Never Fade recap

Months after handing herself to the Children's League, Ruby is one of its most effective agents, leading a team with the Blue Vida and the young Yellow Jude. The League sends her to recover a flash drive holding Lillian Gray's research into the disease, carried by a runaway the League lists only as Prisoner 27, who turns out to be Liam, still with no memory of her. Ruby finds him and Chubs, travels with them without admitting what she did, and is eventually forced to confess and to give Liam his memories back. Clancy Gray, now the League's prisoner, offers his help and manipulates everyone who deals with him. The research proves to be the closest thing anyone has to an explanation of the disease, and reaching the rest of it means getting inside Thurmond. Before that can happen the League's Los Angeles headquarters is attacked and destroyed, Jude is killed, and the organization collapses. Cole, revealed to be a Red and Liam's brother, takes command of the survivors, who escape with the research and commit to breaking open Thurmond.

Previously: a disease killed most of America's children, and the survivors developed abilities that the government answered by locking them in rehabilitation camps. Ruby Daly spent six years inside Thurmond passing as a harmless Green, hiding that she is an Orange who can enter minds and remove or rewrite memories, an ability that first showed itself when she accidentally erased herself from her parents. An undercover agent named Cate got her out for the Children's League, a resistance group that recruits gifted children as soldiers. Ruby ran from them and fell in with three other runaways: Liam, a Blue; Chubs, a Green; and Zu, a small Yellow girl who does not speak. They reached East River, a hidden settlement run by Clancy Gray, the president's son and another Orange, who trained Ruby and used her to steal his mother's research into the disease before forcing his way into her mind. East River was raided and destroyed, Zu was sent west with a truckload of younger children, and Chubs was shot in the escape. To get him treated, Ruby gave herself to the League. Before leaving, she erased every memory Liam had of her.

Ruby is now one of the Children's League's most valuable assets, sent out to do what only an Orange can: read people, empty them out, make them forget. She leads a small team, the abrasive Blue Vida and the young, talkative Yellow Jude, both of whom she is responsible for and neither of whom she wants to be responsible for. Cate is still at the League and still trying to look after her, though the leadership under Alban has little patience for that. The League talks about freeing the camps and behaves like an army spending its recruits, and Ruby has become good enough at the work that she no longer recognizes herself in it. Her control over her ability has grown far past where it was, which terrifies her more than losing control ever did, because it means the damage she does now is something she chose. An older agent named Cole starts paying attention to her, and Ruby cannot tell whether that is a kindness or another use.

The League's true priority becomes clear: a flash drive carrying Lillian Gray's research, the only serious work anyone did on why the disease killed some children and changed others. The drive left League custody with a runaway they refer to only as Prisoner 27, who escaped and vanished. Ruby is assigned to find him and bring the research back, and she is not told who he is until she has no way to refuse. Prisoner 27 is Liam. He got away from the League, is travelling with Chubs, has been carrying the drive without understanding what it is, and remembers nothing about Ruby at all. Ruby takes the assignment because the alternative is someone else taking it, and sets out to reach him before the League's other agents, the government's soldiers or the skip tracers do.

Ruby finds Liam and Chubs. Chubs, alive and as prickly as ever, knows exactly who she is and what she did; Liam meets her as a stranger and takes an instant dislike to the League she works for. Ruby travels with them without admitting the truth, hiding both her orders and her history with him, while Vida and Jude fall in alongside a group they were sent to hunt. The country outside the camps has decayed badly, with checkpoints, militias and bounty hunters between them and anywhere useful. Cole shadows the operation and turns out to be Liam's older brother, which explains his interest in Ruby and complicates every decision the group makes. The drive itself is locked, and the only people who can open it are the ones who made it.

Ruby can no longer keep the secret, and tells Liam what she took from him. Then she gives it back, pushing every erased memory into place and letting him decide what to do with her afterward. He is furious, and he forgives her, and the two of them start again from what is actually true. Meanwhile Clancy Gray has been captured and is being held by the League, and Ruby is put in front of him because she is the only one who can go into his head. He answers questions with more questions, offers exactly enough help to make himself necessary, and works on everyone who comes near him. What the research shows is bigger than any of them expected, and finishing it means getting to material that never left Thurmond. The League's leadership begins arguing over whether the children in the camps are people to be rescued or a resource to be spent.

The group reaches the Children's League's headquarters beneath Los Angeles, where Nico works on the encrypted research and Alban weighs an operation against Thurmond in terms of how many of his agents he can afford to lose. Ruby's ability keeps growing, and she stops being able to promise anyone that she is safe to be near. Clancy, still a prisoner in the same building, plays the League's factions against each other until he has what he wants, and then he is gone. With him goes the last cooperative source on his mother's work, leaving Thurmond as the only remaining route to the rest of it. Plans for an assault on the camp move from argument to preparation, and Ruby, who spent six years inside its fences, becomes the person the whole operation depends on.

The headquarters is attacked and destroyed, and Jude is killed in it. The Children's League does not survive as an organization: its leadership is broken, its base is gone, and the survivors are scattered. Cole takes charge of what is left, and in doing so reveals what he has hidden since the epidemic: he is a Red, one of the classifications the government insisted had been eliminated. Ruby comes out with the research, with Liam, who knows her again, with Chubs, Vida and Nico, and with an ability she has stopped apologizing for. Clancy is loose and unaccounted for. The group goes into hiding with one objective left, the one Ruby would never have let herself want a year ago: get inside Thurmond, get the thousands of children in it out, and make the country look at what has been done to them.

The Children's League's Los Angeles headquarters is attacked and destroyed, and Jude is killed. The League's leadership does not survive the collapse of its own organization intact, and what is left of it falls to Cole, who chooses that moment to admit what he has hidden his whole life: he is a Red, one of the classifications the government claimed to have eliminated. Clancy is loose again, having used everyone who held him. Ruby comes out of it with the research, with her memory of who she was before the League, and with the people she thought she had given up: Liam knows her again and has forgiven what she did, Chubs is alive, and Vida and Nico stay with them. Ruby's own ability is stronger and less bounded than it has ever been, and she has stopped pretending she can put it down. The survivors go into hiding with a single objective, one Ruby would not have allowed herself to want a year earlier: get inside Thurmond, free the thousands of children still in it, and put the truth about the camps in front of the country.