cover them with a layer of white paint, I could still read the black letters spelling out
JOHNSON ELECTRIC
beneath it.

Chubs fell in step beside me, nodding toward the brown line that ran along all of the walls, about halfway up toward the ceiling. So the water from the river had been that high?

Every single step I took, every voice around us, every drip of water from the cracks in the vaulted ceilings seemed to echo. The sounds played off the bare walls and boarded-up windows around us. Despite the fact that we were out of the snow and wind, the building wasn’t insulated to keep out the persistent chill. Old metal trash cans had been repurposed to hold bonfires, but most of these were located toward the other end of the warehouse, not near the patches of kids scattered by the entrance we had come through.

This…wasn’t anything like East River had been.

And the teenage boy sitting on the raised platform in the back, disappearing in and out of a haze of cigarette and fire smoke, was not Clancy Gray.

“Who the hell are you?”

There had been a low murmur of interest as we were hauled in, but at my words, it dropped off to silence. My eyes had gone straight to the kid’s face, snapping over to it so quickly that I hadn’t even noticed the other teens around him until they stepped forward for a better look. There were girls shivering in T-shirts and shorts, leaning against the base of the stage or draped along the crates stacked behind him with only a few blankets between them. Clusters of boys stood around them laughing, some feeding the cloud of putrid gray smoke with their own cigarettes.

This kid had to be closer to his twenties than the others. His face was fringed with the beginning of a reddish beard, which he was busy rubbing against the cheek of a girl with long, dirty blond hair perched on his lap. She was shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or cold. When she turned to look at me, I realized the bruise at the edge of her mouth extended all the way to her jaw.

The kid’s blond hair was long but slicked back neatly behind his ears. His standard-issue combat boots and PSF’s black uniform jacket were spotted with mud but otherwise looked pristine—a little too pristine to have ever been in real use.

“Excuse me?” A Southern accent.

“Who,” I repeated, “the
hell
are you?”

All of the teens who sat on his platform turned to look at him in perfect time with one another, but he was only staring at me. I felt the warm tug in my stomach again, and, despite Chubs’s attempt to grab me, my feet slid across the dusty floor toward him. I barely managed to catch myself before I crashed against the side of the platform. Old, stacked crates with water-warped plywood nailed over them—that was all that stage was. His chair was little more than a metal folding one with a fuzzy blanket draped over it, most likely for effect.

The teen stood, throwing the girl off him. When she cried out in surprise, he thrust the bowl of whatever he had been eating toward her to shut her up. I fought the urge to search for Vida and Jude in the shadows crawling up around us.

“Where did you find them?” He crouched down at the edge of the platform to peer at my face. His eyes were green, for the most part—a large blotch of brown covered the upper half of his right eye.

“Up by the creek,” Michael answered.

“You,” the leader said, turning to one of the girls on the stage, “give him that blanket before he freezes. This guy is a king tonight. Look at the haul he brought in.”

The girl didn’t seem to understand why or how he could ask her to do something like that. She stared, dumb and mute at his back, until one of the boys grabbed a fistful of her short chestnut hair and shoved her forward to the edge of the raised platform. Underneath the warm brown wool sheet, she was wearing a stained yellow T-shirt and a pair of someone’s old boxers. No shoes, no socks.

Michael ripped the blanket from her fingers, clucking his tongue at her resistance. One of the other kids, a small boy, gave him the water bottle he had been holding, watching with hooded eyes as the bigger kid polished off the rest of it before tossing the crushed bottle back to him. Then, he fell into place at the leader’s right. How it was even possible for someone to look so smug and proud cocooned in a blanket with dried blood all over his face was beyond me.

The leader tossed his cigarette onto the ground at our feet, one end still glowing a pulsing red. I kept my eyes at the sliver of exposed skin above the collar of the PSF jacket.

An unworn jacket. I had worked on enough of them in the Factory to recognize one at first glance. There were no patches, not even the standard American flag. Unless he had ripped all of the stitching out, which was unlikely given that the material wasn’t frayed, he had probably plucked the jacket out of a shipment, rather than off a soldier.

He broke his gaze long enough to glance at Michael. A tight shark’s smile stretched across his lips.

“He did that?” A nod toward Chubs.

The other teen used his new blanket to wipe at the crusted blood covering his top lip. He opened his mouth, but then clearly thought better about admitting a girl half his size had given his face an adjustment.

The first let out a low laugh as he turned back to me. “Elbow, fist, or foot?”

“Elbow,” I said. “I’m happy to perform a demonstration on you if you need one.”

The muttering was back, a few wolfish chuckles rising around me. I set my jaw to keep from saying something else equally stupid.
Curb it,
I told myself.
Feel him out.

“A fighter?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “What’s your color, baby?”

I didn’t realize Chubs had moved at all until he was standing beside me. “She’s Green. I’m Blue. And you are?”

“They call me Knox,” he said. “The name Slip Kid mean anything to you?”

“If you’re the Slip Kid,” Chubs said, “I am the goddamn Easter Bunny. This is supposed to be East River?”

Knox stood suddenly at that, his amused smile tightening into a much harsher one. “Not what you thought it’d be?”

“We caught them the same place we grabbed the other two, just off the highway,” Michael supplied oh-so-helpfully. “That girl was a Blue, too. We could have an initiation tonight—”

Knox silenced him with a look. Overhead, the snow had apparently warmed to rain. It slanted down over the metal roof, the only sound aside from the eager whisperings of the kids crowding in around us.

“What do you know about East River?” he demanded.

“Well, to begin with—” Chubs began, crossing his arms over his chest.

“We heard it was in Virginia.” I cut him off. “We were heading that way when your friends picked us up.”

Here was the thing—this smug kid, whoever he was, wherever he had come from, was clearly not the real Slip Kid. We knew that. Knox knew that. But if he knew that
we
knew, I didn’t doubt for a second that Knox would dispose of us before we could let everyone else in on the secret, too. The name was legendary; anyone who could gather this many kids, set up this kind of shop—why wouldn’t they believe he was the Slip Kid?

“This is some operation you have,” I continued, straining my neck to look behind me. No Jude. No Vida. But this was clearly the tribe of Blues Cate had tried to warn us about. “A nice little place. Is this everyone?”

Knox snorted, motioning to one of the younger teens next to him. The boy, twelve or maybe thirteen, went fire-red at the attention. Knox muttered something in his ear and the boy nodded once, then took a running leap off the platform. The last I saw of him was the back of his navy jacket, stained with soot, disappearing out one of the side doors.