In The Afterlight

“Chaaaahrts.” He held them up so she could see and the woman—the reaction was instant. She sat straight up and reached for them. “Cerebellum, pineal body, thalamus, interventricular foramen—”

The quality of her voice completely changed—it was sharp, almost aware. There was a refined edge to it, too, as if she molded each word on her tongue before she said it.

“Okaaay,” Cole said, stretching the word out. “That was...unexpected.”

And then the woman turned over on her other side, and promptly passed out.

Cole started to move toward the door, but I stayed exactly where I was, staring at her prone form. I’m not sure what made me want to try, only that I’d had enough of a chance to process what I’d seen in her head to suddenly be curious about it.

“What?” Cole asked, sounding further and further away as I slipped into her mind. The touch was as gentle as I could manage, and instead of trying to navigating the gleaming scenes that popped up behind my eyelids, I let myself be taken along their flow. I saw textbooks stacked high on a desk, young people in clothing decades out of fashion, movies flickering on screens in the dark, test grades; a bouquet of white roses that matched the dress she wore—that I wore—a younger, handsome version of the president waiting for her at the end of a long aisle strung with ropes of flowers; hospitals, machines; playgrounds, baby clothes, a child with black hair sitting at a kitchen table, his back toward me—all of these small moments of memory were cohesive, flowing as smoothly as if I had been guiding them with my own hand. It shifted, then, all of these glimpses into her life—splotches of rainbow color exploded over the scenes, and I was falling backward through white mist, nothing above or below me.

A dream. She was deep enough in sleep now to relax both her mind and her body. When I pulled back out of her mind and away from her bed, she didn’t stir at all.

“What?” Cole asked. “What did you see?”

I saw a mind that worked, that had whole, cohesive memories. And I was more confused than ever.

“I think...” I began, rising up from my knees, “I need to talk to Chubs.”

Either anticipating the need, or just by virtue of his own curiosity, Chubs was in the computer room, sitting at one of the empty desks near the front of the room. Tall stacks of thick, intimidating books were piled around him like fortress walls. A few of the Greens had taken the laptops down into the garage to work on Liam’s and Alice’s projects, but Nico was still there, as he always was. He saw me before Chubs did, and by the expression on his face, I knew I needed to talk to him first.

“Three things,” he said. “First, it’s done.”

“What we talked about?” I asked him.

He held up a plain black flash drive on a string around his neck. “All I need is to find a smaller size—one I can use to modify and work into glasses frames.”

“You’re the best,” I said, meaning it sincerely. Cole had been right—Nico was our man, and not just because he had something to prove.

He flushed a bit, squirming at the praise, then lowered his voice drastically. “The second thing—the other thing we talked about.”

“We’ve talked about a lot of things,” I reminded him.

Nico clicked around, bringing up the now-familiar server log.

“Someone sent something? Again?”

“An email, two days ago, the night before you left for Oasis—this IP is from one of the laptops, while it was still here in this room,” he continued. “It went to an address that’s now been deleted.”

“Maybe someone was making contact with Amplify?” I asked, not bothering to hide the bitterness in my voice.

He shrugged. “Again, the simplest explanation is usually the right one.”

My eyes narrowed slightly. “But you don’t believe that, do you?”

“It’s just...suspicious. Liam made it sound like they only interacted with Amplify in person, so I’m not sure who would be leaking files to them now, or why. This one only stuck out to me because it was a simple message. Do you think it could have been Cole?”

“I’ll ask,” I said. “I don’t know how he’s been contacting his stepfather.”

“This is a pretty secure way of doing it,” Nico said approvingly. “And Liam and the others didn’t hide any of their activity when they sent the media package out last night.”

“They got it together that fast?” I asked flatly. “Did any of it take with the press?”

“Well...that’s the third thing.” He clicked into a folder on the desktop, bringing up yet another new window. “All of it is offline now—Gray’s censors shut the major news sites down until they stripped the story, but the photos and video have been popping up on hundreds of message boards, as well as several of the flash sites that Amplify feeds out to the net. They throw up hundreds of versions of the exact same site with different domain names and search terms embedded in the coding, so that at least one of them will pop up depending on the keywords that people are inputting. I did screenshots of everything I could find in case you wanted to see it.”

He put up the screenshot of CNN’s homepage as an example. The feature not only was on the main page, it took up half of it: tiled photos of the exterior of the camp, the children with their faces blurred coming out of the bunks. Our backs as we ran down the hallway in those last moments, heading for the door. The largest of the photos was of the wall, the dozens of red handprints that, if you were only scrolling by, could have been mistaken for blood. The headline under which everything fell was NO OASIS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT A ‘REHABILITATION’ CAMP.