Never Fade

sweat. I felt both Vida’s and Chubs’s eyes on me as I ran my fingers along the seams, until they found the hard, rectangular lump that Cole had stitched into the dark lining.

“He’s right.” I passed the jacket over to Vida. “Leave it in there for now; we’ll cut it out after we go.”

My eyes drifted back to Liam’s ashen face. It screwed up with the effort of the next cough, but it sounded stronger to me somehow, like he was clearing out the blockage. Jude hovered behind me, taking all of this in, too. The pride beaming from his face drained away. His hand closed tightly around my shoulder, either to steady himself or me. Both, I guess.

“Can you go tell Olivia I’m ready when she is?” I asked. “And—hey—” I caught the back of his shirt. “Find yourself something warmer to wear, will you?”

A clumsy salute was all I got in exchange for that. Vida raised her brows as he bounced away, a smug Good luck with that one! look stamped across her face. Maybe Vida was right and I should have forced him to stay behind, but there was no telling what kind of tech we were going to encounter. He might not have been able to hit a target a foot away or run more than a hundred feet, but as a Yellow, Jude had been specifically trained to handle electronic locks and security systems.

I helped Chubs lower Liam back onto the ground, but he caught my hands before I could pull back. His eyes slid from his friend’s pale face to mine.

“Is this really better than it would have been if you’d just stayed together?”

I flinched.

“You think you maybe overestimated his ability to take care of his own sorry ass without us?” Chubs asked. “Just a little?”

It wasn’t better, but it wasn’t necessarily worse. Chubs could pick at this scab all he wanted, turning and pointing every single time the wound started bleeding again, but he didn’t understand. The Liam in front of us was a reflection of the world we were forced to live in, and as cruel and harsh as it was…at least it wasn’t the Liam the League would have turned out: a violent, unforgiving reflection of how they thought the world should be.

“I’m not happy about this.”

“I know,” I whispered. I leaned across Liam’s prone form to wrap my arms around Chubs’s neck. If he was surprised by my burst of affection, he didn’t show it. Instead, he patted me gently on the back before turning to finish his work with Vida. “You make me as crazy as a bag of cats, but if anything happens to you, I’m going to lose it. Are you sure…are you a hundred percent positive you know what you’re doing?”

“Yeah,” I said. Unfortunately. “I’ve had training, remember?”

His mouth twisted into a humorless smile. “And to think, when we found you…”

Chubs didn’t have to finish. I knew what I’d been when I’d found them: a terrified splinter of a girl who had been shattered a long time ago. I had nothing, and no one, and no real place to go. Maybe I was still broken and would always be—but now, at least, I was piecing myself back together, lining up one jagged edge at a time.

NINETEEN

WE ONLY WAITED LONG ENOUGH for the sun to go down before heading out. The quick sunset was one of the few blessings of a rapidly approaching winter. I tried to calculate, in a distracted kind of way, exactly how much time had passed since I set off looking for Liam. Two weeks, if even? It was December; I remembered the digital display in the train station in Rhode Island. I counted back.

“We missed your birthday.”

We were hovering at the back of the pack, drifting there almost naturally while Olivia and Brett had taken charge in front.

Whatever Springsteen song Jude had been humming under his breath was bottled back up, mid-note. “What?”

“It was last week,” I said, reaching out to steady him as he jumped over a fallen tree. “Today’s December eighteenth.”

“Really?” Jude crossed his arms over his chest and began to rub them. “Feels like it, I guess.”

“Fifteen,” I said with a low whistle. “You’re getting up there in years, old man.”

I started to unwind the wool scarf from around my neck, but he waved it away and marched on, his EMT jacket crinkling as he moved. For such a large group, we were moving quietly through the undergrowth—snapping a few twigs here and there, breaking through pockets of ice. We were still too deep into what Brett had called the Cheatham Wildlife Management Area to attract much attention anyway.

“Oh! You found it?” I asked when I caught the flash of silver gripped in Jude’s palm.

Jude held it out for me to see. It was a circular, nearly flat disc. The silver coating glinted in the single strand of moonlight that cut through the tree branches. I plucked it out of his hand and put the warm metal at the center of my palm. The compass’s glass had cracked in two places.

“Yeah,” he said, taking it back. “For a second there…never mind.”

“Never mind?” I repeated in disbelief. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just that, for a second, I was really happy I found it, you know? And then I started to think that maybe I shouldn’t take it with me.”

“Because…?”

“Because Alban gave it to me,” he said. “A few days after I came to HQ. He kept saying how proud he was that I was part of the League, but it’s like…now I don’t think I’m so proud of being part of it.”

I let out a long sigh, trying to find the right words. Jude only shrugged again and slid the string over his head. The compass disappeared under his jacket, and I thought, That’s the difference. That was the fundamental difference between the two of us. Once I woke up to reality, I couldn’t go back to the dream—but Jude was still able to hold out hope in his heart that it would be there waiting for him when he was ready to return. After everything, he still believed that the League could be different, better, healed.

I wasn’t out of shape by any means, but hiking over hill after hill, fighting through the thick mulch of newly dead leaves on an empty stomach, all the while trying to keep my brain from circling back to Liam, was beginning to weigh on me. Jude’s stomach had growled no less than four times in the past half hour alone, and while he seemed immune to getting cranky like the rest of us, I felt him start to sag next to me.

“Almost there,” I assured him, shooting a dirty look at the back of Brett’s head. It wasn’t his fault; we didn’t have cars to transport everyone. There’d been some discussion about trying to navigate down on the Cumberland River, but even months after the flooding, Brett felt like its current was too unstable for their rafts. So we were walking, using fabric cut from the tents as makeshift bags for the supplies.

We were walking ten miles, eleven, twelve. My fingers were frozen stiff; not even pressing them up under my armpits could get the blood flowing back through them.

Jude pursed his lips together, reaching up to adjust his cap. With it pressing down at such an awkward angle over his curly hair, it bent his ears out, making them look bigger than they actually were. For a bizarre second, I felt my heart swell just the smallest bit at the sight.

“Annnnnnyway,” said Jude, master of awkward transitions. “This is going to be so great. So, so great. We’ll be in like this”—he snapped his fingers—“swipe the meds and some food, and out, like, bam!” He clenched both fists and flashed his fingers out. “They won’t even know we’ve been there until we’re gone. We’ll be freaking legends!”

Jude kept saying “they” this and “they” that, but that was the problem—we didn’t know who was in charge of the airport or why they were hoarding supplies. I’d tried to send a follow-up message to Cate and Nico to ask, but they hadn’t responded before we left.

We were still heading east, toward Nashville’s center, but the river didn’t follow a straight path. It had looped down again, directly in front of us.

I nudged my way up to the front of the group. My outstretched hand eventually found Olivia’s shoulder, and she reached back, pulling me to the edge of the Cumberland River.

“Whoa,” was Jude’s only comment.