In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(109)

“The goal should be to keep as many choices open for the kids as possible, to not let someone sweep in with regulations on how they could or should be,” Clancy continued. “Is the senator even willing to stand up for their right to make decisions about their future?”

The cure is another way to control us, take decisions out of our hands.

I stepped back from the door, shaking my head. No—helping Lillian was giving us a choice. We couldn’t make a real decision without knowing what the cure was.

Then why, all of a sudden, did the past few hours feel like such a mistake?

“—nothing else you can tell me about Sawtooth?” Cole was on his feet now, taking Clancy’s empty plate from the slot in the door.

Clancy returned to his cot. There was a new, thicker blanket there now—a real pillow, too. A stack of books beside the bed stood up nearly as tall as the cot. Apparently Clancy had been a very good boy, if Cole had been willing to bring him all of that.

“You know everything I do. That wasn’t the camp I helped set up—it was the original one in Tennessee,” Clancy said. “Are you ever going to come in, Ruby?”

I leaned away from the door, but it was pointless. His eyes shifted over to the window and caught mine through the glass. With a deep breath, I unlocked the door and propped it open with my foot. Cole’s hand twitched at his side as he strode toward me. I was starting to have a hard time telling his apprehension apart from his irritation.

I waited until we were back out in the hallway before opening my mouth.

“Don’t,” he said, holding up a hand. “I have this under control.”

“Nothing is ever really under control with him,” I pointed out. “As long as you’re careful...”

“You’re killing me, Gem,” he said, raking his hand back through his hair. “What is it?”

“I think you have to see it to believe it.”

With the others occupied by editing Zu’s interviews and, at Liam’s suggestion, giving their own, Cole and I were left to do the planning for an actual assault on Thurmond. We stayed up through the night rehashing the details. I would go in with the flash drive on February twenty-seventh. On March first, our team of twenty kids and Harry’s forty-odd soldiers would storm the camp at approximately seven in the evening and engage and restrain the PSFs—I would need to get the program uploaded into their servers by a quarter till. The kids would then be brought to a secure location within walking distance of the camp to wait for their parents to retrieve them. Written out step by step, it almost sounded simple. The reality was stark.

The morning officially began with Cole dropping a large blanket of paper over my head, startling me awake from where I’d fallen asleep at one of the computer room desks.

“What’s this?” I asked, pulling it away. At least fifteen sheets of paper had been taped together to form a whole, cohesive image of rings of cabins, shoddy brick buildings, a silver fence, and the green wilderness around it.

I jumped to my feet. “This is Thurmond. How did you get this?”

In response, he calmly passed me a silver burner phone—there was something grudging in his expression, reluctant. I took it from him, raising it slowly to my ear. “Hello?”

“Is this Ruby?”

“Speaking,” I said, watching Cole’s face as he watched me.

“My name is Harry Stewart—” There was static on the other end on the line, and it only made me grip the phone harder. Harry. Liam’s Harry. His voice was deeper than I expected, but I could hear the smile in it. “I wanted to let you know that last night we conducted an operation—”

“We?” I repeated dumbly. Nico had come over to stand next to Cole, looking bewildered. I switched the phone over to speaker so that he could hear it as well.

“One you never cleared with me,” Cole muttered.

“A group of old, retired army types,” he said with a laugh. “Some new friends, too, who have recently had a change of heart about serving the President. This morning at approximately oh-two-hundred hours, we conducted a raid on a suspected black site prison.”

My heart actually stopped. I felt it throb, then nothing as I held my breath.

“It was successful, and we were able to recover a number of suspected traitors and informants.” He said those words—traitors and informants—lightly, a thread of humor in his voice. “We’ve forwarded on what intel we were able to recover from the site as well as from our own sources in the government. We’ll be joining you by the end of the week, but I wanted to let you know that we did get your—”

His voice was muffled, moving away from the phone. I heard another voice, this one higher—a woman.

“Lie back down,” I heard Harry say, “I’m glad you’re awake—these gentlemen will explain what happened—yes, you can speak to her in just a moment—”

My heart was beating crazy fast, I heard it my ears, I felt it down to my toes. There was a scuffle as the phone forcibly shifted hands.

“Ruby?”

Nico let out a cry, pressing his hands against his mouth. Hearing her voice—it couldn’t have been real—they—Cate was—

“Cate,” I choked out, “are you okay? Where are you right now?”

“Ruby,” she said, cutting me off, “l-listen to me—” Her voice was so rough my own throat ached in sympathy. “We’re okay, we’re all okay, but you have to listen to me, some...something happened with the League, didn’t it? They—”