Sparks Rise

by Alexandra Bracken

  For the first time in seven years, there is no one watching me. There is a camera in the corner of the room, but if the power is out in this craphole, what are the chances it’s feeding out to Control Tower? The weight bearing down on me from all sides pulls back, and I feel boneless as I lean forward against the door and press my hands against my face. I don’t want her to see me on the verge of losing it.

  Minutes pass before a soft sound reaches my ears. I spin on my heel, mistaking it for moans of pain. But it’s...there’s a melody. It’s raw, carried out on uneven breaths, but she’s humming. The words come to me, rising up through bleak memories. I know this. He’s got the whole world in His hands, He’s got the whole world in his hands, He’s got the whole world in his hands. How many times did we sing this in Sunday school while kicking each other under our table?

  I step closer and see her shaking, her whole body. From the cold, from exhaustion, from pain, it doesn’t matter. She tries to smother it by curling up tight, but her breath hitches and I know she’s trying as hard as she can not to cry. She’s fighting fear itself with both hands tied behind her back.

  I know it’s not actually meant for me when I shuffle forward again, and the song dies on her lips. She looks up just as I crouch down, dark eyes flashing uncertainly. I brace myself for this. If she doesn’t remember, then—I shake my head.

  “This little light of mine,” I sing softly into the silence. “I’m gonna let it shine...”

  Her breath catches again, but the look on her face hardens and her words come out in a snarl. “If you’re making fun of me, you can go to hell with the rest of them.”

  She doesn’t remember. It’s pathetic how my heart gives a painful jerk. I force a small smile on my face, which only deepens her scowl. “The last time I made fun of Sammy Dahl, she beaned me with a sword and almost knocked me out of a tree.”

  It takes her a moment to process what I’ve said. I can actually see the light come back into her brown eyes. The air leaves her chest in a shuddering, disbelieving laugh. “You remember. You remember me.”

  My relief is mirrored on her face as she crawls toward me. A laugh or sob bubbles up in my chest at the irony of both of us afraid of the same impossible thing. It takes a sharp blade, a huge effort to separate one half of a coin from the other. It would take something a hell of a lot stronger and sharper to separate me from her.

  “Lucas,” she whispers.

  It feels so damn good to hear my name and not a number. To hear it from her. My mom and dad used to tease me so much about her—puppy love, they called it. I guess I must have been leashed, because I followed her around like one. I would have followed Sammy anywhere, led her out of any trouble she got herself tangled in. She made my little eleven-year-old heart actually flutter. She turned me dumb and shy with a single smile. Even this morning, before I made the connection, she had my full attention. Whatever it had been before, the feeling solidified, took root, blossomed. Having her on the other side of the metal bars, only inches away, suddenly feels too far. I didn’t appreciate it enough when I was holding her before. I didn’t recognize the miracle of it. She’s real, she’s here.

  It’s a mess inside me. She has cracked me, left me open and exposed. I’m suddenly terrified of how fast it can and will all disappear. I can’t stop trembling. The feelings that come roaring out are trying to wash me away from the moment. It’s been so long since I’ve let myself really—really—feel something other than anger that I’m not sure I can even remember the names of half of these emotions, only that they eat me up, they devour me whole, and I have never been so grateful as I am in this moment that I am capable of the simple act of feeling. I understand now, maybe in a way I didn’t before, what the other Reds have lost to the Trainers. They will never have this, will they? They might not ever know the feeling of cozying up to a lightning bolt, what it feels like to look at someone’s face and see your heart there.

  The peace inside my head, the murmurs of happy memories, they’re pale compared to how it feels to live inside a real moment like this. I let my heart tune itself like a radio jumping between stations; I can’t move, but it feels like I’m careening around the room. I am bursting with that same breathless excitement I had whenever Sam and me would run through Greenwood. When I’d get myself lost and wait for her to come. She is singing a song that only I can understand, and I call back, I call back. She finds me where I’ve been hiding all along.

  You are the biggest sap in the universe, Orfeo.

  We’re not supposed to care about others. The Trainers want to leave nothing in our hearts but them. I focus on her face again, tired, pale, bruised, and think of sunlight, grass, golden hair, the feel of rough bark on my palms as we climbed up and up and up into the tree fort. The singe of sparks on the Fourth of July as they rose and showered down around us. I don’t speak until the bad feelings clear and my mind is blue skies again.

  “Hey, Sunshine,” I whisper. My parents’ nickname for her, Sammy Sunshine. The word stuck in my throat, left it raw. “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry—I wanted to kill them, all of them—”

  “You couldn’t,” she says, resting her forehead against the bars. I want to melt the hinges off the door, pry it open and scoop her out. Sam must read it in my face because she adds, quickly, “You can’t.”

  Her soft breath fans across my face. I breathe in the smell of soap and detergent and rainwater.

  “Are you in pain?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

  “I’m okay,” she says, bravely. “I’ve had worse.” I shudder, because of course she has.

  Her hands are small enough that she can slide one through the gap in the crate’s bars. She reaches for me and I seize it like I’m drowning and she is the only thing that can pull me clear. My other hand hooks on the door and, within an instant, she’s covered my fingers with her own. It’s not enough.

  “You’re warm,” she whispers, a strange note in her voice.

  “Red,” I say, trying to hide the flush of shame. “Comes with the territory. Megafreak.”

  Sam pulls her face back, her eyes hard. “Who called you that?”

  “No one. Everyone.” I smile, recognizing her indignation all too well. “What are you gonna do about it, Sammy?”

  She looks down, her own small smile touched with sadness. “Let the air out of their bike tires. Set off fireworks under their window. Hit them with snowballs walking home from school.”

  “My champion,” I say. “My hero.” I’d seen her do all that and more when some of the guys at school picked on me for no reason other than my best friend was a girl. Kids can be real dicks, even without the freak abilities.

  Sam seems to remember where we are suddenly, breaking from her own daze. She tries to pull her hand back through the bars, but I won’t let her.

  “The power is out,” I remind her, “the camera isn’t on. It’s just you and me.”

  Her face is so flustered that I know it’s more than that. Sam has her pride. She doesn’t want me to see her like this, despite everything. This may be the one chance I have to talk to her; she has to know that the only thing I care about is that she’s safe and alive and that I hate that I can’t hold her and touch her and...

  I almost can’t believe it, that it’s the first reaction I have, that it’s still there after everything that’s happened this morning.

  It’s because you’ve been alone, it’s because everyone is gone and you can’t admit to yourself you’re scared, and because it feels like home, it’ll feel like nothing ever changed. I know all of it is true, but I also know, on a very basic, human level, hers is the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. They must have created art specifically for people like her, to try and fail forever to capture these small looks, all her various angles and the colors of her moods.

  The urge is overwhelming, and I wonder...I wonder if she’s thinking about the same thing, because her eyes keep flicking down to my lips before finding my eyes again. It doesn’t make se
nse. She’s in pain, we are in actual hell, and none of it seems to matter.

  But isn’t this how it always was with us? When we were together, the world shrank around us. Nothing else existed outside of that space between us. We took Greenwood with us wherever the two of us were together.

  “Lucas,” she says again, “it’s...this isn’t...were you here? Before?”

  I shake my head. “No—I don’t know where the Facility is, but I was never here. Mia, though—I overheard the PSFs say they’d bring her here.” I almost can’t ask. “Have you seen her?”

  “No. What color is she? Do you know?”

  For a moment, I can’t speak at all. I want to look at Sam’s face, the curve of her cheek, her eyes, until the blistering pain leaves. Sometimes I am suffocated by the memory of how helpless I was then, when I tried to get her away from the PSFs. I had fire, but they had Calm Control trapped in a little device. “I don’t know. They took her before she...before she changed. I had already gone through it, but they wanted to take her as a precaution. They kept saying that. Precaution. I overheard one of them say she would be taken here, but—” It’s the first time I’ve admitted this out loud, and it feels just as horrible and bitter as I knew it would. “I don’t know if she lived through the change. When it happened. What she is.”

  Sam gives me a sharp look. “No. She survived. She would have. Mia was strong.”

  “Strong doesn’t have anything to do with it.”

  Still, she continues on, undaunted, and I love her for it. “She’s not Green. I would have seen her by now. There’s a chance she could be Blue. There are so many of them, and unless we have the same shift in the Garden. If she was Yellow—”

  I don’t like the catch in her voice. “If she’s Yellow, what? There aren’t any Yellows here.”

  “They took them out a little bit after the Orange and Red kids,” she says. “She might have been here and then taken out—moved. I don’t think they would have killed them. If they didn’t do it to the Reds—”

  “Right. If the Red monsters get to live, then everyone else should be fine.”

  “Stop it,” Sam says, and this time succeeds in pulling away from me. “Lucas, look at me. Look at me.” As helpless against her as always, I do. “The Reds who were here were...very broken. I don’t think it was their fault. But they were the only ones brave enough to try to do something. Fight back. I didn’t hate them then, and I don’t hate them now. I’m not afraid.”

  “You aren’t afraid of anything,” I say.

  “She could be here. I’ll help you look. We’ll find her,” she says. “Is that why you came here? Did you have a choice?”

  I nod. They gave us the illusion we were choosing our assignments, thinking, I guess, that it would help us commit if we felt like we were making the choice of our own volition. All they did was open a door for me I’d been waiting to look through for seven years.

  The rain and wind beat against the building, filling the silence. I finally see why the concrete under me is so wet—there’s a gap between the wall and foundation in the back corner of the room. I look back at the bags of wasted dog food and start to rise, thinking I can at least stop the hole up.

  “No—” Sam says sharply. “Wait—Lucas, don’t—” Her voice falters. “Don’t go.”

  I lower myself back to the ground. “I wasn’t leaving. I won’t leave you.”

  She’s shaking again, watching me out of the corner of her eye. My heart gives a painful lurch.

  “When—?”

  “The change? A few weeks after we left Bedford—”

  “That soon? Are you—”

  “The same old Lucas?” I have to joke about this, I’m that desperate for one small part of this to feel normal. Normal-ish. Not soul-crushingly awful. “Unfortunately. Only now, I’m slightly more flammable.”

  She doesn’t look amused, but my smile encourages hers, just a little bit. Her frantic plea fades from the room as if the rain were carrying it away. “Fortunately.”

  I try not to beam.

  She studies me as openly as I study her. I feel caught somewhere between a memory and a dream, because everything about her is the same but just that tiny bit different. The roundness to her face has thinned out, and damn if what my mom said was true all those years ago—she looks a lot like her own mother. The difference is, Mrs. Dahl had this...frigid quality to her, like a doll whose sole purpose was to have her hair brushed and her clothes changed before being placed on the shelf again to be admired. Never played with. Sammy seems almost feral in comparison, adapted to her situation here the way a lost dog has to relearn how to live outside in the wild. She’s never, ever going to be trained; she’s always going to bite and bark and run away.

  He knows that, too, I think. Tildon knows that she’s a challenge and he won’t be satisfied until he’s broken her. Pulled out all of her teeth and claws.

  Finally, Sam asks the question she’s been hovering around, unsure if she can approach it. “You’re...not like the others, are you?”

  As if on cue, a voice in my ear buzzes, “Still on auxiliary power. All PSF units, report in.” I listen as twenty voices chirp in alphabetical order. “Cabin one secure.” “Cabin two secure.” Mess Hall, Infirmary, all of it, locked down. I sag against the crate. I have more time. It might not seem like much, but, to me, it’s everything.

  “Lucas?”

  I glance at her concerned face, remembering her question. “I’m different. I didn’t break.”

  She starts to slide her fingers through the bars again, but catches herself before she can reach me. I bow my head toward her, heaving in a deep, tired sigh. I don’t know what to say. My mind is bending itself into knots of knots, trying to figure a way out of this, how I can help her, how the two of us can leave and find Mia together. It doesn’t stop, the ache in my skull doesn’t disappear, not until Sam tries again—reaching out to brush the dark, wet hair off my face. Her fingers are like ice, but I’m overheating, I’m burning.

  “Don’t go near the others, Sam,” I whisper. “Don’t look at them. Don’t try to talk to them. There’s nothing...human left inside. They’ll hurt you. It’s what they were trained to do.”

  “But not you?”

  “I’m not...I’m not totally right inside,” I try to clarify. “I’ve felt what they want me to feel.” The sweet nothing that comes from pushing through the pain, leaving your mind empty. “But I have...ways of dealing.”

  I see her digesting this, the moment her eyes light with understanding. There’s a faint smile on her face. “Turtle.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut and nod. Mom’s nickname scorches my heart.

  “It helps me cope. If I’m lost in my head, I can’t hear them. I don’t feel them. They can’t break me, but they can’t know they haven’t. So I have to...I have to do the things they ask. Bend. Follow orders.”

  “Sometimes we have to bend,” she says, “to survive.”

  “Is that what you call this morning?” I ask. “Bending? Looked more like snapping to me.”

  Sam lets her hand fall away, turning her gaze away from mine. Her jaw sets stubbornly, jutting out slightly. It’s so Sammy, I have the irrational urge to laugh, but I’m not sure I really remember how. This is the girl who never wanted to play princess.

  “Was that the first time he did that?” I say. “How long has he...”

  “How long have I been tempting him?” She spits the word out. I see the lion coming back into her. Her nails curl against the floor like claws. “Since the rotation started a few days ago. He was just assigned to our cabin block. Some of the girls in another cabin...Look, it’ll be okay. I’ll figure out a way for him to lose interest.”

  God. It’s exactly what I thought, isn’t it? He’s fixated on her. He’s fixated on other girls in the past. And instead of dealing with the actual issue, the camp controllers keep moving him around. Not even moving him to a block of boy cabins.

  Unless they already tried that, too, and it didn
’t matter to the piece of shit. I feel like I’m going to be sick. There’s smoke in my lungs, filling my chest.

  “It’s him, not you.” I say the words fiercely. “You’ve done nothing wrong. If he tries it again, I’ll—”

  “Do nothing,” she says. “You can’t. No, listen to me. You have to find Mia and figure out...You have to get out of here. Promise me.”

  “I won’t promise,” I say. “If he touches you again, he’s ashes.”

  “You can’t do anything, Lucas. You can’t. That’s the point of this place.”

  And that’s just it, isn’t it? They’ve taken everything away from us, including the right we have to protect ourselves. This is what it means to be powerless—we are dependent on them for everything, even common decency. We have to trust that they’ll behave like actual humans.

  “Run. As soon as you get a chance. Get out of here and find your parents and—” Sam leans forward again, cutting herself off. Her brows draw together. I can’t hide my expression from her, and I know how it must look. I don’t want to have to hide the pain anymore. I can’t hide anything from her, anyway.

  “Oh...oh, Lucas, no,” she whispers. The missing years stretch out between us, and I hate that I have to fill them, that I have to tell her this. I hate all of the what-ifs. What if we’d just stayed where we were and tried to fight through it? What if I’d come to Thurmond with Sam and Mia and I’d known, at least, where I could find them? “What happened?”

  I try to shrug off the ache that pierces my chest. “We—we went up to Pennsylvania, to live with Grammy and Pops. You remember?”

  “Of course.”

  “We couldn’t stay with them after they started making those announcements about Collections. I’d already changed. It was too dangerous and people knew where we were. So we left and went a few towns over.” We lived out of our car in an abandoned parking garage, but I couldn’t tell her that, not when her face was already so shattered. It wasn’t even that bad, you know? We put up sheets in the window during the day, when Dad went out to look for work, and Mom and Mia would try to outdo each other with their stories. Sometimes I think about being small enough to lay across the backseat, my cheek against the fabric, just listening to Mom as she voiced each of her characters. Dad would come back with food and a smile, lean across the way and kiss her. I miss the days that were boring, hot, and long, because those were the days when I felt safe.