In the Afterlight - Bracken Alexandra (онлайн книги бесплатно полные TXT) 📗

“Ruby?”

“I’m here.” The words came out of me in a rush. “Are you okay? Tell me you’re okay—”

“I’m okay. I’ll see you soon, under—understand? I’m sorry—the—connect—out—”

Dial tone.

I stared at the device, letting Cole reach over and turn it off. I didn’t have the strength to fight off the numb dejection that bled through me. I needed more than that. She had to know—she had to know how sorry I was.

“They’re driving through the middle of nowhere,” he told me. “Bad reception. Harry will call again when they get closer.”

I nodded. “Do you think it’s true? They’re going to attack Kansas HQ?”

“Their servers are offline,” Nico said. “I just tried to ping them and...nothing.”

“I’m going to try to make telephone contact with some of the agents who are still out in the field, see if they know.” Cole tucked my hair behind my ear, ran a knuckle down around my cheek. “This is a solid win. Cate’s okay. We have an actual fighting force coming. Two weeks and we’ll be on the other side of this. Focus on that for now. Don’t let this Kansas thing trip you up. As far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter either way.”

“Of course it matters,” I said. “So many people have already died—”

“I get it,” he said, “I didn’t mean it like that, only that the League is done either way. Claiming the hit as their own was a desperate, last gasp for relevancy. Focus on the future. The cure, now that we have Dr. Gray back in working order. Thurmond—” He tapped his fingers on the printout. “Harry went to all that trouble to track this down for us. Let’s put it to good use.”

He stood, taking the printout with him to tack up on the wall. I stayed where I was until he left, presumably to make good on his promise to investigate Cate’s claims, and then rose, moving toward the satellite images of Thurmond’s grounds, as if in a dream. My eyes traced the rings of cabins—lopsided, uneven rings, apparently. Seeing it from above, like a free bird passing overhead, smoothed out the sick feeling that had started to squirm around in my stomach.

“It’s much bigger now,” Nico said. I nodded, accepting the permanent markers he handed me.

He stepped back to lean against the desk and watch. The longer I worked, the more attention I seemed to attract, until I knew I had a full-fledged audience without ever needing to turn around. I labeled each of the larger structures—FACTORY and PSF BARRACKS on the two rectangular-shaped buildings to the left of the rings of cabins, GARDEN on the square of green at the northernmost point of the camp, and MESS HALL, INFIRMARY, and GATE on the right. Then I moved on to the cabins, and marked the circular CONTROL TOWER. Each ring of small cabins was outlined with either the green or blue marker to indicate its inhabitants.

I felt the focus of someone’s gaze between my shoulder blades like sunlight coming through a lens, burning until I couldn’t ignore the small waves of self-consciousness that began to rise. It was irrational, but it felt like I was revealing something shameful, something I had to be embarrassed about. My mood had slid so quickly from eager excitement to horror and pity that I felt myself start to prickle in self-defense.

“Are there only Greens and Blues there?” I turned around at Senator Cruz’s question. She stood in the doorway, her arm looped through Dr. Gray’s, who seemed to be trying to come closer. Nico took one look at her, froze, and then fled to the back of the room, almost tripping as he sat back down.

“There were Yellow, Orange, and Red children,” I answered, looking back at the women, “but they were moved out of the camp about five and a half years ago. The Reds were taken into a training program, Project Jamboree. The Yellows were moved to another camp in Indiana that specializes in non-electrical containment.”

“What about the Orange kids?” Dr. Gray asked.

My hand stilled, as did the air around me.

“We have no confirmed reports of their whereabouts,” I said.

“Where is this?” Dr. Gray’s words were still slightly halting, as if she half-expected them to start failing her again at any moment. She took a step closer, taking in the patches of wild grass and snow. If anyone looked hard enough, they would have been able to see the little dots of blue uniforms working in the Garden.

“This isn’t Thurmond,” she said. “Thurmond was only one building. I saw it myself.”

“Once they moved the initial research programs out, they rapidly expanded the camp to house more kids,” I said. “I’ve added a little R, O, or Y next to the cabins they used to reside in. They switched out the non-electrical locks on the Yellow cabins and never changed them back. As far as I know, the Red cabins only had additional spigots and sprinklers inside.”

Senator Cruz put a hand on my shoulder and she leaned forward, inspecting my work. “Why were the Reds and Oranges in the second ring from the center, instead of in the outermost? If they were going to cause problems, it seems like they’d try to move them as far away from the Control Tower as possible.”

“They surrounded them on either side with a buffer of Green cabins,” I explained, “so that if they tried to attack the camp controllers, or tried to escape using their abilities, they’d have to burn down a few kids on their way.”

“Did that ever stop them?”

I shook my head.

“Did anyone ever escape?”

I shook my head again. “The ones who tried were shot before they reached the fence. They kept at least one sniper on the roof of the Control Tower at all times—two if a group was working out in the Garden.”

“Well, that kills what little faith I had left in humanity,” Cole said, coming back in.

“Any luck?” I asked him.

“Nada,” he said. “We’ll talk later. Right now, can you walk us through a typical day? I’m sure you had some kind of a routine, right?”

“Five A.M. wake-up alarm. Five minutes later, the doors unlock. After that, it changes by month. They gave us two meals a day, so if you didn’t have breakfast scheduled, you went to the Wash Rooms and worked for the next six hours until midday, when they gave you lunch. Then you had time in your cabin for about two hours before you started an evening work shift, usually some kind of cleaning, like laundry, or mucking out the terrible sewage system that always got backed up. Then dinner. Then at eight, lights out.”

“My God,” was Senator Cruz’s only comment.

“There were over three thousand of us,” I said. “They had the system down to the second. They even figured out how to accommodate for the shrinking number of PSFs, once everyone started finishing their four years for the draft.”

“What would you say the ratio of kids to PSFs was?” Cole said. “Ballpark it.”

I’d already given him this information in my plan, but he was asking for the benefit of the two women in front of me.

“Cate told me there were usually two hundred in the camp at all times, plus an additional twenty bodies working in the Control Tower. There may be fewer now that they’re in the process of closing the camp.” I shook my head. “It doesn’t sound like a lot, but they’re strategically placed, and they’re given permission to harass and bully the kids.”

For someone who had been so involved in researching a cure for IAAN, Dr. Gray looked sick at all of this, like it was her first time hearing it. That seemed impossible. Certain things were bound to be confidential, but her husband was the president—he’d played an integral role in the development of the rehabilitation camp program.

She looked away. “...You’re like my son, are you not?”

“Yes,” I said, “but not in the way that matters.”

“Were you there at Thurmond while he was?”

“After. We didn’t overlap at all. I didn’t arrive at the camp until they’d already started to expand it. Is there a reason you’re asking?”

She cocked her head to the side and I fought off the shudder that threatened to move through me. The simple movement was Clancy, all Clancy.