In The Afterlight

If they’d thought about that in all of their planning, it didn’t show on their faces. And the fact that Dr. Gray didn’t try to refute me seemed to lend some credence to the possibility.

“You absolutely cannot just release the information about Agent Ambrosia, I’m sorry, but no,” she said. “You are severely underestimating the widespread panic it’ll induce in the population.”

“True,” Senator Cruz said. “I’d rather not see people start tearing each other apart to get to natural water supplies. But I agree with Alice that we need evidence; not for the public, but for our foreign allies.”

The buzz that moved through the room was palpable—kids were already shifting around, assigning themselves to groups to drive out to the water treatment facilities. And there was Cole, watching it all. His hand gave a painful jerk as he lifted it to rub the back of his neck, and I wondered if he felt it, too, the slow unraveling. The train that had been so clearly under our care had jumped the tracks entirely. When he looked at me, there was a silent plea in it, a desperation I had never seen in him before.

I couldn’t stand it—it pushed me past furious. He’d done everything in his power to help us. To make the hard decisions. And now they were trying to push him out as leader? He was being mocked by the looks Liam and Alice exchanged? In that moment he could have backed out of the room and I wasn’t sure anyone but me would have noticed.

“Well,” he said finally, “I have some intel for you, if you’d like it.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “I’m sure you do.”

“You say you want to give the world a sense of who these kids are, but you’re really just setting them up to be pitied.” Cole tucked his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, his voice growing louder as the din around him faded. “What motivates people, even more than anger, is fear. Go ahead and release all that intel on Ambrosia, see where that lands this country when people start rioting over the last few fresh, untainted water sources. Or, you can show them Gray’s trump card—that he’s been building an army of Reds.”

“What are you talking about?” Alice demanded.

“You all saw what happened at Kansas HQ today,” Cole said. “But what the news didn’t tell you is that there are reports that it was Reds, not a military unit, that attacked them.”

“Oh, convenient—reports with nothing to back them up.” Alice waved him off.

But, if nothing else, Cole now had the reins of the conversation back in his hand. He was guiding the conversation now, not letting it happen around him. “My trusted source says that there’s a camp of Reds not too far from here, in a place called Sawtooth. I’d like to go and document evidence of them—their training, the camp’s existence—and I’d like to give it to you for Amplify, on the condition it’s used in conjunction with the actual camp hit.”

“Where did this information come from?” Liam asked, his eyes narrowed in suspicion.

“A trusted source,” he repeated.

His brother rolled his eyes. Alice, though—Cole had read her right. It was like a cat that had spotted a mouse creeping along the floorboards. She wanted this story, and she wasn’t going to run the risk of someone else getting it first.

“Okay, what about this,” she began. “We send out five teams to the water treatment facilities, and you can take a small group out to assess the situation there. Snap some photos.”

“I only need one other person,” he said, glancing at me.

“I’ll go,” Liam said, before I could. He set his jaw, daring his brother to refuse. Cole crossed his arms over his chest, eyes darting over to me, looking for a lifeline.

He doesn’t want Liam to go. And it had nothing to do with how Liam may or may not have been able to handle himself, or if he trusted him. I saw that now.

“I’d still like to go,” I said. “I think—”

“He just said two would be enough,” Liam pressed, turning back to his brother. “Unless you think I’m going to screw everything up on your precious little mission?”

Cole snorted, his lips twisting up in a rueful smile. “All right, it’s settled. Now...someone talk to me about our car situation. What’s the gasoline level at now?”

Dr. Gray returned to her seat, finally, eyes fixed on her hands in her lap as Senator Cruz asked her something. The meeting came to a natural end as five teams formed to go out to the water treatment facilities, Alice taking the lead, dividing them up by state and choosing which one she wanted to go with.

I didn’t stay around to watch the stiff conversation between Cole and Liam. I turned on my heel, vaguely aware of Chubs saying something to me as I made my way back into the tunnel, through the Ranch, back to the empty computer room. I sat back down at Nico’s computer station and switched on the news livestream.

“—obviously this is terrible if it’s true and the president will have a considerable amount of explaining to do—” This was the last one still running; the others had been switched off, one by one. A pattern had formed: a news station would show the kids’ interviews, the conversation between the talking heads would swing dangerously toward the this is true camp, and the feed would go dark. This station seemed to be avoiding the censors by casting the guest commentator as a devil’s advocate instead of a so-called expert. “—but what if these children haven’t been coached, and this isn’t some ploy for attention or notoriety from parents? If they have been removed from their rehabilitation program, then aren’t their lives in danger? Our focus should be on returning them to their camps before it’s too late.”