“Come down here,” I said coldly. “Right now.”
A few of the kids made weak attempts to grab him and keep him in place, but he fought past them. I felt a thrill of power at the thought—the hold I had on him now was so strong, he would have fought them off to get to me. He flipped a rope ladder over the edge of the walkway and began to work his way down.
“What’s going on?” someone shouted. “Knox! What the hell?”
Knox stumbled past Vida, who was watching this all with wide eyes from the ground. I’m not sure if she figured it out right then or just wanted to take advantage of the moment, but she lifted her face, streaked with soot and sweat. Her foot swung around, tripping him, sending him sprawling over himself to the ground at my feet.
“Are you happy?” she yelled to him, to the kids around us. “Did you get off watching that? Did we pass your stupid test?”
Apparently there was only one person who decided whether or not a kid passed, and that was the one who had dropped down onto his knees in front of me.
“I want you to apologize,” I said. “Now. To Mason. To all of these kids for what you did to them, for never giving them what they needed or deserved. For making them fight another kid and pretending like that’s the only way we have to survive in this world.” I knelt down in front of him. “I want you to apologize for the kids you left outside to
“Sorry.” It was a frail whisper, a shadow of a word. Several kids gasped, but more were stunned into speechlessness. And still, I could tell by the faces around me that a single word wasn’t nearly enough. It would never be.
“Tell them your real name,” I ordered.
His pupils flared, like he was struggling to fight off my control. I strengthened my grip, my lips turning up in a small smile as he shook. “Wes Truman.”
“And are you the Slip Kid, Wes?”
He shook his head, keeping his eyes low to the ground.
“Tell them how you’ve been getting supplies,” I said, letting frost chill the words. “What happens to the kids in the White Tent when you need another pack of cigarettes?”
I could hear footsteps shuffling up through the loose rubble and debris from the collapsed wall, but I kept my eyes focused on the pathetic boy cowering on the floor.
“I…trade them.”
“With the PSFs?” I pressed.
He bit his lip and nodded.
The silence came crashing down around us—startled cries, wordless screams, weak protests, and one word, repeated over and over again:
“Someone take her out!” a boy shouted. “Take the shot! She’ll do that to all of us—”
“You know what I am now,” I called up to them. “But that also means you know that every word that just came out of his mouth is true. You’ve been lied to all this time and treated like you were worthless and incapable of making your own choices, but it stops tonight. Right now.” I turned to look back at Knox, who stared numbly at his upturned hands. “I want you to leave tonight and never come back—unless,” I began, looking up at the faces above me, “any of you have a problem with that?”
There was some part of me that must have known that a good number of them stayed silent out of fear. The boys who had protested before fell silent the moment my gaze moved across them, their hands strangling the guns in their hands.
It was so simple. All of it. Those same boys nodded and drifted back into the shadows; all I had to do was push the right images into their minds, shifting quickly among the four or five of them before they knew what I had done. I looked down at Knox, my lip peeling back in disgust as I flooded his thoughts with visions of my own: him struggling out in the freezing snow, him coughing, weak, unable to defend himself as he moved farther west, disappearing forever. I wanted him to experience every bit of disorientation and pain and fever that Liam had. I wanted him swallowed up by the world that created him.
I watched him stand up, cutting his hands on the rough ground. He moved slowly, staggering out through the kids crowded around the collapsed wall. For one brief moment, I thought that they would turn him back and then turn on me, but the girl in front, Olivia, took one giant step aside. She crossed her arms over her chest, watching him go with cold, unflinching eyes. A noise rose from the rest of them as they followed suit, clearing him a path—a hissing, spitting, snarling noise that conveyed what most words couldn’t. Then, the ones perched safely above us echoed it back, letting months, even years, of pent-up anger and fear and hopelessness escape with it. The intensity of it was suffocating; I reached up and pressed a hand to my throat. My pulse raced beneath my fingertips.
He was there, and then he was gone. I felt the rage that had powered me follow him out the door, fading like old memory, disappearing into the black night. I thought about it—calling him back in, I mean. It suddenly didn’t feel like enough. He deserved so much worse. Why had I even given him a chance when he hadn’t found it in his damn black soul to give one to the other kids around him?
Vida limped over to me, watching me with wary eyes. She kept a clear distance between us, her hands fisting her torn pants. Looking at me like she had never seen me before in her life. I was about to ask her what was wrong when I felt an arm loop through mine and turn me around.
Chubs’s lips were pressed into a tight line, his eyes hidden by the reflection of firelight in his glasses. It was amazing to me that after everything that happened that night, I still had the strength to untangle myself from him and pull away. He tried to grab me again, to steer me outside and away from the eyes burning into my back.
But I wasn’t afraid of these kids or what they could do to me now that they knew what I was. If I could have found the words, I would have told him. I would have said that before I hadn’t been strong enough to keep our group together. I hadn’t had enough control, enough power, to keep him and the others safe from the world trying to rip us apart. Now I did.
The mood in the room had shifted, was shifting—in that moment, I felt so connected with everyone in that run-down warehouse that I could practically taste their relief like cold, sweet rain on my tongue. It was some time before I realized they were waiting for me to make the first move.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Jude push in through the crowd, his chest heaving from his run. The Chatter was lit up in his hand, vibrating loud enough for me to hear. I saw the only confirmation I needed stretched across his face in a grin.
But his eyes shifted then, and it was obvious he wasn’t seeing me anymore. Only the wreckage, only the fires still clinging to the cement. Only Mason, his blank, empty gaze still fixed on something beyond our seeing.
“It’s okay,” I told him, breaking the silence. “We’re okay.”
And it didn’t matter if the others truly believed what I said. They all followed me out anyway.
EIGHTEEN
The sound of Clancy’s voice pouring out of the small boom box’s speakers made every single hair on the back of my neck stand at attention. Olivia had set it at the edge of Knox’s stage, and Jude had charged the batteries just enough to ensure we would have five minutes of solid listening.
“Why is this still broadcasting?” I asked. “I thought it was being sent out of East River?”
Olivia shook her head. “He set up a couple of signals so the message could be broadcast as far west as Oklahoma. I guess he didn’t think it was important to shut the rest down.”
This was the first time we had gathered everyone into the warehouse, and it was the first time I was able to get some kind of a head count. Fifty-one kids stood in a half moon around the small device, riveted by the words
