Never Fade

The rainwater was collecting in my ear, running free down the curve of my cheek, and soaking Liam’s old jacket. I waited for it to carry my fear away, too, down into the earth where it couldn’t touch me again. I took in one deep, wet gulp of air and held it.

A car engine started in the distance. I opened my eyes again, watching Chubs come toward me. He knelt, one hand smoothing the tangled cloud of hair off my face. We listened to the wheels churn up the loose gravel of the driveway, both of us still and silent.

“I’m sorry,” Chubs said finally. “Are you okay? Did he dislocate your shoulder, because if he did—”

“I’m all right,” I said, “but—but could you please cut the zip ties off now?” I was horrified by the way my voice shook, but in addition to the discomfort, my brain was starting to spark up old memories that were better left buried deep. The bus ride into Thurmond. The sorting. Sam.

The minute I heard the plastic snap under his knife, I was pushing myself up onto my knees, ignoring the ache in my right shoulder. Chubs began to reach over to check on it, but I leaned back, just out of his reach.

We sat there, staring at each other, letting the space between us fill with rain and silence. Finally, I held out my hand, and without a word, he pressed the black booklet into it.

The cover was a tough faux leather, and I hadn’t necessarily been wrong in thinking that it was a passport. At first glance, it looked exactly the same—from the faint blue paper and the iridescent United States of America seal overlaying it.

FUGITIVE PSI RECOVERY AGENT. God, there was an official title for it?

“Joseph Lister,” I read. “Age twenty-four, six feet, a hundred and seventy pounds, from Penn Hills, Pennsylvania.” I glanced over at him. He was wearing an identical scowl to the one in his official photograph. “You know, it’s funny. The least believable thing about all that is your weight.”

“Oh, hilarious,” he groused, snatching it back from me before I could skim through the other pages. It was so Chubs—so the Chubs I knew—that I smiled. He struggled to keep his lips pressed in a stern line, but I saw the beginnings of a curve.

“I really thought you were dead,” I said quietly. “I shouldn’t have let them take you.”

He brought a hand up to his shoulder, pressing it there, as if his mind was cycling back to that moment, too. “You pushed the panic button, right?”

I nodded.

“I would have done the same thing,” he said. “The exact same thing. Well—” He stopped, actually considering this. “I probably would have been a little steadier in applying pressure to the wound, but other than that, yes. Well…”

“You’ll want to stop now,” I told him dryly. “Before you ruin our touching moment.”

The window above us suddenly opened and Jude’s curling mass of hair appeared there. “Roo—are you okay? Oh my God, Vida wouldn’t let me watch, but I tried to go around front, but the doors are all boarded up and there’s nothing in here so I just—”

Chubs helped me up, giving me a look that clearly asked, What fresh hell is this?

“I’ll tell you everything later, and you’re going to do the exact same. But for now, we have to see if we can find some kind of clue about what direction Lee might have headed—”

Chubs’s brows drew together as he lowered his voice. “Didn’t Lee tell you the procedure he and Harry set up to make contact?”

“I knew he had one, just not what it was,” I said. “But he told you?”

He nodded, shifting so his back was facing the window. And, I realized, the people inside. “We need to go. Now.”

“Wait,” I began, but he already had his arm looped through mine.

“They’re watching the house; we have to go,” he said. “And I’m sorry, I’d much rather not have the League riding with us.”

I detangled my arm from his, taking a step back. “I can’t leave them.”

“You are not League,” he insisted. “You are not one of them. You’re one of us.”

“Don’t think about it as us and them,” I pleaded. “We can all work together on this for now. You don’t have to come back with us to California after we find Liam; you just have to stay with us now.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Vida’s electric blue hair through the window screen. “Back then, you didn’t want me to stay, either, remember?”

“Yeah but that was…different,” he said, his voice low. “And you know it.”

“But at the time, you didn’t know that.”

I had read him right. I saw it in his face, in the rigid lines of his tight shoulders.

“You asked me if I trusted you,” I whispered. “Do you trust me?”

He blew out a long breath, his hands resting on his hips. “God help me,” he said finally, “I do. But I trust you, not them. I don’t even know who they are.”

I only held out my hand and waited for him to take it. I needed his long fingers to close around mine, wanted that final proof that his better sense and reasoning had given way to the belief he used to have in me. I waited for him to come with me, to accept that we were now in this together again, that time and distance and uncertainty hadn’t been enough to shake us.

And he did.

TEN

THE TAN SUV REEKED of fake evergreens. The smell of the air freshener was so overpowering, I had to roll down my windows to get fresh air circulating.

“You wouldn’t be complaining if you were there to smell the guy I bought it off of,” Chubs said, handing me a pair of sunglasses to wear. “Now. Put your seat belt on, please.”

Vida and Jude were already buckled into the backseat, though they hadn’t gone quietly. My favorite team member got one look at the metal grating that separated the front seats from the back and just about ripped my hair out at the roots trying to yank me out of the front seat.

“Are we driving this slowly because you have no idea where we’re going,” Vida asked, “or because you’re hoping we jump out of the car and put ourselves out of our misery?”

Jude sat straight up, alarmed. We both recognized that tone. Vida picked fights when she was bored, and battles when she was stressed. If it were the latter, only one of them was going to make it out of this car ride alive. We’d be washing the blood off the windows for weeks.

“That’d be doing the psychos holding your leashes a favor.”

For the first time, I was grateful for the metal grating between us. “They are not psychos, you condescending dick!” she snarled.

“I’m condescending?” Chubs asked. “Do you even know what that word means?”

“You piece of flaming—”

“So,” Jude said, his voice high. “Roo, how do you and Chubs know each other?”

“Charles,” he gritted out. “My name is Charles.”

“That’s supposed to be better?” Vida scoffed. Chubs let the car roll to a stop at a red light and turned to look at me, fire burning behind the lenses of his glasses.

“Yup,” I said. “She’s always like this.”

The tension that welled up in the car hovered among us, strung tight. One word or wrong move would snap it. Jude drummed his fingers against the armrest.

“Cut that shit out, nimrod, before I cut them off,” Vida said.

“Nimrod?” he shot back, his voice jumping an octave with outrage. “You don’t have to be so mean, you know.”