Never Fade (23 page)

When he finally reached me, he grabbed my arm. I squirmed away from the intense light he was trying to shine directly into my face. I lurched away from him, the ground rising up to meet me. “Do you see it?” I heard myself asking. “Do you see it? Give me—give me the light.”

“—ask
her
!” Vida was shouting. “She attacked
me
!”

Chubs dutifully aimed the flashlight where I pointed. “You need to sit down. Hey! Are you even listening to me?”

I patted around the dirt, fingers groping through the mulch, rocks, and roots. I knew the moment I had found it; the black shell was unnaturally smooth and still warm to the touch. During the fight, the screen had flipped down to the ground, stifling the glow.

“What is that?” Chubs crouched down next to me. “A phone?”

Close, but not quite.

“A Chatter?” came Jude’s startled voice. “Where did you get that?”

He was standing behind us, supporting a swaying Vida. No—he wasn’t supporting her. He had one arm across her chest to keep her from going at my throat.

Dumb, brave kid,
I thought for the thousandth time. I turned my eyes back down on the screen and flicked it on.

I had interrupted her in the middle of typing a message. Good. I brought the screen up close to my eyes, squinting at the series of nonsense numbers and letters. The little black line was still blinking, waiting for her to finish up.

I HAVE THEM // PHASE TWO INSTRLWJERL:KS SLKJDFJ

“You
bitch
,” I said, looking up. “You really thought you could play us? Turn us back over to the League? What did Alban promise you—that you could take over as team leader?”

I was half blind with rage, too angry to let her answer. I stood, throwing the device on the ground. Vida and Jude both took generous steps back. My brain was humming with need, with nothing more than the desire to pry into hers and leave it mangled and ruined. My anger added a boost to their strength and I thought, I really did, if I let them loose, the invisible hands would take her this time without me needing to grab her. I turned, ready to let them fly.

Instead, I felt a hand close over my wrist and pull me back. Chubs was on his feet now, too, his eyes fixed on the screen. I heard him click a button, and then the Chatter was hovering in front of my face, and I was reading an old, received message.

HEAD SOUTH ON 40 // ADDRESS AS DISCUSSED // EXPLAIN UPDATED OP IMMEDIATELY UPON CONTACT // TELL HER I AM SORRY

“Tell her I’m sorry?” I turned back toward Vida, who had turned away, her face a stone mask. “Who is this? Cole?”

Vida’s swollen lip slurred her speech, and when she spoke, it was so quiet I had to strain to hear her. Her reluctance proved the blossoming theory in my mind—after all, there was only one person she protected like this.

“No,” she said, “it’s Cate.”

I was ready to have it all out there, but Chubs insisted that we return to the camp and rebuild the fire with a sharp “I prefer to not take my bad news in the freezing dead of night, thank you very much.”

He steered me toward one end of the smothered fire and headed for his car. I was distantly aware of the beep of the car unlocking and the door slamming shut. When he sat back down next to me, Chubs started in on cleaning the cuts on my face and arms with a total lack of sympathy.

“Someone better start talking now,” he said, “because, trust me, you don’t want to hear what I have to say about all this. Especially at one o’clock in the morning.”

Vida sniffed, drawing her knees up to her chest. The right half of her face was cast entirely in darkness. Or covered in an enormous bruise.

I held up the Chatter to the dim firelight, turning it back and forth. “Who gave you this? Nico?”

She waited so long to answer I thought for sure she wouldn’t. All I got was a shrug. Her nails were clawing into the dirt, dragging clumps of it up into her clenched fists.

“So he and Cate are in on this, too?” I demanded. “Who else?”

Vida crossed her arms over her chest and stared out into the dark distance.

“Why keep this from us?” Jude asked. “Did she ask you to? It doesn’t make any sense, and it
really
doesn’t make sense that you still won’t talk about it. You got caught, and now the Op has been compromised. And what are you supposed to do when that happens?”

Accept, adapt, and act. Quickly.
The words had been scrawled onto one of the walls in the training room. They might as well have been tattooed directly onto our brains.

“Fine,” she said, circling her shoulders back as if to ease the tension there.
She’s angry,
I realized. Vida was furious—with herself. The perfect little soldier had blown her own Op, the special one Cate had entrusted her with. She was breathing hard, sucking air up between her clenched teeth. Cate was the single most important person in her life, maybe the only one who really mattered to her. I had an idea of why she had withheld that information, but I wanted to hear her admit it.

“Cate and Cole planned this whole thing, pretty much from the second we brought his ass back to HQ,” Vida said. “They go back. She took him under her wing when he first joined, helped train him. He told her the truth about your dumbass Prince Charming and the flash drive, and you were the solution they came up with. For whatever reason, Cate stupidly trusts you to handle shit.”

“Why have Cole give me the story, then?”

“They’re watching her. Rob and the others. She knew what he was like, or at least figured it out a few months ago, but she was trying to stay close to his creepy ass to make sure he didn’t come after us. She couldn’t go to Alban or any of the advisers, because she was afraid she’d be reassigned from us if they saw her as being ‘difficult.’ Nico showed Cole, Cate, and me the video of Blake being offed and she just about went ballistic.”

“When was this?”

“Just after you left HQ.” Vida tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, glancing over at me. “Nico said you told him not to, but something you said to Cole made him push the issue. They’re sitting on the video until we bring the intel back.”

Of course—because keeping the Children’s League together was the top priority here. Not protecting kids. Not cutting off the psychopaths.

“Let me see if I understand this,” Chubs began. “Cate was in on everything from the beginning, but she kept silent on it? Was that to act as some kind of fail-safe?”

“Not bad, Grannie,” Vida said. “Cole said Cate’s role had to stay a secret, even from you. If you dipshits got caught and were brought in for questioning, he didn’t want you to be able to implicate her—if he took the fall, at least Cate would still be around to be on our side. She hated it, but I told her she had to agree, otherwise I wasn’t going to help you. She didn’t say yes until she realized there was no way to get Jude removed from the mission without it making people suspicious. Rob requested him personally.”

Jude looked like he was a breath away from throwing up all over himself. The firelight drew out the flush of panic in his cheeks.

Vida threw a truly pitying look his way. “Cate said he ran after you called him out. Went totally off the fucking grid before Barton could bring him in for questioning.”

“So he won’t be there when we get back,” Jude said, sighing in relief.

No, but it meant that I had released a furious monster out into the world to rip it apart and remake to his own liking.

“That’s everything I know,” Vida said. “The end. But I’m telling you now, if either of you breathe a word—one goddamn word—about Cate, I will come down on you so hard, they’ll be naming hurricanes after me for a fucking century.”

I opened my mouth to fire back at her but thought better of it in the end. For as long as I’d known Vida, I’d felt a sharp sense of pity over her obvious worship of Cate. I thought I’d been given a glimpse of the real Cate that lived below the pristine exterior. But now it was becoming harder and harder to believe that either one of us was completely right about who she was. To me, her belief in the League had always seemed naive—I really thought she blinded herself to everything going on around her to stay in that happy world that existed only in her mind. Maybe Jude really was right, and the League of today didn’t remotely resemble the one she had willingly joined years ago.

Then why did she only give herself up to me in pieces? And why had it taken me so long to put them together into a somewhat complete picture?

“You’ve been communicating directly with Cate, I suppose?” Chubs took the Chatter out of my limp hand and turned it over. “She’s been guiding you along?”

“Yeah,” Vida said. “She sent me the routes to get down here. Too bad she couldn’t just load his ass into Google Maps. Not even Nico has been able to track him.”

The screen between Chubs’s fingers flashed to life and let out a low, vibrating growl. The light it emitted was bright enough that we could all watch as his eyebrows rose steadily up past his glasses’ frames to his hairline.

“Well, maybe she can’t send exact coordinates,” he said, flipping it around, “but she has an idea of where we could start.”

TWELVE

TARGET SIGHTED OUTSIDE NASHVILLE // HOSTILE BLUE TRIBE IN NEARBY AREA // APPROACH WITH CAUTION

“The sighting isn’t listed in the skip-tracer network,” Chubs said. His finger flicked against the screen of the small tablet I had fished out of the glove box for him, scrolling down. “That’s not surprising, though. I haven’t been able to pick up an Internet signal in a few days to download an update.”

“What is that thing?” I asked. At the top of the color screen was Liam’s bruised, scowling face—the picture that had been taken, I guess, when he was brought into Caledonia. Next to the photo was a list of the same information I had been able to access in the PSF network—the only update being that his reward had gone up to $200,000 and his last reported sighting was outside of Richmond, Virginia.

“It has direct access to the skip-tracer network,” Chubs said. “You get one after you register and are approved by the government. The information on there is closely guarded—the PSFs don’t have access to it, so they can’t swoop in and steal a score.”

It was a touch screen, easy enough to flick through the various listings beneath it. A skip tracer named P. Everton had been the one to sight him in Richmond—he had posted the following on Liam’s listing:
Stewart driving red Chevy truck, stolen plates. Target in jeans and black hooded sweatshirt. Lost sight of car during pursuit.

“Why would they be sharing information with one another like this?” I asked. “If only one of them gets the reward?”

“Because if a tip turns out to be good, you’re upped in the standings. Each kid, especially the big bounties, are assigned points in addition to dollar amounts—but you can also earn points by adding tips or supporting the PSFs when they are trying to locate a kid.” Chubs shrugged. “The top twenty or so skip tracers get more supplies from the government, not to mention better equipment—and easy access to the Internet. That alone makes a huge difference. I can’t even tell you how many stupid kids have been found because of the pictures and postings their families had online. I think that’s probably how the PSFs found me the first time. Mom forgot she had an album of our cabin up on some website.”

I nodded, continuing to scroll through the list. There were only about a thousand or so active listings of kids, many of them without pictures. These, I assumed, were the lucky ones who had been added to the online IAAN registry by their unsuspecting parents for updates and instructions from the government, but who had avoided being collected and brought into a camp. They had either found a great place to hide or had mastered the art of living off the grid. I kept scrolling.

Dale, Andrea. Dale, George Ryan. Daley, Jacob Marcus.

Daly, Ruby.

The picture was of a ten-year-old me, eyes wide under a ratty mess of wet, dark hair.
That’s right,
I thought.
It had been raining the day they brought us in
.

“What the hell?” I held it up for him to see. “Four hundred thousand dollars for a reward?”

“What—Oh, that.” Chubs plucked the tablet from my hands and said grimly, “Congratulations, you’re officially a big score.”

“That’s—I just—
Why?
”

“Do you really need me to break it down for you?” he said, sighing. “You escaped from
Thurmond
with the help of the
League
, and are, oh, by the way, an
Orange
.”

“What are all of the listings?” I asked. “I’ve never been in Maine or Georgia.”

He held the screen up for me to see. “Look closer.”

Sighted outside of Marietta, Georgia, moving east. J. Lister.

At least five of them were from J. Lister, otherwise known as the teenager in the driver’s seat next to me.

“I would have done more, but you get penalized for spamming the network with false tips. I try to do that for you and Lee whenever I can, to throw off the other skip tracers.”