In The Afterlight

The new recruits were willing enough; the group of five Blues that had come back—Isabelle, Maria, Adam, Colin, and Gav—had all served on East River’s watch and, in theory, knew how to use weapons. The issue was, after months spent in the wilds of Utah looking like they’d survived a meteor apocalypse, they only took orders from Gav—who didn’t particularly enjoy taking orders from anyone, least of all an “adult shithead” like Cole. He complained about the cramped sleeping conditions, the plain, basic food we ate, the smell of the shampoo—like he was some kind of connoisseur of floral notes in fragrance. Gav was stocky, had a ruddy complexion, and seemed mean enough to want to fight, but only if we begged him.

The Saga of Gav the Asshole ended when Cole hauled him up by the arm from dinner, dragged him into the shooting range, and locked the door behind them. Five minutes and a muffled gunshot later, Gav came out a team player, and Cole looking far less like he wanted to set the kid’s hair on fire.

The other tribe was a group of Greens, who spent days circling the various computers that the resident Greens now seemed chained to night and day, if only to keep the new hands from tampering with their settings. Only one of the girls, Mila, offered to join the tactical team, but I had to work with her each morning to get her to understand what each hand signal meant so she’d be able to follow my commands.

The third group that arrived, two days after Mila’s, found us. And we knew them.

Nico had spotted the three teens looking around Smiley’s, clearly drawn to the crescent moon that we’d painted on the now-defunct bar’s door. Kylie and Liam had all but run for the tunnel door to greet them. It wasn’t until I saw their interaction on the computer screen, the way Liam pounded the back of one of the guys with shaggy dark hair and tan skin, that I recognized him.

“Friends of yours?” Cole asked, coming out of the office as the five them came up through the tunnel laughing, practically talking over each other to get answers.

“You remember Mike,” Liam said, gesturing to the kid in the Cubs baseball hat. He was thinner than I remembered—a good ten pounds lighter from stress and the strain of the road, likely—but I knew him by the wary look he cast in my direction. The kid gave me a stiff nod, then turned to accept a bear hug from Lucy.

Cole let out a faint whistle at that. “Not a fan of yours, I take it.”

“The feeling is mutual,” I assured him. Mike hadn’t liked me or trusted me, and had never really wanted to take the blindfold off his eyes about Clancy.

“That’s Ollie and Gonzo over there, they’re brothers,” Liam continued, pointing to the two teens standing off to the side. One—Gonzo, I think—had his hand on a makeshift knife made out of a glass shard, a stick, and fabric. “They were on watch with me. You guys hungry? I think dinner should just about be ready....”

I caught his arm before he led the group away. “You can’t tell them about Clancy.”

“I already did,” he told me in a thin voice. “And they don’t care as long as he stays locked up.”

“If they try to find him—”

“They won’t,” Liam said, pulling his arm away. “They’re not here for him.”

I wanted to ask him what, exactly, he meant by that, but he was already gone, jogging to catch up to the others. Zu, who’d been idling nearby in the hall, had come to stand beside me, looking up at me in question.

“I’ll tell you later,” I promised her. Because we didn’t have time. I didn’t have time to think about Liam, let alone constantly seek him out in the garage where he kept to himself.

The morning after the Greens perfected the cameras embedded in the glasses, two and a half weeks before March first, Kylie and drove Tommy and Pat out of California. They wound their way down surface streets and access roads until they reached Elko, Nevada, the closest town to Oasis that was more than a few houses baking in the desert sun. The boys spent the next few days hanging out at the fringes of town, appearing, disappearing, causing just enough suspicion for some money-hungry soul to call them in for a reward. There was a close call, during which it seemed like the PSFs who collected them were going to take them out of state, up to the camp in Wyoming, but they changed course at the last moment.

Their glasses captured everything. We had a front row seat as the kids were driven up through the desert, as they were processed into Oasis, as they walked through the hallways with their many doors, as they were brought into their rooms, as the PSFs roughed them up a little to show off, slapping Tommy hard enough to knock the glasses off his face. We charted meal times, lights out, rotations, and compared the personnel lists on the PSF network to the faces we saw.

After one day, we’d already seen the entirety of the premises. The camp was a two-story building, shrouded from outside eyes by a tall electric fence and canopied tarps, both to keep out the sun and to block any views of the yard from above.

We knew that the weekly supplies came at four-thirty every Friday morning. The loud engines and tires chewing gravel and dirt announced their arrival.

“The batteries in the cameras will run out soon,” Nico warned.

“Is everything saved and downloaded somewhere?” Liam asked, standing behind him, next to a clearly impressed Senator Cruz.

Nico turned around in his chair. “Yeah, but why?”

Liam glanced toward the floor. “In case we need to refer back to it when we figure out planning and timing.”