In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(39)

Vida backed against the wall, sliding down it, openly sobbing, both hands pressed to her face. “It was my fault, why don’t you f**king see that? I was in the back, you weren’t even close to him! I should have heard him, I should have made him walk in front of me, but I was so damn scared I wasn’t thinking at all!”

“No—Vi, no.” I crouched down in front of her. “It was so loud down there—”

This wasn’t her fault at all. I felt a fierce surge of protectiveness go through me at the thought of anyone else walking by and seeing her so vulnerable. Later, when she pulled herself back together, it would make her mortification about this that much worse. I rearranged myself as I sat down, trying to block the view of her from anyone coming down the hall. When I reached out to her, she didn’t stop me.

“You and Cate, you won’t even say his name,” she said, “I want to talk about him, but you keep trying to box him up and put him away.”

“I know you think I don’t care.” My chest felt unbearably tight. “It’s just...if I don’t hold these things in, I feel like I’ll dissolve. But you, all of you...the only thing I’ve ever wanted was to keep us all together and safe, and I can’t ever manage to do that.”

“Them, you mean.” Vida hugged her knees to her chest. “I get it. They’re your people.”

“And you’re not?” I asked. “There’s no ranking of who I care about most. I couldn’t do it even if I tried.”

“Well if the building was on fire, who would you save first?”

“Vida!”

She rolled her eyes, wiping her face. “Oh, calm down, boo. I was just kidding. Obviously it wouldn’t be me. I can take care of my own damn business.”

“I know,” I said. “I don’t know who I’d try to save first, but if I had to pick someone to back me up on the rescue, there wouldn’t be any question.”

She shrugged and after a while said quietly, “The thought of going back into that room makes me...I know this is going to make me sound like I’m on crack, but I keep walking into rooms and I keep looking for him like he’s going to be there. It’s like a punch to the goddamn throat when I catch myself.”

“I do that, too,” I said. “I keep waiting for him to come around each corner.”

“It is a stupid, f**king awful place I’m in,” she said, “to be jealous of that little girl and you and all of them, that you get to all be together when it’s never going to be that way again for us. You can’t even look at Nico—God, Ruby, what’s it going to take for you to stop punishing him? When do you start listening to his apologies?”

“When I have a chance of believing them.”

She gave me a hard look. “Jude was his only friend. Nothing you could do to him is worse than what he’s doing to himself. Cate’s not going to be able to pull him back from this again. This is worse than when they first brought him into HQ, after he got out of that research program where they did all of that shitty experimenting on him.”

I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry I left you to tell Cate alone...”

“No,” she said, holding up a finger, “be sorry that you’ve been too chickenshit to really talk to her about it. I don’t understand—I don’t get why everyone I care about is in f**king pieces and none of you will even try to help each other because it hurts too much to face it head-on. Jude would never have let this happen. He wouldn’t have. He was the best of us.”

It was amazing, you know, how Jude had pinned us all down, how deeply he had read into who we were and what we wanted. There were people in the world whose purpose seemed to be to serve as points of connection. They opened us up to each other, and to ourselves. What was it that he had told me? That he didn’t want to just know someone’s face, but their shadow, too?

“He was.” There would never be another person like him. There was the loss I felt, and the loss that the rest of the world would never realize. Both sat like stones on top of my chest.

“I’m not good at huggy shit,” Vida warned. “But if you want to talk like this again...I’m there. Okay?”

“Okay.” And I don’t know why that moment about did me in, when every moment before had been just as gutting. I leaned my shoulder and head against the wall. Maybe because I knew how proud of us he would have been for coming this far, and saying this much.

“Talk to Nico, please,” Vida said. “Don’t make me beg. Don’t treat him like he’s not even goddamn human.”

“I think I hate him,” I whispered.

“He made a mistake. We all did.”

I leaned back on my hands, fingers curling against the cold tile.

“Did they mess with her?” Vida asked suddenly, holding out an arm to stop me. While she didn’t whisper the question, the fact she wasn’t asking directly in front of Zu seemed to indicate some newfound sensitivity. “Scramble some eggs up here or something?”

Or not.

“No,” I said quietly, watching as Liam settled in next to her, running a hand over her hair. “She doesn’t want to talk, so we don’t make her. It’s her decision.”

Vida nodded, absorbing this. “Must have seen some shit then. Some real bad shit.”