Never Fade (The Darkest Minds #2)(33)

I climbed up to the driver’s seat and popped the door open. My boots had just landed in the snow when Jude came around the back of the ambulance.

“What are you—?”

I bolted forward, clapping a hand over his mouth. His eyes went wide in panic until I pressed a finger to my lips. Jude was too confused to process what was happening. I had to take his wrist and drag him behind me, letting the ambulance’s bulk block us from view.

“We’re inside,” came Rob’s rough voice in my ear. “Status, Leader?”

“On schedule, Minder.”

I glanced up at the street sign—Garfield Street—and tried to get my bearings. I had to put as much distance between Rob and us before he realized we were gone; I could outrun him on foot, but I couldn’t outrun a car…especially not with Jude. If we could make it back to the protest, we might be able to lose him and Reynolds in the crowd. Rob wouldn’t think to look for us in the one place we had a decent chance of being caught. He was a brute, and a vicious one at that, but he wasn’t very imaginative.

Jude panted beside me, looking slightly frazzled but otherwise all right. The wind was knocking around his hat and tugging at mine. I pulled the black knit cap down snug over my ears, trapping my loose long hair and muffling sounds from both prongs of the Op.

The cold was like nothing I had ever felt in Virginia. It was sharp, a persistent clawing at every bare inch of skin. I tried picking up my pace into a faster run, blinking back the tears and snow flurries, but Jude was struggling to keep up as it was. Patches of ice snapped underfoot, branches hidden beneath the old snow crushed as I trampled through the trees separating the houses and buildings. South, south, south—I just needed to keep heading south, and I’d find Harvard Yard, and the protesters, and escape.

“Target acquired. Tangerine, is the perimeter clear?”

Jude jerked toward me in wild fear, but I shook my head in warning.

Rob’s voice went down my spine like a match against a matchbook. The fire it lit was small, but it was burning through the tight control I had over my voice. “Oh yeah,” I said after I pressed a finger to my comm. “The coast is all clear.”

I knew the moment Rob opened the ambulance door, the very second he found us gone. His end of the line went silent, even as HQ and Barton were requesting status updates from him. I could see his face in my mind, white, rapidly turning purple with the effort to hold back his fury. A small smile curved the corners of my mouth. He couldn’t call out for me without revealing that he had lost me in the first place. A Minder’s job, above anything else, was to mind the freaks under his care.

“Tang—” Reynolds began to say, only to be sharply cut off.

“Hey, Rob,” I said in a low, even voice. I saw the light from the bonfire in the yard, the new orange hue of the sky. Jude caught the back of my jacket, his long fingers twisting in the leather as he struggled to keep up with me. Snow was falling harder now. I pulled the hood of the fleece I was wearing under my jacket up over my head, stuffed my hands into my pockets, and crossed the last street. “I got a question for you.”

“Roo,” Jude whispered. “What are we doing? Where are we going?”

“Tangerine, keep all non-Op transmissions off the line,” came Barton’s voice.

Good. I wanted him to hear. I wanted all of them to hear this.

The ring of police and National Guardsmen had been busted open, and the protesters gathered there were streaming past them, signs clutched in their hands, drums beating. A midnight march, I guess, though I had no idea for what. And judging by the variety of signs I saw, they weren’t really sure what they were protesting, either. The draft that forced them into PSF service? President Gray’s unwillingness to negotiate with the West Coast government? The general state of awfulness spreading like poison over the entire country, as the pollution had over Los Angeles?

Most of the faces around us were young but not teenagers. A good portion of the country’s universities and colleges had been temporarily shut down due to lack of funding, but if a few still had money left, I guess Harvard would have been one of them.

WE ARE YOUR TIRED, YOUR POOR, YOUR HUDDLED MASSES… read the sign next to me.

I let them get ahead of us, trailing far enough behind that the others had less of a chance of hearing the chanting over the comm. I waited until they had cleared out of the square before touching the comm again to activate the microphone.

“I just want to know—what were their names?”

“Tangerine.” Rob’s voice was tight, and he sounded slightly breathless. “I have no idea—”

“Tangerine, cease—” The woman at HQ didn’t sound particularly happy with me, either.

“What the hell is going on, Minder?” Barton was still listening, too.

“Those two kids you took out of that camp, the night before we met,” I said, keeping my eyes straight ahead on a young guy with dreadlocks waving us all forward. “The boy and the girl. I’m sure you remember them—it must have taken a lot of effort to get them out, never mind to tie their hands and feet that way.”

Jude stared at me, his dark brows drawn together in confusion.

“It doesn’t make any sense to me. You got them out, and then you killed them in that alley and left them there—why? What was the point? What did they say or do to make you so angry? That girl was begging you. She didn’t want to die, but you took her out of that camp, and you executed her. You didn’t even take that boy’s mask off.”