Jude slowed again, looking at me like he’d never seen me before. “I was right,” he whispered. “That is why he picked me. I was right.”
“Yeah,” I admitted. “You were.”
Jude nodded, working his jaw back and forth, trying to get the words out. Finally, he reached into his EMT jacket and pulled out the familiar black button, tossing it aside.
“It was dead anyway,” he muttered, pulling back out of my grip. “I fried that car and everything in it, remember?”
Right. Of course. The trackers in his clothes would be dead, too.
“All right,” he said, his voice sounding stronger. This was the Jude I had been counting on—the one who thought all Ops would be as cool as the video games he played with Blake and Nico.
I reached over and brushed the snow powder from his hair and shoulders. “You have to follow what I say exactly, understand? We’re going completely off the grid, and no one can know where we are. Not Cate, not Vida, not even Nico. If they find us and bring us in, we ruin every shot we have at this Op—at making sure the League is a safe place.”
As quickly and simply as I could, I laid the Op out for him. Everything, from where we were headed first to what Rob and the others had been planning. I gave him a sliver of the truth: that I had been traveling with Liam for a while, but we’d split up before Cate brought me in and I’d lost track of him.
Would it really be so awful to just tell him the whole truth? I was surprised there was a part of me that was even tempted to talk about those last few precious moments in the safe house. It just…didn’t make sense to complicate everything by letting him into that moment of good-bye. I was the only one I wanted living in it, thinking about it, dreaming of it. And, to be honest, I needed him to trust me absolutely now, more than he ever had, if this was going to work. If I told him what I had done to Liam, every look Jude would give me from that moment on would be tainted by the fear I could do it to him, too. If he could even bring himself to look at me at all.
This was the kid who had sat with me for every meal, when half of the League was too afraid to look me in the eye. He didn’t flinch when I touched him; he waited for me to get back from Ops to make sure I was safe. As annoying as it had seemed to me then, I had never thought about what it would be like to lose it. Him.
Jude listened to it all, strangely calm for him. He didn’t react at all when I told him what was on the flash drive Liam was carrying. At first I thought he had stopped paying attention, but at the end of it all, he nodded and simply said, “Okay.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked. I was fully aware of how stupid that question was. What wasn’t wrong? “Are you feeling okay? Nothing bumped, bent, or broken, right?”
“Oh, uh, no, I’m fine, all in one piece, at least.” He knocked on the top of his head. “It’s just I was wondering…”
“About?” I prompted.
“About before. Before-before, I mean.” He turned to look at me. “Did you have to deal with the PSFs a lot at your camp? It’s just—you were so calm. Don’t get me wrong, when you were all, Get lost! it was pretty epic, but you didn’t seem, you know, scared.”
My brows rose. “You think I wasn’t scared?”
“I wasn’t scared, either!” Jude added quickly. “It just made me wonder about before you came to HQ.…”
“Are you trying to ask me what I was doing before Cate brought me in?”
“Well, yeah!” Jude said. “We all wondered—there were rumors, but they seemed really hard to believe.”
“Really.”
“Really.” Seeing that his line of questioning was a one-way road into Silenceville, USA, he changed the subject as awkwardly as he could manage.
“Do you really think the scientists discovered what caused it?” Jude asked. “Idiopathic Ado-blah-blah-blah?”
“Idiopathic Adolescent Acute Neurodegeneration,” I supplied. Otherwise known as the reason most of us died and the rest of us turned into freaks. How could he ever forget what those letters stood for?
“Right, whatever,” Jude said. “Oh man, can you imagine what the League could do with that?”
I could hear the hope underlying his voice and felt my heart break, just that little bit. How could I tell him it would be a miracle if we actually found Liam, let alone found him still in possession of the flash drive?
“I think about it a lot,” he said, “don’t you? There’s a lot I don’t understand, and Cate and the others don’t really give me anything to work with, but it’s sort of cool to think our brains somehow mutated. I mean, it would be slightly cooler to know how and why that happened, but still cool.”
I used to think about it, when I was at Thurmond and there was very little else to focus on outside of my own misery. I spent countless days staring up at the bottom of Sam’s bunk, wondering how and why any of this had happened to us. Why some of us were Green and others Orange and others dead. But almost from the exact moment Cate got me out, I forced myself not to dwell on it. There were more important things to focus on—like surviving. Not being recaptured. Liam, and Chubs, and Zu.
“I know it’s dumb, but I’ve been trying to puzzle it all out. Sometimes I really do think it’s a virus, and then other times…I mean, how could it be a virus or disease if it barely spread outside of the US?” Jude was saying. “What was different about us from those other kids, the ones who died?”
All fair points. All distracting points. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. We have to find Cole’s brother first.”
Jude nodded. “Man, that’s going to be so…weird. Meeting him, I mean. I remember when he ditched. No one even noticed he was gone until they did the headcount at the end of the simulation.”
I glanced over. “You knew Liam?”
Jude glanced up, his amber eyes widening slightly. “Oh, no, not, like, personally. Knew of him. He was training at Georgia HQ, and Vida and me have always been in LA. Liam’s the reason they moved all of the Psi training to California, though. Less chance for people to go missing when everyone is underground, I guess.”
Right. Of course. Liam wouldn’t have been in California. I was surprised at how much better the thought made me feel, knowing that he hadn’t been forced to live in that dank hole in the ground.