In The Afterlight

“Good, hopefully that means he doesn’t remember the half of it. The guy was—he was a monster. He was the devil himself when he got his temper up. Guess one of us was bound to be a chip off the old block. I used to wonder, you know, if the abilities we have are somehow dependent on something we already have inside us. I thought, this fire—this is his anger. This is my dad’s rage.”

I knew it wouldn’t do anything, or at least reassurance had never done much when it was delivered to me, but I had to say it. I had to tell him. “You’re not a monster.”

“Don’t monsters breathe fire? Don’t they burn down kingdoms and countries?” Cole sent me a wry smile. “You call yourself that, too, don’t you? No matter how many times others tell you it’s not true, you’ve seen the proof. You can’t trust yourself.”

I settled back against my seat, wondering, for the very first time, if he wasn’t just as desperate as the rest of us for a cure.

“This isn’t about the camps for you...is it?” I asked. “It’s about the cure.”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Got it on the first try. Feel free to think I’m an ass**le.”

“Why? Because you don’t want to suffer like this?” I asked sharply. “Because you want to be normal?”

“What’s ‘normal’?” Cole asked. “Pretty sure none of us remember what that feels like.”

“Fine,” I pressed, “then because you want a life where you’re free from all of this bullshit. I want the cure more than I want my next breath. I never used to. I never let myself think of the future, and now it’s like a compulsion. I want that freedom so badly, and it seems like the more I strain to try and reach it, the further away it gets.”

Cole rubbed his hand over his face, nodding. “I underestimate it sometimes...you forget, because you function, and each time you get kicked down you manage to pick yourself up. But now, it’s starting to get harder, right?”

“Yes.” It was the first time I’d admitted it. The word was as hollow as I felt.

“It’s not that I don’t think I won’t be able to get up. It’s that I’m afraid one day I’ll just...explode. Combust. Take out everyone I care about because I can’t stop myself from feeling so damn angry all the time.” He pulled up his hand, holding it in front of his face, waiting for it to spasm again. When it didn’t happen, his gaze shifted down to Clancy. “They keep them locked in these white rooms. Lights are on the whole time and there are voices. Voices that don’t stop, that are constantly telling them shit like, you’re wrong, admit you’re wrong so we can fix you. They hurt the kids—they really hurt them, over and over. It was...I could barely stand to see it, and I wasn’t the one getting beaten. Was that...real? Can he make stuff up?”

My hands tightened around the wheel. “He can plant any image he wants in your mind, but I think the truth is bad enough that he doesn’t have to embellish it.”

“I don’t know what pisses me off more—what they did to the kids, or that they figured out how to contain the fire in them. Shit, Gem. How the hell...” He shook his head as if to clear it. “If he tells any of the others, if he tells Liam, what am I supposed to do? None of the kids will come within a hundred feet of me.”

“He’s not going to,” I promised. “How much more of that stuff do you have?”

He unzipped the pouch. “Three more vials.”

“Then he’ll stay out until we get to the Ranch and we get him secured,” I said. “We’ll keep him separated at all times, and I’ll be the one he interacts with.”

“Killing him would be simpler.” There was nothing heated or furious about his words, and maybe that was why they were so disarming. Just cold, ruthless pragmatism. It was unsettling how fast the switch flipped.

“Can’t,” I reminded him, recycling one of his own arguments, “he’s the only one who knows where his mother is. You can’t do anything to him, not until we find out where she is. I need the cure. Whatever it is, I need it. I hate him more than anything in the world, but I hate living this way more. I hate the idea of there not being an end to this.”

Cole turned back toward the window, watching the buildings around us blur around us. “Then you and me, Gem, we’ll have to figure out a way to stay one step ahead of our monsters.”

I nodded; my throat was tight with the need to cry, with the surprise of finally having someone who understood—who struggled not just with everything and everyone around them, but with themselves.

“Are you sure this isn’t a nightmare?” he asked quietly. “And that we won’t just wake up?”

I stared ahead at the road, the way the dust blowing in from the desert covered it with a faint golden sheen even as gray clouds began to gather over us.

“Yes,” I said after some time.

Because dreamers always wake up and leave their monsters behind.

4

THE RAIN STARTED IN WITH a clap of thunder just outside of Mojave, a small town situated at the base of the nearby mountains’ craggy slopes. In the distance, over their jagged crowns, I could see the first hints of green.

“That Days Inn,” Cole said, pointing to the small, two-story complex hugging the corner. “Pull in there. We need to get them another car, and we need to switch ours out.”