In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(40)

“Stop pushing her on it, okay? She’s had every other choice taken away from her. She at least gets to choose what she wants to say, and when she says it.”

I turned at the sound of soft footsteps padding up behind us. Zu hung back, her hands tucked into her pockets until Vida waved her toward us. She waited until Zu was looking at her before saying, “My bad, Z. I shouldn’t have gone bitch on you. We cool?”

Some of the strain on the girl’s face faded. She stuck her hand out to shake, but Vida gave her a little fist bump instead.

“All right,” I said, forcing my stiff body up off the floor. “Should we go back? The boys are probably wondering where we are.”

“Let ’em wonder,” Vida said. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”

8

THE HALLWAY WAS WASHED OUT in a familiar shade of red, one that seemed to glow in an unsettling way. It grew brighter, pulsing as I took another step forward, glancing at the framed photos that lined each side of the otherwise bare walls around me. There were faces there I recognized, I remembered: that young agent who’d been killed escaping custody after an Op gone wrong. The woman who’d been picked up just as she was going to meet a contact—shoved into a dark van, and never heard from again.

I ran my hand under the photos, counting them off in twos, then threes. Dead. This is where the League marked the lives it’d sacrificed, and remembered the bodies that would never get graves. So many—so many men and women who’d died before I ever joined up. Almost eight years of death.

My fingers stilled under the unsmiling face of Blake Johnson. He looked...small. Young. It might have been because he was surrounded by older faces, or maybe the shot had been taken when the League first brought him in. That had to be it. He had looked so much more grown-up when he’d gone out on the Op that’d killed him, hadn’t he? Why was there such a difference between the face of a fourteen-year-old and a sixteen-year-old?

Something warm and wet hit my toes. A thin line of black liquid, like ink, was gathering there, soaking my skin. Staining it. That tiny rivulet was the product of four separate, winding streams sliding down the tiled hall. My hand knocked against the next picture as I braced myself, and there was a sharp, white-hot pain in my palm that finally forced me to look up. The last dozen pictures were cracked, their frames hammered together with what looked like twisted pieces of metal and shards of glass.

The red light burned brighter, dimmed, and burned again. Over and over. I raised a hand to shield my eyes, but it was only an EXIT sign. At the next swell of light, I saw the black ink had a source, a growing pool. I saw it wasn’t black ink at all.

The figure was facedown, both arms and legs twisted at a strange angle. It was a—it was a boy, all thin limbs. Big hands, big feet, as if he hadn’t quite grown into them yet. Puppy paws, Cate had called them once. The light faded over him again as I rushed forward, and brightened just enough for me to see it was Jude.

The blood was everywhere, streaking his face, his hands, his broken back. I was screaming, screaming, screaming, because his eyes were open, his mouth was turned down into the pool of it, but his lips were moving. He shook, his body giving those last involuntary jerks—

Two hands clamped down on my upper arms, ripping me out of that hallway and into another. No—oh God—he needed help, I needed to help him—

My mind came awake with a surge, so quickly I thought I was actually going to be sick. I spun, my legs disappearing under me, but someone held me up. My teeth knocked together as I was shaken back into reality.

“Easy—easy!” Southern—Liam? No, Cole. His anxious face came into focus. The lights overhead were pure, unwavering white, with more light from small windows at either end of the hall. I focused on the pane of glass behind his head, where I could see a variety of weights, treadmills, and mats. Gym. Cole’s face was beaded with sweat, his skin was flushed, because he’d been in the gym. But I hadn’t walked here. I hadn’t come to find him. I hadn’t left—

Cole drew me forward into the training room. The air conditioning was running at full throttle, instantly cooling the patches of sweat on my back and under my arms. He lowered me down onto one of the benches and disappeared for a second, returning with a small towel and a paper cup of water.

I hadn’t realized I was shaking until I tried to drink. Cole took my left hand and pressed the towel against my palm. I looked down, surprised to find streaks of fresh blood running down my wrist, into the crook of my elbow. It was all over my jeans and shirt.

I jumped up, or at least tried to. My mind narrowed in on the image of Jude, the way the red light had turned his blood black. But this was—this wasn’t his blood, was it? This wasn’t HQ. This wasn’t Los Angeles.

We had left Jude in Los Angeles.

“Do you know where you are?” Cole asked, crouching down in front of me. He waited for me to nod before continuing. “I’m sorry to wake you up the way I did, I know you’re not supposed to, but I saw you pass by and then you started screaming. I didn’t realize you had those kinds of pipes, kid.”

I barely heard him. “I was...sleepwalking?”

“Seems like it,” he said, not unkindly. “What did you cut your hand on?”

I shrugged, my throat aching. “What time is it?”

“It’s about five in the morning.” The lines around Cole’s mouth were so much more pronounced. Now that the flush was fading from his face, the shadows were returning—under his eyes, under his high cheekbones, the new beard growth along his jaw. “You made off with about five hours of sleep.”