In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds 3)

“Yeah, and look at what we don’t have!” Cate finally detonated. Her pale face flushed, and she was barely keeping a lid on her trembling anger. “You sent away trained professionals—the ones who could have conducted these camp hits you want to do, the ones who could have protected all of these kids! We should have spent time working to bring them over to our side, not manipulating them into thinking it was their idea to go. And how dare you make this kind of decision without even consulting me? I can’t—” She shook her head, her eyes latching so fiercely onto mine that I had to look away. “Ruby, what is going on?”

“Give it a rest, Conner,” Cole said, with an edge to his tone. “The plan is to train the kids to fight. To empower them.”

“To empower yourself,” Cate corrected sharply, and if Vida hadn’t been in the room, I have no idea what Cole would have said or done in response to that. His fist clenched at his side. “I get it, Cole...I do. But this wasn’t the right way. They took the computer servers. I have one laptop, and only because I brought it into my quarters to do some work last night and hid it when they started talking about leaving. They’ll lock us out of the system. What are we going to do then? You burnt this bridge without giving us a way to get back over.”

The League had spent the better part of a decade building up a network of information on everything: whereabouts of former politicians, access into the skip tracer and PSF databases, building schematics, black site locations. I’d been counting on having access to it to proceed with any and all camp hits. If nothing else, we’d need the few known satellite photographs that had ever been snapped of some of the camps.

“The Greens can break into the League’s network, that’s not even a question,” Cole said. “They’re the ones that built it. And I took measures to ensure that we would be able to copy the research on the cure. My only question is, where is the flash drive of the information I stole from Leda Corp? With the study on what caused IAAN?”

Cate’s jaw set as she looked away. Her throat bobbed as she swallowed, silent just long enough for a cold, gripping dread to come over me. “It’s in the garbage. We weren’t far enough outside of the city when the EMP went off. It was wiped clean by the pulse...I’m sorry. I wish—” She shook her head, stopping herself.

At that, I sat down heavily in one of the chairs, feeling more and more like I was passing through a long tunnel in the opposite direction from everyone else. I barely heard Cole’s sarcastic “Oh, wonderful.” Didn’t register that Cate had stood and was already moving around me to get to the door.

“Where are you going?” Cole asked. “Let the kids sleep a little while longer.”

“I’m not going to the kids,” she said coldly. “I’m going after the other agents to fix this mess you’ve gotten us into. To get them to come back so we can work together on this.”

The chill in her tone sank through me, down to my bones. I’d never seen her like this, or at least I’d never had the full force of her anger barreling toward me. But I was angry too—furious. She had left us, she hadn’t been there when I needed her, and I’d done the best I could to help everyone survive.

“You want them to come back?” I asked. “Who? The ones that ditched you at the drop of a hat to go play terrorists, or the ones that wanted to hand us over to the PSFs?”

Cate couldn’t even look at me. “I’m sure there’s been a misunderstanding...”

“You’re right,” I said, “I misunderstood how in denial you are about who these agents are—”

“Ruby!” Vida snarled. “Shut the f—”

“I don’t know how many times they have to prove it to you, but these agents have never cared about the League you joined, the one that actually cared about the kids who are still stuck in camps—who are still dying every day from something we’re within an arm’s length of finding a cure for. We don’t need them! We don’t need to have them taint what we’re trying to do here! Wake up!”

“I am not interested in sending kids out to play soldier,” Cate said.

“You didn’t have a problem with that before,” I said bitterly.

“You were supervised by trained agents who led the tact teams—”

“Right. You mean the agents who then turned around and started picking us off one at a time? How about Rob? The one who tried to kill both me and Vida in one ‘accident.’ Do you even know that he came after us? He hunted us. He put a muzzle on me!”

Vida was frozen in place, her face ashen. The instinct to protect Cate from any insult was clearly at war with the side of her that knew the truth. Cole reached out to put a hand on my shoulder, but I sidestepped him, waiting for Cate to look at me. Waiting for an answer.

“Dolly and I will leave first thing tomorrow,” she said quietly. “The other agents only left a few hours ago. We can still catch up to them.”

It felt like she’d slapped me across the face. “Fine. Then go.”

“Good luck,” Cole added, with only a trace of mockery in his voice.

Her pale eyes flicked down over me one last time before she went out of the room, letting the door slam open and shut behind her. Vida was fast on her heels; I watched them go through the windows lining the computer room until they finally disappeared. I couldn’t stand it anymore and started after them.