Never Fade (The Darkest Minds #2)(145)

Clancy was filthy—covered in sewage and dust and blood that caked around his swollen nose and eyes. But even from where they’d pushed him onto his hands and knees, he managed to look smug. Defiant.

For the first time, I noticed the door open behind him. It was directly across from the exit we had taken, on the opposite embankment, hidden in the blind spot in one of the pillars, under a layer of bright graffiti.

Clancy let out a low, humorless laugh. “Through the drain in the boys’ showers.” His dark eyes met mine. “After I had to smash my way out of the closet.”

“Was that how you were planning to get out?” I demanded. “After you got what you needed from Alban’s office?”

Clancy shrugged, unbothered by the guns pointed in his face. “Didn’t know about that exit, did you?”

“Jesus,” one of the agents said. “This is…this is really the president’s kid?”

Clancy is alive, I thought, turning in to Liam’s side, and Jude is not. He tucked his arm around my neck, drawing me in closer. It didn’t make sense—it wasn’t possible.

“He’s our ticket out,” another said suddenly. “We trade him for safe passage! Come on, Stewart—uniforms are swarming the city, and we have no transport or way to contact the ranch. What other card do we have to play?”

“Well, it’s not exactly going to be a cakewalk dropping him off with our new neighbors, either. He’s an Orange; he’ll find a way out of it.” Cole glanced at Clancy, ignoring the shocked noises from the others. “So maybe it’s better to end him now and send the body back. That’d be quite the message to dear ol’ Dad. We’ll find another way out of the city.”

There was a murmur of agreement from a few of the others.

“You’re not getting out of this city,” Clancy said. “My father’s not reactionary. That’s not his game. He’ll have accounted for every possible exit strategy. Trust me, this has been in the works for months, maybe even years. When he got tired of waiting for an excuse to justify the attack, he created one.”

That was almost too ridiculous to believe. “You think your father arranged a hit on himself?”

“It’s what I would have done. I’m assuming he survived?”

Liam’s hold on me tightened until it was almost unbearable. I was shaking again, only this time it was anger blazing through me. Vida and Chubs both glanced over my way, like they were waiting for me to contradict him. I don’t know what terrified me more: that he wasn’t wrong or that this was the old Clancy, the one who knew he could always get his way.

“You guys believed me when I said we were starting over, didn’t you?” Cole was addressing the kids and agents who were still sitting beneath the bridge, looking torn and petrified. “Well, this is it. We make our own road. But he’s not coming with us.”

“Think of the intel we could get out of him!” another agent cried, throwing her hands up in the air. “We can sedate him—”

“Try it,” Clancy dared. “See how it ends for you.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Cole said, rolling his eyes. “We probably should just kill you.”

“Go ahead, then.” Clancy’s teeth were stained with blood as he smiled. “Finish it. I finished what I came to do. And you all—” He turned toward the huddled masses of kids around him, his eyes focusing on Nico. The boy trembled under the intensity of his gaze. “You all can thank me when you can still fight back. I saved us. I saved us.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Cole was losing his patience. He glanced back at me, but I couldn’t look away from Clancy Gray. Not when I felt the first trickle of realization working its way through the grief still clouding my mind.

That morning, a whole city had been destroyed, and countless lives with it. There would be so many people who would never return home to their loved ones that night, though those mothers, father, daughters, sons, wives, husbands would pass through the afternoon and midnight hours, waiting, hoping. The smoke would seep into the concrete that lined every inch of this place, permanently bruising an already beaten city. In ten years, twenty years, it would still be too terrible to speak of what happened—a morning that a thousand other blinding, brilliant mornings would never ease from memory. But somehow, when Clancy spoke again, it was his words that changed everything.

“The cure for IAAN,” he spat. “The one my mother developed, the one Alban kept hidden from you, waiting for the right opportunity to trade it to my father to benefit himself.” Clancy swiped at the blood draining from his nose, laughing in that same humorless way. “The one that would have taken our abilities away and left us helpless. I burned it to ash, and my father buried it without realizing. Now her memory of it is gone, and no one will ever have the research—no one will take away what’s ours.”

A cure. That single word was chiming like a bell in my ears, ringing again and again. My mind couldn’t grasp it, couldn’t recognize it. I’d spent so many years conditioning myself to accept that it was impossible, forcing myself to let go of thinking there was a world beyond the camp’s electrified fence, that the word no longer existed in my vocabulary.

I felt myself start to turn, looking to Jude for his reaction—but Jude wasn’t here. I had left him behind. I had let him fall back into the darkness. And it was like seeing Liam and Chubs climbing out of the tunnel alone all over again. It stole the breath from my chest.