In The Afterlight

It was up near an aquatics park that my mind started to go a bit soft. I caught my eyes closing and jerked back awake more than once. Stop it, I thought, wake up wake up wake up. Cole needed to finally be able to recharge after the two hellish weeks we’d had on the run in Los Angeles. I could handle this. I could at least stay awake until we had to stop again for gas.

The light dimmed with every minute that passed, the winter sun setting even earlier behind the silver storm clouds. In the gray-blue light, the cement sign for the recreation area seemed to glow, and the tags there seemed especially dark in comparison. The initials I saw gave my brain something to play with, at least, while I watched the road.

PGJR...Paul, George, John, and Ringo...parrot, giraffe, jaguar, rabbit...pistol, Glock, Jericho, rifle...

HBFB...Hazel, Bigwig, Fiver, Blackberry...hash browns, bacon, flapjacks, bran flakes...Harrisonburg, Bedford, Fairfax, Bristol...

Below that line of initials was another faint one. I slowed the truck, squinting through the sheet of rain at it. The downpour had nearly carried the letters away, but I could still see the faintest hint of KLZH.

Kia...Lexus...Z-something...Honda...Okay, that one didn’t exactly work. Kansas, Led Zeppelin, ZZ Top, The Hollies. Damn, Z was hard—zebras, zoo, zero, zilch, and Zu. And that was it. That was all my brain had.

I yawned through my smile. K-something, Liam, Zu, Hina. Oh—Kylie, Kylie from East River, that worked. Kylie, Liam, Zu, Hina. Or even Kylie, Lucy, Zu, and Hina—

The air whooshed through the vents, louder now that my mind was completely still and silent. It filled my ears until my heart started banging against my ribcage, hard enough for the sound to reach my ears.

Kylie, Lucy, Zu, and Hina. My mind was singing out the names over and over again until I felt almost delirious. Stop it. I tried to move on, tried kangaroo, lion, zebra, hyena, but I couldn’t shake the fizzing sensation in my blood.

If they were kids leaving that tag, then we couldn’t have been far behind them. And if they knew how to follow the code, then they were...they had to be from East River, right? I’d only seen one group of kids actually leave East River, and that had been Zu’s group.

Stop it, I thought, sucking down a long gulp of the air coming through the vents. I reached over to turn the heat up slightly, trying to drive out the chill. There were other kids, plenty of other kids, with those same first letters. And regardless of who the other girl had been, if it was Zu’s group, then there should have been a T there for Talon, the teen boy who’d gone with them. I tried to call up each of their faces, but Kylie, Lucy, Talon, and Hina were blank. Weird how I could remember their hair, the way they’d worn their black bandanas, the sound of their voices, but not what any of them really looked like. My mind had blocked out so much of our time at East River as a defense against the pain, it all might as well have happened to a different person.

But Zu—I remembered everything about Zu, from the way her hair spiked up first thing in the morning to each freckle across her nose.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw yet another code tag—two of them, on a sign with directions to the nearby freeway that was counting down the miles to the next city. One was the crescent moon in a circle, the other was a set of arrows, pointing right—east—not straight ahead like the others.

I switched the truck’s headlights on, letting them flood the clusters of trees on either side of the road. I started to pull the truck over onto the shoulder, wishing I had some other way to talk to Liam and Chubs, but I stopped myself.

These past few days had been hard enough on Liam already. Giving him this thrill only to have it ripped away seemed especially cruel. Chubs could bear the disappointment, but Liam...I didn’t want to see his face fall when it all turned out to be nothing. I’d already let him down so many times, in so many ways. I couldn’t add this to the list.

But there was that small voice rising above the other thoughts, whispering, what if it is her, though?

Kylie, Lucy, Zu, and Hina. KLZH.

This was dangerous—this was letting myself think that sometimes life had the near-magical quality of working out. It could unfold in a way that’s so much better and easier than what you could have imagined.

That paint—it’d been fresh enough to run under the insistent stroke of rain, hadn’t it? They couldn’t have been that far ahead.

Don’t do this to yourself, I thought. We were farther north than where Liam thought her uncle’s home was, and the initials were still missing Talon’s T. Maybe it was exhaustion, or desperation, or some kind of need to prove that life could sometimes be kind. Whatever it was, I couldn’t ignore it.

What was the risk in following this trail through, just to see what was waiting for us at the end? What if this was the one chance we’d ever have of finding her?

Jude would have done it. With him, it wouldn’t have even been a debate.

I still felt crazy taking the next right, and clearly the others felt the same way. Vida tapped the horn, a quiet question. It was a dark access road, not even paved. The truck settled into the mud, rolling through the fresh tracks left by another set of tires. The overgrown trees lining the road were gnarled and twisted into each other; I kept the truck moving fast enough to tear through them, snapping branches and ripping away leaves.

It was that noise, not the earlier, inquiring honk from the other car, that finally shook Cole out of his two-hour nap. I saw him tense, running his hands over his face once, twice, trying to clear up the disorientation brought on by such a deep sleep.