Never Fade
“Bitch, please,” she said. “If you had been able to recover fast enough to do something, then you really wouldn’t be human.”
“As opposed to what?”
She shrugged. “A mannequin? An unfeeling, heartless bitch who feeds on others’ misery and is physically incapable of crying, unless it’s tears of blood?”
I flexed my good hand in my lap. “Is that my rep at HQ?”
“They call you Medusa,” Vida said. “One wrong look and your brain turns to stone.”
Creative. Also, fitting.
“Where are the others?” she asked.
“In the White Tent outside,” I said. I sat back against the steel AC unit so I could look at Vida. “They’re all really, really sick. Half of them look like they’re already dead.”
“They’re that bad?” she asked. “Stewart, too?”
“Yeah.”
“Damn,” she muttered. “That explains why you looked so pissed.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling my anger start to prickle again. I’d had him—he was right there, and I had been too stupid and too slow to end it. “It does.”
“Hey, boo,” she said. “I’m in this now, too, and I got a lot of experience playing ass**les like they’re f**king harps. You need backup, I got you. Stop trying to convince yourself that you’re in this alone.”
I looked up, surprised.
“But just so you know,” she said, sounding like herself again, “if it turns out that we have to fight each other for this initiation shit, I’m still going to kick your ass.”
SIXTEEN
WE WERE LOCKED UP LONG ENOUGH that what little sunlight there was seeped into winter’s early night. Long enough that hunger started to set in, for a fine mist of rain to turn to flurries of snow, and a worried Jude to leave the shelter of the White Tent and come looking for us.
Without any kind of electricity to pump through the light poles in the parking lot, it was damn near impossible to make out anything other than someone’s or something’s general shape. I gave up looking for a friendly face and turned my full attention back to the kids standing at the corner of the warehouse, about a hundred yards from where we were locked up. I was so absorbed in the horrifying conversation they were having about Knox putting down a wild dog, I didn’t see Jude until he popped up at the other end of the cage.
“Roo!” he whispered. “Roo!”
Vida whirled around, reaching for a gun that wasn’t there. “How did you…?”
“Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap. I had to go the whole way around the building to get by without them seeing me.”
I cast one last look over my shoulder at our “guards,” and then moved toward his glowing face. To his credit, he knew to duck down so Vida and I could block him from the other kids’ sight.
“What happened?” The chain-link fence rattled as he pressed himself up against it. “I thought you were just going to chat with him, but you were gone so long, oh my God, why are you in there, what did you do? Chubs was—”
“Jude,” I tried to interrupt, “Jude—”
“—and then I was all, ‘no way; Roo wouldn’t let anything bad happen,’ but Olivia started saying all of these terrible things that Knox has done, and we couldn’t find the flash drive on him, which means it still must be in that jacket—”
“Jude!”
He stopped mid-ramble. “What?”
“…I need you to go ask Olivia where they store the jackets and stuff they swipe from the kids they recruit,” I said.
“Why?” Jude asked. “To try to find Liam’s?”
Vida snapped her fingers, cutting him off. I shot her a grateful look.
“No—no, we don’t have time to look through them all, and another kid might have grabbed it. We need Liam to be able to tell us what happened to it. What I want you to do is find the jacket I was wearing—the leather one, remember? The Chatter is in the inside left pocket. That’s all I need you to get.”
He stared at me, clearly not comprehending this.
“The Chatter,” I repeated. Vida, oh so helpfully, poked him through the fence, directly between his unblinking eyes. “In the inside left pocket. Can you get it for me?”
“You… You want me…”
“Yes!” Vida and I both hissed.
He hesitated for a split second, then broke out into the biggest, goofiest grin I had seen in a long time.
“All right, cool!” he said. “Of course I can do that! Do you think I’m going to have to pick a lock, though? Because I never got that one door open at HQ when Instructor Biglow tried to teach me—Wait.” Jude looked from Vida’s face to mine, the bright eagerness in his eyes fading quickly with his smile. “Why are you guys in a cage?”
Very quickly, with as few interruptions from Jude as we could manage, I told him what happened.
“Which means you can’t go right now, okay?” I said. “You have to wait until tonight, when we’re doing the initiation.”
“What is it?” he asked. “Some kind of a fight?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I told him. “You can do this. It’s simple. We’ll have most of the attention on us, so you just need to find the right moment to slip away. Then you need to contact Cate and have her put Nico on the search for a place we can hit for whatever medicine Chubs needs. Tell them we need it now and that it has to be close by. Can you remember that?”
“Okay.” Jude took a step back, bouncing on the balls of his feet. His face split again into another quick, nervous grin. “I’ll take care of everything.”
His hand instinctively went to the place where the solid lump of the compass should have been.
“Where is it?” I asked, startled.
“They took it. When they brought us in. It’s cool—it’s fine. I’ll find it. It’s probably in that room.”
“Are the others all right?” I asked. “Liam?”
“Umm…” He hesitated, biting his lip. “Not good. He won’t say it, but I think Chubs is really worried. He said if we don’t get medicine, there’s a good chance that he and the other kids could die. And I believe him. Roo, it’s bad. It’s really, really bad.”