The Darkest Minds: Never Fade (Darkest Minds Novel, A)

Because Jude deserved to live to see this moment—he should have been here, now, next to me, suddenly seeing that everything was alive with the possibility of change.

He’d come here to close that door, but instead he had left it wide open for me to walk through.

There is a cure. The insanity of that thought made me feel like the hand on Jude’s compass spinning, and spinning, and spinning, searching for its true north.

I caught Liam’s eye, but his expression was so open, so raw with pain and longing that I had to turn away. I knew what he was imagining. In my mind, we were standing on that beach, too, with the crystal clear skies overhead and our beautiful, whole families around us.

A cure.

I felt myself start to turn, looking to Jude for his reaction—but Jude wasn’t here. I had left him behind. I had let him fall back into the darkness. And it was like seeing Liam and Chubs climbing out of the tunnel alone all over again. It stole the breath from my chest.

Clancy is alive, I thought, turning in to Liam’s side, and Jude is not

He was alone,” I cried. “He didn’t have anyone with him—he must have been so scared. I told him we would stay together.”

My mind was fixed on Jude’s face, the way his ears stuck out from the sides of his head like they’d been mismatched with the rest of his body. What was the last thing I said to him? Stay close? Keep going? And what had he said back? All I could remember was his pale face in the faint light of Cole’s yellow glow stick.

Follow Leader. He had followed me out and I had led him to this. I had done this to him.

I threw the compass at him, and when that didn’t rock him, when that didn’t hurt him, I threw my fist after it, pounding against his shoulder. He caught it with his other hand and pinned both of mine to his chest

Down his torn shirt, across the stained skin of his wrists, to the bent, twisted remains of a small silver compass.

And it was so strange how swift the numbness was to settle. How it smothered every word, every thought, until I forgot I needed to keep breathing. I felt my lips part at the same moment my chest seemed to collapse in on itself.

“No.” My fingers clenched around it, hiding it from sight, denying it was there.

It’s on me,” I said. “I’m Leader.”

“You’re not my leader,” he said softly

Jude was down there. He was down there. And the last place I would ever leave Jude was alone in the dark.