Never Fade

Until we hit that first barrier, I hadn’t really understood why, months after the floodwaters receded, the city was still closed. But it was like with any disasters; the cleanup was almost always worse than the stress of the disaster in progress. No wonder the ground had become little more than a swamp under my boots, no wonder the river was still flooding out. The initial storms had been powerful enough to carry whole sections of homes back into the river, to upend massive river barges and leave them stranded and rusting under the sun. It was like a terrible drain clog. The water couldn’t flow naturally down toward the city, which meant it was still bleeding out into the nearby fields and forests.

“It’s right over there,” Brett said, pointing to distant white shapes. As if on cue, a red light on one of them began to pulse slow and steady. “Nice to see Gray and his boys got around to cleaning this mess up like he swore he would.”

“Are we…swimming?” I asked, trying not to grimace.

Olivia turned toward me, holding up our one lone flashlight. The scarred half of her face stretched into a genuine smile. “Nope. We’re going to play leapfrog.”

It turned out that “playing leapfrog” with a bunch of Blues essentially meant resigning yourself to being flung from floating object to floating object like a rag doll. The system they’d worked through was impressive; the river was too wide for the Blues to lift another kid with their abilities and send him cruising the whole way across it. Instead, Brett took advantage of the flood’s wreckage, lifting Olivia and setting her down, with impressive accuracy and care, on the upturned corner of a half-sunk barge. She, in turn, sent the next Blue a little farther, onto the roof of what looked like a large mobile home. With the three of them in position, they were able to pass each of us along without much trouble at all. I landed on my knees, finally on the other bank.

We cut another path through a thicket of trees, emerging muddy and slick with the fresh rain falling overhead. The runway was shorter than the ones I’d seen at bigger airports, jam-packed with planes of all sizes and shapes. Mixed in between the helicopters and one-seaters were green-and-tan military vehicles. The airport wasn’t in use after all, then—and if the planes and trucks were out here, it meant there really was a good chance that Cate and Nico’s intel was good, and something else was being stored in the hangars.

Someone—the National Guard by the look of the vehicles—had halfheartedly put up a chain-link fence around the perimeter of the runways and hangars, along with signs that read things like NO TRESSPASSING and HIGH VOLTAGE. Olivia threw a rock, which bounced back and hit the mud with the tiniest rattle. Jude twisted out of the grip I had on his shirt to belly crawl through the grass.

“Hey!” I whispered. “Jude!”

He tapped the fence with his finger, then again for good measure before he hustled back over to us. “That has about as much electricity as my shoe,” he whispered.

This isn’t right, I thought. If there was something worth having here, there’d be people to protect it…right?

I scanned the field in front of us again, Instructor March’s voice ringing in my ears: If it looks too good, too easy, it never is. And the simulation we’d run after—with Vida and I storming a warehouse—had proven that point. Sure, it had been all clear on the outside. The agents playing the roles of the National Guardsmen had been waiting for us inside.

“Roo.” Jude groaned. “Come on.”

There was no real cover between the trees and the hangars, but that didn’t stop Brett and some of the others from blowing past us to continue forward. Even Olivia looked over at me, exasperated, before she stood and jogged to catch up to them.

“All right,” I told Jude, “stay close—”

But he was already up and running, too, weaving through the vehicles and planes on the runway. I finally caught up with them when they stopped at the edge of the asphalt, crouching down behind the last line of vehicles.

“I’ll take Brett and Jude with me,” I said, taking the flashlight from Olivia. “Two flashes for all clear, one for turn back. Got it?”

“There’s no one here, Ruby.”

“And that doesn’t strike you as odd?” I hissed back. There were tire tracks and footprints all around us; if they were old, they would have been washed out after days of rain.

The nearby parking lots were mostly empty or filled with large shipping trucks. Now and then a light above them would flicker, but aside from that, the airport was dark.

Every nerve in my body was tingling by the time I met up with Brett again after we’d lapped the buildings. I jerked my chin back in the direction where we’d left Jude waiting.

“This is too easy,” Brett finally admitted, shifting his old rifle to his shoulder. “Where the hell is everyone?”

Please not in the hangars, I thought. Please. This was my idea—I’d pushed them into this, and it would be on me to get us out if everything blew up in our faces.

Cate wouldn’t have sent us here if she thought it was too dangerous, I told myself, not if there was a chance we could be caught.

“Call the others over,” I told Jude, silencing the small voice before it could send me spiraling into true fear.

I counted them again as they ran toward us. One, two, three, all the way up to twenty-one.

The hunting party shrank into the shadow of Hangar 1, backs pressed to the wall, eyes scanning the dark field. The hangar door was locked with a series of imposing chains we had no way of slicing through, but there was a side-access door that, like I’d predicted, had some kind of electronic lock that looked like it had been beamed back from the distant future.

“Step aside,” Jude said, shooing me away with his hands. “The master is here.”

“Careful,” I warned. “Frying it completely will probably trigger it, too.”

“Honestly,” he said, squinting at the display. It lit instinctively when he stepped in front of it, pulling up a digital number pad. “You’re acting like I’ve never done this before!”

“You haven’t,” I reminded him. “Nico usually disables the alarm systems remotely.”

“Details, details.” Jude waved me off with one hand and brought his other palm up against the screen. “Be silent so the master can do his work!”

“Can the master hurry the hell up?” Brett hissed, hopping from foot to foot, arms crossed over his chest. I was starting to feel the winter bite, too. The sweat gliding down my face felt like it was two degrees away from freezing into solid crystals.

“Count of three,” Jude breathed out, “push on the door handle. Ready?”

I slipped around him, getting a good grip on the metal bar. “Go for it.”

At three, the system’s screen flickered black, and I waited only long enough to hear the lock pop before shoving it open with my shoulder. When the system’s number pad flashed back up, it cast an eerie red halo on the drifting snowflakes.

I waited for the shrill cry of an alarm, the blinding flash of floodlights spotlighting our small group. I waited to feel Jude shrink against the wall behind me in terror. I waited, waited, waited. But there was nothing to wait for.

“Okay!” Jude called. “I tricked the system into thinking that the door is actually closed—we just have to keep it open, and then we won’t run into any problems.”

“Nice job!” I whispered. The others streamed in past us, leaving a trail of mud and slush on the concrete ramp. We smelled like wet dogs that had rolled around in an ashtray.

Jude grinned as he dashed in after them. Someone hit the overhead lights and flooded the room with pristine white. I covered my eyes with a hand, trying to adjust to the glare.

There was a strange charge to the air now; I felt Jude’s mood shift from a sparkling excitement to the kind of shock that only ever comes like a brick to the face. The shift was so fast, and so sudden, that I was almost too afraid to see the hangar for myself.

“Holy…shit.”

There were rows of metal shelves lining the echoing room; they’d been set up almost like the stacks in a library but had to be a good two or three times the normal size. The soldiers had dragged them into tight, neat