Never Fade

Andy reached over with his left hand, plucking something off his dashboard. The tape around it peeled off without protest, like it was used to being lifted and then stuck back on. He held it out, waiting for me to take it.

A little boy smiled back at me from the glossy surface of the photo, dark hair gleaming. He looked ten, maybe twelve if even that. I recognized the muted colors of the backdrop behind him—a school portrait.

“That’s my grandson,” Andy explained. “His name is Michael. They took him from his school about four years ago. When I tried to contact the police about it, the government, the school, they wouldn’t tell me anything. Same for everyone. Couldn’t post about it online without my access being shut off. Couldn’t go on TV or write in to the papers because Gray was all over them, too. But some of the parents at his school, they said they overheard some PSFs talking about a place called Black Rock.”

I wiped the smudged fingerprints from the photo’s surface and handed it back to him.

“You’re right,” he said, “I’m not entirely selfless. I guess what I’m hoping is that maybe you can give me some information. Maybe you know what or where this Black Rock is and we can call it even?”

It was the pleading quality to his voice that did me in. I couldn’t detach it from the thought of my own grandmother, left wondering what had happened to me. My skin felt tight around my chest.

“I do. Black Rock is a camp in South Dakota.”

“South Dakota!” Andy sounded astonished. “All the way out there? You’re sure?”

I was more than sure. The League had a list of all fifteen camps the surviving Psi kids were divided among. Some were itty bitty—a couple dozen kids. Some were converted schools that could hold a few hundred. Then, you had camps like Black Rock and Thurmond that, because of their remote location, could hold thousands.

The South Dakota camp was of special interest to the League because of the rumors surrounding it. All new births from the time IAAN was officially recognized had to be registered in a special database. Those children were supposed to be brought into local doctors or scientists every month for tests, so they could chart any “abnormalities.” Any child that developed Psi abilities before the age of ten was put into a special study program run out of Black Rock. The other kids, if they survived IAAN and developed their abilities on the normal schedule, were forcibly picked up and brought to the “normal” rehab camps.

“They might have transferred him at some point,” I said. “Do you know what he is?”

“What do you mean, what he is?” Andy said, turning slightly. “He’s my grandson, that’s what he is!”

I only meant to find out if he was one of the dangerous ones—a Red or Orange like me. To see if there was a chance he had already been erased, permanently.

“These camps…” Andy began, shielding his eyes from the headlights of a passing truck. “You know what they do there? Have you seen one yourself?”

I glanced sideways at Jude. “Yeah.”

“And they let you out because they fixed you?” he asked, and the hope in his voice broke my heart. “You’re better now?”

“They can’t fix us,” I said. “All those kids they took aren’t doing anything other than working and waiting. I only got out because someone helped me escape.”

Andy nodded, like he had already suspected as much.

“These are terrible times,” he said after a long while. “And you’re right not to trust any of us. What we’ve done…what we allowed them to do to you, it’s a shameful thing. A shameful, shameful thing, and we’ll go to our graves knowing it. But I want you to know that for every person who would turn in a kid out of fear or for funds, there are hundreds and thousands more who fought tooth and nail to keep their families together.”

“I know.”

“It’s just…they were such bad times then, and the government kept saying—they kept going on about how if parents didn’t send the kids to go through the programs they would die like all of the others. Then it wasn’t a choice at all. They knew we couldn’t do anything to get them back, and it kills me. It kills me.”

“Did people really think the rehabilitation programs were going to work?” I asked. Jude shifted in his seat, trying to get more comfortable.

“I don’t know, sweetheart,” Andy said, “but I think they hoped like hell they would. You get down to nothing—no money, no work, no house—and hope is all you tend to have left, and even then, it’s a rare commodity. I doubt anyone believes the lies these days, but…what can we do about it? We have no information to work with, only rumors.”

It hit me then, how equally important it was for me to find Cole’s flash drive as it was to find Liam. All along, I had been thinking of it as this little plastic device, not sparing much thought to the value of what was locked inside of it. Finding Liam mattered to me, meant everything to me, but finding Cole’s data…that would help everyone. That had the potential to reunite families, loved ones.

“I’m going to get every kid out of every camp,” I said. “I’m not going to stop until they all get home.”

Andy nodded, keeping his eyes on the road ahead. “Then we’re more than even.”

The conversation died out, and the radio came on. I watched the sunrise, the colors lighting the horizon a mellow pink, feeling sick to my stomach with exhaustion. But still, I couldn’t fall asleep.

I pulled Liam’s leather jacket up over me like a blanket and felt something slip past my hand, out of one of the pockets. The two train tickets the woman had bought floated lazily to the ground, one facing up, the other down.

STAY

The word had been scribbled several times over by pen on the back of one of the tickets, the letters wild and jagged, and with each stroke, darker and deeper.

I picked them up, checking the other ticket. SAFE

STAY SAFE

Apparently I hadn’t had as firm of a grip on that woman as I thought. It was stupid of me to feel so frightened and anxious when she was hundreds of miles away, but I couldn’t stop myself from picturing the worst. How she could have warned everyone about the terrors in her backseat. She could have gone into that train station and run or called us in to every nearby skip tracer. She could have had the reward, the satisfaction of knowing we were off the street and out of her hair.