Sparks Rise

by Alexandra Bracken

  But I know what mice sound like as they scrabble against the concrete and through the walls. That is not a mouse.

  Someone exhales between their teeth. I don’t hear it so much as feel it near my ankle.

  “Who’s there?” My voice sounds unnaturally loud to my ears, even at a whisper. How long had I been sleeping? I would have heard someone coming in; the creak of the door alone would have jolted me out of the deepest layer of sleep.

  I start to draw my legs back from where I’ve stretched them out. But that small movement sparks another one—warm, smooth muscle glides along my skin, up my calf with silent intent. And I think, He’s back, I think, He’s here, he’s got the lock off. I can’t see a damn thing, I can’t get out of this damn cage, this room, this life; the darkness has taken on weight, and I can’t get out from under it. I can’t get out. I am never getting out.

  It’s not until after I frantically kick that I can hear my mind whisper, Snake.

  The hiss sounds like I’ve tried to throw a bucket of ice water onto a fire, it sounds like my heart, the frantic pulse of it just before it stops completely. My numb, frozen body is alive with feeling, overwhelmingly aware of the weight stretched out along my hip, down my leg. By then, it’s too late.

  The metal sheet beneath me pops as weight suddenly shifts. I can’t go still, limp, anything I know I’m supposed to do, I just want out, I want out of here. There’s a moment’s grace as it coils before the lunge. I feel it spring forward, and, God, do I feel it when its fangs punch through my skin and strike the ankle bone.

  I scream in pain and shock and it only—it hurts—

  It hurts—

  It electrifies my brain. I can see colors and lights that aren’t there. I feel the devil in this room as surely as if he’d guided the snake in.

  Stop. Moving.

  It whips out of the cage so fast, I think it’s flying. It leaves the way that it must have come in, through the gap Tildon made trying to pry the door off. I choke on my next breath as its scale-slick body rubs against the first bite the last time. If it’s leaving, it won’t bite again. It’s as scared of you as you are of it.

  I stay still for as long as I can bear it, until the trembling starts. Reaching down as best as I can, I rub my fingers along the punctures, already swollen and tender. They come away slick and warm—warmer than any other part of my body. I can almost imagine how it happened, how the snake was washed out of its deep hole by this winter’s rain and made a shelter of this place, and then a home when he realized how many mice risked running wild to get to the dog food. I wasn’t anything more than a heater to it. It stretched out to try soaking in what warmth I had to offer. To—

  Waves of nausea churn in my stomach. I was a Girl Scout for all of two years before the change, and they taught us to identify the poisonous ones, how to avoid them on hikes, what to do if you can’t. But I can’t remember any of it. There’s nothing in the box. My mind is scrambling back through the years, but none of it matters because it happened before I went through the change. I can’t remember how to tell one snake apart from the other, and, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It’s too dark to see anything. The only thing I know is that I don’t feel right.

  I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, and, for the first time in years, I don’t want to lay here and let luck roll the dice on whether I have to hang around, or if I’m finally getting off this ride. I see now that there’s something for me at the end of all of this. When I get out, no matter how many years it may be from now, I know there is someone who’ll care. If Lucas can’t escape this demented program they’ve set up for Reds, then he’ll need me to find him. I will help him find Mia, and even though I have no idea what to do or where to go from there, none of it matters because we’ll be speeding away, the darkness disappearing into the dust the wheels will kick up. I will outrun this place and protect them both from ever feeling the pain of loss again.

  I shift onto my knees, mind and leg throbbing with my pulse. I need to get someone’s attention—in our cabins, if anything were to happen, we had an emergency button to push. That’s how they knew to come and get Ruby. I don’t have that luxury, and I haven’t understood that it is a luxury until this moment when every single part of me is shaking and panic is making it hard to focus on anything. I gasp in a deep breath, feeling my leg again. My fingers don’t even brush the bite, but my leg feels waxy to me, and aside from the shooting pain, there’s barely any sensation outside of the feeling of sand pouring into my bones.

  What I have is a dark room, and one lone camera somewhere on the wall behind me.

  I stick my hand through the opening that Tildon created in the metal bars. Each time my mind brings up the image of a snake, I stubbornly turn it back to Lucas’s face. No one is coming becomes He’ll come, he’ll come, he’ll come to get me. I don’t want to be a realist. I don’t want to pretend like I’m okay living in this gray numbness anymore. I want to get out of here. I want to live. I want to feel every ounce of pain and happiness life can serve up, because it’ll mean I’ve survived. It’ll mean I’m alive.

  I fit my arm as far through as it’ll go and wave it up and down. Minutes tick down, second by second, until I can’t ignore the way the metal is cutting into my arm and that nothing has happened. I tug on the lock but my hands are shaking too hard to keep my grip. Shuffling back along the metal bottom of the kennel, I pull off my shirt and expose my skin to the cold. It feels good, actually. There’s something boiling just under my skin; I feel it bubbling in my stomach, too, until it starts to cramp. The shirt is pushed out the hole first, and I reach down to grip it, hoping beyond hope that they’ll be able to see the color moving in the dark better than my arm. I wave it frantically up and down.

  Nothing happens, and no one comes, and the longer it takes for me to realize it, the worse I feel. It’s too dark here. Unless the cameras can see in the dark, they have no idea anything is wrong. I could try to scoot the crate back, get close enough to the stacked crates to try to send them crashing to the ground, but it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t see it.

  I have to get to the lights.

  At this point, the punishment I know will come stops mattering and I flip myself around again, scraping my back against the top of the kennel. I can’t make out anything in front of my face, it’s all feeling fingers and desperate hands. Still, I lay on my back and I kick. One leg, the one that feels like it’s actually on fire, I can’t so much as move. I grit my teeth and use my other to kick against what I think are the crate’s hinges—they can break, can’t they? Anything can break if you hit it hard enough. Aren’t we all proof of that?

  I hear a snap; the reverberation of the hit races up my leg. One more. Please, just one more—

  The door flies off and clatters against the cement. I don’t waste a second in twisting myself around so I can use my arms to drag myself out. The contents of my head are swinging around. I can’t get a bearing on the ground with my feet under me. It’s farther to fall, anyway, than if I go on hands and knees.

  I move through the dark, scraping my skin, feeling the loose pieces of concrete dig into my skin. The hand out in front of me bumps the wall and I reach up, feeling along the wall for the switch. My fingers fumble, slick and clumsy. I force myself farther up until I hear a click, and the light that floods the room burns tears into my eyes. I shield my face and look to the door. It would lock from the outside, wouldn’t it? I could try. I need to try.

  But that’s just it. Strength seeps out of me, beading on my skin as sweat. I’m shaking and I can’t stop. My head isn’t in control of anything below my mouth.

  “Help!” The word tears out of me. I squint up toward the dark blur in the upper corner of the room. “Help me! Please!”

  I don’t want to die. I don’t want to die like this.

  “Help me! Help—”

  It hits me so fast, I barely have time to turn my head before the contents of my stomach come rocketing up and out of me. In between he
aves, I can’t release a breath, let alone another word. I’m gasping and it doesn’t stop. Even when there’s nothing left, I’m heaving and cramping and crying because it hurts, it hurts—

  The dark swallows me up and spits me back out; there’s no way to measure how long I drown before my body drags me up from the depths again. My hair clings to my face, my neck, my shoulders as the world goes fizzy and foggy around me. The dreams that emerge from the dark are disjointed and bold, colors like vivid sunsets.

  My father’s voice trumpets through the night, Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy; and nothing shall by any means hurt you. I see him standing at the altar, wings with purple and gold feathers expanding behind him, casting shadows over pews. My mother’s perfect, icy face melts off and falls into her lap. Lucas, older Lucas, is above me, climbing up and up and up through the branches of a tree. When he turns to look down, I see a crown of stars around his dark hair. The sparks drift down around me as I reach up for his hand.

  I’m on the bus in the pouring rain. The kids around me are silently crying, turning their faces down so the men and women standing in the aisles can’t see. It plays in black and white, an old movie my brain has filed away. But in the row ahead on the opposite side, there’s a little girl with dark hair. I see her in color—green eyes that flash toward me, blue-and-yellow Batman pajamas. I remember this—the gunshot, the Orange. The blood on the bus windows that the rain resignedly washes away. That girl walks next to me the whole way to the big brick building until we’re dripping on the black-and-white checkered tile inside. I hold her hand. I remember holding her hand.

  It’s Ruby. I know it is. Ruby, who slipped away, Ruby who disappeared. Is this what she felt like? All those nights I used to wonder, Where did she go? If there’s a Heaven, will they let any of us in? Where do we go? If there’s no place for us outside the fences, where do we go when we die?

  The girl crumbles into a pile of ash. I try to scoop her up, mold her back into her shape, but she’s gone, it’s all gone—I hear scratching, a metallic whine, and turn toward the other end of the hallway where a pale blue light glows. The kids around me fade to shadows. A voice like a gunshot cracks through the silence.

  “—gency—require—immediate—transportation to—”

  The world rocks and rattles, shaking me out of the black and into the blue. I blink against the foggy light around me and try to turn my head to see what dark shape is moving near my feet, but my body is locked up tight. My tongue is swollen and it tastes like bile in my mouth. I can’t feel anything anymore. All that’s left of my heartbeat is a soft, tentative knocking in my chest. A Stay awake, a Fight harder, a You can’t go.

  It’s too hard to keep my eyes open for long. When I come back, there’s a face I don’t recognize above me, saying things I can’t hear. One of his careful hands is on my throat, the other on my leg. Gone, back, gone—I’m moved, lifted up on something stiff and unbending. The cold air can’t touch me, but the smell, the smell of clean air, the last traces of rain, it makes me want to cry. I glide under a sky so blue, so purple, so golden I fight as hard as anything to keep my eyes open, because I want to remember it forever, however long that lasts.

  Because I know it’ll be the last thing I ever see.

  FOUR

  LUCAS

  WE WAKE UP about a half hour before the rest of the camp does, not with the piercing alarms over the loudspeakers, but the clang of a PSF dragging their baton along the barred barracks window. When you’ve trained your body and mind to rest without ever falling into a real, deep sleep, it’s enough to send you shooting straight up out of your bunk to kick-start the morning routine of wash up-pull on uniform-make bed-stand at attention-wait for instructions. I seem to do all five in one quick motion.

  The barracks are silent save for the shuffle of feet and the running of water. The building is old but well heated and decently maintained. We have windows and tiled floors and painted walls, which makes the whole thing almost seem homey in comparison to what I saw of the cabins yesterday. And where they kept Sammy overnight.

  Up until last week, it housed PSFs about to hit the end of their mandatory service. We only had to slide neatly into their vacated place, set our uniforms and toiletries in the small chests at the end of the bunks that used to house theirs. There were no decorations on the wall, but they do have a few sun-faded posters up—one with the camp’s posted schedule, which apparently hasn’t changed in seven years, others with charts of the color classifications. The angry slash of red at the top of the chart is labeled FIRE, HIGHLY DANGEROUS.

  My breath comes out as a harsh snort.

  F13 falls into place beside me, smoothing a braid back over her shoulder. In my head, I’ve always called her Rose, because of the color of her hair. I’ve imagined a whole fake life for her, for all of them, always something silly to counteract the harsh reality. For Rose, I pretend that her parents are zookeepers, and growing up she had a pet armadillo named Fernando and monkeys that hung out in her backyard. I pretend her voice sounds as soft as falling petals, because I’ve only ever heard her scream. The Trainers stripped these kids down to a letter and a number, sapped every feeling and thought that belonged to them. I want to see them as humans. I will dream for them, if I have to.

  She’s finished wrapping the sheets over her bed with the pointless military precision drilled into us, and takes a moment to straighten out her uniform and make sure that her shirt is properly tucked in. I do the same, smoothing out a wrinkle that’s not there; I’m bursting with the need to move, to rock back and forth on my heels until it’s time to head out and start the day.

  Instead, I picture someone pouring plaster under my skin, letting it dry, keeping me trapped in that same stiff pose. It helps. A little. But I’ve been waiting hours to check on Sam. I kept looking toward Olsen during the dinner rotations, ready to be sent to bring her food, to check on her, to be posted there overnight. I tried to do the math in my head of how long I could disappear from my post and go out around back of the building before anyone would notice.

  But Olsen never said a word to me, neither did the camp controller who dismissed us for the night and sent us back here. I didn’t exactly expect them to, but I wanted some kind of hint that she’d at least been brought a blanket or water. What happens when she has to go to the bathroom? Do they let her get up and move around for a few minutes at any point during the night? The questions kept my brain from shutting down. I couldn’t escape them, and a part of me felt like I didn’t deserve to.

  The only thing I’d been able to do was watch Tildon to make sure he didn’t disappear at any point, but after the dinner rotations? There was no way to know for sure. He could have gone back, slipping out when he should have been returning to his own barracks.

  I close my eyes and take a deep breath to steady myself against the flood of violence and flame that filters through my mind.

  The door at the far end of the room swings open, and a camp controller strides in, her gaze sweeping over us. I straighten as a PSF moves between the beds, inspecting the cotton for wrinkles and untucked corners. Satisfied, he nods toward her.

  “Your assignments for the day are as follows,” the camp controller begins. I listen only long enough to hear that I’m the medical escort, not assigned to Sammy’s cabin block. A lick of defeat hits me right at my center. I’m babysitting a whole bunch of kids who aren’t her, and, worse, they haven’t rotated me to any of the Blue cabin blocks to confirm for myself that Mia isn’t here.

  We follow the camp controller out of the barracks, heading our separate ways. The world around us is still damp and dripping, with the promise of another storm. I’m handed a clipboard with a single sheet of paper listing the names, locations, and times to pick the kids up and walk them over to the Infirmary. At the end of my day, I have an allotted two hours to “assist medical staff” before dinner rotations.

  Whatever that means for them, it
means something else entirely for me. There are computers in the Infirmary. If I can find one, it’s just a matter of finding a room not under camera surveillance to run a simple search in their system—I’ll know, for better or worse, exactly where Mia is.

  I let that thought carry me forward to the Mess Hall for first meal, arms swinging in time with the others’. I feel in control of myself now, enough not to fly off into a rage when I see Tildon smirking from where he’s posted at the door, holding it open for the kids who are filing inside.

  My feet carry me over to our small table as my eyes scan the room again. Sam’s cabin is included in the first meal rotation, and there—I can see them across the way, over hundreds of heads bent over their Styrofoam bowls. The girl with dark, curly hair, the one I saw crying yesterday, looks like she’s been dusted with chalk, she’s so pale. Her eyes dart to the blank space next to her as the PSF patrolling the aisle behind her leans down and whispers something in her ear. A thick finger runs along the shell-pink curve of her ear and I know, even before he looks up and catches me staring, that it’s Tildon.

  That empty space is Sam’s. My stomach turns to stone and I barely manage to swallow the food already in my mouth. They still have her locked up, then. She is still in that goddamn cage.

  The tables vacate one by one, faces and numbers assembling into orderly lines, two by two. We do the same, and I’m surprised to find that I’m actually eager to get moving today. Work means the hours will pass faster, and I’ll see Sam when our schedules collide one last time at the final meal rotation. I pick up my clipboard from the table and tuck it under my arm, ignoring the terror on the faces of the Green boys who have assembled to our right.

  F14 turns toward them, her eyes as dull and flat as sandstone. If it weren’t for the PSF standing nearby, I think the kids still would have scattered like mice. The proximity of us is wearing down their nerves.