Never Fade (59 page)

“The
cure
for IAAN,” he spat. “The one my mother developed, the one Alban kept hidden from you, waiting for the right opportunity to trade it to my father to benefit himself.” Clancy swiped at the blood draining from his nose, laughing in that same humorless way. “The one that would have taken our abilities away and left us
helpless
. I burned it to ash, and my father buried it without realizing. Now her memory of it is gone, and no one will ever have the research—no one will take away what’s ours.”

A cure
. That single word was chiming like a bell in my ears, ringing again and again. My mind couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t recognize it. I’d spent so many years conditioning myself to accept that it was impossible, forcing myself to let go of thinking there was a world beyond the camp’s electrified fence, that the word no longer existed in my vocabulary.

I felt myself start to turn, looking to Jude for his reaction—but Jude wasn’t here. I had left him behind. I had let him fall back into the darkness. And it was like seeing Liam and Chubs climbing out of the tunnel alone all over again. It stole the breath from my chest.

One of the younger kids began to cry loudly behind me, asking in a panicked, confused voice, “What? What is he…what is he talking about?”

Oh,
I thought.
Oh my God
.

I had been wrong—so wrong. The first lady hadn’t been studying what caused the disease. She had invested her life in figuring out how to end it.

I felt myself step toward him, away from the others. Chubs was visibly shaking, about to collapse under the weight of what could have been. I caught Liam’s eye, but his expression was so open, so raw with pain and longing that I had to turn away. I knew what he was imagining. In my mind, we were standing on that beach, too, with the crystal clear skies overhead and our beautiful, whole families around us.

A cure.

Alban had been right when he said Lillian Gray had never been blinded by her love for her son. She knew Clancy would never willingly give up his abilities, and that she’d never find him. No. He needed to come to her, to be lured by the satisfaction of tracking her down after being shut out and denied access to her for so long. He had to be the first one to receive the treatment, because if he heard so much as a whisper of the possibility of it, he’d disappear forever. It made me wonder if that was the reason Alban had sat on the secret for as long as he did—if that was part of the deal. Clancy first. Then, he could present it to the world. He could be the nation’s hero.

I studied Clancy’s face as I crouched down to his level. His gaze flickered toward my hand as I slid it into my coat pocket.

Behind all of his venomous words was the sting of true betrayal, an ache that ran so deep, his whole body seemed to throb with it. His mother, his
own mother
had set up the trap. And he had done what in return? Burned down her lab, attacked her, scrambled her mind, and used the situation at HQ to his advantage to finish what he’d started in Georgia.

That’s how he knew she sent the results to Alban,
I thought, slowly smoothing the papers out over my knee. I had his full attention now.
He must have seen it in her mind.

Clancy loved the idea his father had inadvertently buried the one thing that could potentially fix his country and salvage his legacy. But the true irony here was that if Clancy hadn’t come looking to destroy his mother’s research, we never would have found it in time. It would have been left behind like everything else as we escaped.

He’d come here to close that door, but instead he had left it wide open for me to walk through.

There is a cure
. The insanity of that thought made me feel like the hand on Jude’s compass spinning, and spinning, and spinning, searching for its true north.

He deserved this. I blinked back the prick of tears and let my anger rise to swallow the anguish for now. I let it propel me forward. Because Jude deserved to live to see this moment—he should have been here, now, next to me, suddenly seeing that everything was alive with the possibility of change.

I held up the rumpled, smoke-stained papers directly in front of Clancy, high enough for the ring of Psi and agents around us to see them, too. And I don’t know what was more powerful and gratifying to me—the look of terror that swept across his face, or the exhilaration of knowing I finally had my future back in my own hands.

“You mean this research?”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

R
IGHT OFF THE BAT
, I need to shower some love on the fantastic team at Disney-Hyperion for the incredible amount of hard work and enthusiasm that they’ve put into this series. Thanks especially go to my editor, Emily Meehan, Laura Schreiber, Stephanie Lurie, publicist extraordinaire Lizzy Mason, Dina Sherman, LaToya Maitland, Andrew Sansone, Lloyd Ellman, Elke Villa, and Marci Senders.

None of this would have been possible without my fearless agent, Merrilee Heifetz. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I couldn’t be in better hands, and I’m grateful every day that I have you in my corner.

Much gratitude to Anna Jarzab and Erin Bowman who read early, terrifyingly messy drafts of this story and gave me incredible, thoughtful feedback that made this story so much better than I ever imagined it could be. Thanks also to Sarah J. Maas, not only for her many reads and critiques, but the overwhelming amount of love and support she sent my way during an incredibly difficult year.

Much love to Tyler Infinger and Catherine Wallace—the friendship and care they’ve shown me over the years has meant more to me than words can express.

To fall back on a cliché, I
really
hit the jackpot with my colleagues and friends at RHCB, especially Adrienne Waintraub, Tracy Lerner, and Lisa Nadel. I really could not admire each and every one of them more.

And, finally, all the love in my heart goes to my family for their bravery, resilience, and strength this past year. Just when I think they can’t be more amazing, they go and prove me wrong.

Keep reading for a sneak peek of
In Time
, the eBook novella that bridges
The Darkest Minds
and
Never Fade
!

ONE

L
ISTEN
, no matter what anyone tells you, no one really wants this job.

The hours are endless and the pay is crap. No, I take that back. It’s not the pay that’s crap. There’s a sweet little penny in it for you if you can hook yourself a decent-sized fish. The only thing is, of course, that everybody’s gone and overfished the damn rivers. You can drop in as many hooks as you want, buy yourself the shiniest bait, but there just aren’t enough of them still in the wild to fatten up your skeletal wallet.

That’s the first thing Paul Hutch told me when I met him at the bar this afternoon. We’re here to do business, but Hutch decides that it’s a teaching moment, too. Why do people constantly feel like they have to lecture me on life? I’m twenty-five, but it’s like the minute you take actual kids out of the picture, anyone under the age of thirty suddenly becomes “son,” or “kid,” or “boy,” because these people, the “real adults,” they have to have someone to make small. I’m not interested in playing to someone’s imagination, or propping up their sense of self-worth. It makes me sick—like I’m trying to digest my own stomach. I’m no one’s
boy
, and I don’t respond to
son
, either. I’m not your damn dead kid.

Someone’s smoking a cigarette in one of the dark booths behind us. I hate coming here almost as much as I hate the usual suspects who haunt the place. Everything in the Evergreen is that tacky emerald vinyl and dark wood. I think they want it to look like a ski lodge, but the result is something closer to a poor man’s Oktoberfest, only with more sad, drunk geezers and fewer busty chicks holding frothy mugs of beer.

There are pictures of white-capped mountains all around, posters that are about as old as I am. I know, because our mountain hasn’t had a good snow in fifteen years, or enough demand to open in five. I used to run the ski lifts up all the different courses after school, even during the summer, when people from the valley just wanted to come up and do some hiking in temperatures below 115 degrees. I tell myself,
At least you don’t have to deal with the snotty tourists anymore
—the ones who acted like they’d never seen a real tree before, and rode their brakes all the way down Humphreys’ winding road. I don’t miss them at all.

What I miss is the paycheck.

Hutch looks like he crawled out of a horse’s ass—smells like it, too. For a while he was working at one of those tour group companies that let you ride the donkeys down into the Grand Canyon. They closed the national parks, though, and the owner had to move all the animals back to Flagstaff, before ultimately selling them off. There’s no work for Hutch to do there anymore, but I’m pretty sure the woman lets him sleep out in the stables.

He’s been here for hours already; he’s looking soggy around the edges, and when I walked into the dark bar, he glanced up all bleary and confused, like a newborn chick sticking its head out of an egg. His hair is somehow receding and too long at once, the wisps halfheartedly tied back with a strip of leather.

Trying to speed things up, I slide a crumpled wad of money his way. The stack looks a lot more impressive than it actually is. I’ve been living off tens and twenties for so long I’m convinced they stopped printing the bigger bills.

“It’s not that I don’t think you can do it, son,” Hutch says, studying the bottom of his pint. “It just sounds easier than it is.”

I should be listening harder than I am. If anyone knows what the job’s really like, it’s him. Old Hutch tried for six months to be a skip tracer, and the prize he won for that misadventure was a burnt-up, mutilated, four-fingered hand. He likes to tell everyone some kid got to him, but seeing as he’s managed to burn down two trailers by falling asleep with a cigarette in his hand, I’m inclined to doubt it. Still, he milks it for all he can. The sight of the gimp hand gets him sympathy drinks from out-of-towners stopping in the Evergreen. Some extra nickels and dimes, too, when he’s holding a cup at the corner of Route 66 and Leroux Street, pretending his white ass is a military vet from the Navajo Nation. Somehow he thinks that combination elevates him over the rest of us bums.

“Can I have the keys?” I ask. “Where’d you park it?”

He ignores me, humming along to the Eagles’ “Take It Easy,” which this bar has on loop apparently for no reason other than the fact that Arizona is mentioned once in it.

I shouldn’t be buying this truck from him. I know there’s going to be something wrong with it; it’s older than I am. But this is the only one I can afford, and I have to get out of here. I have to get out of this town.

“Another one,” he says stubbornly, trying to flag down Amy, the bartender, who is doing her absolute best to deny his miserable existence. She and I have talked about this before—it’s hard to look at him. His teeth got bad over the years, and his cheeks sag so low they’re practically hanging like wattles against his neck. He’s only forty-five, but he already looks like the after photo of a meth addict—the mug shot of the killer on one of those crime TV shows they’re always rerunning. His breath alone is like a punch to the face.

I used to like Hutch a lot. He got to know my dad when he dropped off fresh produce at the restaurant. Now it’s like…I don’t know how to explain it so it makes sense. It’s like he’s a cautionary tale, only one you know you’re speeding toward without brakes. A glimpse of the future, or whatever. I just look at him and I know that if I don’t get out of this place, I’m going to be this old man who’s not even old, but smells like he pisses himself on a regular basis. The guy who spins and spins and spins on his barstool, like he’s riding the old carousel at the fairgrounds.

Hutch slides the key out of his pocket but slams his hand down over it when I reach for it. His other hand traps mine, and then he’s looking at me with these wet, feverish eyes. “I loved your daddy so much, Gabe, and I know he wouldn’t want this for you.”