Never Fade

THIRTEEN

IT DIDN’T EVEN OCCUR TO ME that Chubs might not be able to keep up with my pace as I ran. The group had cleared a path through the mud and pockets of lingering snow, packing it down to a manageable level with their feet. I took in a deep gulp of the dry air, trying to ignore the snow slipping from the low branches of trees and brush as I tore through them. My pants and coat were soaked through by the time I finally skidded to a stop. The trail of prints, so wide and obvious before, came to a definite end at the lip of a frozen stream.

Chubs panted heavily as he came up beside me, one hand pressed hard against his shoulder. I turned to take the bag of supplies he’d packed, but then thought twice. The one he handed me was just as heavy, and I wouldn’t be able to get through the snow with both of them, at least not quickly.

“What now?” he gasped between breaths. “They crossed here?”

“No, it’s not possible,” I said, kneeling down to test the ice. “There had to be at least ten of them. There’s no way they all would have made it across without breaking the ice.”

His eyes narrowed at me as I stood. “You can tell all that just by a few prints?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know the exact number. Ten or more. Vida wouldn’t have let herself be taken by any less.”

Chubs looked doubtful, but he didn’t deny the possibility.

I walked a ways along the bank of the stream, looking for stray tracks, human or otherwise. They couldn’t have just vanished here.

Shit, I thought, threading my fingers through the messy bun I had twisted my hair into. Shit!

“Could…” Chubs swallowed, shifting the bag uncomfortably on his shoulders. “Do you think they were taken by soldiers? Ones the blockade sent after us?”

I shook my head. “They would have taken the road. We would have seen them.” Or at least, that was what I was telling myself. “Skip tracers, maybe?”

This time he was the one to shoot the thought down. “Ten of them? Why would they all be out here, in the middle of nowhere?”

“Then…” I began. Chubs’s eyes widened as he caught my train of thought.

“The tribe of Blues we’re looking for?” he asked. “But why put up a fight?”

I fought back the first sting of panicked tears. Oh, God. Jude must have been terrified. “They don’t understand how it works. They don’t have a life outside of the League—they, we, I mean, were taught to only trust one another.”

It was only dumb luck that I turned back to the stream when I did, that the wind pulled back the evergreen foliage of the trees across the way. Otherwise I would have missed the silver glint of gunmetal between its branches.

I threw myself over Chubs, tackling him face-first into the ground as the first shot was fired. I felt something tug on my backpack, and I turned away from the small explosion of snow and dirty leaves when the bullet tore through the ground beside us.

The bullets screeched as they cut through the air following our path as I rolled the two of us back into the shelter of the tree line.

“Keep your head down!” I whispered to Chubs, all but shoving him behind a dense cover of growth. The gun I’d fished out of the glove compartment was warm in my hand as I pulled it up from the waistband of my pants. I fired one shot back, aiming for the spot I thought I had seen the person before, across the stream. The shooting from his or her end came to a sudden, unexpected stop.

The afternoon air was pale and still between us. It had a sharp quality to it; it smelled like snow.

“Ruby!”

A dark blur dropped out of the tree behind me. I spun, without thinking, and launched my elbow out. It connected with something soft that made an audible crunch as I threw my full weight into the hit.

There was a sharp cry of pain, followed by a heavy thump. The impact sent up whirling clouds of snow. I turned back for Chubs, reaching out for him through the white haze, and felt a hand close over my forearm. The skin was pale, each knuckle torn open or scabbed.

I pulled back a step, bringing my knee up to throw the next attacker off, but the fight was over before it started. I felt a cold, sharp blade dig into my spinal column, and lowered my arms. I turned slightly to look over my shoulder at Chubs. He was covered in mud, his face ashen.

“Who are you?” I said, coming around slowly to face him, keeping clear of the knife.

“Son of a bitch,” he hissed. The pitch of the voice had been enough to tell me how old he actually was: my age. A year or two older at most.

The boy I’d hit staggered up from the ground, swiping his nose against the sleeve of his threadbare coat, leaving a long, dark streak of crimson on it. The kid with the knife stepped back but didn’t put it away.

Bloody Nose held out his hand and I reached out, acting like I was about to put my gun in it. At the last minute, I dropped it and took his hand instead, driving into his mind. His body twitched under my control. I saw a flash of Jude’s frightened face in his mind, and it was enough for me.

“What did you do to those kids?” I snarled. “The boy and the girl from earlier? Where did you take them?”

Chubs had a strange look on his face as he watched me, but he stayed silent.

“The guys—” he said, his voice altered by the sickening angle of his nose. My elbow ached in response. “The guys b-brought them to the Slip Kid.”

Of course.

Those were the first words that sprang to mind, that chipped through the ice that gripped me in place. Of course. Clancy’s system had worked so well the first time—why wouldn’t he try it again? Of course. It wouldn’t matter who the kids were, only that they’d be willing—or easily swayed by his abilities—to go to war with President Gray.

Of course.

I had to release the kid from my grip when four other figures appeared in the woods around us, closing in to investigate what had happened. I could control one person, but I wasn’t Clancy; any more than that was impossible, and any attempts to try would have revealed the only upper hand I currently had. I stepped forward, showed them I was unarmed, and motioned for Chubs to do the same.

“We want to see the Slip Kid,” I said. “We won’t give you trouble.”

“That a fact?” one of them asked, glancing down at the dazed kid at my feet. “Michael, you hear that, or did that hit knock your screws loose?”

Blood Nose—Michael—shook his head in an obvious attempt to clear it. A head injury was a decent cover for what I had done to him, but it was taking his little brain so long to recover I was worried the other boys around us would get suspicious. They didn’t seem willing or able to do anything without his permission.

“We’re taking them,” Michael said. “Make it fast. Two of you stay on this post. I’ll send someone back for you.”

This guy is the leader? I thought. It wasn’t unreasonable. His size alone would have inspired fear, if nothing else.

They pushed Chubs toward me as we made our way back to the stream. I looped one arm around his waist to keep him close. They took our bags and hauled them up onto their shoulders.

“Well,” Chubs muttered, “shit.”

We were out in the open again, near the frozen stream—and, more importantly, in the line of sight of the gunman in the tree.

There were hands on me, patting me down, feeling around the insides of my boots. I tried not to react as one took my Swiss Army knife from my boot. The freezing air stung my face, but it was the thought of what they might find in Chubs’s pockets that made me go cold to the bone.

Chubs must have read the question on my face, because he shook his head ever so slightly. The kid searching him only found his knife and a pocket full of candy wrappers. He had been with it enough to dump his skip-tracer ID in the woods during the attack or leave it behind in the car, then. Thank God.

I turned to look across the river, narrowly avoiding Chubs’s kicking feet as he was lifted off the ground and out of my reach.

He thrashed into the air in the half second it took for the kid with the outstretched hand to lift him up and, using nothing more than his freak abilities, toss him onto the opposite bank.

I felt the warm tug at the pit of my stomach and recognized the sensation. I didn’t have the chance to protest before I was hauled up and over the stream, too, dropped onto Chubs with a total and complete lack of kindness.

The other kids burst out laughing, floating one another over the frozen stream with all the gentleness of calming breezes. Other than that, they didn’t speak, didn’t offer up a single explanation or confirmation of where they were taking us. Two stayed behind to snuff out our tracks in the soft white powder.

We walked in silence. Snow began to fall, catching on my hair and lashes, and cold crept in through the leather of Liam’s coat. Chubs tensed, rubbing his bad shoulder absently. I caught his gaze, and I could see my anxiety mirrored in his dark eyes.

“I can’t believe it,” he muttered. “Again.”

“I’ll take care of him,” I said quietly, looping my arm through his.

“Since that worked so well last time?”

“Hey!” Michael held up his silver handgun. “Shut the hell up!”

We were on foot long enough that I began to wonder if we were ever going to reach the encampment or wherever they planned on taking us. It didn’t occur to me until the large river came into sight that we were moving toward Nashville.

I understood straight off why they had originally closed the city; though the river must have surged past its banks months before, most of the water had yet to freeze or pull completely back to its normal level. The water’s edges were bloated, drowning the nearby landscape. The river was a monster that only grew larger the closer we came. It was the only thing that stood between us and a looming white warehouse across the way.

Waiting for us on the bank were three small, flat rafts that looked like nothing more than crates and spare planks stitched together with bright blue vinyl rope. A kid in white stood on each of them, gripping a long pole. With the group of us spread out over the three rafts, the kids with poles pushed and navigated us through the shallow, muddy water in slow, methodic movements.

My fists clenched at my sides. One of the loading docks of the warehouse was open and waiting. With a steadiness I didn’t expect, the raft floated the rest of the way to the curled silver door and the dark room inside.

The loading platform was raised enough that the rafts were no longer necessary. I was lifted up by the waist and deposited into the arms of another kid waiting there. The girl who caught me was a skinny, pale thing, her green eyes jutting out of the blunt bones of her face. She let out a wet, rumbling cough that came up from deep within her chest, but she didn’t say anything as she took my arm and forced me inside.

The walls and floors were cement, cracked and tagged within an inch of their lives with old, faded graffiti. The warehouse was roughly the size of a high school gymnasium, and it still held a few clues about its past life—signs marking where cables and wires could be left. The back wall, the one we were walking toward, had been painted a light robin’s-egg blue, and though someone had tried to cover them with a layer of white paint, I could still read the black letters spelling out JOHNSON ELECTRIC beneath it.

Chubs fell in step beside me, nodding toward the brown line that ran along all of the walls, about halfway up toward the ceiling. So the water from the river had been that high?

Every single step I took, every voice around us, every drip of water from the cracks in the vaulted ceilings seemed to echo. The sounds played off the bare walls and boarded-up windows around us. Despite the fact that we were out of the snow and wind, the building wasn’t insulated to keep out the persistent chill. Old metal trash cans had been repurposed to hold bonfires, but most of these were located toward the other end of the warehouse, not near the patches of kids scattered by the entrance we had come through.

This…wasn’t anything like East River had been.

And the teenage boy sitting on the raised platform in the back, disappearing in and out of a haze of cigarette and fire smoke, was not Clancy Gray.

“Who the hell are you?”

There had been a low murmur of interest as we were hauled in, but at my words, it dropped off to silence. My eyes had gone straight to the kid’s face, snapping over to it so quickly that I hadn’t even noticed the other teens around him until they stepped forward for a better look. There were girls shivering in T-shirts and shorts, leaning against the base of the stage or draped along the crates stacked behind him with only a few blankets between them. Clusters of boys stood around them laughing, some feeding the cloud of putrid gray smoke with their own cigarettes.

This kid had to be closer to his twenties than the others. His face was fringed with the beginning of a reddish beard, which he was busy rubbing against the cheek of a girl with long, dirty blond hair perched on his lap. She was shaking, but I couldn’t tell if it was out of fear or cold. When she turned to look at me, I realized the bruise at the edge of her mouth extended all the way to her jaw.

The kid’s blond hair was long but slicked back neatly behind his ears. His standard-issue combat boots and PSF’s black uniform jacket were spotted with mud but otherwise looked pristine—a little too pristine to have ever been in real use.

“Excuse me?” A Southern accent.

“Who,” I repeated, “the hell are you?”

All of the teens who sat on his platform turned to look at him in perfect time with one another, but he was only staring at me. I felt the warm tug in my stomach again, and, despite Chubs’s attempt to grab me, my feet slid across the dusty floor toward him. I barely managed to catch myself before I crashed against the side of the platform. Old, stacked crates with water-warped plywood nailed over them—that was all that stage was. His chair was little more than a metal folding one with a fuzzy blanket draped over it, most likely for effect.

The teen stood, throwing the girl off him. When she cried out in surprise, he thrust the bowl of whatever he had been eating toward her to shut her up. I fought the urge to search for Vida and Jude in the shadows crawling up around us.

“Where did you find them?” He crouched down at the edge of the platform to peer at my face. His eyes were green, for the most part—a large blotch of brown covered the upper half of his right eye.

“Up by the creek,” Michael answered.

“You,” the leader said, turning to one of the girls on the stage, “give him that blanket before he freezes. This guy is a king tonight. Look at the haul he brought in.”

The girl didn’t seem to understand why or how he could ask her to do something like that. She stared, dumb and mute at his back, until one of the boys grabbed a fistful of her short chestnut hair and shoved her forward to the edge of the raised platform. Underneath the warm brown wool sheet, she was wearing a stained yellow T-shirt and a pair of someone’s old boxers. No shoes, no socks.

Michael ripped the blanket from her fingers, clucking his tongue at her resistance. One of the other kids, a small boy, gave him the water bottle he had been holding, watching with hooded eyes as the bigger kid polished off the rest of it before tossing the crushed bottle back to him. Then, he fell into place at the leader’s right. How it was even possible for someone to look so smug and proud cocooned in a blanket with dried blood all over his face was beyond me.

The leader tossed his cigarette onto the ground at our feet, one end still glowing a pulsing red. I kept my eyes at the sliver of exposed skin above the collar of the PSF jacket.

An unworn jacket. I had worked on enough of them in the Factory to recognize one at first glance. There were no patches, not even the standard American flag. Unless he had ripped all of the stitching out, which was unlikely given that the material wasn’t frayed, he had probably plucked the jacket out of a shipment, rather than off a soldier.

He broke his gaze long enough to glance at Michael. A tight shark’s smile stretched across his lips.

“He did that?” A nod toward Chubs.

The other teen used his new blanket to wipe at the crusted blood covering his top lip. He opened his mouth, but then clearly thought better about admitting a girl half his size had given his face an adjustment.

The first let out a low laugh as he turned back to me. “Elbow, fist, or foot?”

“Elbow,” I said. “I’m happy to perform a demonstration on you if you need one.”

The muttering was back, a few wolfish chuckles rising around me. I set my jaw to keep from saying something else equally stupid. Curb it, I told myself. Feel him out.

“A fighter?” he asked, raising his eyebrows. “What’s your color, baby?”

I didn’t realize Chubs had moved at all until he was standing beside me. “She’s Green. I’m Blue. And you are?”

“They call me Knox,” he said. “The name Slip Kid mean anything to you?”

“If you’re the Slip Kid,” Chubs said, “I am the goddamn Easter Bunny. This is supposed to be East River?”

Knox stood suddenly at that, his amused smile tightening into a much harsher one. “Not what you thought it’d be?”

“We caught them the same place we grabbed the other two, just off the highway,” Michael supplied oh-so-helpfully. “That girl was a Blue, too. We could have an initiation tonight—”

Knox silenced him with a look. Overhead, the snow had apparently warmed to rain. It slanted down over the metal roof, the only sound aside from the eager whisperings of the kids crowding in around us.

“What do you know about East River?” he demanded.

“Well, to begin with—” Chubs began, crossing his arms over his chest.

“We heard it was in Virginia.” I cut him off. “We were heading that way when your friends picked us up.”

Here was the thing—this smug kid, whoever he was, wherever he had come from, was clearly not the real Slip Kid. We knew that. Knox knew that. But if he knew that we knew, I didn’t doubt for a second that Knox would dispose of us before we could let everyone else in on the secret, too. The name was legendary; anyone who could gather this many kids, set up this kind of shop—why wouldn’t they believe he was the Slip Kid?

“This is some operation you have,” I continued, straining my neck to look behind me. No Jude. No Vida. But this was clearly the tribe of Blues Cate had tried to warn us about. “A nice little place. Is this everyone?”

Knox snorted, motioning to one of the younger teens next to him. The boy, twelve or maybe thirteen, went fire-red at the attention. Knox muttered something in his ear and the boy nodded once, then took a running leap off the platform. The last I saw of him was the back of his navy jacket, stained with soot, disappearing out one of the side doors.

“I’m Ruby,” I said, then thrust a thumb toward Chubs. “This is Charles. Like I said, we’re just making our way through, heading east.”

Knox returned to his seat and, without any sort of prompt, the same girl as before scurried back to him, handing him the bowl of food. Soup, judging by the splatters that hit his jacket. I didn’t miss the way the teens around him seemed to lean in, watching as the broth vanished spoonful by spoonful.

Do not look at Chubs, I ordered myself. I wouldn’t have been able to hold back. The girl, in her threadbare outfit, was skin hanging off birdlike bones.

Knox waved Michael forward, and he and another teen dumped our backpacks on the platform. Two other girls, younger than the first, sprang to action. Piece by piece, they disassembled the packs of supplies we had so carefully stowed. Good-bye, food bars; good-bye, first-aid kits; good-bye, water bottles and blankets and matches…

Each item they took out was enough to break the thin control I had on my anger. I shifted my eyes up toward where Knox was watching this process, wondering how good it would feel to take his mind apart in the same way. It would be easy, if I could just get close to him.

When Knox glanced up at us, it was with a completely new expression on his face. One that was…hungry. Excited. “Where did you get this stuff?”

“We picked over an old gas station,” I said, taking a small step closer. “It’s ours. We found it.”

“What’s yours is mine, baby,” he said. “Everyone here has to earn his or her things.”

Chubs grumbled something under his breath.

“Take this all to storage,” Knox told Michael. “Then you and your guys can eat. As much as you want.”

Michael grinned, gathering the blanket more firmly around his coat. His team was jumping all over themselves with excitement, pushing past one another to go out the same side door the boy had earlier, except for one teen, the one who hung at the back of the pack. He was average height, wearing an army green coat that was a size too small and had to be worn open. His hair was as long and wild as the others in his group, but he kept his out of his face with a fleece hunter’s hat. Just before the door shut, something must have caught his eye, because he turned back, leaning up against the wall there.

“Are you with the kids my guys picked up earlier?” Knox asked, drawing my attention back to him. A heavy gold chain slipped out from beneath his undershirt and jacket as he leaned forward. “The hot piece and the scarecrow?”

Well…that was one way to describe them.

“No,” I said. Another step closer. Another. “I have no idea who you’re talking about.”

“Roo!”

Every head in the warehouse swiveled toward that side door. A river of relief broke through me—Vida and Jude stood there, looking slightly worse for wear but whole. Both of them were without jackets. Jude had given up any sort of pretense of pretending he wasn’t freezing, but Vida’s jaw was clenched tight, her arms pressed hard against her sides. I saw something flicker in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything. I wish the same could have been said for Jude.

“See?” he was saying as he poked her arm. “I told you they’d come!”

I sighed, turning back to Knox and the platform.

“Want to try that answer again, sweetness?” he asked coldly.

I shrugged and said nothing. Dammit.

“So a Green, a Yellow, and two Blues walk into my woods.…” Knox began. He stood and hopped down over the edge of the platform. Vida and Jude were shoved toward us.

He was pacing in front of us, to the amusement of the other kids. Just out of my reach. “Now, the two Blues—you’re mighty welcome here, but, of course, we’ll have to figure out which of you is actually strong enough to join the hunting parties in initiation.”

Initiation?

“I have to duke it out with him?” Vida asked petulantly. “I thought you said it was going to be a fight?”

Knox laughed—and once Knox laughed, everyone was laughing, too.

“Honestly,” Vida said, whipping her mass of blue hair back over her shoulder, “you might as well let him go. He’s totally worthless—I’ll have him laid out on the ground in three seconds. Just sayin’.”

Jude wore his confusion plainly, not understanding that this was her warped way of trying to protect Chubs from a fight he’d never win. I was surprised she cared enough to try.

“She’s not lying,” I said. “If you want the better fighter, it’s her, hands down. But he’s trained in first-aid. He’s patched me up more than once. Look.” I lifted my hair away from the scar on my forehead.

Knox didn’t take the bait to examine it closer. He wove his fingers together and rested them on the back of his neck as he seemed to mull this over. “The question is more what we’re going to do with you and the Yellow.”

I did not like the direction this conversation was heading. And neither did Jude. I felt him start to shake, just a little bit, and I closed one hand over his wrist.

“We don’t take on weak ones,” Knox said. “This isn’t a pity parade or a homeless shelter. I’m not about to waste food on a Green or a Yellow. No one here can vouch for you, which means you’ll have to prove yourself in…other ways.”

Chubs turned on him, his fists clenched at his sides, but another voice rose up before his had the chance to. It was small, more timid than I remembered, but I recognized it.

“I can vouch for them.”

At East River, Clancy had relied on two different kids to run security for the camp—Hayes, the ogre-sized brute who ran hits for supplies, and Olivia, who coordinated watch at the perimeters of the camp. To say I was relieved to see a head of long, honey-blond hair push its way through the crowd was an understatement, but her face—I recognized the pieces of her, but it was like they had been torn apart and reassembled with a careless hand. She limped, badly, as she moved closer to us.

Yes. This was Olivia. But at the same time, it wasn’t.

Her round cheeks, always flushed with the run she had taken or the orders she had barked out, had sunk in so deeply that it made her eyes look owlish. The golden tan that had kissed her skin was faded to dull ash—and as she turned to look at me, a bolt of horror raced from my heart to the pit of my stomach. Almost the entire right side of her face was puckered with pink scar tissue; it dragged down the corner of that eye, ran down her jawline. It looked as though she’d been mauled by a wild animal or slapped with a fistful of flames.

“Olivia,” I gasped. “Oh my God!”

How—No, I knew that she had escaped. Liam had told us as much. When the fires and PSFs came to East River, a few of the Watch kids had been lucky enough to get away in time, Olivia included. Liam was the only one who had come back to look for us.

“Christ,” Chubs said, automatically taking a step toward her. “You—”

“The four of them were with me when we escaped the PSF van that had rounded us up,” Olivia said, ignoring the hand Chubs raised in her direction. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the boy in the green coat push himself off the door and through the crowd, stopping near Knox’s side. “We got separated in the escape through the woods.”

The Olivia I had known had been so full of fire, she could have brought the entire warehouse down to a pile of simpering ash. Now, she merely bobbed her head with a meekness that didn’t suit her at all. “Ruby is the one who planned the escape, sir.”

“Oh yeah,” said the boy in the green coat. He stuffed his hands in his pockets, rocking back on his heels. “I thought they looked familiar. A couple kids gave us the slip that day.”

Olivia’s gaze flickered toward his, her brows creased in what was either surprise or confusion. It certainly wasn’t gratitude on her face.

“Really.” Knox’s voice was still flat, but I felt his eyes drift back over to me. “And you spent the last few months just wandering around my fine state?”

“Laying low, gathering supplies, looking for Olivia,” I said quickly, risking a glance to the boy. What was he playing at?

“Why didn’t you mention this to Michael, Brett?” Knox asked. “Or speak up before.”

The boy—Brett—shrugged. “Didn’t make the connection till now, I guess. Her hair was shorter”—he nodded toward me—“and the other one was dressed different.”

“They can help me,” Olivia continued, her eyes still on the ground. “At least until they prove themselves to you.”

Knox blew out an exasperated sigh. He began to pace again, each step falling like thunder in the silence of the warehouse. There was almost a little skip to his step as he walked. “Fine,” he said, looking up. “Take the Yellow and Green. Charles, too.”

And just like that, he was out of my reach. I was useless to get us out of there.

“The hot piece will stay and keep us entertained,” Knox said, smoothing his hair behind his ears with a grin. He nodded to the boys at his left. “Strip their jackets, take anything valuable they might still have on them, and keep them outside—where the trash belongs.”