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

“I didn’t expect to see you,” he said casually enough. “Did he go to Sawtooth, then?”

Did he really expect me to answer that?

No. Obviously not. “How does it feel?” he asked, placing a hand flat against the glass. “To be on that side of things? To control the flow of information?”

“About as good as knowing you’ll never experience it for yourself again.”

“It’s incredible how things have turned out,” he said. “A year ago, you were still in that camp, still behind that fence. Now look at you. Look at me.”

“I am looking at you,” I told him. “And all I see is someone who wasted every chance they had to really make a difference for us.”

“But you understand now, don’t you?” he asked, surprised. “You see why I made the choices I did. Everyone survives in their own way. When it really comes down to it, would you have changed any of the decisions you made, good or bad? Would you have stayed in Thurmond, with the opportunity to escape within reach? Would you have gone straight to Virginia Beach, not let them convince you to try to find East River? Would you have sealed off the younger Stewart’s memories? You’ve come such a long way. It’d be a shame for our friendship to end here.”

“I think there was a compliment buried in there somewhere...?”

He snorted. “Just an observation. I wasn’t sure you had it in you. I’d hoped, though.”

“Oh, really?”

“Didn’t you ever ask yourself why I wanted you to come with me after East River was attacked? It wasn’t because I liked you all that much.”

“Obviously not. You wanted me to show you how I messed with others’ memories.”

“Well, that. But also because I was trying to gather people around me who could step up and help me build this future. Granted, I probably wouldn’t have wasted time trying with this camp strategy. I would have taken us straight to the top. I still will.”

“If only you weren’t trapped in this little glass cage,” I said flatly.

“If only.” Clancy smiled. “It’ll be so easy to get rid of everyone now—if what Stewart, the elder Stewart, told me is true, you’ve badly hurt the government’s credibility. I’ll take it a step further. My father. His moronic advisors. The camp controllers. One by one, I’ll tear their lives apart. The thing is, Ruby, you can stand at the head of those kids, and they’ll listen, they will, if for no other reason because you’re an Orange and it’s the hierarchy of things. But you can’t bring the world to its knees the way I will.”

“The way you will, huh?” I asked, knocking against the glass. “When’s that?”

One corner of Clancy’s lips turned up, and I felt a cold drip of something run down my spine.

“Ruby, this is your last chance to align with the right side of history,” he said. “I’m not going to offer again. We can leave now and no one will get hurt.”

His gaze was as black and bottomless as it had always been, sucking me in, trying to drown me in the smooth, easy possibilities he presented.

“Enjoy your time in your box,” I said and turned to go, holding his laundry out in front of me in distaste.

“One last thing,” Clancy called. I didn’t look back, but it hardly mattered to him. “Hello, Mother.”

I whipped the door to the hall open, but the woman was already gone, chased out by her son’s laughter.

That night I fell into a deep sleep, the kind that grips you by the ribcage and refuses to be shaken off easily. The voice in my dream, the same one that had been echoing somewhere behind me as I walked down the familiar path to Cabin 27 at Thurmond, shifted from the deep baritone of a man to a loud, almost shrill call, this time from a woman.

“—up! Ruby, Ruby, come on—”

The lights in the room were on again, highlighting the ashen quality of Vida’s face as it hovered over mine. She shook me again, violently, until I broke free from that last bit of disorienting sleep.

“What happened?” Five minutes could have passed, or five hours—I couldn’t tell. Zu hovered behind Vida, her cheeks already wet with tears. Fear ripped through me as I grabbed Vida’s arm, feeling the way she trembled.

“I was in the computer lab,” she began, the words pouring out of her. Was she shaking? Vida—shaking? “I was talking to Nico, watching the photos come in as Cole took them, and it went quiet for about an hour—I had just left to go to bed but then another photo came through and Nico ran out to get me and...and, Ruby...”

“What? Tell me what’s going on!” I tried to untangle myself from the sheet, my heart hammering in my chest like I’d just sprinted ten miles.

“All he kept saying was...” Vida swallowed. “He kept saying one thing—Stewart is dead.”

21

“LIAM OR COLE?”

The question, the same one I’d asked her a hundred times, became more frantic as we made our way down the hall toward the computer room. The clock on the wall inside said it was two in the morning.

“Vida,” I begged, “Liam or Cole?”

“They don’t know,” she said, the same answer she’d given me the first ninety-nine times I asked. “They can’t tell from the photo.”

“I can—” The words were out before I could think about why it would be a terrible idea. “Let me see it. I can tell them apart.”

“I don’t think so.” She caught my arm before I could go charging into the room. I barely felt the touch. My whole body had run ice-cold. Panic made my thoughts disjointed, bursts of terrifying images interlaced with thoughts of not him, not them, not now—I couldn’t break the pattern, I couldn’t catch my breath.

“No!” That single word, a sharp bark from Chubs, brought Vida up short. “Absolutely not! Take her back to the room and stay there!”

There were a number of Greens hovering outside the window.

“Get lost!” Vida barked at them. And by the force of her voice alone, they did, scrambling to get away as she opened the computer room’s door and thrust me inside.

“What’s going on? Did something happen?” Senator Cruz appeared in the hallway, Alice not far behind, her flaming red hair collected in a crooked ponytail, red marks from her pillow and sheets on her face. Vida must have tried to explain to them but I heard none of it. Nico looked like he’d been sick several times over, and the smell in the computer room seemed to align with that theory. He was drenched in sweat as I came toward him.

“Do you...do you really want to see?”

“This is a bad idea! Ruby, listen to me, you don’t want to—” Chubs’s pitch got higher until it finally cracked. He leaned back against the wall, his face buried in his hands.

Nico didn’t move. His hands were limp in his lap, forcing me to reach over and click through the series of photos that had come through from the cell phone on Cole. There was a test shot in broad daylight—a distant mountain, Liam’s back as he faced it, looking out into the distance. There were three dozen of a low, squat building, all taken after sundown. He’d captured the PSFs posted outside, a ladder up to the building’s roof, a sniper in position. If there was a fence around the camp, Cole and Liam were already inside of it when they’d started snapping the photos.

“They’re going in,” Senator Cruz said. “I thought they were supposed to stay outside?”

They had gone inside. The images were fuzzy, lacking the brightness the full moon outside had provided. They were high up, looking down at tables below, the heads bent over them, eating. The kids wore dark red scrubs—the same uniforms we all had to wear in the camps, but the color—I hadn’t seen that shade in years—

The next image was of one of those kids in uniform looking up, eyes locking on the phone. My finger hesitated over the mouse before clicking again. Nico made a small noise at the back of his throat, his hand closing over mine. “Ruby, you don’t want to...”

I pressed my finger down.

There was a moment where my mind couldn’t make sense of what it was seeing. The photos were taken inside of a dark room, the walls painted black, the lights lining the floors rather than the ceilings. The figure at the center of the room was slumped forward in a chair, the weight of his body straining against the restraints around his chest. Blond hair fell over his face, masking it. My hand gripped the desk as I clicked forward again. A metallic taste flooded my mouth when I noticed the splatters of blood on his neck and ears. The angle made it impossible to tell, I needed another photo—