Never Fade (The Darkest Minds, #2)

by Alexandra Bracken

I used to dream about turning back time, about reclaiming the things I’d lost and the person I used to be. But not anymore.

“Do I . . . look as pretty as I feel?”

“It’s just that nowadays people are so quick to boil you down to bare bones of info and upload you into a system, you know? And I think no one can ever really know another person unless you really pay attention.”

“I don’t want to just see someone’s face; I want to know his shadow, too.”

I didn’t want to give him the false hope that these people were anything other than lone candle flames in a sea of never-ending black.

“You asked me if I trusted you,” I whispered. “Do you trust me?”

“Cut that shit out, nimrod, before I cut them off,” Vida said. “Nimrod?” he shot back, his voice jumping an octave with outrage. “You don’t have to be so mean, you know.” I pressed a hand to my forehead. “That gets you upset? That dumb name? She’s been calling you Judith for months.”

“Chill the fuck out, Grannie,” Vida said. “You’re going to give yourself a stroke.” “You cannot give yourself—”

There were only a few of us who had actually lived in one and experienced the life firsthand, but there was an unspoken rule we didn’t talk about it. Everyone knew the truth, but the truth didn’t live inside them the same way it did for us. They’d heard about the sorting machines, the cabins, the testing, but most of their stories were gossip, completely wrong. These kids had never stood for hours on end in an assembly line. They didn’t know fear came in the shape of a small black camera lens, an eye that followed you everywhere, at all times.

“What do you want me to tell you? You want to hear about how they tied us up like animals to bring us into the camp—or, hey! How about that time a PSF once beat in a girl’s skull so badly she actually lost an eye? You want to know what it was like to drink rotten water for an entire summer until new pipes finally came? How I woke up afraid and went to bed in terror every single day for six years?

“I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’d be up for hearing about the one-eyed chick,” Vida said with a shrug.

“And people like you are the reason we have middle fingers.”

I will come down on you so hard, they’ll be naming hurricanes after me for a fucking century.”

He’s a sweet kid. Hyperactive, totally unwilling to accept reality, but sweet.”

“Yup,” Vida said to no one in particular, “just a fucking idiot.”

“Asshole,” she was muttering. “God damn him, I hate his stupid-ass face and his stupid-ass driving—acting like we’re as dumb as dirt. Asshole!”

“I’m not the same person. I’m not, and I know that. I’m not okay with who I am or what I had to do, but I’m also not okay with us separating again! Don’t do that! Don’t just disappear! If you’re mad at me, then hit me or something—just don’t think that I don’t want to stay with you. I’ll always want to stay with you!”

“It’s all different now. I just want it to go back to the way it was, when we were in that stupid minivan—Jesus, will you say something?” “Don’t,” I said, “call Black Betty stupid.”

“It won’t matter,” I said. “In the end, it won’t. After we find Liam and get the intel, you better believe I’m going to burn every single one of those camps to the ground.”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know the exact number. Ten or more. Vida wouldn’t have let herself be taken by any less.”

If a heart could break once, it shouldn’t have been able to happen again. But here I was, and here he was, and it was all so much more terrible than I ever could have imagined.

“Ruin him.”

The look on her face told me everything I needed to know. If Knox made the mistake of leaning back in his chair just then, she would have gladly found a way to break his neck.

“Show me,” Vida said. When I didn’t flip my palm up, she did it for me. I was surprised to feel her vibrating with her own kind of rage. “Damn. I’ll kill him.”

“Bitch, please,” she said. “If you had been able to recover fast enough to do something, then you really wouldn’t be human.” “As opposed to what?” She shrugged. “A mannequin? An unfeeling, heartless bitch who feeds on others’ misery and is physically incapable of crying, unless it’s tears of blood?”

“Is that my rep at HQ?” “They call you Medusa,” Vida said. “One wrong look and your brain turns to stone.” Creative. Also, fitting.

“I’m in this now, too, and I got a lot of experience playing assholes like they’re fucking harps. You need backup, I got you. Stop trying to convince yourself that you’re in this alone.”

“if it turns out that we have to fight each other for this initiation shit, I’m still going to kick your ass.”

“I missed,” Knox said. I craned my neck around, watching as he lowered the silver handgun just a tiny bit. “Oh well. Mama did say it was important to throw out broken toys.”

Because unfortunately for you, they weren’t invisible to me.”

“I am going to straight up murder you,” Vida said, her voice trembling with the intensity of the pain, “right in the face.”

“Please. If it means getting away from you for five minutes, I’d gladly let you do it.”

“She would drive a saint to murder. Like, ten-stab-woundsto-the-torso murder.” “Good thing you’re not a saint.”

I knew what I’d been when I’d found them: a terrified splinter of a girl who had been shattered a long time ago. I had nothing, and no one, and no real place to go. Maybe I was still broken and would always be—but now, at least, I was piecing myself back together, lining up one jagged edge at a time.

“They won’t even know we’ve been there until we’re gone. We’ll be freaking legends!”

I felt myself slipping under a flat, gray ice, and I didn’t have the strength to pull myself up from under it.

I’d already driven the knife into his chest. Twisting it now would finish things forever.

“I know I don’t have the parts you like, but we can always make it work.” “Oh, like a functioning brain?” he shouted.

“I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,” he whispered. A hand drifted up, dragging back through his hair. “I can’t think straight when you’re around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t breathe—I just—”

“I love you.” He turned toward me, that agonized expression still on his face. “I love you every second of every day, and I don’t understand why, or how to make it stop—”

One of his fingers hooked a belt loop on my jeans and inched me just that tiny bit closer. His nose skimmed up my throat, along my cheek, and I saw none of it. I squeezed my eyes shut as his forehead finally came to rest against mine. “Look at me.” “Don’t do this,” I whispered. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he breathed out. “I feel like . . . I feel like I’m losing my damn mind, like your face has been carved into my heart, and I don’t remember when, and I don’t understand why, but the scar is there, and I can’t get it to heal. It won’t go. I can’t make it fade. And you won’t even look at me.”

“I’m . . . It’s—it’s like torture.” His voice was strained, hardly even a whisper. “I think I’m losing it—I don’t know what’s happening, what happened, but I look at you, I look at you, and I love you so much. Not because of anything you’ve said, or done, or anything at all. I look at you, and I just love you, and it terrifies me. It terrifies me what I would do for you. Please . . . you have to tell me . . . tell me I’m not crazy. Please just look at me.”

Because you thought I wasn’t strong enough to survive being with the League?” “Because I’m not strong enough to survive seeing you with the League!” I said. “Because I wanted you, after everything you went through, to have a chance to find your parents and live your life.” “Dammit—I wanted you!” Liam seized my arms, his fingers tightening like he could make me understand his pain that way. “More than anything! And you just . . . crashed through my mind and sealed everything away, like you had the right to, like I didn’t need you. What kills me is that I trusted you—I was so sure you knew that. I would have been okay, because you would have been there with me!”

“It feels like it never ended for me. Do you get that? I can’t forget it ever happened. I can’t hate you—I can’t, not when I want to kiss you so damn badly.”

“If you can’t change anything, then what’s the point of it?” I wrapped my fingers around his and gave his hand a steady squeeze. “I don’t know. But when I figure that out, you’ll be the first to know.”

He’d come here to close that door, but instead he had left it wide open for me to walk through.

There is a cure. The insanity of that thought made me feel like the hand on Jude’s compass spinning, and spinning, and spinning, searching for its true north.

And I don’t know what was more powerful and gratifying to me—the look of terror that swept across his face, or the exhilaration of knowing I finally had my future back in my own hands. “You mean this research?”

Dickweasel. I’m going to use that one.

She holds me, and she doesn’t let go.