In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(127)

“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 f**king 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.