In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(29)

Cate’s head shot up. “What do you mean, she ‘sold’ that?”

“You knew,” Vida said, a scathing edge to her voice. “You sent them away?”

I held up my hands, refusing to press my back against the door and get as far from those furious looks as I could manage. “I did. I influenced them to go straight to Kansas, so that we could break off on our own somewhere outside of the state. I should have made sure they didn’t contact the agents here before we could arrive, though.”

“What the hell?” Vida seethed.

“I second that,” Cate said, leveling Cole with a cold look. “Explain exactly what you were hoping to accomplish.”

“Ah, well, how about trying to save the lives of all of these kids?” Cole shot back. He braced his hands on his knees. “You want to know what your pal Sen was planning? They were going to split the kids up between the cars, take them just far enough outside of Los Angeles to think they were safe, and then turn them in for the reward money.”

If it were possible, Cate went even paler. Vida, finally, stopped pacing.

“You can’t know that...” Cate began.

“I saw it in her mind,” I said, letting the acid I felt in my stomach coat my words. “She had everything planned out to the minute. They wanted the money to be able to buy weapons and explosives on the black market. They want to go hit Washington, D.C.—they have no interest whatsoever in helping us free the camps.”

“Our plan played out like we thought it would,” Cole said, “Mostly. Don’t get your panties in a twist, Conner. No one got hurt. It’s a clean break. The fact that the other agents left does nothing but prove that our instincts on this were right. No one wants to help the kids. At least this way, we’ve got the Ranch and we’ve muddled them on what our plans are. If they’re stopped or picked up by President Gray’s friends, they’ll give them wrong intel on us. This is the right base of operations for us, not them. It’s quiet, we have working electricity and water, and, now, plenty of space to work.”

“Yeah, and look at what we don’t have!” Cate finally detonated. Her pale face flushed, and she was barely keeping a lid on her trembling anger. “You sent away trained professionals—the ones who could have conducted these camp hits you want to do, the ones who could have protected all of these kids! We should have spent time working to bring them over to our side, not manipulating them into thinking it was their idea to go. And how dare you make this kind of decision without even consulting me? I can’t—” She shook her head, her eyes latching so fiercely onto mine that I had to look away. “Ruby, what is going on?”

“Give it a rest, Conner,” Cole said, with an edge to his tone. “The plan is to train the kids to fight. To empower them.”

“To empower yourself,” Cate corrected sharply, and if Vida hadn’t been in the room, I have no idea what Cole would have said or done in response to that. His fist clenched at his side. “I get it, Cole...I do. But this wasn’t the right way. They took the computer servers. I have one laptop, and only because I brought it into my quarters to do some work last night and hid it when they started talking about leaving. They’ll lock us out of the system. What are we going to do then? You burnt this bridge without giving us a way to get back over.”

The League had spent the better part of a decade building up a network of information on everything: whereabouts of former politicians, access into the skip tracer and PSF databases, building schematics, black site locations. I’d been counting on having access to it to proceed with any and all camp hits. If nothing else, we’d need the few known satellite photographs that had ever been snapped of some of the camps.

“The Greens can break into the League’s network, that’s not even a question,” Cole said. “They’re the ones that built it. And I took measures to ensure that we would be able to copy the research on the cure. My only question is, where is the flash drive of the information I stole from Leda Corp? With the study on what caused IAAN?”

Cate’s jaw set as she looked away. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, silent just long enough for a cold, gripping dread to come over me. “It’s in the garbage. We weren’t far enough outside of the city when the EMP went off. It was wiped clean by the pulse...I’m sorry. I wish—” She shook her head, stopping herself.

At that, I sat down heavily in one of the chairs, feeling more and more like I was passing through a long tunnel in the opposite direction from everyone else. I barely heard Cole’s sarcastic “Oh, wonderful.” Didn’t register that Cate had stood and was already moving around me to get to the door.

“Where are you going?” Cole asked. “Let the kids sleep a little while longer.”

“I’m not going to the kids,” she said coldly. “I’m going after the other agents to fix this mess you’ve gotten us into. To get them to come back so we can work together on this.”

The chill in her tone sank through me, down to my bones. I’d never seen her like this, or at least I’d never had the full force of her anger barreling toward me. But I was angry too—furious. She had left us, she hadn’t been there when I needed her, and I’d done the best I could to help everyone survive.

“You want them to come back?” I asked. “Who? The ones that ditched you at the drop of a hat to go play terrorists, or the ones that wanted to hand us over to the PSFs?”