In The Afterlight

“It is a stupid, f**king awful place I’m in,” she said, “to be jealous of that little girl and you and all of them, that you get to all be together when it’s never going to be that way again for us. You can’t even look at Nico—God, Ruby, what’s it going to take for you to stop punishing him? When do you start listening to his apologies?”

“When I have a chance of believing them.”

She gave me a hard look. “Jude was his only friend. Nothing you could do to him is worse than what he’s doing to himself. Cate’s not going to be able to pull him back from this again. This is worse than when they first brought him into HQ, after he got out of that research program where they did all of that shitty experimenting on him.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I left you to tell Cate alone...”

“No,” she said, holding up a finger, “be sorry that you’ve been too chickenshit to really talk to her about it. I don’t understand—I don’t get why everyone I care about is in f**king pieces and none of you will even try to help each other because it hurts too much to face it head-on. Jude would never have let this happen. He wouldn’t have. He was the best of us.”

It was amazing, you know, how Jude had pinned us all down, how deeply he had read into who we were and what we wanted. There were people in the world whose purpose seemed to be to serve as points of connection. They opened us up to each other, and to ourselves. What was it that he had told me? That he didn’t want to just know someone’s face, but their shadow, too?

“He was.” There would never be another person like him. There was the loss I felt, and the loss that the rest of the world would never realize. Both sat like stones on top of my chest.

“I’m not good at huggy shit,” Vida warned. “But if you want to talk like this again...I’m there. Okay?”

“Okay.” And I don’t know why that moment about did me in, when every moment before had been just as gutting. I leaned my shoulder and head against the wall. Maybe because I knew how proud of us he would have been for coming this far, and saying this much.

“Talk to Nico, please,” Vida said. “Don’t make me beg. Don’t treat him like he’s not even goddamn human.”

“I think I hate him,” I whispered.

“He made a mistake. We all did.”

I leaned back on my hands, fingers curling against the cold tile.

“Did they mess with her?” Vida asked suddenly, holding out an arm to stop me. While she didn’t whisper the question, the fact she wasn’t asking directly in front of Zu seemed to indicate some newfound sensitivity. “Scramble some eggs up here or something?”

Or not.

“No,” I said quietly, watching as Liam settled in next to her, running a hand over her hair. “She doesn’t want to talk, so we don’t make her. It’s her decision.”

Vida nodded, absorbing this. “Must have seen some shit then. Some real bad shit.”

“Stop pushing her on it, okay? She’s had every other choice taken away from her. She at least gets to choose what she wants to say, and when she says it.”

I turned at the sound of soft footsteps padding up behind us. Zu hung back, her hands tucked into her pockets until Vida waved her toward us. She waited until Zu was looking at her before saying, “My bad, Z. I shouldn’t have gone bitch on you. We cool?”

Some of the strain on the girl’s face faded. She stuck her hand out to shake, but Vida gave her a little fist bump instead.

“All right,” I said, forcing my stiff body up off the floor. “Should we go back? The boys are probably wondering where we are.”

“Let ’em wonder,” Vida said. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”

8

THE HALLWAY WAS WASHED OUT in a familiar shade of red, one that seemed to glow in an unsettling way. It grew brighter, pulsing as I took another step forward, glancing at the framed photos that lined each side of the otherwise bare walls around me. There were faces there I recognized, I remembered: that young agent who’d been killed escaping custody after an Op gone wrong. The woman who’d been picked up just as she was going to meet a contact—shoved into a dark van, and never heard from again.

I ran my hand under the photos, counting them off in twos, then threes. Dead. This is where the League marked the lives it’d sacrificed, and remembered the bodies that would never get graves. So many—so many men and women who’d died before I ever joined up. Almost eight years of death.

My fingers stilled under the unsmiling face of Blake Johnson. He looked...small. Young. It might have been because he was surrounded by older faces, or maybe the shot had been taken when the League first brought him in. That had to be it. He had looked so much more grown-up when he’d gone out on the Op that’d killed him, hadn’t he? Why was there such a difference between the face of a fourteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old?

Something warm and wet hit my toes. A thin line of black liquid, like ink, was gathering there, soaking my skin. Staining it. That tiny rivulet was the product of four separate, winding streams sliding down the tiled hall. My hand knocked against the next picture as I braced myself, and there was a sharp, white-hot pain in my palm that finally forced me to look up. The last dozen pictures were cracked, their frames hammered together with what looked like twisted pieces of metal and shards of glass.

The red light burned brighter, dimmed, and burned again. Over and over. I raised a hand to shield my eyes, but it was only an EXIT sign. At the next swell of light, I saw the black ink had a source, a growing pool. I saw it wasn’t black ink at all.