Never Fade - Bracken Alexandra (читаем бесплатно книги полностью TXT) 📗

I forced a deep breath in, relaxing my face into a fake smile. I had to work this slower, get him to drop his guard so I could get closer. Every nerve in my body was screaming for me to move, run, grab him. My heart throbbed with the refrain: now, now, now. But there were too many bodies between us. Too many hands with guns.

Knox leaned forward in his chair. “Something you wanna say?”

I noticed Vida then, her shock of electric blue hair shining over his shoulder. She moved carefully, long limbs graceful as she swerved and slid through the bodies on the stage.

The look on her face told me everything I needed to know. If Knox made the mistake of leaning back in his chair just then, she would have gladly found a way to break his neck.

Okay? I mouthed to her. Vida nodded, her eyes flicking down to Knox, then back at me. I knew what she was telling me to do.

Michael stood from where he’d been pawing at some poor shaking girl’s chest, and he blocked Vida from my sight again.

“I was just wondering what it would take to convince you to let me go out on hunts,” I said. I slipped my frozen hands into the back pockets of my pants as I walked up to the stage. “To let me go out and get supplies for everyone?”

Knox threw his head back and laughed. Several of the girls and younger boys sitting on the platform around his feet forced out breathy laughter of their own. My skin prickled; it sounded like a pack of dogs with sliced vocal cords was trying to bark.

I felt a body move behind me, coming up at my back, but I didn’t turn to see who it was. These kids weren’t about to force me out through intimidation. Michael could hit me, Brett could haul me back outside by force, but what I could do to them went beyond the physical.

“You?” Michael scoffed. “A Green?”

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Don’t tell me you’re afraid I’ll prove there’s nothing special about you Blues after all. I’ve always heard you guys were all brawn, no brain.”

Just like I thought—he definitely wasn’t used to being spoken to this way. The bully in him was fascinated and very, very angry all at once. Most likely because everyone around us looked like they were starting to wonder why I couldn’t go out and get them the supplies they obviously needed.

Knox stood slowly, tapping the ash from his cigarette out on the ground.

Come here, I thought. Come here and let me end this.

The trickle began at the back of my mind, turning to a full-on roar. I could do this. One step closer, and I’d show him why they ranked my kind as Orange, and his only as Blue.

I would tear him down.

Knox’s hair slid forward, past his ears. When he pushed it back, I saw he had woven together bright pieces of paper into rings around each finger. They almost looked like… They almost looked like the project a bored kid would make with a candy wrapper. I didn’t know what the hell they were or why he was wearing them, but it gave me an idea.

“How about a trade?” I asked. “No work, no food, right? You let me join one of those hunting teams so I can eat, and I provide enough food to feed everyone for the winter.”

Knox scoffed, rolling his eyes.

“I’m not lying,” I said. “You saw what we had in our packs. That’s just what we could fit in our bags. We had to leave tons of it behind.”

Vida’s full, petal-pink lips parted, a silent question dripping from them.

Of course I was lying. She knew that. Come on, I thought. He’d have to accept. I could feel the mood of the kids around us shifting in eagerness. They watched me with a new light in their eyes.

“There was canned food, walls of it—and gallons of clean water. Toilet paper, even,” I added, because, let’s face it, there are some things you want but don’t necessarily need. “Clothes, blankets, you name it. You could stock this place nicely.”

By the time I finished speaking, it was so silent I could hear the plink, plink, plink of water dripping from a nearby leak in the roof.

“Oh, yeah? And where is this wonderland? Half past nowhere, straight on into your imagination?” Knox was pacing across the stage again, still blocked by the kids sitting at the edge of it. If he didn’t bite soon, I was going to have to jump up there myself.

“Why would I tell you?” I asked. “When you won’t give me what I want?”

That was how relationships worked these days. No one did anything for each other unless it benefitted them in some way. Knox had clearly seen enough of the world we lived in to have figured this out, too.

But he didn’t like it.

Come on, I thought, fuming. Come on!

With one jump, he was off the platform and I was shoved back by an invisible set of hands onto the cement. My teeth clacked against each other, and I just missed losing the tip of my tongue between them. Michael’s laughter boomed around me, like it was echoing off the timid, silent figures circling us.

“You think I need to trade you something?” Knox spat. “You think I don’t have other ways of making you and your friends talk?”

My hands pressed flat against the ground, wrists throbbing from the impact. This kid had more pride than greed—something I hadn’t expected. He didn’t even see that more food and supplies at his disposal meant more power for him. All he saw was a little girl who claimed to know better than him, who was giving him a solution to a problem he had created and stirring up unwanted questions in the kids around him. Even if the kids didn’t believe me, they wanted to.

“Sure you do,” came Vida’s voice. “But are you willing to risk waiting when the National Guard is going to be back to clear the joint out?”

She had made herself comfortable in Knox’s seat, to the visible horror of every kid nearby.

Michael whirled back around, fury rising from his shoulders like steam. “Knox! You gonna take that from her?”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared of a few little soldiers,” Vida continued, inspecting her broken fingernails. “Is that why you keep trying to prove her wrong? Because you’re scared of what’ll happen if she’s right?”

“C’mon,” came Brett’s voice somewhere near my right. “You have to admit it sounds too good to be true. We’ve been up and down the river a million times looking for food and never found so much as an empty bag of chips.”

“So you’d blow an opportunity like this?” I asked. “After you already saw the proof?”

For his rough exterior, Brett was surprisingly reasonable when it came to hashing things out. “I could go with her—make sure she’s not trying to pull a fast one. I’d be happy to take another trip back with a team and get the supplies—”

“Oh, you could?” Michael snarled. “You’d be happy to? Whose team are you talking about—mine? You think I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, dickhead? That I haven’t been watching your weak-ass attempts to steal my game—?”

Knox held up a hand, stopping them before they could start circling each other like starving feral cats. “The answer is no. Not now, not ever.”

“I should have known,” I said, pushing myself onto my feet. “You left those kids out in the freezing cold to die. Why would you ever care enough to give everyone here the food and supplies they need?”

You can push someone’s button over and over again to get what you want, but there comes a point when your finger slips and you finally hit the wrong one.

“Michael,” Knox murmured, suddenly very quiet. Vida had worked enough of a spell over the room that it took calling his name twice to get him to snap out of it. “Take these two…pearls of girls outside.”

“Knox,” Brett began. “What about the supplies…?”

Knox’s fist flew out fast, clipping the other boy under the chin. “Take them outside. If they’re so damn eager to be hunters, then they can prove it at initiation tonight, like everyone else had to.”

Vida pushed herself up off the chair and dropped onto the floor next to Knox. Whether he meant to or not, his eyes flicked down over her face and body, over every exposed inch of rich, dark skin. “If you get through it, you’re on. But if I see your faces one more time before I send someone to get you, I will burn them off myself.”