Never Fade

I pressed a hand over my eyes.

“I’ll have you know I haven’t been suspected once,” he said, a bit too pleased with himself. “My parents got the doctored birth papers, which was the hardest part. It’s actually not that difficult to be registered as an official skip tracer. You just have to provide the right paperwork and establish yourself.”

The fire popped loudly, collapsing the small pile of wood we’d gathered. It seemed to be the right place to take a break in the story. I stood and pulled Chubs up off the ground to come with me. Jude started to rise, but I waved him back.

“We’re just going to get some food,” I said. “We’ll be right back.”

“Don’t worry,” Vida said in her sugary sweet voice. She wrapped an arm around Jude’s shoulders. “We have been known to survive two whole minutes without you.”

I tried very hard not to stomp over to the car.

“I really do not trust that girl,” Chubs said, glancing back over his shoulder to where Vida was still sitting, her legs stretched out in front of her. “Youths who dye their hair are always battling inferiority complexes. Or hiding secrets.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Youths?”

He was so focused on her that he almost whacked himself in the face with the rear door of the SUV. Chubs’s hand flew to his left shoulder, as if to protect it.

“Let me see it,” I said, stopping him before he could reach for the tub labeled PROTEIN BARS. He sighed and slipped that arm from its jacket sleeve. There was enough stretch in his shirt’s fabric for him to pull the collar down across his left shoulder where a quarter-sized patch of pink, puckered skin stood out stark against his otherwise dark skin.

“Did they…” My throat suddenly felt dry. “Did they get it out? The bullet?”

He adjusted his shirt, smoothing it back down again. “It was a clean shot. It went straight through. As far as bullet wounds go, it wasn’t anything awful.”

It wasn’t anything awful. I swallowed, a weak attempt to keep from crying.

“Oh jeez, not again,” he said. “I’m fine. I’m alive, right?”

“Why did you come back?” I whispered, hearing my own voice break. “Why didn’t you stay up there, where it was safe?”

Chubs, food cradled against his chest, reached one long arm up to close the door. “And leave you two idiots out on the run?”

I watched him heave in two deep breaths, then send them sailing out in a long white cloud.

“I’m so angry with you,” he said finally, his voice low. “I’m furious. I know why you erased yourself, I understand, but all I want to do is shake some sense back into you.”

“I know,” I said. “I know, okay?”

“Do you, though?” he asked. “You won’t leave these two, even though they could report me—and Lee—back to the League. You put yourself in the line of fire, with the worst people, and you did it without someone there to watch your back. How do you think Lee’s going to react when he finds out what you did?”

The knot in my stomach tightened to the point of pain. He was furious; the strength of the anger powering him was like a beacon to my mind. It made him vulnerable, exposed.

“He won’t find out,” I said. “I told you, all I was going to do was get the flash drive and make sure he was all right. I wasn’t going to…I’m not going to interfere.”

“That is the most bullshit, cowardly thing I have ever heard come out of your mouth,” he shot back. “You lied to us before about what you are, and I got it. I understand why you did it, but now…you’re out, and we can all be together again, and you’re choosing the only option that ends with us apart? Maybe Liam could forgive you for what you did, but if you go back to them, to California, I will never forgive you.”

He started to turn back to the fire and dark-green tent, only to pivot back to me. “Do you remember what it felt like when East River was attacked and we hid in that lake? All that night, I kept thinking, Well, this is the worst thing that will ever happen to me. I thought the same thing when we escaped Caledonia and we had to leave the other guys in our cabin behind, bleeding to death in the snow. And again, when I was shot—but the thing is, I was wrong. Ruby, the worst thing—the worst feeling—was being safe up in that barn and not knowing, for six months, what happened to you and Liam and Suzume. It was seeing your names pop up on the skip-tracer networks with upped rewards and potential sightings, and not being able to find any of you for months.”

Sometimes…most of the time with Chubs, really, it was impossible to tell his anger from his fear. They fed into each other.

“Then, all of a sudden, you were showing up everywhere. In Boston, in a train station in Rhode Island—you were being really careless there, you know.” He shot me a disapproving look. “Liam’s even worse. For months, nothing, then a tip about him being sighted in Philadelphia. I had to doctor evidence that the tip was bad to get it deleted off the network.”

The League had backdoor access to both the PSF and skip-tracer databases of kids, but neither of Liam’s profiles looked like they had been updated in ages. I knew—I checked twice a week. No wonder it looked like it hadn’t been updated the last time I looked.

“How did you know to go to his house?” I asked. The timing couldn’t have been a coincidence.

“I figured it had to be something to do with the protocol Harry set up to help them find each other—based on the sightings, I thought maybe the two of you were coming down to his old house to check to see if his stepdad set up the procedure.”

“Which was what?”

“When Cole and Liam left to join the League, Harry told them that if he and their mom felt like they needed to get out, he’d leave coordinates under the windowsill of Liam’s old bedroom.”

“And you have the coordinates?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “there was nothing there.”

“That must be why he went to find Cole in Philadelphia—to see if he knew anything.”

Chubs rubbed a knuckle over his lips, nodding. “That’s what I’m thinking, too. It doesn’t help us, though, if Cole had no idea, either.”

“I know,” I said. “Running blind, just like old times.”