In The Afterlight

Liam was still crouched down in front of me, blue eyes searching my face. The wrinkles in his brow smoothed out as he released a small breath of his own. He took the water bottle and poured some water on the bandana he’d pulled out of his back pocket. Slowly, tenderly, he wiped the blood and dirt from my hands and face. “Better?”

I nodded, taking the water bottle for a sip.

“What happened?” he asked. “Are you okay?

“I just...” I couldn’t tell him. He and Chubs had been planning for days to find a way for us to slip away from the others when the time came to leave the city. What little hate he carried in him was aimed squarely at the agents. If he knew, he’d try to get us to leave tonight. Or, worse, he might accidentally tip the agents off. He’d never been able to guard his feelings the way Cole did. They’d read him like the day’s newspaper and dispose of him just as quickly to avoid him stirring up the other kids. “I just got...overwhelmed.”

“Has it been happening a lot?” Liam sat cross-legged in front of me.

God. I didn’t want to talk about these attacks, either. I couldn’t, not even with him. Then I’d have to talk about Jude, about what happened, about everything we hadn’t had the time to talk through before things went to hell. He seemed to sense that, at least.

“You’ve been gone all day,” he said. “I was starting to get worried.”

“It took a while to find someone I could use,” I said. “I wasn’t just out there running around being reckless.”

“I didn’t say you were,” Liam said. “I just wish you had told me you were heading out.”

“I didn’t think I had to.”

“You don’t have to. I’m not your keeper. I was scared, okay?”

I said nothing. This was how it was between us now. Together, but not in the way that was important—the way we were only months ago. After I’d betrayed his trust so badly, I wasn’t sure it could be like that again. And it didn’t help that I could feel myself falling back on the only way I knew how to cope—wrestling with the thoughts inside of my head, trapping them there so they wouldn’t infect anyone else. I’d carefully constructed this invisible wall between us, brick by brick, even as I hugged him, gripped his hand in mine, kissed him.

It was so selfish, I knew it was, to take even that much when I wasn’t giving everything back to him...but I needed him here. I needed the presence of him at my back, at my side. I needed to see his face and hear his voice and know that he was safe and I could protect him. That was the only way to get through each day.

But it was impossible to clamp down or compartmentalize things around Liam. He was a talker. He felt things more deeply than anyone I’d ever met. He’d been trying to start these conversations with me for days. You aren’t responsible for what happened to Jude. About what happened in the safe house...

“Ruby, seriously, what happened?” he asked, his hands loose around my wrists.

“Sorry,” I whispered, because what else could I say? “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be so...I didn’t mean to bite your head off. Nothing’s going on. I should have told you, but I had to leave in a hurry.” And I knew you’d try to tell me it was too dangerous and I didn’t want to argue. “But I got what we needed. I know how to get us out of here.”

His lips compressed into a tight line as he studied me. Liam didn’t seem satisfied in the least with that answer, but he was all too willing to drop the topic in favor of another one. “Does that mean we can finally talk about what comes next?”

“Cole isn’t going to let us go.” Especially not you.

“We could look for my parents—”

“Isn’t it just as dangerous to drive around aimlessly, looking for your mom and Harry, as it is to stay with the others?” I asked. “This is our fight...what we wanted all along, remember? Cole made a deal with me that we’d actually focus on helping kids now—freeing the camps.”

At least, it was what we had wanted while we were at East River. Liam had been the one behind the wheel then, steering us all in the direction of getting the kids out of the rehabilitation programs. Maybe it was foolish of me to hope that what had happened there wouldn’t affect his dream. But sure enough, his eyes drifted over to the door down the hall that only Cole and I were allowed to enter, to the monster waiting inside.

“Cole says that now, and the agents might be playing nice for once,” Liam said. “But how long before they’re back to their own agendas?”

I tried not to wince. Sooner than you think. “This isn’t the League anymore.”

“Exactly. It could be worse.”

“Not if we’re here to keep it from becoming that,” I said. “Can we at least give it a little while? See what happens? If things head south we can get out, I promise. If nothing else...I have to see if Cate and the others made it. If they did, they’ll be waiting for us. She has the flash drive of Leda Corp’s research on the cause of IAAN. If we can put that information together with the cure—we won’t just be helping ourselves, we’ll be helping every kid that comes after us.”

He shook his head. “I don’t want to make you feel like it was all for nothing, but what if there isn’t anything useful in the pages you fished out of the fire? For all the sense we can make of them, we could shred them tonight and it still wouldn’t make a difference to our lives. I don’t want us to just...attach ourselves to the idea of them in the hope that one day down the road it’ll make sense.”