Never Fade

He must have already been out looking for us. We met him on the path, just as it curved into the campsite. The kid was a mess of sleepy eyes and rumpled clothes; his brain must not have fully warmed up yet, because he hadn’t thought to put on a coat or shoes despite the frigid temperature.

“What?” he cried, looking between us. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t even believe you,” Liam rasped. “What the hell kind of game are you playing here?”

Chubs blinked. “What are you…?”

“I know everything!” Liam stalked over to him, still breathing hard from the climb back up the trail. “How long were you planning on keeping this from me? The League. Really? Jesus—you’re supposed to be the smart one! You made a deal with them?”

“Oh.” Chubs rubbed a hand over the tufts of his dark hair and blew out a long, exasperated sigh. I had about three seconds to deflect Liam’s anger back on me before Chubs said something he’d really regret.

“Yes, that!” Liam charged up into the campsite, stalking over to the smothered fire. He wouldn’t let me get close enough to so much as share his breathing space.

“Will you please listen to me?” I asked. “It was all my idea—all of it. Your brother sent us to find the flash drive, and in the process we found your friend. We agreed that if we helped him find you, we wouldn’t turn any information about you over to the League. And we’d help you get to California to find Zu.”

At first I assumed the wide-eyed look Chubs flashed my way was because he’d been shocked at my ability to turn out one lie after another. But some part of me must have known, even as I said it, that I’d picked the wrong nail to hammer home.

“And you know that how?” Liam demanded. “And you know her how, exactly?”

I swallowed, wrapping my arms around my center, my mind spinning through excuses, each one worse than the next.

“Answer me!”

I flinched. “I just…have heard stories—from Chubs, I mean.”

Liam spun toward Chubs, his face burning with anger and disbelief. “What else did you tell her?”

“Nothing! Lee, you have to calm down—please, sit down. Listen.”

“I can’t believe you! Don’t you realize they have ways of tracking her down? Do you want them to take her in? Zu—we promised that we’d—I thought—”

“He didn’t tell me anything about her, other than you were traveling together for a while,” I said calmly. Liam had been protective of all of us in different ways, but Zu had been a special case.

“Stay out of this, Green!” He was still wholly focused on Chubs. “What else did you tell her? What else did she get out of you?”

I jerked back, one single word throwing me off balance.

“What did you just call her?” Chubs interrupted. Of course he had caught it, too.

“What? I’m not allowed to use her name now?” he demanded. The look on his face was ripe with derision. “What do you want me to call you? What clever codename did the League think up for you? Pumpkin? Tiger? Tangerine?”

“You called me Green,” I said.

“No I didn’t,” he said. “Why the hell would I call you that? I know what you are.”

“You did,” Chubs insisted. “You called her Green. You really don’t remember?”

My heart shattered the ice around it, slamming against my rib cage, beating harder with every minute of silence that followed. The anger had left him quickly, replaced by confusion that bloomed into an open, barefaced fear as he looked between us.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding up my hands in a weak attempt to placate him, “it’s fine. You can call me whatever you want; it really doesn’t matter.…”

“Are you messing with him? Are you forcing him to play nice with you?” Liam asked. His face was flushed, and it almost seemed like his anger was edging into anxiety. He was looking at his friend and seeing a stranger.

I couldn’t keep up with his flip-flopping moods, and I suddenly wondered if it was even worth the energy to try. The memory of what had happened when he’d found me down by the falls evaporated like mist in the sunlight. Maybe I had imagined it altogether.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Chubs said. “After what happened at East River? Do I need to remind you that while Clancy Gray turned you into his little poodle, he couldn’t even touch me?”

“I don’t… What?” Liam’s breath exploded out of him. “What are you talking about?”

Oh, I thought, damn.

When I had gone in and pulled myself out of Liam’s memories, I’d had to…tweak a few of them, otherwise they wouldn’t have made sense. The night we tried leaving East River had been one of them, because the whole terrifying episode had been sparked by my letting my guard down and trusting Clancy when I shouldn’t have. I was a crucial part of that story.

But now—what had I slipped into its place? Had I just erased that night completely? My mind was spinning, trying to dig up what images I had pushed into that vacant space, but everything was black, and black, and black.

Chubs turned to look at me with a glare that could have incinerated a mountain.

“What are you looking at her for?” Liam exploded. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here, and with them!”

“We were trying to find you!” Chubs said. “All of us just wanted to help you!”

“Oh, for f**k’s sake,” came Vida’s shrill voice from inside the tent. “Can you two shut the hell up and just go back to spooning? We don’t need to hear this same shitty argument for the tenth f**king time before five A.M.!”

Jude made a very valiant effort to shush her, but the damage was done.

“You—you—I can’t—” Chubs sputtered, too furious to form an actual sentence. “Come out here. Right now!”

“Come and get me, big boy,” she sang back. “I know I don’t have the parts you like, but we can always make it work.”

“Oh, like a functioning brain?” he shouted.

“Chubs!” I snapped. He knew what she was like—he was only playing into her hands. “Vida, please come out. You too, Jude.”

She exited the tent with a blanket wrapped around her like a queen’s flowing robe. The effect was soured by the fact her fading blue hair was sticking straight up on either side of her head like horns. Jude didn’t look much better—I don’t know that I had ever seen such dark rings under his eyes. He slouched out after her in his EMT jacket, taking a seat on the opposite side of the fire pit.