In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds 3)

“What happened to the bedding?” Cole asked in a low voice.

“They took it.” Dolly lifted a shoulder and shot a look from him to the kids and then back to him, and finally Cole stopped asking questions.

She led us down another bright white hall, the lights overhead bleaching out everyone’s skin, making the dirt and grime that much more obvious. Pictures taped to the wall fluttered as so many bodies moved past them. The sharp smell of bleach. A large room, the size of a school’s gym, wide open and littered with sleeping bags and bedding.

Rest, I thought. I can finally stop.

“Hey, Gem,” Cole said. “Can you come with us for a bit? I want to debrief Cate so she has the full picture.”

Liam’s grip on me tightened and I almost said no—I didn’t think I could handle being around Cate until I recharged. But he and I were in this together. And I wanted to know where the other agents were.

“I’ll be there in a second,” I told Liam. “Pick us out a good room.”

“All right...” he began uncertainly, but followed the others downstairs with only one last look over his shoulder.

Cole motioned for me to follow him into the room just to the left of the tunnel’s opening, but I held my ground a second longer, trying to get a better look at the place. And I was...unimpressed.

Back in Los Angeles, HQ had had a kind of ramshackle look to it, like someone had dug a deep hole, poured in some concrete, and brought in mismatched tile, desks, and tables to decorate it. The lighting and plumbing had been exposed overhead, and we’d never had reliable hot water. But the Ranch just looked like it had been forgotten. Despite the fact that the agents had been up here for at least a week, the floor was coated with clouds of gray dust and dirt. Door handles hung limp and broken. Paint was peeling off walls and the wood on several doors was splitting. Light bulbs were either out or missing completely, leaving random patches of the hallway in darkness. The ceiling tiles were crumbling into powder; whole chunks of the ceiling had fallen to the ground and had just been kicked aside. It was like they didn’t care; a wave of anxiety went through me as I took it in. This was how you treated a place you had no intention of staying in. Owning.

“—is bullshit! This is such f**king bullshit!” Vida’s voice called me to the room the others had entered. I stepped in and shut the door firmly behind me, nearly knocking into a wall of filing cabinets. The room was just large enough for a single desk, three chairs, and a few framed maps of the United States.

This must have been Alban’s office, I thought, while he was still here. It wasn’t nearly as crammed with random junk as his office had been at HQ, but certain touches, including the limp American flag hanging on the wall, were recognizably him.

“As soon as they were out of Los Angeles, Sen contacted the Ranch and told them they were heading to Kansas,” Cole explained to me from where he was leaning against the front of the desk with Cate. She kept her face turned down, her arms crossed tightly over her chest, thoughts clearly somewhere else. Vida paced what little free space there was to move, her hands on her hips.

“And they all left,” I finished. Dammit. Cole had been sure that the agents who’d left HQ with Cate to look for transportation for us were, if nothing else, loyal enough to Cate to want to stay and help us.

“And took pretty much everything that wasn’t nailed down here with them, including most of the food,” Cole said. I was surprised at how calm he seemed. “Cate and Dolly were going to come looking for us—apparently you really sold that we were going to Kansas. We’re going to have to start from scratch in building this place up, but it’s doable.”

Cate’s head shot up. “What do you mean, she ‘sold’ that?”

“You knew,” Vida said, a scathing edge to her voice. “You sent them away?”

I held up my hands, refusing to press my back against the door and get as far from those furious looks as I could manage. “I did. I influenced them to go straight to Kansas, so that we could break off on our own somewhere outside of the state. I should have made sure they didn’t contact the agents here before we could arrive, though.”

“What the hell?” Vida seethed.

“I second that,” Cate said, leveling Cole with a cold look. “Explain exactly what you were hoping to accomplish.”

“Ah, well, how about trying to save the lives of all of these kids?” Cole shot back. He braced his hands on his knees. “You want to know what your pal Sen was planning? They were going to split the kids up between the cars, take them just far enough outside of Los Angeles to think they were safe, and then turn them in for the reward money.”

If it were possible, Cate went even paler. Vida, finally, stopped pacing.

“You can’t know that...” Cate began.

“I saw it in her mind,” I said, letting the acid I felt in my stomach coat my words. “She had everything planned out to the minute. They wanted the money to be able to buy weapons and explosives on the black market. They want to go hit Washington, D.C.—they have no interest whatsoever in helping us free the camps.”

“Our plan played out like we thought it would,” Cole said, “Mostly. Don’t get your panties in a twist, Conner. No one got hurt. It’s a clean break. The fact that the other agents left does nothing but prove that our instincts on this were right. No one wants to help the kids. At least this way, we’ve got the Ranch and we’ve muddled them on what our plans are. If they’re stopped or picked up by President Gray’s friends, they’ll give them wrong intel on us. This is the right base of operations for us, not them. It’s quiet, we have working electricity and water, and, now, plenty of space to work.”