Never Fade Read Free

now, it didn’t mean the firefight below had drawn all of the attention away. If I were caught, that would be it. I’d be finished, killed one way or another.
    But there was that man I had seen, the one with the hood over his head.
    I didn’t feel any particular loyalty to the Children’s League. There was a contract between us, a strange verbal agreement that was as businesslike as it was bloody. Outside of my own team, there weren’t people to care about, and there certainly wasn’t anyone who cared about me beyond the bare minimum of keeping me alive and available to inflict on their targets like a virus.
    My feet weren’t moving, not yet. There was something about that scene that kept replaying over and over again in my mind. It was the way they had bound his hands, how they had led Prisoner 27 down into the dark unknown of the bunker. It was the gleam of guns, the improbability of escape. I felt despair rising in me like a cloud of steam, spreading itself out through my body.
    I knew what it felt like to be a prisoner. To feel time catch and stop because every day you lost a little bit more hope that your situation would change, that someone would come to help you. And I thought that if one of us could just get to him, to show him we were there before the Op failed, it would be worth the try.
    But there was no safe way down, and the firefight below was raging in a way only automatic weapons could. Prisoner 27 would know people were there—and they weren’t able to reach him. I had to shake that compassion. I had to stop thinking these adults deserved any kind of pity, especially League agents. Even the new recruits reeked of blood to me.
    If I stayed here, right where Rob ordered me to, I might never find Vida. But if I left and disobeyed him, he’d be furious.
    Maybe he wanted you to be standing there when the explosion went off, a small voice whispered at the back of my mind. Maybe he was hoping…
    No. I wasn’t going to think about that now. Vida was my responsibility. Not Rob, not Prisoner 27. Goddamn Vida the viper. When I was out of here, when I found Vida, when we were safely back to HQ, I’d play the situation out in my mind again. Not now.
    My ears were still thrumming with their own pulse, too loud for me to hear the heavy steps coming from the lookout post in the Laundromat. We literally crashed into each other as my hand brushed the outside door.
    This soldier was a young one. If I had been going on appearances alone, I would have thought he was only a few years older than me. Ryan Davidson, my brain filled in, coughing up all sorts of useless information from the mission file. Texas born and bred. National Guard since his college had closed. Art History major.
    It was one thing, though, to have someone’s life printed in crisp black letters and laid out in front of you. It was something else entirely to come face-to-face with the actual flesh and blood. To feel the hot stink of breath and see the pulse jump in his throat.
    “H-Hey!” He reached for the gun at his side, but I launched a foot at his hand and sent the weapon clattering across the landing and down the stairs. We both dove for it.
    My chin hit the silver metal, and the impact actually jarred my brain. For a single blinding second, I saw nothing but pristine white flash in front of my eyes. And then, everything returned in brilliant bright color. The pain filtered through next; when the soldier tackled me and I hit the floor, my teeth sank into my bottom lip and it burst open. Blood sprayed across the stairwell.
    The guard pinned me to the ground with his entire weight. The instant I felt him shift, I knew he was going for his radio. I could hear chatter from a woman; I heard her say, “Report status,” and “I’m coming up,” and the knowledge of just how badly I would be screwed if either of those things actually happened sent me into what Instructor Johnson liked to call a controlled panic.
    Panic, because the situation