Never Fade (49 page)

I can break the connection,
I thought, letting my mind reach out for hers. But it was like a sheet of steel had melded around Vida’s thoughts—no matter how hard I threw myself against it, I was knocked back. Shut down.

“You’ve improved a great deal,” Clancy said. “But do you honestly think you could break my hold before I could have her fire?”

No,
I thought, hoping my eyes would be enough to convey to Vida how sorry I was, that I hadn’t given up yet.

“How long have you been monitoring our Chatter’s link?” I asked, turning back to him.

“Take a guess, and then another, at when I actually started answering in Catherine Conner’s place.” He began drumming his fingers against the table, and Vida’s hand steadied, finger tightening on the trigger. I clenched my fists but took a seat across from him, not bothering to hide the revulsion on my face. “She’s very worried about all of you. To her credit, she figured out I wasn’t you faster than you figured out I wasn’t her. And, even better, she sent you to Nashville. I’m guessing you ran into that little poser while you were there. Did you take care of him?”

It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Knox.

“It must have
killed
you,” I said, “to know a lowly little
Blue
was parading around with the identity you built. Did you know he had one of your Reds?”

“I heard murmurs about it.” Clancy gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “I knew the Red was damaged, otherwise I would have gone and gotten him myself. He would have been incredibly useful to have around, but I don’t have the time to sit around and retrain that kid, to strip all of the mental conditioning and build it back up.”

“They destroyed him—
you
destroyed him,” I said. “By just suggesting the program to your father. That boy was…he was like an animal.”

“And what was the other option for them?” Clancy asked. “Would it have been better to let my father’s people murder all of them the way they did the Oranges?
Is it better to out-monster the monster or to be quietly devoured?
” He fingered the edges of his old paperback. “A good question from Nietzsche. I know my answer. Do you know yours?”

I didn’t know who Nietzsche was, and I didn’t particularly care, but I wasn’t about to let him derail the conversation.

“Tell me why you’re here,” I said. “Is it about the Reds again? Or are you finally bored with screwing people over? I bet it gets pretty lonely with only your ego for company.”

Clancy actually laughed. “I’ll be the first to admit my East River plan was childish. It completely lacked the sophistication it needed to be successful. I got ahead of myself, testing the waters before they were warm enough. No, I’m here now because I wanted to see you.”

Every joint in my body seemed to seize in the grip of cold dread.

His attack came at me like a knife in the dark; the strange, disconcerting feeling at the back of my skull was the only warning. But I was quick, too. It was just like what Instructor Johnson said—sometimes the only time an opponent has his guard down is when he’s mid-swing. So I went for it; I knew what I was doing now. I blocked his assault with one of my own, driving straight into the deep reaches of his mind.

Images and sensations flittered by, bursting like white hot flashes, changing every moment I seemed to get a grip on one. I focused on the one that kept coming up—a woman’s face framed by blond hair—and seized it, pulling it up to the front of his thoughts.

The scene slid down around me, shaky and discolored at first but growing stronger the longer I held it. With every breath a new detail would appear. The dark room wavered in my mind before a ring of stainless steel tables appeared. Just as quickly, those tables filled with glowing machines and intricate microscopes.

The woman was no longer a face but a whole person, and standing in the middle of it all. Though her face was calm, her hands were up in front of her in a pacifying way that made me think she was trying to calm someone down or defend herself.

The woman tripped on something behind her as she backed away, sending her stumbling to the ground. The glass scattered on the tile around her flared as it caught the light of a nearby fire. I leaned down over her, noticing the small spray of blood on the woman’s white lab coat, and her lips forming the words,
Clancy, no, please Clancy—

I wasn’t sure how the two of us ended up on the ground, crawling away from each other with weak, shaking limbs. I heard Jude shouting my name from outside again, thundering his fists against the back door. I pressed a hand to my chest, like that would be enough to slow my heart’s galloping pace. Clancy couldn’t stop shaking his head—in disbelief, maybe, or to clear it. For a long, terrible moment, we did nothing but stare at each other.

“I’m assuming that’s Stewart out there, banging to be let in like the dog he is?” he asked finally.

“It’s not,” I said, clenching my jaw. “He’s gone. They left us here.”

Clancy’s eyes flicked over to Vida again, and I heard a whimper.

“I’m telling you the truth!” I said. “Do you think I’d willingly let him get tangled up in this mess? He’s gone.
Gone
.”

He stared at me, his eyes tracing the lines of my face with faint amusement and more than a little annoyance.

The restaurant’s side glass door shattered, blown out by some force I didn’t see. Clancy’s full attention whipped from me to Vida, anger flashing in his dark eyes. It didn’t even occur to me to wonder who was breaking in—my body was way ahead of my brain. I dove for Vida’s legs, knocking her to the ground and wrestling the gun out of her hand before Clancy could do anything.

I rolled onto my back, aiming both guns at him from the floor. Vida was cursing, raging in confusion as she came up from Clancy’s fog, but my eyes were fixed on Clancy—and his were fixed on the boys who came charging in with such force that they slid across the piles of shattered glass.
No!
I thought.
No, not here!

“He’s gone,”
Clancy muttered, his voice high in a weak imitation of mine. “Gone.”

Liam’s gaze traveled from where I was on the ground to where Clancy still sat in the booth, rolling his eyes to high heaven in exasperation. Then Liam was moving, coming at him with a mask of pure, unflinching fury stretched tight over his features. I saw his decision there, read it in the way his fist was coming up for blood. So did Clancy.

“Don’t—!” I shouted. Liam jerked to a stop, every muscle in his body seizing up, as Clancy sunk deep into his mind. I watched him slump to the ground with no way of catching himself.

I scrambled onto my feet as the president’s son looked down on Liam, crossing his arms over his chest. The blood from his wound dripped down onto Liam’s leather coat. Liam’s face changed from a wince, to a grimace, to a red mess of agony, and I knew it was different than before; Clancy’s cool smile as he looked down on him was so much more terrifying than it had been at East River.

“Stop it!” I said, forcing myself between them. I pushed Clancy back, one gun tucked up under his chin. “Let him go—
Clancy
!”

I’m not sure why he backed off then, releasing his grip. I let my eyes tell him everything I was willing to do to him. And Clancy, he’d come to realize, just as I had, that I wouldn’t kill him to protect myself, but I would to save the people I cared about. And if he couldn’t invade my mind anymore, then he had no way of controlling me outside of them. The anger darkened his eyes as he stepped back, jaw clenched.

I forced him into the booth, making sure he heard the safety switching off. My hands shook, not with fear but from the sudden spike in my pulse. The power I felt watching him shrink back, without even a word between us, was intoxicating. I would do it—if he tried to compel any of my friends again, I’d kill him, and the last thing he’d see was the smile on my face. We needed to get out of there. While we still had the flash drive and the upper hand.

I saw the thought flash behind Clancy’s eyes, the way his whole body seemed to relax as he figured out the exact right thing to say to keep himself alive. “If you shoot me now, you’ll never know what’ll happen to your friends back in California. Not before they die, too.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

I
T WAS
J
UDE WHO FOUND HIS VOICE FIRST
, weak as it was. I watched his hand fly up, pressing the compass against his chest. “What are you talking about?”

I drew the barrel of the gun closer to Clancy’s face. “Answer him.”

In that moment it became just as clear to me as it was to Clancy that he had never been in a situation like this before—one he couldn’t wriggle out of, let alone control. Reluctance and frustration burned an ugly expression on his face. “I have a source in the League who says that they’re going forward with their plans to blow those kids to hell. You kill me, and you have no idea about when or how it happens.”

I shook my head, but inwardly, my stomach clenched. “Who’s the source? You could have pulled those plans off a computer network for all we know.”

The smirk on his face was enough to make me want to pull the trigger. He drew the name out, twisting the vowels. “Our mutual acquaintance. Nico.”

“No!” Jude cried. “No! Roo, he’s lying—”

“Nico and I go way back,” Clancy interrupted, glancing over to where Liam was struggling back onto his feet, coughing.

“Do you ever tell the truth?” I asked. “You would never have had access to Nico. He was in Leda’s testing program until the League got him out, and he hasn’t left HQ since.”

Clancy looked at me like he couldn’t quite believe I hadn’t put it all together by now. “Ruby.
Think
. Where was he
before
that? Or do you all honestly not know?”

“I know I’m going to shred the skin off your face and turn it into hair ribbons,” Vida snarled from the floor, still visibly struggling to get her legs under her. She sneered at him, pulling her fury around her like armor.

“That’s the spirit,” Chubs murmured, waiting for her to finally accept his help up—which, of course, she did not.

“What?” Jude was saying, coming up behind me. “What’s he talking about?”

I felt sick—faint enough that I almost sat down again. “Nico was in Thurmond? While you were there?”

“Annnnnd she gets it. Finally.” Clancy gave me a little round of applause. “We were scalpel buddies. They liked to compare our brains—to study kids at the opposite ends of the color spectrum. They even brought us in on the same day, way back when.”

My mind was racing, trying to figure out how I couldn’t have known that until now, if Nico had ever offered up a hint of it. But I couldn’t remember if
I
had ever told him I was in Thurmond. Had Cate?

“Are you saying your old man had them experiment on you?” Liam’s voice was rough as he came to stand behind me.

Clancy tapped his fingers against the table. He had no proof. His father had consented only if the researchers didn’t leave scars. “After I walked out of that camp, I did wonder what happened to the others—I figured that they must have moved the experimentations to another location once they started expanding the camp to bring in kids like our friend Ruby. It took me some time to find they’d been brought to Leda Corp’s Philadelphia lab.”

My stomach turned over. I tried to say something, anything, but the picture of Nico—small, scared Nico—strapped down to one of the Infirmary’s beds was too much for my mind to take. I couldn’t process anything else.

“Even before East River,” Clancy said, folding his hands on the table in front of him, “I realized the only kids who would ever truly understand what I was trying to do were those who had been there with me. I thought they could be useful. But by the time I traced them to Leda Corp, Nicolas was the only survivor whose brain hadn’t been completely destroyed.”

“And all you had to do was wait until the League broke him out to make him
useful
,” I said, disgusted. “Were you planning on convincing him to break away and meet you at East River before that plan imploded?”

“I didn’t wait for anyone. Who do you think slipped the intel to the League about what they were doing in that lab? Who do you think suggested a way for them to get the kids out? I had to be patient, of course, and wait until they had him back in California before contacting him. And no—it was never the plan to bring him to East River, Ruby. He was more useful to me there, collecting every piece of intel about the League I asked for.”

“No,” Jude said, dragging his hands back through his hair. “No, he wouldn’t…”

“You’ve all misjudged him. Underestimated him. No one has ever suspected him, no matter how much digging I had him do.” Clancy‘s eyes were on the gun as he continued. “He’s the one who told me that the League is moving forward with strapping the bombs to those kids. That’s why he hacked the Chatter link for me. So we could meet. So I could do him this favor.”

“He told you about the flash drive,” I said. “That’s really why you’re here, right?”

His eyebrows rose, lips parting just that tiny bit. The eager glint was back in his eyes. “Flash drive? And what would be on this flash drive? Something I’d like?”