“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—
Click.
“Who took these photos?” Senator Cruz demanded, though no one seemed to be able to respond.
“My guess is the people who caught...” Alice wasn’t sure if it was a him or them. I pressed back against the question, focusing on the screen. Someone had hung a sheet of paper over his neck. Two words had been scrawled there in thick, uneven writing: TRY AGAIN.
In the corner of the shot was a sliver of deep red cloth, and even though my brain knew what was coming, knew it sure enough for the screaming to start inside of my head, I moved to the next photo.
Fire.
The image, the whole of it, was flooded with white flame.
Fire.
Fire.
A screen of gray smoke, and—
Senator Cruz tore herself away from the computer, walking to the far corner of the room, trying to escape the sight of the charred remains. “Why? Why do it? Why?”
The dispassionate, cold creature the Children’s League had been careful to nurture in me clawed its way back up inside of me. And for a second, one single second, I was able to look at the burnt, mutilated corpse in the careful, distant way a scientist would have studied a specimen. In the small section of his face I could see, what skin remained was burnt, dark and rough, like a scab.
I moved back through the shots of the fire. The sick assholes—those goddamn sick fucks who took these pictures. I’d kill them. I knew where to find them. I would kill each and every one of them. I held onto the cold fury with everything I had because it froze out the pain, it didn’t let me shut down the way I wanted to. The burn of tears was at the back of my eyes, my throat, my chest.
“I can’t tell,” Chubs said, edging closer and closer to full-out hysteria, “dammit—”
I scanned through the earlier photos, my stomach as tight as a fist. If I started crying, the others wouldn’t be able to stop. I had to focus—I had to—I stopped on the second photo of the figure in the chair, when they’d put the sign on him. His head lolled to the left, but I saw it. I hadn’t imagined it. I knew who it was.
“It’s...” Vida leaned forward again. Her nails dug into my shoulder. “I can’t...”
Alice had spun away from the gruesome image, overcome by her own retching. But Nico—Nico was looking at me. I felt the words leave my throat, but I didn’t hear them.
“It’s Cole.”
“What?” Vida asked, looking between me and the screen again. “What did you say?”
“It’s Cole.”
A thousand needles flooded my veins, shooting toward my center. I doubled over against the desk, incapable of speech, of thoughts, of anything other than seeing the body—Cole’s body, what they’d done to it. I sucked in a shallow breath, trying to push the pain down. I wanted the numb control back. My head was spiraling faster, harder than even my stomach. Because I knew what would matter to Cole, I knew what he would be asking. Where is Liam? If Cole was—if Cole was—
“Are you sure?” Chubs asked, when no one else seemed able to.
Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Lillian come in and, for a heart-stopping moment, thought the blond hair belonged to Cate, that somehow she and Harry were already here. I heard the murmured explanation Senator Cruz gave.
“Harry...we have to tell him...and Cate, God, Cate...”
“I will,” Vida said, her voice as tight in her throat as Chubs’s arm was around her shoulder. “I’ll do it.”
“Is Liam—” Chubs began, “is there...can we check to see if they took him into custody? If there’s some update to the networks?”
If he’d been killed and they positively ID’d him, then they would update his profile in the PSF network and remove him from the skip tracer listings to reflect as much.
“I’m trying to get into the PSF network,” Nico said, “I’m trying—it’ll be faster to go in through the skip tracers’. Can you give me your login information?”
“Here, I’ll put it in,” Chubs said.
“Is the phone still on?” I heard myself ask as I was drawn back away from the computer, still in my chair. I didn’t trust my legs to try standing. Are we going to get more pictures? And we would just have to sit there, sit and do nothing other than wait for them to come. I choked on my own rage.
“Reds?” Dr. Gray repeated. “You’re sure? Can I see the photos, please?”
Nico pulled up the screen again and shifted to the computer next to him to work. Dr. Gray moved through the photos, skipping around until she found what she was looking for. The violence and horror of it registered only in her frown.
“He was dead when it happened,” she said. “He would have bled out almost instantly from the gunshot to his neck.”
I could have told her that. Cole would have fought to the death. He wouldn’t have let them take him into their program. He would have fought until he flamed out completely.
She shook her head, turning to look at me. “This is why. This is why we need the procedure. These children shouldn’t be able to do this and harm themselves and others.”
My anger blew up, swallowing me in a cloud of blistering incredulity. “No, this is why no one should be fucking with our heads in the first place!”
“There’s nothing on the network,” Chubs said, “not yet...any changes to the PSF’s would take an hour or two to feed into the skip tracer network.”
“We—let’s give him some time, he might still be trying to get away.” Vida shook her head, raking her hands back through her hair. “The last photo came an hour ago. They would have sent something else if they had Liam...right?”
Senator Cruz looked over at me. “Where’s the phone that he’s been using to contact his father? I’ll make the call.”
“Upstairs. The office.” Nico stood up so suddenly that he knocked his chair over behind him. “I’ll get it. I need to...”
Get out of this room, my mind finished, away from the pictures.
He returned less than a minute later, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. He held the small silver flip phone out to the senator—only to drop it when the screen lit up and it began vibrating.
For a moment, no one moved. The phone rang. It rang, it rang, it rang.
Chubs lunged for it, scooping it off the floor before it rang out completely. “Hello?”
His whole body sagged in relief. “Lee—Hey—hey, Liam, where are you? You have to—”
Senator Cruz was beside him before even I was, ripping the phone out of his grip and silencing his protests with a wave of her hand as she put the phone on speaker.
“—took him, I couldn’t do anything, I couldn’t—”
That voice I knew as intimately as my own skin, the one I’d heard laughing, pitched in fear, furious, flirting shamelessly, wasn’t the one coming through the small phone. I almost didn’t recognize it at all. The connection made him sound distant, at the other end of a highway, beyond our reach. The words came out of his chest so ragged, so raw, it was almost unbearable to listen to him.