“Sam?” she whispers, and it’s the best thing I’ve heard in weeks. I take her hand and drag her forward, past the clean, empty surfaces of the bar. Her backpack’s strap catches one of the chairs and sends it spinning. Whatever is inside rattles, too loud, too loud—
We are halfway down the hall, the side exit in sight, when a loud “Hey!” cracks through the air.
I swallow the burning as it rises in my throat; my lungs suck in more air. Mia and I both look back over our shoulders in time to see the man rush out the front, and bark something at the soldier still smoking there. I am so high on fear and exhilaration at pulling this off that I’m worried I’ll rip the door off its hinges when I finally reach it and fling it open.
“Stop!” the man shouts. “Mia!”
Will they kill me for this? Will they hurt her? Did I just destroy what little chance we had for a good life? I can’t predict the response—I don’t know their minds the way I knew the PSFs’—
The emergency exit opens up on one side of the parking lot. There aren’t any cars or trash containers to duck behind, nothing for cover when the man shouts, “I’ll shoot!”
“Sam!” Mia gasps, feet slipping against the black ice. I’m already slowing us down with my limp. Pain lances up it, spiking each time I swing my leg forward. “Sam!”
“Keep going!” I choke out. Across the street is a line of storefronts, and behind them, the car. “Don’t stop!”
The gunshot tears through the dusk, echoing back to us a thousand times over. The bullet pings against one of the streetlights—he’s shot wide, a warning.
Don’t stop, don’t stop, don’t stop. My thoughts keep pace with my tortured gait. Lucas, Lucas, Lucas—
Mia whirls around, dropping my hand. I skid forward against the ice, my breath a harsh white cloud around me. “No!”
But she’s not turning back. She throws her arm out at the same moment the guy takes aim, and she sweeps it sharply to the right. I stop, stunned, as the man goes sailing right back into the hotel’s brick wall, and he folds, as limp as any of the trash blowing by our feet. The papers didn’t list what ability each unclaimed kid has—Mia, then, is Blue.
“I…never tried that…before….” Mia’s teeth are chattering, and I can’t tell if it’s from the shock or the cold.
I take her arm. “Come on, it’s just a little farther.”
“W-where are w-we going?” she asks. “W-what are you doing here?”
I don’t stop, not until we’ve crossed the deserted street and bolted straight through the ravaged storefront directly in front of us. The racks and overturned shelves are totally bare, but if you take a deep enough breath, you can still smell polish and leather.
The back door swings open as I barrel my shoulder into it. Mia stumbles, her toe catching on the frame. “Wait—Sam, wait!”
I spin back, my breath wet in my chest. I cough, trying to get my wild, tumbling thoughts back in some kind of order. It’s not until the panicked haze clears from my vision that I look at her face—really look at it.
Mia is frightened.
I’ve scared her worse than the man back there ever did.
Of course you did! I press the back of my hand against my forehead, surprised to feel sweat there. You didn’t even ask her if she wanted to come with you! You took her—you took her just like one of the snatchers would!
“I’m sorry.” My lips are numb. It’s barely a mumble. “I just…do you want to go back? Do you want…do you want the procedure? Tell me you don’t…please, whatever they’ve told you…”
“I just want to know where we’re going!” she pants out. “Is that your car?”
There’s only one back here, and it’s parked at a diagonal across three spaces. A tan Honda sedan that was left unlocked in front of a shopping center not unlike this one. It was harder to teach myself how to shift gears, which pedal was stop and which was go, and the rough mechanics of parking, than it was to find the car itself.
“I’m taking you wherever you want to go,” I say, climbing into the driver’s seat. My hip is so stiff by the time I finally sit, my calf muscle strung so tight, I have to bite the inside of my mouth to keep my gasp in as I floor the gas pedal and send us sailing backward in reverse.
“Whoa!” Mia scrambles for her seat belt—why didn’t I warn her to put it on? I should have warned her before ever getting into this car. I got her out of that mess, but now I’m going to get her killed because I don’t really know how to drive, and I don’t know how soon that man and those soldiers are going to come for us, and why did I do this? Why did I do this?
Lucas.
I whip the car out of the parking lot, and it turns on what feels like two wheels as we find the road. I painstakingly charted my drive out here on a map, but I know the way back by sight. Mostly. Was it right at this tree? No—left. The car flies forward into the intersection, cutting across the traffic lanes as I make the turn too sharply.
How long have I been gone for? How long will it take to get back? I glance over at Mia and catch her watching me with dark eyes, and I’m scalded all over again. Those are Lucas’s eyes. Those are their father’s eyes. And for a second, it’s like they’re both watching me—they’re both judging me for taking a mess and dropping a bomb into it.
“Breathe, Sam,” Mia says. “It looks like you’re going to rip the steering wheel off the dashboard.”
My hands are choking the wheel, chapped and red from weeks of being exposed to the cold. But what Mia doesn’t see, or maybe she does see and just doesn’t really understand, is that there’s so much ice on the road that the wheels feel like they’re trying to slip out from under us. It’s like being on the bare back of a horse that suddenly bursts into a gallop. You have to bury your fingers into its mane and hold on for dear life.
“I’m…not very good at this yet,” I admit, too scared to take my eyes off the road again, much less look in the rearview mirror to make sure we aren’t being followed. Most of the buildings we pass have the same look as the rest of the country: battered and empty, boards where there should be windows, yellow police tape whipping around in the breeze.
Before I went to Thurmond, I had a sense that things were bad; the only reason we were able to stay in our house, while the Orfeos had to move, was because our house was paid for by the church my father served. But I was so focused on what was happening to me inside of the camp’s electric fences, I barely spared a thought for what kind of world we’d find outside of it. Imagine my surprise to find that it’s only slightly less welcoming to us than it is to everyone else.
Mia shifts next to me, turning in her seat to face me more fully.
“Can you teach me?” she asks, the words singing with excitement. “I want to learn how to drive!”
It’s some kind of bizarre reflex—some conditioning ingrained too deep to rub out—that makes me say, “Not until you’re sixteen.”
“Oh, because you took lessons and you’re all official with a license?” Mia snorts. “Give me a break.”
Good to know Mia’s attitude survived Black Rock. For one sickening second I’m almost jealous of her—that she hasn’t seen enough of the world beyond her camp’s gates to know to be scared of it. She hasn’t seen that nothing is in our control, that there aren’t a set of rules to follow to ensure our survival. I miss rules. I miss stability. I miss feeling brave.
I start to respond to that, but rain—sleet—suddenly patters down on the windshield, which is already fogging up from our combined heat. I fumble for the windshield wiper and only manage to turn on the left blinker, which lets off a taunting little click click click until I turn it off again. I push every button under the glowing clock on the dash—triangle means four flashing lights, good to know—until the right heat vents kick on, and my view of the world is no longer masked by a cloudy gray.
But figuring it out doesn’t settle me, not the way it should. It feels like my stomach is rolling itself up, and I’m half a second away from bursting
into tears or puking. I’m not a crier, and I’m not a puker, but right now I don’t feel like myself. Actually, I feel like I’m sitting in the seat behind mine, watching a girl who looks like me. Eyeing the crack that’s forming along the ridge of her spine as it widens, spreads out into a thousand thin veins. She’s barely holding herself together.
Why did I think I could do this? Why did I think I could take care of this girl when I’m barely keeping myself alive?
“Where are we going?” Mia asks again.
I bite my lip. I know she doesn’t have any other family, and I don’t know if any of their parents’ friends would take her in. I didn’t really think this through, beyond getting her away from them—the government. My gut wants me to take her back to the house, but—my whole body clenches as fear slips through me like a knife. It’s so dangerous—it’s too dangerous. But what’s the alternative? Bring her back to have her skull cut open, to be dropped into the lap of a foster family that might not treat her right?
“Why did you even come?” Mia asks, brows raised. “You’re barely talking to me. It’s been like…what, six years? Seven? Why would you even think to look for me?”
“You…” I feel the icy burn of her gaze on the side of my face. I came because of Lucas, but I can’t tell her that; I can’t. Not yet; please….
“What are you not telling me?” she demands.
“I’m just here for you. I didn’t want to leave you there, with those people, alone—”
“Well, I want to look for Luc. Can we do that?”
Several seconds of silence pass. Too long to play this off. I have the heat turned down to try to preserve what little gas we have, but sweat dampens the hair on the back of my neck, and I have to tug my knit cap off. The steering wheel is suddenly too slick to hold. Not yet, please don’t make me tell you….
Mia’s too perceptive to let this drop. I should have known.
“You know something!” Her voice rises and rises, spiking through my sluggish thoughts. “That’s how you knew to get me, isn’t it?”
I can’t get the words to my mouth fast enough. My lips, my face, are numb with panic. This is my new normal—I can’t remember how to get back to the anger, to the unbending strength. Take a girl out of her camp, tip her world over, and she has to figure herself out all over again.
“Sam!” Mia grabs my arm too hard and the car swings wildly to the right. I try to slam my foot down on the brakes, but we’ve hit a patch of black ice, and the locked wheels simply spin and spin and spin to the right.
I can’t tell our screams apart. The steering wheel jumps out of my hands as it corrects itself. The curb checks us hard enough to finally stop us before we can go plowing through the front of the nearest drugstore.
This time I do throw up. I barely get the door open fast enough to lean out. The emptiness in my stomach is only compounded by the gaping hole left behind from unleashing all of that terror in those few seconds. I’m so tired and rattled that I’m shaking as I look over at my passenger.
“Are you okay?” I rasp out.
Mia is leaning her forehead against the glove compartment, breathing like she’s just made a run for her life. Her rich, warm complexion has gone as white as milk. As white as the patches of snow melting on the sidewalk beside us.
We can’t sit here, not with what’s happened, but I can’t bring myself to move.
“Sam…” Mia’s voice drifts over, sounding as small and scared as I’ve ever heard it. “Just tell me…is he…is Lucas dead?”
I lean back against my seat, squeezing my eyes shut. Not yet, not yet, not yet…
But then, when? If our seats were reversed and Mia was the one in control, I wouldn’t stop, I would fight the information out of her. It’s not fair for me to keep it from her, even if I can justify it by thinking I’m protecting her from the pain. It’s no different than all the secrets the government kept about us, it’s no different than the parents who left their kids at their schools on Collection days without telling them what was happening. Like my father did.
“No,” I say finally, watching the last bit of sunset play out across the sky. “It’s so much worse than that.”
The truth is, I don’t even remember making the decision to do it.
I woke up that last morning in Thurmond with a head stuffed full of thoughts and memories that had…been blocked, I guess. I’d asked Ruby to undo whatever she’d done, fill the empty spaces she’d left behind, and she did. And then some. Each memory rolled through my mind like bursts of static shock. A thousand little bridges grew between all of the disconnected hazy images and feelings. Like eating a full, satisfying meal when you didn’t even realize you were hungry in the first place.
Not Green. Never Green. Hiding. For years, hiding.
Dangerous one. Ruby was one of the dangerous ones….Orange. If she could play with my thoughts that way, then she was Orange. And it was so strange, because the second that this realization sank through me, the traces of trembling anger I felt toward her evaporated. It made sense why she had been the way she was: as much my scared little shadow as my friend. All of those times she shrank back, stayed silent, left me to deal with the PSFs, were cast in a new light. We all knew what happened to the dangerous ones at Thurmond.
I spent my last day at camp beside a girl who didn’t look anything like my memories. She didn’t flinch and fold up into herself to try to fight off the cold. Ruby had been so stark when we were younger: black hair, white skin. Thin limbs and sharp joints. The spectrum of her emotions consisted of only calm and terror. She came back to us in full color. Even Ruby’s quietness had a different tone—when I looked at her, I could see thoughts moving behind her hard eyes, not fear. It was unnerving, actually, the way Ruby wore such a serene expression. Most of the girls were so caught up in her miraculous return from the dead, the fact that she had seen the outside and had lived there for months and months, that they didn’t see the charge building in her, like a thundercloud forming beneath her skin.
I was so distracted sorting through the new set of memories, shuffling them, categorizing them, re-adding them to my mental box, that I didn’t realize Ruby had something planned until it was already underway. Until they dragged her away at dinner.
The two Reds assigned to escort us that night, both girls, marched us back through the drizzle of rain to our cabin. For the hundredth time that day, I caught myself looking for Lucas, and saw the back of him as he led the way for another group of Greens. My eyes tracked him until I saw him step up to Cabin 40 and unlock it. Then I went back to looking for Ruby. A PSF had walked her out of the Mess through the kitchen, which was bad news—that was one of their favorite spots to bring us for discipline because it wasn’t under any kind of camera surveillance.
There was no thud of the electronic lock, just the scrape of the manual one as the Reds shut us in for the night. So…the power was out completely. No backup generator kicked in; not ten minutes later, not twenty, not a half hour.
Then, without warning, our world exploded.
The bunks actually shook, jittering and shuffling across the floor, the way everything trembles under the force of an oncoming train. The roar of the explosion shredded the quiet murmur of the storm. I was on my feet, stumbling against the nearest wall as the ground shuddered violently, rolling some of the girls out of their beds.
“What the hell?”
“Was that—?”
The questions were choked off by the familiar whip-crack of gunfire. I pushed past Vanessa toward a small window, only to find that, whatever the blast was, it had knocked the thick sheet of plastic out of its frame. We had a clear view of the Red stationed nearby as she took off at a run in the direction of the camp’s entry gate, her gun already up and aimed.
Someone’s here.
“Everyone—shut up!” Ellie had been the one to take charge when Ashley disappeared. She was only beginning to wake up from the shock of that loss now that Ruby was back—there was just the smallest pos
sibility that Ashley was out there, too. “Come here, come here!”
I wanted to stay by the window, but Vanessa dragged me with her toward the center of the room.
“Circle up, come on—whatever it is, it’ll be over soon,” Ellie said.
And what if it isn’t? I thought. What if we need to protect ourselves, not curl up into little balls?
The shots got louder, splitting the air, making it impossible not to flinch with each one, until they finally knocked against our door.
And nearly blew it off its hinges.
It swung in, still smoking, as two figures dressed in head-to-toe black rushed in. The taller of the two tugged up his mask—and the face there was young, so much younger than I was expecting. His blue eyes scanned our faces frantically as the girl beside him lifted her mask and reached for her radio.
“Negative on Twenty-Seven,” she said, voice harsh. There was a static response I couldn’t hear over the drumming in my head. Her hair was tucked up into the ski mask, but a single vivid purple strand escaped as she unleashed a torrent of cussing.
“Ruby?” The boy was Southern, his words curling in a familiar way that made something inside me ache. His movements were jerky, frantic, and he seemed to forget he still had a gun in his hands. “Where’s Ruby?”
They’re here for her? Amazement stole through me. People had broken into the camp. And if they were here for her, did that also mean they were here…for the rest of us?
These were kids. They were like us. And they were…they were…
“She—they took her out of the Mess Hall. Out back.” Ellie barely managed to get the words out. “It’s the big building to the right of the camp’s entrance.”
The girl raised a dark brow at the boy. “Go ahead. I got them.”
The boy threw us one last look over his shoulder before rushing back out into the rain.
“All right, ladies, listen up because I still have ten more cabins to clear and do not have one more goddamn second to waste. Pull on your big girl panties, grab your shoes, a coat, whatever, and follow me.” The girl was already at the door before she realized none of us had moved. “Why the fuck are you all staring at me like that? You want to stay in this shithole and get flushed with the PSFs?”
Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) Page 22
