Never Fade

“Home Front here. Line is secure, tracking both units now. Okay to proceed at twenty-two thirty. Satellite feed shows minimum interference at Target Two. Minder, we’re showing considerable activity in your sector.”

I’m not sure who was more disgusted to hear him referred to as “Minder,” Rob or me. He didn’t have a team of kids like Cate, but anyone who supervised a freak kid on an Op was slapped with that title.

“There’s a protest in the Old Man’s Yard,” Rob said. I looked up, scrambling on all fours to get to the back window. He was right. We were passing by the university’s tree-lined park, with its crisscrossing paths. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of bodies clustered around a large bonfire, ignoring the sleet falling around them. Signs and drums littered the nearby patches of snow, the only thing between the protesters and the small ring of disgruntled police officers that had them surrounded. People seemed to be hovering at the edge of the small park, as if looking for a way to break through the line of uniforms and guns.

“What are they protesting?” Jude whispered, his breath fogging up the glass. I didn’t answer, just motioned for him to get down. I began counting the blocks we passed—one, two, three, four, five.

The ambulance came to a shuddering stop a short distance away from the professor’s pleasant little white house with a slanted gray slate roof. Rob unhooked his seat belt and stood, stretching slightly as he climbed into the back.

“We’re in position,” he said, pressing a hand to his ear. I felt his eyes slide over to me, but I kept mine fixed firmly on Jude, who had started shaking again.

This kid is going to get himself killed, I thought, pinching the bridge of my nose.

“You have the all clear,” said the agent monitoring the Op at HQ. “Goose Egg is a go.”

“Roger,” Barton said, and Rob echoed him.

He was looking a little ragged, a dark beard coming in along the edge of his square jaw, but Rob’s eyes were alert. He tossed the boy the other EMT jacket and a cap—like that could hide the fact that Jude looked about two years younger than he actually was.

“Don’t say a word, don’t fidget, and follow my lead exactly, then get your ass back here,” he told the boy. Then, turning to me, he added, “You know what to do?”

I met his dark eyes straight on. “I do.”

Rob needed Jude to disable the house’s alarm system and man the gurney to get the professor out on the chance that any neighbors got nosy and opened their curtains at the wrong moment. We were supposed to take him around the city in a long fifteen-minute lap so I could work him into a state of cooperation, then dump him back on a sidewalk, his memory erased of the encounter. If he proved to be too hard to crack, Rob had a safe house we could bring him to for more…painful methods of persuasion, I guess.

Rob opened the back door, letting in a freezing draft of air. He and Reynolds pulled the gurney down, along with a duffel bag. Jude was wringing his hands again.

I grabbed his arm just before he jumped down after Rob. “Be careful.”

Jude gave me a little salute and clenched his teeth in a way that made me think he was trying for a reassuring smile or trying not to puke all over himself. “Later, gator.”

The door slammed shut behind them. In an hour, sunflower.

In all of the wild daydreams I’d had about the day I’d finally pack it up and leave, none of them had come close to resembling this moment. I didn’t expect to feel as calm as I did. The first time I had escaped from Cate and Rob, the fear had flamed up fast and true, moving my feet before my brain could catch up. I hadn’t known where I was going or how I was going to get there. I had just run. It was only dumb luck that I had found Zu and the others.

I couldn’t rely on luck this time. I didn’t have time to feel afraid of what would happen if I were caught. The steady composure I felt made me feel so much stronger than any of the wild, raw emotions I had surrendered to in the gas station. I had something to accomplish and people to protect, and no one—especially not Rob Meadows—was going to keep me from it so long as there was breath in my body.

The porch light flipped on as the three of them passed under it. Jude threw one quick glance back over his shoulder at me, then disappeared around the side of the porch to the little power box that controlled the house’s electricity.

When the porch light switched off and Rob bent over the gold door lock, I shrugged out of the League’s heavy black coat, pulling out a lighter and the Swiss Army knife I had stashed in one of the pockets and tucking them in my boots. Liam’s old leather jacket wouldn’t keep the cold out for long, but it didn’t have a tracking device in it.

I climbed up to the driver’s seat and popped the door open. My boots had just landed in the snow when Jude came around the back of the ambulance.

“What are you—?”

I bolted forward, clapping a hand over his mouth. His eyes went wide in panic until I pressed a finger to my lips. Jude was too confused to process what was happening. I had to take his wrist and drag him behind me, letting the ambulance’s bulk block us from view.

“We’re inside,” came Rob’s rough voice in my ear. “Status, Leader?”

“On schedule, Minder.”

I glanced up at the street sign—Garfield Street—and tried to get my bearings. I had to put as much distance between Rob and us before he realized we were gone; I could outrun him on foot, but I couldn’t outrun a car…especially not with Jude. If we could make it back to the protest, we might be able to lose him and Reynolds in the crowd. Rob wouldn’t think to look for us in the one place we had a decent chance of being caught. He was a brute, and a vicious one at that, but he wasn’t very imaginative.

Jude panted beside me, looking slightly frazzled but otherwise all right. The wind was knocking around his hat and tugging at mine. I pulled the black knit cap down snug over my ears, trapping my loose long hair and muffling sounds from both prongs of the Op.

The cold was like nothing I had ever felt in Virginia. It was sharp, a persistent clawing at every bare inch of skin. I tried picking up my pace into a faster run, blinking back the tears and snow flurries, but Jude was struggling to keep up as it was. Patches of ice snapped underfoot, branches hidden beneath the old snow crushed as I trampled through the trees separating the houses and buildings. South, south, south—I just needed to keep heading south, and I’d find Harvard Yard, and the protesters, and escape.