Never Fade

I watched him stand up, cutting his hands on the rough ground. He moved slowly, staggering out through the kids crowded around the collapsed wall. For one brief moment, I thought that they would turn him back and then turn on me, but the girl in front, Olivia, took one giant step aside. She crossed her arms over her chest, watching him go with cold, unflinching eyes. A noise rose from the rest of them as they followed suit, clearing him a path—a hissing, spitting, snarling noise that conveyed what most words couldn’t. Then, the ones perched safely above us echoed it back, letting months, even years, of pent-up anger and fear and hopelessness escape with it. The intensity of it was suffocating; I reached up and pressed a hand to my throat. My pulse raced beneath my fingertips.

He was there, and then he was gone. I felt the rage that had powered me follow him out the door, fading like old memory, disappearing into the black night. I thought about it—calling him back in, I mean. It suddenly didn’t feel like enough. He deserved so much worse. Why had I even given him a chance when he hadn’t found it in his damn black soul to give one to the other kids around him?

Vida limped over to me, watching me with wary eyes. She kept a clear distance between us, her hands fisting her torn pants. Looking at me like she had never seen me before in her life. I was about to ask her what was wrong when I felt an arm loop through mine and turn me around.

Chubs’s lips were pressed into a tight line, his eyes hidden by the reflection of firelight in his glasses. It was amazing to me that after everything that happened that night, I still had the strength to untangle myself from him and pull away. He tried to grab me again, to steer me outside and away from the eyes burning into my back.

But I wasn’t afraid of these kids or what they could do to me now that they knew what I was. If I could have found the words, I would have told him. I would have said that before I hadn’t been strong enough to keep our group together. I hadn’t had enough control, enough power, to keep him and the others safe from the world trying to rip us apart. Now I did.

The mood in the room had shifted, was shifting—in that moment, I felt so connected with everyone in that run-down warehouse that I could practically taste their relief like cold, sweet rain on my tongue. It was some time before I realized they were waiting for me to make the first move.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jude push in through the crowd, his chest heaving from his run. The Chatter was lit up in his hand, vibrating loud enough for me to hear. I saw the only confirmation I needed stretched across his face in a grin.

But his eyes shifted then, and it was obvious he wasn’t seeing me anymore. Only the wreckage, only the fires still clinging to the cement. Only Mason, his blank, empty gaze still fixed on something beyond our seeing.

“It’s okay,” I told him, breaking the silence. “We’re okay.”

And it didn’t matter if the others truly believed what I said. They all followed me out anyway.

EIGHTEEN

IF YOU CAN HEAR THIS, you’re one of us. If you’re one of us, you can find us. Lake Prince. Virginia…

The sound of Clancy’s voice pouring out of the small boom box’s speakers made every single hair on the back of my neck stand at attention. Olivia had set it at the edge of Knox’s stage, and Jude had charged the batteries just enough to ensure we would have five minutes of solid listening.

“Why is this still broadcasting?” I asked. “I thought it was being sent out of East River?”

Olivia shook her head. “He set up a couple of signals so the message could be broadcast as far west as Oklahoma. I guess he didn’t think it was important to shut the rest down.”

This was the first time we had gathered everyone into the warehouse, and it was the first time I was able to get some kind of a head count. Fifty-one kids stood in a half moon around the small device, riveted by the words and bursts of static.

Finally, when it was clear that Olivia couldn’t stomach the thought of listening to it play through again, she switched it off. The spell of calm and curiosity went with it. Voices sailed up to the rafters, questions were shot back and forth, ricocheting off the water-stained cement walls. They wanted to know who the voice was, where the boom box had come from, why the kids from the White Tent had been moved inside and the fire barrels dragged closest to them.

“Does this prove it to you?” I asked them. “Knox was never the Slip Kid, at least not the real one, and this isn’t East River.”

I was annoyed we even had to do this at all; it was clear that most of the kids had believed what I said the night before, but a few holdouts from the hunting parties were clinging stubbornly to their loyalty to Knox. Maybe it wasn’t even that—I think they were just afraid they wouldn’t get the lion’s share of supplies now that Knox wasn’t there to enforce his bullshit rules.

Or maybe they really had deluded their hearts into believing that this was East River.

I sat next to Olivia on the edge of the stage. With the spread of kids laid out in front of me, I could see other traces of Knox’s cruelty. Burns. That bulging-eyed hunger. The jumps when the wind moaned through the cracks in the roof.

“Is that enough for everyone?” Olivia asked, turning to the kid in white who stood directly in front of the old device. Brett was no longer one of Knox’s little watchdogs. He was a seventeen-year-old, born and raised in Nashville, who had never once stepped foot in a camp and, apparently, was slow to process important news.

“Play it again,” he said, his voice hoarse. “One more time.”

There was a quality to Clancy’s voice—confidence, I guess—that made you listen to every last word when he spoke. I rubbed the back of my hand against my forehead and finally let out a breath when he drawled out the final Virginia.

“How do we even know that’s the Slip Kid?” Brett asked. He had been the one to call in the three other hunting teams and their leaders—Michael, Foster, and Diego. He had also been the one who insisted on watching us when we went through the crushing routine of putting Mason to rest. He hadn’t offered help or comfort, even as the blisters on my palms burst with the effort of trying to break the shovel through the frozen ground.

I understood, though. We were outsiders. We’d broken the system. I was only nervous he’d be so put off and angry about our little revolution, he’d convince the others not to make the supply run. Even now, I caught him tossing glances over his shoulder toward where Chubs knelt, tending to the sick kids.