Never Fade

You were supposed to stay away! I told him to tell you not to come back until it was safe! Until tomorrow!”

“What the hell?” I said, whirling toward Clancy. “What game are you playing?”

The faces around me looked just as confused as I felt. “Who are you talking to?” Jude asked, glancing around.

“Him!” I snapped, exasperated. I tried to grab Clancy before he slipped back out the door. “Who else?”

“Roo…” Jude began, his eyes wide, “there’s no one there.”

“Clancy’s—”

“Clancy?” Nico said. “He’s here? He came?”

“He’s right here,” I said, grabbing for his arm. My fingers passed right through it, drifting through cold air. The sight of him wavered, flickered.

Faded into nothing.

He’s… My mind was gripped with panic. I couldn’t finish the thought.

“I didn’t see him get away,” Jude said. “Did Vida take him to disable the cameras…? Roo?”

“The cameras are already down! We hacked into the program hours ago!” Nico said.

“We have to stay here,” one of the other kids added. “They told us to get into one room and stay until it was all over. You’re too early.”

“Until what’s over?” Jude was asking. I barely heard him over the roar of blood in my ears. “What’s happening at six?”

Nico let his head fall back for a second, taking a deep, frustrated breath.

“That’s when Cate and the others are coming to get us.”

TWENTY-NINE

IT WAS A TRICK.

“Okay…” I said, trying to catch one of the thoughts flying through my head long enough to put it into words. “Okay…we just…”

He was there. In the tunnel, he was there. He came in with us. If he was going to get away, why didn’t he do it before? Clancy could influence more than one person. He could have tricked all of us by never getting off the plane in the first place. But he had. I had dragged him down the steps myself, felt his pulse jump when I pushed him toward the ladder down into the tunnel. Why not escape then? It had been just as dark outside.…

“What should we do?” Jude was asking.

Because he needed me to get him in here. Before Cate and the others came back.

“You have to stay here where it’s safe,” Nico rambled. “If you go back out there—”

I let him play me again.

“Ruby—Roo!” Jude grabbed my shoulder, turning me back toward him, forcing me to break my gaze with a crack on the far wall. His hair and eyes were both wild, his freckles overlapping points on a map I’d only recently learned to read. He was anxious, but he wasn’t afraid. This was a good Jude to have.

“Go down and get Chubs and Liam and bring them up here,” I said, “but come back if you think, even for a second, that you might get caught. Understand?”

He nodded eagerly.

“Vida will be here in a few minutes,” I told the others. And probably in a holy terror of a mood when she realized I’d sent her up to disable the cameras for no reason. “Once the four of them are back, move the bunks and barricade the doors. No one else comes in.”

“What about you?” Nico asked.

“I have to go take care of your friend,” I said, hoping my voice was enough to convey how deep Nico’s betrayal had buried us in this mess.

“I should go with you…” Nico whispered. “He’s here? Really?”

I’d seen that look a hundred times, a thousand, at East River—the wide-eyed adoration of someone who either had no idea there were scales under Clancy’s skin or someone unhinged enough to just not care. I thought of Olivia and the way she had all but clawed at her own throat when she said his name. I’d been nursing my anger toward Nico from the moment Clancy told us he’d been slipping him intel all this time, letting it grow into thoughts like, I’ll never forgive him. But looking at him now, I forgot it in an instant. Heartache just tore it away, and what was left was the true realization of how damaged the kid in front of me was. His paranoia, his nervous fidgeting, his silent moods. Of course Clancy was his hero. He had saved him from a hell too terrible for nightmares.

“Did he ask you any questions about HQ recently?” I asked. “About particular files or people…?”

By the way Nico’s mouth seemed to twist, it was looking more and more likely that his loyalty to Clancy was going to win out over his alarm that Clancy had flat-out lied and brought us here despite the warning he’d given him.

“He gave me a list of words and people to look for,” Nico said. “There were a lot of them.… One of them pinged in the system a few weeks ago. An agent called Professor.”

I tensed. “Professor? You’re sure?”

“The agent was doing some kind of research at our Georgia base—it just suddenly popped up on the classified server a few weeks ago. I think he knew who it was because he wanted the base’s location.”

What had the adviser said when he came into Alban’s office all of those weeks back? Something about a situation in Georgia with Professor—and a project called Snowfall.

“What about stuff here at HQ?”

“He asked about the different tunnels and the blackouts…” Nico said slowly.

“What else?” I pressed. I was aware of the ticking clock, even if he wasn’t. “What about the blackouts?”

“He wanted to know if they shut off things like the lock pads or retinal locks—”

I turned on my heel, throwing Jude off me as I opened the door and bolted out into the hallway. Spots flashed in front of my eyes as they struggled to adjust again. I counted off the door handles as I ran. I kept to the outside curve, one eye always on the dark infirmary windows to my right. They’d drawn all the curtains. Not even the machine lights were bleeding through.

In fact, the only light on the entire second level seemed to be the flashlight Clancy clenched between his teeth as he riffled through the filing cabinets inside of Alban’s office.

All of the lock pads and retinal locks were on the backup power generator, and normally they would have been enough to keep even Clancy out, had they actually still been attached to the door. Someone had taken something—a crowbar, an ax, a small explosive—and blown them off that way.

I slid forward, nudging the door open farther as I slid my gun out of the waistband of my jeans.

Clancy made a small, triumphant noise as he ripped a bulging red folder free from where it had been trapped among a hundred others. He wasted no time flipping through the pages as he turned back around to Alban’s desk. Someone had flipped it onto its side as he or she ransacked the place. He used one of its wide, flat legs to lay the folder out and free up his hand to hold the flashlight. The look on his face was so painfully eager I felt a twinge of apprehension.

“Found what you were looking for?”

Clancy’s head shot up at the same moment his hand slid the folder back, off the desk, into a metal trash can. For a moment, anger fought with exasperation on his face, but Clancy settled on a devastating smile as he stared down the barrel of the gun.

“I did, but…don’t you have more important things to worry about?” His voice had taken on the quality of smoke. “Other people more important than me?”

He inclined his head toward the other end of Alban’s office, and even before I turned, the metallic scent of warm, sticky blood was everywhere. Just past my initial line of sight, I saw the two of them on the floor. Chubs had crumpled, curling in on himself the way a leaf would just before it fell from the tree in autumn. Liam was