I knew what it felt like to be a prisoner. To feel time catch and stop because every day you lost a little bit more hope that your situation would change, that someone would come to help you. And I thought that if one of us could just get to him, to show him we were there before the Op failed, it would be worth the try.
But there was no safe way down, and the firefight below was raging in a way only automatic weapons could. Prisoner 27 would know people were there—and they weren’t able to reach him. I had to shake that compassion. I had to stop thinking these adults deserved any kind of pity, especially League agents. Even the new recruits reeked of blood to me.
If I stayed here, right where Rob ordered me to, I might never find Vida. But if I left and disobeyed him, he’d be furious.
Maybe he wanted you to be standing there when the explosion went off, a small voice whispered at the back of my mind. Maybe he was hoping…
No. I wasn’t going to think about that now. Vida was my responsibility. Not Rob, not Prisoner 27. Goddamn Vida the viper. When I was out of here, when I found Vida, when we were safely back to HQ, I’d play the situation out in my mind again. Not now.
My ears were still thrumming with their own pulse, too loud for me to hear the heavy steps coming from the lookout post in the Laundromat. We literally crashed into each other as my hand brushed the outside door.
This soldier was a young one. If I had been going on appearances alone, I would have thought he was only a few years older than me. Ryan Davidson, my brain filled in, coughing up all sorts of useless information from the mission file. Texas born and bred. National Guard since his college had closed. Art History major.
It was one thing, though, to have someone’s life printed in crisp black letters and laid out in front of you. It was something else entirely to come face-to-face with the actual flesh and blood. To feel the hot stink of breath and see the pulse jump in his throat.
“H-Hey!” He reached for the gun at his side, but I launched a foot at his hand and sent the weapon clattering across the landing and down the stairs. We both dove for it.
My chin hit the silver metal, and the impact actually jarred my brain. For a single blinding second, I saw nothing but pristine white flash in front of my eyes. And then, everything returned in brilliant bright color. The pain filtered through next; when the soldier tackled me and I hit the floor, my teeth sank into my bottom lip and it burst open. Blood sprayed across the stairwell.
The guard pinned me to the ground with his entire weight. The instant I felt him shift, I knew he was going for his radio. I could hear chatter from a woman; I heard her say, “Report status,” and “I’m coming up,” and the knowledge of just how badly I would be screwed if either of those things actually happened sent me into what Instructor Johnson liked to call a controlled panic.
Panic, because the situation seemed to be escalating quickly.
Controlled, because I was the predator in the situation.
One of my hands was pinned under my chest, the other between my back and his stomach. That was the one I chose. I bunched up his uniform the best I could, searching for bare skin. My brain’s wandering fingers reached out for his head and pried their way in, one at a time. They fought through the memory of my startled face behind the door, moody blue images of women dancing on dimly lit stages, a field, another man launching his fist at him—
Then, the weight was off, and air came flooding back into my lungs, cold and stale. I rolled over onto my hands and knees, gasping for more of it. The figure standing over me had tossed him down the stairs like a crumpled piece of paper.
“—up! We have to—” The words sounded like they were being carried along underwater. If it hadn’t been for the strands of shocking violet hair sticking out from under her ski mask, I probably wouldn’t have recognized Vida at all. Her dark shirt and pants were torn, and she seemed to be moving with some kind of limp, but she was alive, and there, and in mostly one piece. I heard her voice through the muffled ringing in my ears.
“Jesus, you’re slow!” she was shouting to me. “Let’s go!”
She started down the stairs, but I grabbed the scruff of her Kevlar vest and pulled her back. “We’re going outside. We’ll cover the entrance from there. Is your comm still working?”
“They’re still fighting down there!” she shouted. “They can use us! He said not to leave our post—!”
“Then consider it an order from me!”
And she had to, because that was the way this worked. That was what she hated most about me, about all of this—that I had the deciding vote. That I got to make this call.
She spat at my feet, but I felt her following me back up the stairs, cursing beneath her breath. The thought occurred to me that she could easily take her knife and slash it through my spine.
The soldier I met outside clearly hadn’t been expecting me. I raised a hand, reaching out for hers to command her away, but the sound of Vida’s gun firing over my shoulder rocketed me back and away from the soldier so much faster than the splatter of blood from her neck did.
“None of that bullshit!” Vida said, lifting the gun still somehow strapped to my side and pushing it into my palm. “Go!”
My fingers curved around its familiar shape. It was the typical service weapon—a black SIG Sauer P229 DAK—that still, after months of learning to shoot them, and clean them, and assemble them, felt too big in my hands.
We burst into the night. I tried to grab Vida again to slow her down before she ran into a blind situation, but she shrugged me off hard. We started at a run up the narrow alley.
I hit the corner just in time to see three soldiers, singed and bleeding, hauling two hooded figures up out of what looked like nothing more than a large street drain. That access point definitely wasn’t in the Op folders we were given.
Prisoner 27? I couldn’t be sure. The prisoners they were loading into the van were men, about the same height, but there was a chance. And that chance was about to get into a van and drive away forever.
Vida pressed a hand to her ear, her lips compressing to white. “Rob’s saying he wants us back inside. He needs backup.”
She was already turning back when I grabbed her again. For the first time maybe ever, I was just that tiny bit faster.
“Our objective is Prisoner 27,” I whispered, trying to phrase it in a way that would connect with her stupidly loyal sense of duty to the organization. “And I think that’s him. This is what Alban sent us for, and if he gets away, the whole Op is blown.”
“He—” Vida protested, then sucked back whatever word was on her lips. Her jaw clenched, but she gave me the tiniest of nods. “I’m not going down with your ass if you sink us. Just FYI.”
“It’ll all be my fault,” I said, “nothing against your record.” No blemish on her pristine Op history, no scarring the trust Alban and Cate had in her. It was a win-win situation for her—either she’d get the “glory” of a successful Op, or she’d get to watch me be punished and humiliated.
I kept my eyes on the scene in front of us. There were three soldiers—manageable with weapons, but in order to be really useful, I’d need to get close enough to touch them. That was the single, frustrating limit to my abilities I still hadn’t been able to break through, no matter how much practice the League forced on me.
The invisible fingers that lived inside my skull were tapping impatiently, as if disgusted they couldn’t break out on their own anymore.
I stared at the nearest soldier, trying to imagine the long snaking fingers grasping out, stretching across the tile, reaching his unguarded mind. Clancy could do this, I thought. He didn’t need to touch people to get a grip on their minds.
I swallowed a scream of frustration. We needed something else. A distraction, something that could—
Vida was built with a strong back and powerful limbs that made even her most dangerous acts seem graceful and easy. I watched her raise her gun, steady her aim.
“Abilities!” I hissed. “Vid
a, no guns; it’ll alert the others!”
She looked at me like she was watching my scrambled brains run out of my nose. Shooting them was a quick fix, we both were well aware of that, but if she missed and hit one of the prisoners, or if they started firing back…
Vida lifted her hand, blowing out a single irritated breath. Then she shoved her hands out through the air. The three National Guardsmen were picked up with such accuracy and strength that they were tossed halfway down the block, against the cars parked there. Because it wasn’t enough that Vida was physically the fastest or strongest or had the best aim out of all of us—she had to have the best control over her abilities, too.
I let the feeling part of my brain switch off. The most valuable skill the Children’s League taught me was to purge fear and replace it with something that was infinitely colder. Call it calm, call it focus, call it numb nerves—it came, even with blood singing in my veins as I ran toward the prisoners.
They smelled like vomit, blood, and human filth. So different from the clean, neat lines of the bunker and its bleach stench. My stomach heaved.
The closest prisoner huddled near the gutter, bound arms up over his head. His shirt hung in pieces off his shoulders, framing welts and burns and bruises that made his back look more like a plate of raw meat than flesh.
The man turned toward the sound of my feet, lifting his face from the safety of his arms. I ripped the hood off his head. I had stepped up with words of reassurance on my tongue, but the sight of him had disconnected my mouth from my brain. Blue eyes squinted at me under a scraggly mop of blond hair, but I couldn’t do anything, say anything, not when he leaned farther into the pale yellow streetlight.
“Move, dumbass!” Vida yelled. “What’s the holdup?”
I felt every ounce of blood leave my body in a single blow, fast and clean, like I had been shot straight through the heart. And suddenly I knew—I understood why Cate had originally fought so hard to get me reassigned to a different mission, why I had been told not to enter the bunker, why I hadn’t been given any information on the prisoner himself. Not a name, not a description, and certainly no warning.
Because the face I was looking at now was thinner, drawn, and battered, but it was one I knew—one that I—that I—
Not him, I thought, feeling the world shift sideways under my feet. Not him.
Seeing my reaction, he stood slowly, a rogue smile fighting past his grimace of pain. He struggled up to his feet and staggered toward me, looking torn, I thought, between relief and urgency. But the Southern lilt of his accent was as warm as ever, even if his voice was deeper, rougher, when he finally spoke.
“Do I…look as pretty as I feel?”
And I swear—I swear—I felt time slide out from under me.
TWO
HERE IS HOW YOU FIND the Children’s League: you don’t.
You don’t ask around, because no soul alive in Los Angeles would ever admit to the organization being there and give President Gray an itch to scratch. Having the Federal Coalition was already bad enough for business. The people who could tell you the way would only cough it up for a price that was too big for most to pay. There was no open door policy, no walk-ins. There were standing orders to dispose of anyone who so much as gave an agent a sidelong look.
The League found you. They brought you in, if you were valuable enough. If you’d fight. It was the first thing I learned sitting next to Cate on my way in—or at least the first real thought to solidify in my mind as our SUV zipped down the stretch of freeway, heading straight into the heart of the city.
Their primary base of operations—HQ, as everyone called it—was buried two stories beneath a functioning plastic bottle factory that kept limping along, doing its part to add to the congestion of the brown haze clinging to downtown Los Angeles’s warehouse district. Many of the League agents and senior officials “worked” for P & C Bottling, Inc. on paper.
I kept my hands clenched in my lap. At least at Thurmond we’d been able to see the sky. I’d seen the trees through the electric fence. Now I didn’t even get that—not until the League decided I was allowed to go aboveground and look.
“It’s owned by Peter Hinderson. You’ll probably meet him at some point. He’s been a staunch supporter of the League’s efforts from the beginning.” Cate smoothed her hair back into a ponytail as the car turned into what looked like yet another parking garage. That was this city—fading paint in sunset colors and cement.
“They built HQ with his help. The structure is located directly under his factory, so if satellites were to try searching for us, the heat signatures they’d pick up from our ventilation system can easily be explained away.”
She sounded so incredibly proud of this, and I honestly could not have cared less. The plane flight from Maryland had fought it out with the carsickness from the ride over from the airport and the city’s unrelenting stench of gasoline for what was going to give me the biggest blinding headache. Every part of me was aching for the sweet, clean air of Virginia.
The other agents piled out of their car, their chatter and laughter dying off the second they spotted us. I had felt them staring the whole plane ride; they hadn’t needed any other entertainment, apparently, than trying to figure out why I was important enough for Cate to have launched such a search for me. They were floating words over to me like little toy sailboats on a pond—spy, runaway, Red. All of them wrong.
We hung back while the other agents walked toward the silver elevator on the other end of the parking garage, their footsteps echoing on the painted cement. Cate made a big show of needing time to get our things from the trunk, each movement achingly slow, perfectly choreographed to give them a head start on us. I hugged Liam’s leather coat to my chest until it was our turn.
Cate pressed some kind of ID card against the black access pad next to the elevator doors. It rumbled back up to us. I stepped through, keeping my eyes on its ceiling until the doors rushed open again and we were hit with a wall of heavy, damp air.
It must have been a sewer once—well, no, judging by the rats, and the acrid smell, and the weak ventilation, it almost definitely had been a storm drain or sewer. We set off some sort of motion detector as we stepped out and the dismal string of tiny lightbulbs they’d hung up along both walls flared to life, illuminating bright bursts of graffiti and the puddles of condensation collecting on the cement ground in long, loud drips.
I stared at Cate, waiting for the punch line of what was obviously a terrible joke. But she only shrugged. “I know it’s not…beautiful, but you’ll come to…well, no one loves it. You’ll get used to it after a few trips in and out.”
Great. What an awesome thing to look forward to.
Walking the length of one block, breathing in the Tube’s damp, moldy air, was enough to turn a person’s stomach; four blocks was pushing the limits of human endurance. It was just tall enough for most of us to walk upright, though a number of the taller agents—Rob included—had to duck below each of the metal support beams as they passed under them. The walls curved around us like laugh lines around a mouth, cupping us in darkness. The Tube had about zero luxury associated with it, but it was wide enough that two of us could walk side by side. There was breathing room.
Cate looked up and waved at one of the black cameras as we passed beneath it, heading toward the silver doors at the other end of the Tube.
I don’t know what it was about that sight that made me rear back. The finality of it, maybe. The full realization of how hard I’d have to work, how careful and patient I’d need to be to give Liam time to get to a place where they couldn’t touch him, until I could break myself out of here.
The access pad beeped three times before it flashed green. Cate clipped her ID back to her belt loop, the sound of her relieved sigh half lost to the whoosh of treated air that came billowing out of the doors.
I pulled away before she could take my arm, cringing at her kind smile. “Welcome to HQ, Ruby. Before you get the full tour
, I’d like you to meet a few people.”
“Fine,” I mumbled. My eyes fixed on the long hallway wall, where hundreds of yellowing papers had been tacked up. There was nothing else to see; the tile was a gleaming black, the lights nothing more than long fluorescent tubes fixed over our heads.
“Those are all of the agents’ draft notices,” Cate said as we walked. Gray’s mandatory conscription in the wake of the crisis meant that everyone forty and under would eventually be called upon to serve the country, whether it be as peacekeepers with the National Guard, border patrol, or babysitting freak kids in the camps as PSFs. The first wave of unwilling recruits had mostly been those in their twenties—too old to have been affected by IAAN and too young to have lost children.
“A lot of the agents here are ex-military, like Rob,” she said as we walked. “Even more of us are civilians who joined because we believed in Alban’s mission for truth, or to try to gain a little more information on what was happening to our kids or siblings. There are more than three hundred active agents, with a hundred or so in HQ monitoring Ops, training, or working on our tech.”
“How many kids?”
“Twenty-six, if you include yourself and Martin. Six teams of four, each assigned to an agent—a Minder, Alban calls us. You’ll train with the rest of my team and, eventually, be sent out on tactical operations.”
“And the League pulled all of them out of camps?” I asked.
She had to flash her ID again at the next door. “Maybe four at the most in the five years the League has existed. You’ll find that these kids come from all over the country. Some, like Vida and Jude—you’ll meet them in just a bit—were brought in when the Collections began. Some were lucky enough to be spotted during transports to camp or as the PSFs came to pick them up. Then we have a few oddballs like Nico, the other member of my team. He…has an interesting story.”
I couldn’t tell if that was supposed to be bait. “Interesting?”