Never Fade

ago.

“I’ll be in the atrium,” I murmured, “if you still need me.”

Alban was the one to wave me off, but it was Frog Lips’s voice that followed me out of the office, carrying through the door as it shut behind me. “I never thought this was a good idea. We warned her!”

Curiosity kept me standing there, waiting for some kind of hint as to what they were talking about. The man was practically spitting with anger, the words pouring over his oversize lips in a torrent. I tried to remember the last time I had seen one of them so worked up, and couldn’t—Jude always joked they were part robot, programmed to do their tasks with the least amount of heart possible.

“She took precautions; it’s not all lost,” Alban said calmly. “Let it never be said that woman lets herself be blinded by love. Walk with me—Jarvin will be back and I need to loop him in. He might have to take a team to Georgia to salvage the mess there—”

I only needed to hear the footsteps approaching from the other side of the door to know I’d gotten what little information they’d be giving. I turned as a cluster of kids passed by me on their way to the atrium, letting myself be drawn toward the back of the crowd.

When I glanced back, Alban stood outside his office door, letting the advisers work their whispers into a buzz around his ears. He didn’t acknowledge me, but I felt his eyes follow me the whole way, like he couldn’t quite let me out of his sight.

A few hours later, I was still in the atrium. Still waiting for a convenient slot in Alban’s schedule for me to scramble someone’s brain. Nico had shown up a few minutes before and brought a sandwich over to me, but between the two of us, I’m not sure who was less interested in their dinner.

Snowfall. The League was careful to give code names to every agent and every Op. At this point, I knew HQ’s roster well enough to know that we didn’t have a “Professor” working out of Los Angeles. But Snowfall… My brain was turning the phrase over the way it would sound out a foreign word. Slowly. Methodically. I’d had access to names of classified missions and projects well above my security clearance in the League just by virtue of the dirty work I was doing for them downstairs, but that wasn’t one of them.

“Hey,” I said, glancing over to where Nico was staring at his laptop screen. “If I were to give you an Op name, would you be able to search the servers for it?”

“The classified servers?” he asked. Anything less secure was a waste of the Greens’ time and talents. “Sure. What’s the name?”

“Snowfall. I think the agent in charge is called Professor—it sounds like a woman who might have been working out of the Georgia headquarters.”

Nico looked like I had picked up my plastic tray and slammed it into his face.

“What?” I asked. “Have you heard of it?”

The agents sitting nearby had gotten up and left when I sat down, giving me my own private section of the round hall. I had glared at the loud table of Blues nearby until they left, too. So it was quiet enough for me to actually hear him swallow as he looked back down at his keyboard and then back up at me.

It also meant it was quiet enough to hear Jude’s panting as he came bursting through the atrium’s doors.

He bypassed the other tables of agents and kids and came straight toward us. Ignoring him wasn’t going to make him disappear—he was the rash that kept coming back, even after six different kinds of silent treatment.

“Hey,” Nico said, “what are you—”

I kept my eyes on my untouched sandwich, only looking up when he grabbed both of our arms and started to pull us out of our seats.

“Come with me,” he said in a tight voice. “Now.”

“I’m busy,” I muttered. “Go find Vida.”

“You have to come—” His voice was hard, low. I barely recognized it. “Right. Now.”

“Why?” I asked, refusing to look up.

“Blake Howard came back from his Op.”

“And I care because…?”

His fingers seemed to burn my skin. “He came back in a body bag.”

By the time we arrived at the entrance hall, the small crowd of spectators, senior agents, Alban, and his advisers were flocking down one level to the infirmary in a long line of drawn faces and furious whispered questions.

“You’re sure?” I asked Jude as we tailed the crowd. “Positive that’s what you saw?”

He gulped back a deep breath. This close, I saw the red rimming his eyelids, and I wondered if he had cried himself raw before coming to get me.

Jude’s hand floated up to grip the small, nearly flat silver compass that he wore around his neck with a string. Alban had given it to him out of his personal collection of junk, along with the personal prophecy that Jude would turn into “a great explorer” and “a traveler of the first order.” The kid never took it off, even though his abilities rendered the small device mostly useless. As a Yellow, Jude’s touch always carried a faint electrical charge that messed with the magnet inside. It meant the colored arm always pointed toward Jude and not to the actual direction he was headed.

“I saw them come in, then Cate made me leave. But I heard Alban asking Agent Jarvin how it could have happened, and Rob said it had been an accident.” Jude glanced around us, peering over my head to make sure no one was close enough to hear. “Roo, I don’t think it was an accident.”

When we reached the second-level landing, Nico blew right past us, heading down to the third, lowest level.

“Hey!” Jude called. “Nico—”

“Let him go,” I said, half wishing I could follow him and avoid this mess altogether.

The infirmary was directly beneath the atrium, occupying the large circular space on the second level, with the computer lab directly beneath it on the third. Despite its size, it was almost always clogged with machines, beds, and the few nurses and doctors the League kept on staff for emergencies and training accidents. I’d had to go in more than once to get patched up and hadn’t missed the fact that they wore special, thicker rubber gloves to touch me.

Now they wore the usual clear ones as they moved Jarvin and his other teammates in to be examined. Jude tried to go inside, his breath hitching as he reached for the door handle. I dragged him away to the observation window, where a few other agents were crowded, watching as a gurney was navigated through the beds and medical carts toward the screen at the back of the room. On top of it was a black body bag, occupied.

I squeezed up to the front of the window with Jude in time to see them unzip the bag and lift Blake Howard onto a flat metal table. A white sneaker dangled from his right foot, and the blood soaking his clothes was visible from where we were—and then nothing. Alban stepped through with Jarvin and Cate and Rob, and the screen was drawn back in place, leaving us with only shaded silhouettes.

“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” Jude was whispering, his hands fisting in his reddish-brown curls. “It was him; it was really him—”

I reached out to steady his elbow as he swayed. I hadn’t really known Blake at all. I didn’t know any of the kids who weren’t on my team aside from their names, and my winning personality guaranteed they would never know me. But Jude and Blake had been as thick as thieves; the two of them and Nico spent most of their downtime together goofing off in the computer lab or playing some kind of game. The only time I had ever seen a smile crack Nico’s face was when Blake had been with him, green eyes flashing, hands waving, telling some story that had Jude practically sobbing with laughter.

“We should go find… We should go find Nico, I think. I think he went to check on something,” Jude finally managed to get out. I guided him away from the door and down the hall toward the stairs. We had to squeeze past the agents jogging down the hall to confirm the rumors that I’m sure were blazing through HQ.

“I have to tell you something,” he whispered as we reached the stairs. “You have to see that…that I don’t think it was an accident. I think—I think I did this.”

“This had nothing to do with you.” I sounded so much calmer than I felt. “Accidents happen all the time. The