Never Fade

THIRTY-ONE

I DIDN’T FEEL THE PAIN RIGHT AWAY, only the heavy pressure against my spine.

I woke in total darkness with Nico shouting my name, gripping my shoulders. There was a single blessed moment where my brain was in tatters, and it couldn’t connect what I was seeing, and smelling, and feeling with the reality of what had just happened. Everything was filtered through darkness.

“No! I have to find her first—”

“Dammit, Liam, move!” Cole roared. “Go with the others!”

“They’re here,” I heard Vida say. “Help me with this—”

The weight pinning me on top of Nico lifted, and smoky, dust-stained air flooded into my lungs. I coughed, my hand sliding across the floor until I found what felt like a glow stick.

It wasn’t. It was someone’s finger, and it wasn’t attached to his body.

I was hauled up and onto my feet, held there until my knees solidified. “Everyone—” I started to say.

“Bunker busters,” Vida said. “We gotta go.”

“Jude—”

“I’m here,” he said. “I can’t see you, but I’m here—”

“Everyone’s here; we’re all okay,” Chubs cut in. “Tell us where to go.”

“Down—” I coughed, clearing the thick dust coating my tongue and throat. My eyes were adjusting now, and I was realizing that the dull orange glow surrounding us wasn’t from the glow sticks but from the fires caused by the explosions. Everything else rushed at me with the force of a bullet to the head: wires were hanging down from the partially collapsed roof, along with pieces of the roof itself. And the sound of distant thunder—it was still there, louder now, firing off on a driving beat.

They’re bombing the city. It didn’t matter who “they” were, not then. I wiped at the slick rush of warmth running down my jaw, glancing over to make sure Nico was okay. He and Jude were huddled together, their arms wrapped around each other.

I turned on my heel, counting them off as I went. Chubs stood, watching the dark shapes of kids and agents limping out of the west exit of the room. Liam was trying to get back to us, shoving at Cole, who was trying to force him to line up behind the others. And Vida—she was staring at the still bodies strewn across the floor, some half buried where the ceiling had actually caved in. The whole room smelled like scorched meat and smoke. Sneakers and boots were scattered, thrown off bloodied, unmoving feet.

“We can’t leave them,” Jude cried, starting to reach toward Sarah, one of the Blue girls. Sarah stared back up at him, her chest caved in by the scaffolding that had fallen on her. “We—It’s not right; we can’t leave them down here! Please!”

“We have to,” I said. “Come on.”

We’d run evacuation drills a total of two times since I’d been with the League, both using a different exit to leave HQ. One was out through the elevator and tunnel, the way we would have normally come in. The other was an enormous stairwell that twisted and curved its way up to the surface, a short distance away from the factory that was supposed to serve as our shield. Neither of them was an option now. I could see that just by looking at Cole’s face.

“Move, move, move,” he was telling us, shoving each kid and agent through the door. “Down to level three; we’re going out the way you came in. Follow Agent Kalb!”

I tried to count the heads as they passed, but it was too dark and the smoke was too thick. The whole structure shook, throwing me forward toward Liam, who was waiting for us at the door.

“Are you okay?” he asked in a rush of breath. “He grabbed me; I didn’t want to go—”

Cole took him by the collar and hauled him out into the hallway before us. It was clear they’d been aiming for the dead center of the building. We stumbled after, a line of us, trying to navigate through the concrete, flaming rubble, and the hissing, spitting steam pipes that had burst. Still, it was some small miracle it hadn’t been damaged the way the atrium had.

The stairwell down to level two was clogged with more smoke and steam. My shirt was drenched through with sweat. I started to strip my jacket off, automatically feeling for the flash drive that wasn’t there.

Cate, I thought. Where’s Cate? What’s happening to Cate?

I was thrown forward into Liam’s back with the next impact. One of the kids up ahead of us screamed, but all I could hear was Jude behind me, whispering, “Oh, God, oh my God,” over and over again. I don’t know what he was picturing in his head, but if it was anything like my image of being crushed under ten tons of cement and dirt, I was surprised he could even function at all, let alone keep moving forward.

The line slowed as we rounded down to the second level, clogging with some problem we couldn’t see. I slipped around Liam and grabbed Cole’s arm to get his attention.

“What about the people in the infirmary?”

“If they couldn’t get up and walk themselves out, we’re not doing it for them,” Cole said with a note of finality.

“What about Clancy?” I asked, though a part of me already knew the answer. “Did they let him out?”

“There was no time to clear the floor,” Cole said.

I glanced back over my shoulder, wishing I could see Liam’s face in the dark. I felt him instead, hands on my waist, gently pushing me forward. Then his voice was in my ear saying, “What would he do if it were you? Me?”

It didn’t make it any easier to swallow the bile in my throat. It was one thing to bring a person in as a prisoner, and another to sentence him to what was very likely death.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” Vida snarled as she and Chubs gripped a panicking Nico and kept him going. I could see Jude’s pale face behind them, looking on in horror.

“I’ll get him,” Nico said. “I can get him!”

“No!” Jude cried. “We have to stay together!”

The aftershock of the next explosion tossed us all to our knees. I smacked my head against the wall, spots bursting in front of my eyes. I hauled myself up and then we were all running down the steps, through the dark hall, jumping down into the interrogation block. Sections of the wall to my right were already partly collapsed.

“Stay right behind me,” Cole said, glancing back at us. “Come on, we need to be at the front.”

He was able to edge his way up through the line, but everyone was bottlenecking as they reached the door to the tunnel. I could only imagine what the response would have been if the six of us tried to cut to the front of the line and follow him.

We were finally close enough to see what the problem was. On the other side of the door, each kid and agent had to carefully climb over the pipes and cement that had been shaken free from the tunnel’s ceiling.

My blood was beating hard inside of my head, but my limbs felt hollow with panic as we waited, and waited, and waited for it to be our turn. Liam was bouncing on the balls of his feet, like he was gearing up to bolt forward at any moment.

Once we were at the door, I stopped and stepped aside to let the others go in front of me, but Liam was having none of it. He all but lifted me up and over the debris, then climbed over himself, his body the wall that kept me from turning back.

I heard Vida curse behind me and Chubs’s labored grunt. The tunnel felt hot and humid with so many bodies crammed into it. The blasts from above had collapsed sections of it, slowing our progress again and turning what had been a simple path into an obstacle course.

I felt the thundering vibrations before the sound of the crashes actually reached my ears. It was a series of four low bangs, each louder and worse than the next. Vida shouted something up to us I couldn’t hear over the vicious wave of noise that followed. My stomach, my heart, everything inside of me seemed to drop, like the tunnel had given out under me. The seconds passed at half their speed, giving me just enough time to turn away from the explosion that blew out through the door we’d just come through.

We threw ourselves to the ground as a blast of gray dust and chunks of cement and glass came shooting out of the doorway. The tunnel shook so hard, I was convinced it would cave in. The kids, the agents, everyone was shouting now, but I heard Cole’s voice amplified over everyone’s: “Move, move, move!”

But I couldn’t. I was only able to push myself up onto my knees, drag myself up using the wall. I could hear Vida and Chubs talking, complaining about the dark, how they couldn’t see each other.

“That was HQ,” I whispered. “Did it collapse?”

“I think so,” Liam said.

“The tunnel back in is totally blocked off now,” Chubs called up, coughing. The kids in front of us passed the news up through the line of people ahead of them. We heard the shock and tear-stained responses all the way from the back of the herd.

Those agents…the kids…their bodies that we had to leave behind, whose families would never know what happened to them, who didn’t get a chance to escape, who might have still been clinging to life when—

The sob stuck in my throat, and I couldn’t cough it free. I wasn’t crying, but my body was shaking violently, hard enough that Liam wrapped his arms around me from behind. I felt his heart racing against my back, his face as he buried it against my neck.

He was solid and here; all of us, alive. Alive, alive, alive. We had made it out. But still, I couldn’t stop seeing it, the way the ceiling must have caved, the falling glass, the floor that suddenly wasn’t there, the darkness sweeping down.

Focus, I commanded myself. There are still kids behind you. You’re still not out of this. Don’t let it take you, too. Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Jude. Liam, Chubs, Vida, and Jude.

“Just breathe, just breathe,” Liam said, his own voice shaking.

The steady pattern of it, the rise and fall of his chest beside me, was steadying enough that my grip on his side relaxed. He pressed his lips against my forehead, more out of relief than anything else, I thought.

“We’re okay,” I said. “We’re okay. Just keep going.”

My mind caught the words and carried them forward in the dark. Just keep going. The longer we walked, the harder it became to tell the difference between my fear, my anger, and my guilt. They were a swollen mass in my chest, a rising sore. Someone ahead of us was either laughing or sobbing; the noise was so unhinged, I couldn’t tell the difference.

The biggest fear, the one that kept my heart firmly lodged at the base of my throat and my knees sliding forward, forward, forward as the cement gripped at my shoulders, was knowing that, at any point, the whole thing could come down on top of us.

Breathe.

It should have been comforting to feel Liam pressing close behind me. We finally reached a section of the tunnel that was whole and where we could stand at our full height. It felt better to be moving that way, like it was a sign we were almost through. But it was still so impossibly dark. No matter how many times I tried to look back, I couldn’t see anything past the vague shape of Liam’s face.

Keep going—Head down, arms in, only going forward, forward, forward as fast as I could move my feet. I lost track of time. Five minutes passed, ten minutes, maybe. Fifteen. The mildew smell changed to an all-out rancid stink as the drains constricted again. I kept my hands out on either side of me, letting them glide along the slick, dripping cement. Liam let out a strangled grunt as he cracked his head against the sloping ceiling, and a second later, I had to duck.

The standing water was thick and reeked of rotting things and mold. I heard someone start to retch, and it was like it always was—once one person started, everyone else’s stomach was heaving, too.

I clawed blindly at my face, trying to clear the hair that stuck in clumps to my cheeks and neck. It snuck up on me, the suffocating—the thick, sticky air seemed to vanish, the tunnels constricted, and I couldn’t see a thing, not one damn thing.

We are not going to die down here. We were not just going to disappear.

I tried to stay focused on the rhythmic, slow shuffle of skin against concrete and the way the water seemed to recede with the ceilings. How was it possible that the tunnel felt so different heading out than it had coming in? I felt it widen again, dipping down; it might have been my eyes adjusting to the dark, but I could have sworn it was getting lighter.

I wasn’t imagining it. The change had been gradual at first, a hint of a glow, but it was bright enough now that I could see Liam’s surprised face as it turned down to meet mine. The tunnel filled with sounds of relief. I stood on my toes, trying to see over the heads in front of me. The smallest pinprick of light was staring us down the long tunnel, and it grew just that tiny bit larger with each step. A sudden burst of energy kicked my legs up, moving them faster, and faster, and faster until I could see the ladder, the figures climbing up out of the crippling dark and into the light.

For a long time, there was nothing beyond the smoke.

It hung around us in a curtain of graying brown, warmed only by the setting sun. The debris that had been blasted in the bombing still hadn’t settled. It floated down through the open door, a fine, crushed cement that swirled as we stirred it. My arms shook the entire climb up the ladder. Cole was waiting for us at the entrance to the tunnel, gripping my arm and hauling me out before turning back to get Liam.

“Goddammit, you stupid kid!” he cried, shaking him. His voice was hoarse, and he seemed to choke on each word. “You scared the shit out of me! When I say stay behind me, I mean stay behind. Why didn’t you just leave when I told you to? Why can’t you just listen to me!”

He wrapped his arms around his shoulders, and Liam, in all of his relief and exhaustion, let him. I couldn’t understand what they were saying to each other as they stood in front of the door, but Vida’s “Some of us are still trying to get out, assholes!” shattered the moment.

Another agent guided us down the embankment of the Los Angeles River, to the spot where the others were huddled beneath the center of the bridge overhead. I pulled my shirt up over my nose and mouth to avoid breathing it in, but the chalky taste was already in my throat. I had already swallowed the day’s poison down, letting it mix with the smoke and bile.

The sights of Los Angeles and the warehouse district were too much for any of us to take. No one was willing to turn around and face the wreckage in the distance. We knew, all of us, that the city had been attacked, but to actually see the burning skyscrapers on the horizon, watch the black smoke funnel out and up and into the clear blue sky, was sickening.

Liam and I sat down a small ways from the other kids, who were crying and hugging one another. It was enough for me that he was sitting next to me, that his shoulder was pressed against mine. I watched them, the tears streaming down their faces, and I wished I could have let myself break down, too—to clear out the twisting mass of terror still churning inside me.

But out here, my exhaustion numbed me. The sight of the everyday objects scattered nearby in the river quieted the thoughts racing through my head. The dust-covered cars in inches, the ground in feet. It gave way under us like playground sand. We were miles from downtown, but we were finding papers, an office chair, sunglasses, briefcases, and shoes that had been dropped and forgotten or blown out from nearby demolished buildings. The airstrike had left One Wilshire, the old skyscraper that housed the Federal Coalition, a burning black husk. I had seen it, just for a second, belching out rolling streams of smoke, turning entire city blocks dark.

And all Liam could say, over and over, was “Damn.”

I took a deep, steadying breath. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jude standing out from under the bridge, his eyes closed, his face turned up to the patch of sun that had broken through the smoke. I couldn’t bring myself to stand, but I pretended I was there, too. Tilting my head back, letting the warmth dry the sticky, wet clumps of my hair. Letting it burn away the taste of fear on my tongue. Pretending we were somewhere far away from here.

Liam stood as Chubs and Vida came toward us, their dark skin plastered with silvery dust. He hooked an arm around his friend’s neck, guiding him over to where I was waiting.

“We heard Cole talking to some of the other agents who got out of the tunnel first. They said every car and every phone they found was dead. Cole thinks it really was some kind of electromagnetic pulse. We just couldn’t tell because we were so far underground.”

That was one of the reasons Alban had insisted on building it so deep into the earth, for protection from that kind of thing. If Cole was right and they had set off an EMP, everything fell into place the way Alban had assured us it would. The detonation knocked out the power station supplying electricity to HQ, but the backup generator had kicked in, at least for a time.

I couldn’t believe Gray—or whoever was in charge—had gone this far—had fried every vehicle, computer, and TV, ensuring he’d be helpless. Defenseless.

“We can’t make contact with Cate,” Vida said.

“She’s all right,” I told her, hoping I didn’t sound as hopeless as I felt. The flash drive. Cate still has the flash drive. And if something had happened to Cate, then…

“The city…?”

“Swarming with soldiers, apparently,” Chubs said. “It’s not good.”

“Full-on invasion,” Vida said, dropping next to me. She pointed to where Nico was standing at the door leading down to the tunnel. He was staring down it, as if waiting for one last person to come through.

I rubbed my face with my hands, trying to clear away the image of Clancy Gray trapped down in the dark. That’s where he belongs, came the savage voice in my mind. He was the only reason we had come here in the first place—he’d lied and risked every one of our lives, and for what? So he could work out some kind of demented mommy issue?

I didn’t want to think of the dead, so I focused on the living. I kept my thoughts on the people beside me, the rare kindness life had shown in getting us out just before the whole structure collapsed. It didn’t feel real to me yet, but these kids were. Liam, his head bent toward his best friend, whispering, “We’ll stay with them until we figure out how to get out of the city.” Chubs nodding, visibly struggling not to cry. Vida lying back, her hands on her stomach, feeling its rise and fall with each deep breath she took.

And Jude—

I turned to my right, glancing around the circles of kids. And—there he was. The dark head of curls I was looking for was walking away, chattering excitedly with some other kid. Where the hell did he think he was going? He tilted his head back toward us, and was—

Not Jude.

Why did I think that? This kid, he looked nothing like him—he was one of the Greens, a good head shorter than him. Why did I think that was him? I had taken one quick glance at his hair, and it was like my mind had defaulted on memory.

Why would I ever think that?

Every muscle in my body, every joint, every ligament hardened to stone. I was shaking again with the effort to move, to spin around one last time. I tried to call out for him, but the sound came out like a gasp. I brought a hand up to the base of my throat, pressing hard to dislodge whatever nightmare I had just swallowed.

“Ruby?” Chubs said. “What’s wrong?”

“What?” Liam said, turning toward me. “What is it?”

“Where…” I began. “Where’s Jude?”

The boys shared a look, then turned to survey the kids themselves.

“Jude!” Vida called, looking around. “Judith! This isn’t funny!”

I didn’t see his face in the kids sitting around us, and the agents were making sure that no one left the cover of the bridge now. Faces were starting to turn toward us, including Cole’s.

“He came down, right?” I asked, my voice high with panic. “He was with you guys at the back, wasn’t he?”

Oh my God.

Vida’s brows drew sharply together. Some dark thought flickered over her face.

“Vida!” I grabbed the front of her sweatshirt. “When was the last time you talked to him? When was the last time you saw him?”

“I don’t know!” she cried, pushing me off her. “I don’t, okay? It was so dark—”

I started at a run, pushing past Vida to get to the tunnel’s opening at the top of the embankment. Nico looked up at me, and I finally understood that he was waiting for Jude, not for Clancy.

“Ruby…” he began. “Where is he?”

“Stop,” Cole said, catching my elbow. I struggled against him, trying to twist away. Jude was down there. He was down there. And the last place I would ever leave Jude was alone in the dark.

“You were at the back, weren’t you?” he continued. “I sent one of the agents down to make sure we didn’t leave anyone behind. They said the whole structure must have caved in—”

“Shut up!” Liam said. He pulled me away from Cole. “Chubs and I will go, okay? I’m sure he just got separated from the group.”

“No way in hell I’m letting you back in there,” Cole said. “I will knock your ass out if you take one step closer to it.”

Liam ignored him.

“He could have twisted his ankle maybe or slipped and hit his head,” Chubs added, but he looked sick. “Maybe he’s just caught in the debris…”

“No!” I snarled. “He’s my—”

“Ruby, I know, okay?” Liam said. “But you and Cole and the others need to figure out how to get us out of here, and fast. Let us do this for you at least.”

“It’s on me,” I said. “I’m Leader.”

“You’re not my leader,” he said softly. “Remember? It’ll be faster if Chubs and I go. We’ll be back before you even know we’re gone. You and the others have to figure out how to get us out of here.”

I shook my head.

“Ruby, let them go,” Vida said, taking my arm. “Come on.”

Cole let out a sharp, angry grunt, shoving a glow stick against his brother’s chest. “You have an hour, no more. Then we’re leaving without you.”

Liam glanced at Chubs, tilting his head toward the waiting door.