Never Fade (The Darkest Minds, #2)

by Alexandra Bracken

Blue eyes squinted at me under a scraggly mop of blond hair, but I couldn’t do anything, say anything, not when he leaned farther into the pale yellow streetlight.

Not him, I thought, feeling the world shift sideways under my feet. Not him.

But the Southern lilt of his accent was as warm as ever, even if his voice was deeper, rougher, when he finally spoke. “Do I…look as pretty as I feel?” And I swear—I swear—I felt time slide out from under me.

The fact that time actually slides out when the next chapter starts it’s brutal

The one thing the past few weeks had driven into me over and over was the more you got to know someone, the more you inevitably came to care about him or her. The lines between you became blurred, and when the separation came, it was excruciating to untangle yourself from that life.

I wanted Liam. All I wanted was Liam right there, standing close enough for me to breathe in the leather, the smoke, the sweet grass.

shoved my way down the slight roll of the hill, through the tangle of tree branches, through the collapsing fence, through to him.

“Why aren’t you together?” Now he looked close to tears himself.

“You were the gawky one,” he corrected, “Lee was the reckless one, Zu was the cute one, and I was the wise one.”

At least five of them were from J. Lister, otherwise known as the teenager in the driver’s seat next to me.

I try to do that for you and Lee whenever I can, to throw off the other skip tracers.”

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!”

“You’re…awfully pretty. What’s your…name?”

His brows drew together in a look of intense concentration, his lips repeating that one word over and over again, soundlessly.

“Don’t go again,” he whispered. “Don’t go…where I can’t follow, please, please, not again…”

People were afraid that IAAN was contagious and could jump ship, riding shotgun on a package or in a person to go plague another, healthier country.

“Sometimes you’re the one speeding along in a panic, doing too much, not paying attention, wrecking things you don’t mean to. And sometimes life just happens to you, and you can’t dodge it. It crashes into you because it wants to see what you’re made of.”

And I knew I was going, I was gone, because it sounded like Liam was screaming, too.

“Tell me she’s okay!”

His face was as open as it always was, so heartbreakingly perfect even with pain tightening the line of his mouth. His eyes were—they were so pale in this light, jumping from my eyes to my nose to my lips like he had never seen me before but never wanted to stop looking.

He said that you and me, we never met before, but we had to have, we had to, because I know your face. I know your voice. How does that work?”

“Stay out of this, Green!”

“I can’t—I can’t think about anything or anyone else,”

“I can’t think straight when you’re

around. I can’t sleep. It feels like I can’t ...

“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—”

“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 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 ...

My eyes drifted up to his, and ...

“Dammit—I wanted you!”

I would have been okay,

because you would have been there with me!”

“I would have torn this whole damn country apart looking for you,” I said softly. “Maybe you really would have left. Maybe you wouldn’t have come looking for me. Maybe I misread everything. But if you even felt a quarter of what I did…”

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.”

Liam’s hand came down next to mine on the seat, his fingers inching over one at a time, hooking over mine in a way that was as tender as it was shy.

“Life isn’t fair,” I said. “It’s taken me a while to get that. It’s always going to disappoint you in some way or another. You’ll make plans, and it’ll push you in another direction. You will love people, and they’ll be taken away no matter how hard you fight to keep them.

You’ll try for something and won’t get it. You don’t have to find meaning in it; you don’t have to try to change things. You just have to accept the things that are out of your hands and try to take care of yourself. That’s your job.”

“Give ’em hell, darlin’.”

They were everything.

There have been times, in the course of human history, that fire has been needed to burn out an insidious infection. These are such times. This is the

only way for us to build our nation again, stronger than before.”

But the true irony here was that if Clancy hadn’t come looking to destroy his mother’s research, we never would have found it in time.