In The Afterlight

He froze: muscles, limbs, expression like stone. Clancy didn’t move until I did, and then it was only as a mirror of my actions. It was like plucking strings; each touch against this part of his mind produced a different response in him. I arranged him like I would an action figure, ignoring the pressure of his own mind trying to fight me off.

This is it—this is what he felt each time he played with one of us. Lightheaded, dizzy with the possibilities.

I wasn’t where I needed to be, not really—somehow, I needed to redirect myself back into his memories, only I didn’t know how to remove myself from this part of his mind. It was dark, and gripping—

Mirror. The word sprang into my ears. Clancy’s voice, assertive, forcing me to listen—he knew I couldn’t get out on my own, and he must have been afraid of what damage I could do inside him if he was actively trying to help me. Mirror minds.

I understood.

My own thoughts shifted; I squeezed my eyes shut, hands clenched at my sides, as I forced the memory of me walking into the room to rise to the surface. I pulled free from the dark, feeling every bit like I was being physically dragged back by the hair. I was in the hallway again, watching as one by one the windows into his memories were slammed shut. I only had a second, just one, before he recovered—

“Lillian,” I said, “mother—”

The trick worked the way it always had. Hearing the words redirected his thoughts, drawing up the one memory he’d been thinking of most recently—the one he wanted to protect.

I knew what I was looking for, having seen a glimpse of the memory before. At the first appearance of the beautiful woman, her face framed by blond hair, a plea on her lips, I dove in, driving harder than I ever had before. Lillian Gray’s lab took shape around me—objects clicking into place like a puzzle. She’d tried to trick her son in order to bring him in to perform the procedure. She’d leaked her location in Georgia, knowing he’d be able to find her—and he did. I tugged harder on the image, forcing it to pass faster. Her hands were up, pacifying, the words Calm down, it’s going to be okay tumbling out of her. I remembered the splatter of blood on the lapel of her white lab coat, how she’d ended up begging Clancy, no, please Clancy from the floor as he set the world around her on fire, trashed her machines.

What I hadn’t seen was the way he gripped her neck between his hands. I could actually feel her racing pulse beneath my fingers at the slightest pressure. Oh God—he was going to—

But instead, my hands drifted up, gripping either side of her face. There were no words to describe what I saw next—reading a mind within a mind, an explosion of memories within a memory. The heat at my back was unbearable, but I was working, holding her still as I twisted, bent, broke every thought the woman had.

A gunshot broke the connection, pain tearing across my right shoulder. I turned away from the woman’s blank face, letting her crumple to the floor, as two dark figures burst through the door. The glass around her caught the winking light of the fire. The strange, entrancing beauty of it was the last thing I remembered before I ran.

I was thrown out of his head so hard that I fell back, cracking my skull against the wall behind me. Clancy was on the floor, as far away from me as he could get. His face was turned into the wall, his whole body heaving for breath. The cot was on its side, a barrier between us.

“Get out,” he snarled. “Get out!”

This time, I ran. My hands fumbled with the first lock, Clancy screaming those two words at me the whole time. The door opened from the other side and I collided with the person there, struggling to get out of their grip as the door was kicked shut behind me.

“It’s me, it’s just me—” Chubs hauled me down the short hall, into the old file closet. I clung to his arm, my mind a mess of thoughts and feelings that weren’t even mine.

My legs gave out before we were in the hall. He jammed the key into the lock and turned it, stopping only long enough to rattle it once to make sure it was secure.

“Ruby?” he said, his face splitting into two, three, four...We walked briskly toward the end of the hallway, me leaning on him the whole time, trembling with the effort it took to stay vertical. He opened one of the bunk room doors and pulled me inside.

I slid down the nearest wall, trying to purge the sound of Clancy’s voice with each exhale. Chubs crouched down in front of me, watching me intently. How much of that had he heard? How much of what he’d seen had he actually understood?

You out-Clancyed Clancy. I never even thought there was a chance I could do that with my abilities. To beat him, I’d managed to become him. And even with all of my promises to do whatever it took to find out about Lillian, I’d somehow never imagined...this. That I was capable of it.

Don’t think about it. I had what I’d come for. I got the confirmation I needed.

“She’s still with the League,” I said before he could ask me the question I saw in his face. “They came and took her away at the end.”

“The First Lady? He definitely didn’t kill her, then?”

I shook my head. “He did something much worse.”

By the time I went looking for him, Cole was already gone. Senator Cruz delivered the news when I passed her in the upper-level hallway.

“He went to meet with a friend who’s still associated with the League to see if they have information about the agents who were arrested,” she said. “He told me to tell you not to worry and that he’d be back tonight.”