Never Fade (41 page)

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Liam nod. Of course he understood—he’d gone off a number of times by himself because he didn’t want us to see him fray and unravel. When you have people relying on you, you can’t put on anything other than a brave, determined face, otherwise you chip away at their confidence, too.

“There has to be something in the medicine…in the bag,” he was saying, “something to help you rest or to…to…”

They had gotten the medicine back to camp, then. Chubs had administered it. The fact that Liam was even as coherent as he was now meant that the hit hadn’t been for nothing—some small good had come out of it.

I took my boots when he offered them, slipping them on. The numbed sensation was working up from my toes to my ankles to my calves, and I was waiting for it to spread. I was so tired; I hurt so badly. I felt myself slipping under a flat, gray ice, and I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up from under it. I sucked in a deep breath, tilting my head back—like that would be enough to stop the tears.

“Tell me,” he pleaded. “I can’t—This is… It’s too much.”

Too much.
My mind latched onto that single phrase.
Too much, too much, too much.

He knelt down next to me, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallowed; I couldn’t tear my eyes away from it, not until he reached over, his finger running along the scar on my forehead. When I didn’t flinch away, I felt it trail feather-soft down the side of my face, across my cheek. His hands were rough and chapped from the unforgiving weather as they slid back through my hair to the hollows behind my ears. I closed my eyes, letting his thumbs brush away the tiny flakes of snow that had caught in my lashes.

Move,
I told myself as I forced my eyes open.
Move
—because he wasn’t. I could feel him leaning toward me, dipping his head closer to mine, and I mirrored him, tilting my face up to meet him halfway. Liam’s eyes were closed, and it seemed, just for a second, almost like he was trapped in some kind of a dream. I felt his breath warm my lips.

The touch was so assured, and I had wanted it for so long, that in that tiny slice of morning, it was almost easy to forget what I had done.

That he wasn’t supposed to know me at all, let alone care enough to try.

Too much.

“What are you doing?” I whispered.

Every part of him seemed to seize up, and I recognized the alarm in his face when I saw it. Liam jerked his hands away, falling off balance in the process. He tried to scramble up onto his feet, but he was slow and weak, and the best he could manage was looking away as the tips of his ears went bright red. He was on his feet and moving before the feeling of his touch disappeared from my skin.

He muttered something, tucking his hands up under his arms as he shook his head. He backed away two steps at a time, and I wondered what kind of expression I must have been wearing for him to mirror such a lost one back to me.

“It’s okay,” I told him, though it was so far from the truth, I would have laughed if I wasn’t already crying. It was amazing—I had no idea you could keep sinking, even after you’d hit the dark bottom of your life. But letting him get that close, letting him comfort me after everything I had done, was a bruising low.

Before I could finish, Liam was talking again, and that strange tone was back in his voice. Even as he spoke, he was shaking his head. “Ruby—you’re Ruby. Chubs said that you and Vida and Little Buddy there were helping him look for me. He said that you and me, we never met before, but we had to have, we had to, because I know your face. I know your voice. How does that work?”

“I talked to you while you were sick,” I said, feeling panic grip at my stomach. “In the warehouse in Nashville.”

“No—
no
—I mean, yeah, I know you did.” Liam was rambling in a way that was almost agitated. Pacing, too, the small width of the wooden deck. “That’s not it; I know it’s not.”

End this now. Don’t twist it any further. A clean cut and you can go and finish this.

“I’m League,” I blurted out, because it was the one thing I knew would stop him from coming closer—the one thing that would change his look of compassion to one of total and complete contempt.

“You—” he began. “What? That’s not…that’s not possible.”

The camps. I needed to think about the camps we’d free as soon as I brought the intel back to Cole and Cate. The good work that would come from this, rising up above the blood pooling under my feet and the trail of smoke and fire my footsteps left behind. That was my future now. That was the only thing there was for me.

“You’re right, though. We did meet before,” I said. “At a safe house in Maryland. I handed you the money from your brother, remember?”

He did now. I could see it in his face, the way he squared his shoulders. I kept my eyes on the trees behind his head, my arms wrapped tight around my center to try to trap in that last bit of warmth. He looked like he was about to be sick.

“But you got out, right?” Liam said. “Because Chubs would have told me. He wouldn’t have kept that from me. You were League, but now you’re—”

“I’m League, and so are Vida and Jude.” I knew Chubs well enough to know exactly why he hadn’t let that piece of information slip. “He didn’t tell you because he knew that you’d want to split. But he and I have a deal.”

“I—I don’t get it,” Liam managed to squeeze out. He was backing away again, running a hand over his face. “A deal?”

I’d already driven the knife into his chest. Twisting it now would finish things forever.

Don’t,
a small voice whispered.
Not again
.

He stared at me, waiting, shaking from the cold or anger, I couldn’t tell. I came toward him, and he let me. Liam was breathing harder now, a wheezing, wet whistle, as I reached for the bottom hem of his brother’s jacket and ripped the stitches Cole had hastily sewn in place.

The flash drive was a simple black rectangle, stamped with Leda Corp’s golden swan. It was warm from having lived so close to his body for the past few hours—days, maybe.

Liam stumbled back, his every thought crashing over his face. “What the hell is that?”

“Your brother,” I said. “He sent us to find you. You took his jacket instead of yours when you ran in Philly. And you took this with you.”

“What is that?” he repeated, trying to reach for it. I closed my fist and shoved the damn thing in my pocket before I was tempted to do something stupid. All of this for a tiny piece of cheap plastic.

“It’s classified intel,” I told him, forcing my feet forward, up the path. “From the Op your brother was running.”

I half hoped he wouldn’t come after me. That he’d stay down there, and I could go back and walk through the camp, through whatever woods we were in, and just disappear. But nothing in my life was ever going to be that easy. Instead, he pushed past me on the trail, taking those first few steps like he was staggering out of knee-deep water, unsteady and coughing up the fluid trapped in his lungs. Instinctively, I put a hand out to steady him, but he ripped his arm away and kept pressing forward, calling Chubs’s name.

He must have already been out looking for us. We met him on the path, just as it curved into the campsite. The kid was a mess of sleepy eyes and rumpled clothes; his brain must not have fully warmed up yet, because he hadn’t thought to put on a coat or shoes despite the frigid temperature.

“What?” he cried, looking between us. “What’s going on?”

“I can’t even believe you,” Liam rasped. “What the hell kind of game are you playing here?”

Chubs blinked. “What are you…?”

“I know everything!” Liam stalked over to him, still breathing hard from the climb back up the trail. “How long were you planning on keeping this from me? The League.
Really?
Jesus—you’re supposed to be the smart one! You made a deal with
them
?”

“Oh.” Chubs rubbed a hand over the tufts of his dark hair and blew out a long, exasperated sigh. I had about three seconds to deflect Liam’s anger back on me before Chubs said something he’d really regret.

“Yes,
that
!” Liam charged up into the campsite, stalking over to the smothered fire. He wouldn’t let me get close enough to so much as share his breathing space.

“Will you please listen to me?” I asked. “It was all my idea—all of it. Your brother sent us to find the flash drive, and in the process we found your friend. We agreed that if we helped him find you, we wouldn’t turn any information about you over to the League. And we’d help you get to California to find Zu.”

At first I assumed the wide-eyed look Chubs flashed my way was because he’d been shocked at my ability to turn out one lie after another. But some part of me must have known, even as I said it, that I’d picked the wrong nail to hammer home.

“And you know that
how
?” Liam demanded. “And you know her
how
, exactly?”

I swallowed, wrapping my arms around my center, my mind spinning through excuses, each one worse than the next.

“Answer me!”

I flinched. “I just…have heard stories—from Chubs, I mean.”

Liam spun toward Chubs, his face burning with anger and disbelief. “What else did you tell her?”

“Nothing! Lee, you have to calm down—please, sit down.
Listen
.”

“I can’t believe you! Don’t you realize they have ways of tracking her down? Do you
want
them to take her in?
Zu
—we promised that we’d—I thought—”

“He didn’t tell me anything about her, other than you were traveling together for a while,” I said calmly. Liam had been protective of all of us in different ways, but Zu had been a special case.

“Stay out of this, Green!” He was still wholly focused on Chubs. “What else did you tell her? What else did she get out of you?”

I jerked back, one single word throwing me off balance.

“What did you just call her?” Chubs interrupted. Of course he had caught it, too.

“What? I’m not allowed to use her name now?” he demanded. The look on his face was ripe with derision. “What do you want me to call you? What clever codename did the League think up for you? Pumpkin? Tiger? Tangerine?”

“You called me Green,” I said.

“No I didn’t,” he said. “Why the hell would I call you that? I know what you are.”

“You did,” Chubs insisted. “You called her Green. You really don’t remember?”

My heart shattered the ice around it, slamming against my rib cage, beating harder with every minute of silence that followed. The anger had left him quickly, replaced by confusion that bloomed into an open, barefaced fear as he looked between us.

“It’s okay,” I said, holding up my hands in a weak attempt to placate him, “it’s fine. You can call me whatever you want; it really doesn’t matter.…”

“Are you messing with him? Are you forcing him to play nice with you?” Liam asked. His face was flushed, and it almost seemed like his anger was edging into anxiety. He was looking at his friend and seeing a stranger.

I couldn’t keep up with his flip-flopping moods, and I suddenly wondered if it was even worth the energy to try. The memory of what had happened when he’d found me down by the falls evaporated like mist in the sunlight. Maybe I had imagined it altogether.

“Are you freaking kidding me?” Chubs said. “After what happened at East River? Do I need to remind you that while Clancy Gray turned you into his little poodle, he couldn’t even touch me?”

“I don’t… What?” Liam’s breath exploded out of him. “What are you talking about?”

Oh,
I thought,
damn.

When I had gone in and pulled myself out of Liam’s memories, I’d had to…tweak a few of them, otherwise they wouldn’t have made sense. The night we tried leaving East River had been one of them, because the whole terrifying episode had been sparked by my letting my guard down and trusting Clancy when I shouldn’t have. I was a crucial part of that story.

But now—what had I slipped into its place? Had I just erased that night completely? My mind was spinning, trying to dig up what images I had pushed into that vacant space, but everything was black, and black, and black.

Chubs turned to look at me with a glare that could have incinerated a mountain.

“What are you looking at
her
for?” Liam exploded. “I don’t even know what you’re doing here, and with them!”

“We were trying to find
you
!” Chubs said. “All of us just wanted to help
you
!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” came Vida’s shrill voice from inside the tent. “Can you two shut the hell up and just go back to spooning? We don’t need to hear this same shitty argument for the tenth fucking time before five
A.M.!
”

Jude made a very valiant effort to shush her, but the damage was done.

“
You
—you—I can’t—” Chubs sputtered, too furious to form an actual sentence. “Come out here.
Right now!
”

“Come and get me, big boy,” she sang back. “I know I don’t have the parts you like, but we can always make it work.”

“Oh, like a functioning brain?” he shouted.

“Chubs!” I snapped. He knew what she was like—he was only playing into her hands. “Vida, please come out. You too, Jude.”

She exited the tent with a blanket wrapped around her like a queen’s flowing robe. The effect was soured by the fact her fading blue hair was sticking straight up on either side of her head like horns. Jude didn’t look much better—I don’t know that I had ever seen such dark rings under his eyes. He slouched out after her in his EMT jacket, taking a seat on the opposite side of the fire pit.

“I’m not gonna change my mind, so don’t even start spinning your little yarn about how
great
the League is, how
wonderful
the agents are,” Liam said, crossing his arms over his chest. “Tell Cole to go screw himself. I don’t need him—or
you
—to take care of me!”

“Says the kid who was two steps away from death’s grasping fingers when we found him,” Vida said, rolling her eyes. “You’re fucking welcome, by the way.”