In The Afterlight

“Inglés, por favor,” Vida said, catching the tail end of this. “Unfortunately, you’re the only one here fluent in Geek.”

He snorted. “Basically, we form what we want to say in the Wernicke’s area of the brain, and then that planned speech is transferred to the Broca’s area, which actually carries out the speech. I wonder...”

“What?” I prompted.

“Maybe Clancy managed to...shut down, or somehow numb those parts of her mind? Or depressed them, maybe, so they’re not functioning at full capacity.” He turned a shrewd look on me. “When you restored Liam’s memories, what exactly did you do?”

“I was thinking about...I was remembering something that happened between us,” I said. “I was—” Kissing him. “Reaching out to him somehow, it was kind of...instinctive. I was trying to connect to something in him.” I was trying to find the old Liam I had given up.

Mirror minds.

“Oh,” I said, pressing both hands to my mouth. “Oh.”

“Share with the rest of us,” Vida said, hands on Zu’s shoulders. “Your half is the only half of the conversation I understand.”

“I need to jumpstart her,” I said.

“Excuse me?” Cole said, joining the conversation now. “Who are we giving the shock treatment to?”

“You think you can reset that system in her mind,” Chubs said, understanding. “But...how, exactly?”

“Clancy said something to me the last time I was in his head,” I said. “Mirror minds. I think that’s what happens when I enter someone’s head. I’m mirroring what’s in their mind with my own. When I’m tampering with memories and searching through them, it’s like I’ve set up a mirror between us, and all of those changes I’m imagining into existence are immediately reflected in the other mind.”

“Okay?” Cole said. This was going to be nearly impossible to explain—they had no idea what any of this felt like, and I wasn’t sure I knew how to articulate it.

Thank God for Chubs, though. “So you think that if you engage that part of your mind, it’ll engage that part of her mind, too, and reset it?”

I held up my hands. “Worth a try?”

“More than worth a try,” Cole said. “It’s time we checked in on her anyway—”

There was a bang on the loading dock door—one loud sound that came like a shot through the calm that had settled over the room. Liam jumped to his feet, a grin splitting his face as he jogged to the door. It was the only reason I let myself relax as he and Kylie unhooked the padlock they’d installed there and the door rolled up, rattling like thunder as sunlight spilled in.

I counted off the eight kids as they came in, each somehow looking worse than the next; filthy, in a variety of mismatched knits. We could smell them from where we were standing, which Cole chose to note with raised brows and an expression I’d seen Liam wear a dozen times.

I recognized the new faces, but I hadn’t been in Knox’s camp in Nashville long enough to assign them names from memory. The kids there had been so hopeless, left with next to nothing by way of supplies because Knox and a few of the others had taken everything they brought in for themselves. Now this group only seemed to be in slightly better shape. Between them, they had a few backpacks and makeshift bags tied together from old sheets. If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have thought they walked from Nashville.

Liam had reached up to start pulling the door down, but stopped, leaning out to wave the last two in. One, a tall blond girl, stopped to clasp a hand on his shoulder. The other, an even taller guy wearing a bright red-checked hunting hat, dropped his backpack and stretched.

Olivia, I thought. Brett.

And sure enough, Kylie and Lucy rushed forward with a cry of “Liv!”

The girl turned toward them and the other two were brought up short, actually skidding against the cement at the full sight of her face. One side of it had been burned by Mason, the Red that Knox had kept prisoner in his camp, and had scarred badly as it healed.

“Got a makeover,” she said in a light voice, “as you can see. Hi, Ruby.”

Brett was there in an instant, running a hand down her long braid to rest against her lower back.

I crossed the last few feet between us. Despite the fact that neither of us were particularly warm, cuddly people, I hugged her like it had been years, not a month, since we’d parted ways. “It’s good to see you,” I said. It really was. “You too, Brett.”

“Feeling’s mutual,” he assured me. I stepped back, letting Kylie, Lucy, and Mike approach her, hug her, bring her more firmly into the fold. “So this is Lodi, huh?”

“This is it,” Liam confirmed. “We’ve been busy. Did you catch the news today? We did the camp hit I mentioned to you before.”

“You did it?” Olivia said, blinking. “I remember you mentioning it, but...”

She exchanged a confused look with Brett.

“It was all over the radio as we were coming in,” Brett said. “You guys do know that the Children’s League is taking credit for it...right?”

And just like that, the wind went completely out of Liam’s sails—in fact, the air itself seemed to have been sucked completely out of the garage. It was Cole who walked over to the workstation, sending the kids standing there scattering as he switched on the radio.