In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds, #3)(20)

My eyes skimmed over the wall, vaguely aware of the steps coming up behind us. One of the tags, this one done in blue spray paint, was fresh enough that the letters there—what looked like a K, L, Z, and H—were running, drooping down to the ground. I pressed my fingers against it, unsurprised that they came away sticky and stained.

“Oh. Wow.” Liam let out a startled laugh, stepping up next to me to get a better look.

“Oh, wow, what?” Chubs asked.

“It’s road code. Remember? At East River?”

I glanced at Chubs as his brow furrowed, clearly as confused as I felt. Liam had dived into camp life headfirst, befriending anyone and everyone, but I had kept mostly to Clancy, and Chubs had kept mostly to himself.

“Well,” Liam said, undaunted, “it was the system they worked out for safe travel. We used it to mark how to get back after going out on supply runs, and it was taught to all of the kids who left and went out on their own.”

He flattened his palm against the crescent moon. “I remember this one. This means that this is a safe place. To sleep. To rest. That kind of thing.”

“And the names are what, kids who have passed through?” Vida asked.

“Yeah. They were supposed to do that in case they had to split up, or they were trying to leave a trail for another group to follow.” The rain was coming down harder, forcing him to stop and wipe it off his face. “There are different ones for places to pick up food, where you can find supplies, a house of friendly people who might be willing to help you, and so on and so forth.”

“Clancy thought of this?” I asked.

“Amazing, right?” Liam said. “I didn’t know he was capable of thinking of anyone other than himself for two seconds without killing himself in disgust.”

“Huh.” Chubs held up one of his broken lenses and peered through it like a magnifying lens, ignoring Vida’s snicker. “Kids actually made it all the way out here from Virginia?”

We did, I almost said. But our circumstances had been...different, to say the least.

“I bet...” He took my arm, leading me away from the others, walking to the corner where the house’s fence met the fence running along the end of the parking lot. Down the street on the opposite corner was some kind of church. Painted there in bold, black strokes were two inverted Vs, one on top of the other like arrows, surrounded by a circle. “That’s a directional marker to show them which road to take.”

“Wow,” I said, “I’ve been seeing those since we left Los Angeles. I had no idea—I just assumed it had something to do with road construction.”

“What’s funny is that I remember them from before—when we were driving through—” He hesitated. “Through Harrisonburg?”

I looked up at him, confused. But it hit me soon enough, and the question in his tone registered like the sharp ache of a repeat injury.

“We did drive through there...together, I mean? I’m not—I’m not remembering the wrong thing, am I?”

What killed me, almost more than the frustrated expression on his face, was that there was no accusation in his voice. I knew that what I had done to his memory had mostly been—undone, I guess. But he still had moments of overlap between what had really happened, and the story I had planted in his mind. I’d overheard him asking Chubs for clarification a few times, but this was the first time I’d ever been so directly confronted with it. My whole chest ached. If I’d had the option of melting into a puddle and letting myself be carried down into the storm drain, I would have taken it.

“No,” I managed to get out. “You’ve got it right. We drove through on the way to that Wal-Mart.”

I started to turn back to the motel, but he caught my wrist. I braced myself for whatever he was about to say.

Which, apparently, was nothing. He looked down, his thumb stroking the soft skin on the inside of my wrist.

Finally, Liam said, “I remember the other motel—it looked almost exactly like this one, but the doors weren’t red.” He rubbed the back of his neck, a rueful grin on his face. “I acted like an idiot trying to give you a pair of socks.”

In spite of myself, I smiled. “Yeah. What about serenading me with The Doors? Come on baby, light my fire....”

“I probably would have put on a whole song-and-dance routine if you hadn’t started laughing,” he said. “That’s how badly I wanted you to smile.”

My heart hurt in a completely different way now. I rolled up onto my toes, pressing a soft kiss onto his cheek. There was a sharp whistle from the parking lot. Cole waved us back over from where he stood next to a compact white sedan. Liam rolled his eyes at the sight of it, but started toward the driver’s side. Cole shook his head and pointed to Vida.

“She’s driving.” He cut Liam’s protest off before he could get a word in. “No attitude. Your shoulder needs to rest. Trade off later.”

“You’re such an *! I’m fine—”

“Is this what they call brotherly love?” Chubs wondered aloud.

“Hey, this works for me,” Vida said, ignoring him. “Maybe now we’ll break forty miles an hour. Laters—try not to drive us directly into another military patrol, ’kay?”

“Be careful,” I called after her, pointlessly.