Mia is breathing so hard it steams the air. She looks to me for an answer, and I hope I’m not making the biggest mistake of my life when I nod.
“Follow the road out—see that SUV? That’s our ride.” The girl jerks her thumb toward the car parked across the lanes, about a half mile down the road. “We’ll be right behind you. But for the love of God, hustle.”
It’s raining in earnest now; the clouds pelt us with cold, fat drops that do more to clear the haze of exhaustion than the growing disbelief that we’re out, that we’re with other kids, that this is happening.
“Who are these people?” Mia whispers. “How does she know who you are?”
“They’re friends…I think,” I say.
And I know I’m right a second later, when the back door to the car opens and a small figure climbs down, awkwardly trying to swing a heavy walking cast out without slipping. I don’t realize I’m moving faster, hobbling forward on my own bum leg, until suddenly I can see the worry fade from her face and relief settle in. I laugh at how pitiful we must look with our limps, but somehow it’s perfect. Despite all of our differences, Ruby and I have always been a pair.
She was always so careful and reserved with her touch and words, I’m shocked all over again as she throws her arms around my shoulders. Her clothes breathe out the heat of the car, and I let myself sag against her, too close to sobbing to say anything.
I knew she was okay. I read everything about her the papers published, including the fact that one of the Camp Controllers had broken her leg when she shut down the camp’s power. I saw the news reports speculating what was “to be done” with her, because of what her abilities are, every minute spliced with shots of a thousand exploding camera flashes as she left the hotel in West Virginia to go home with her parents. But I didn’t realize how badly I wanted and needed to see her until this moment.
“Are you okay?” Ruby asks, voice breaking. “Did they hurt you? We got here as fast as we could—”
Something about the way she cries finally triggers my own tears. They collect in my lashes, disappear in her long, dark hair. Another door opens and shuts; the driver comes around the front of the car. I recognize him, too. There’s a bit of scruff on his face, and he’s wearing a plaid shirt and leather jacket instead of black fatigues, but he’s the one who came rushing into our cabin with the purple-haired girl looking for Ruby. Now he hangs back, watching us with a wary expression, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his jeans.
“How?” I manage to get out as I pull back. How did you know? How did you find us?
“I had a friend flag your profile in the system so it would alert me if someone searched for you,” Ruby says, green eyes bright. “I hope that’s okay. I was so worried when I realized you weren’t at the hotel, and your parents never checked in. I’ve been looking for you for weeks.”
She turns to Mia, who hangs back, arms crossed, clutching at her elbows. Ruby brings a small, encouraging smile to her face. I haven’t seen one like it from her in years, maybe ever. Something about her steadiness must speak to the part of Mia that craves it, because she takes Ruby’s hand when she offers it, shakes it all proper and civilized.
“I’m Ruby Dal—”
“—I know who you are,” Mia blurts out. “I mean…the news…they let us watch at our hotel.”
Ruby’s smile falters, just for a moment. “I’m guessing you’re the mysterious Mia?”
Called in her favor. Isn’t that what Vida had said? It makes more and more sense as I weave the thought through what I know. Ruby was part of the group of people who freed the camps, she worked directly with Senator Cruz—maybe the government felt like she was owed something?
And…I made her blow it on us.
“We need to go,” the boy says, the driver. The words are gentle but firm, as is the way he cups her elbow.
“I’m sorry,” I say. I don’t know why I’m apologizing, exactly—that she could have gotten something amazing from them, that I’ve somehow shuffled my mess into her lap, that she’s been through her own hell and now I’m forcing her to walk into mine.
“Don’t say that. I owe you everything.” She startles, as if just realizing something. “Where’s the boy who was with you? I thought he might be the one from Thurmond…the Red?”
I swallow. Nod. “They separated us.”
Ruby doesn’t react the way I expect her to—the way anyone would, who saw what the original Reds at Thurmond were like. She doesn’t even tense. “They didn’t have any details about him in the report that was filed in Iowa, other than that he wasn’t…responsive.”
“He’s not himself,” Mia says.
We are all dancing around the real, straight truth: Lucas is broken. He can’t or won’t take care of himself.
He will likely slip away and die.
He has already started to go.
He could die before we ever find him.
Someone could hurt him again.
I might never find him again.
The breath burns in my chest and fear becomes a wasp nest in the pit of my stomach. “It’s…bad, Ruby.”
I made a mistake.
Her lips compress, but her eyes are still soft, understanding, as the others finally reach us. The girl with the crazy hair shakes her head.
“It’s okay, we’ll figure it out, I promise.” She turns to Mia, reaches back for the door. “In you go.”
Mia glances back at me. “Are you sure he’s not here?”
There is sheer agony in not knowing—if we leave and he is here, if he’s only hidden, I don’t think I could recover from that. Knowing we left him here to die alone would kill me. It would.
“Positive,” says the boy in the fleece; then, after being elbowed by the driver, adds, “I’m sorry. He’s not here.”
“Look,” the other girl says to Ruby, who is now also hesitating—who, with a single glance, tells me that she won’t leave if I don’t want us to—“we’ll call Nico on the way. I know you don’t need me to remind you about how fucking close we’re cutting this—”
“Agreed,” the driver says. “Let’s roll and figure it out as we go—just like old times.”
“Yay,” the other boy says, without a hint of enthusiasm. “Because that always went so well.”
With a steadying breath, I climb into the way-back seat, trying to ignore how badly I’m shaking, how cold I feel at my core, despite the heat coming through the vents. Mia is right behind me. The others quickly fall into place—Ruby in the front passenger seat, our rescuers in the two middle seats, and—
“Sam, Mia, this is Liam,” Ruby says as Liam buckles up and starts the engine. He makes a wide arc and sends us sailing down the open highway. “You already met Vida and Chu—Charlie.”
“Hi,” Mia says, which is good, because I can’t seem to get whatever is stuck in my throat out. “Where the hell are we going?”
Vida actually snorts. “My thoughts exactly.”
Liam glances up at us in the rearview mirror. “Where do you want to go?”
“What he means to say,” Vida says, “is what the hell were you planning on doing with that Red?”
“That Red is my brother,” Mia growls. Vida turns fully around in her seat now, brows raised, assessing.
“She didn’t mean it like that,” Ruby interrupts.
“Of course she did,” Charlie says, rolling his eyes. “And, by the way, it’s a valid question.”
“Still need a direction to drive, here,” Liam says.
The way these kids talk to each other, the way they look at each other, it’s so…comfortable. I bring my arms around my center, hugging myself.
Ruby told me once that her parents died, way back when we were first processed into Thurmond. Though I know that’s not true now, she’s clearly found a new family all the same. A part of me wonders if it’s not what she went through that has shaped her into something so solid and strong, but the people who went through it with her.
I’m not
jealous…not exactly. I feel a longing that surprises me, though, to capture this easy warmth with Lucas and Mia again. I want to stay inside this warm bubble of Ruby and her friends, and start believing in the possibility of finding steady ground to stand on again.
I can tell Mia is still, despite Vida’s bluntness, a little starstruck by everyone in the car. Save for Vida, these are all faces that have appeared in the press, people who’ve had their stories told—they’re the ones who have been speaking up on our behalf. These kids got to fight for the rest of us. If you had asked me seven years ago who I thought would be at the helm of the ship torpedoing the camps, I would have reached into the box of memories in my mind and pulled out some senator’s name, or a general’s. I would not have offered up Ruby’s.
But here she is, so much more than I ever thought. So much braver than I ever gave her credit for.
“We want to find Lucas,” I say finally. “We appreciate you…we’re so thankful you got us out of there, but we can…we can do it on our own. We’ve already been enough trouble.”
“Luckily for you, this particular group specializes in trouble,” Ruby says, pulling what looks like a small cell phone out of the cupholder. She starts to tap out a message as she continues, “Did you guys hear anything about where they might be taking him? Anything at all? Damn—I thought we fixed this stupid battery. It just died again.”
Ruby turns to Vida, who’s already reaching into her jacket pocket for something.
“No. No,” Charlie says. “Bad enough we’re out here, but using a phone they can listen in on?”
Vida already has the device in her hand and is dialing. Her other hand covers his mouth as she flashes him a look of utter exasperation that he returns tenfold. Charlie peels it off, but instead of dropping her hand, he wraps his long, narrow fingers around hers and holds on. And she lets him. The tension that had seemed to ricochet through her softens.
“Hey, Zuzu—yeah, everything’s good here, what about you? You keeping Cate on her toes? Ah, that’s my girl.” She gives the others a little thumbs-up. “We’ll be back soon. I know, I’m sorry—”
“She’s a friend,” Charlie explains in a low voice. “They have her enrolled in a school pilot program in D.C. We couldn’t take her with us without raising some red flags, and she was not happy.”
“My ears are still blistered,” Liam complains. “The sass. The sass! Too much time with Vi.”
To Vida, who is now smirking, Charlie adds, “Tell her to do her homework!”
“She’s been sassy all along,” Ruby says, rolling her eyes. “You and Chubs just treated her like she was a little angel—”
“Excuse you,” Charlie—do they seriously call this string bean of a boy Chubs?—says, outraged. “She is an angel.”
“Exactly. She wasn’t born, she was found at the end of a rainbow,” Liam agrees.
“Why do you always have to take it to such a weird place?” Charlie complains.
I can’t keep up with this back-and-forth.
Vida hushes them with a wave of her hand. “Yeah, the chatter died,” she says into the phone. “We’ll try to recharge—did you find the present I left for you?”
“Was this present a knife?” Liam asks, sounding legitimately nervous.
“An angel that is now fascinated by weaponry,” Charlie amends, glaring at Vida.
Vida ignores them both. “Can you get Nico for me? Hey, Nico—yeah, no, everything”—her voice pitches several degrees louder—“everything is fine. Are you near a computer—yeah, okay, stupid question. Slow down, Turbo—”
Mia leans forward, trying to catch whatever hints she can from the voice on the other end of the line. I’m gripping the seat cushion so hard, pieces of the upholstery are gathering under my nails. A green blur of trees slips by us, and it feels like we are being fast-forwarded through this; I can’t keep up with my hope and confusion.
“Can you check to see if a kid was transferred out of the Zone One station—what other station would I be talking about? Yeah, it’d be deep network—these asshole bureaucrats can’t take a shit without someone filling out a form in triplicate, of course there’s got to be some kind of a record—I don’t know, whatever keywords they use as code for Reds? Oh my God, I swear—”
“Put him on speaker, Vi,” Ruby says, interrupting whatever is about to explode out of the girl’s mouth. She does as she’s asked. “Hey, Nico, it’s me. You might find something if you look for a medical alert or incident flag.”
“I’ll try that.” The voice that comes tumbling out of the phone sounds as young as any of us, and that catches me off guard. But…of course. Of course they would trust another kid with this, over an adult. “But Ruby, aren’t you supposed to be heading back now?”
Another reference to some silent clock that’s ticking down without any sort of explanation as to why. Everyone’s eyes in the car swing over to her, even Liam’s. I’ve been watching his expression grow harder and harder in the rearview mirror, until now it seems set in deep unhappiness.
“Plenty of time,” Ruby says calmly. “Anything?”
“Well…actually, yeah. There’s a request for a medic at a safe house in Ashland, Ohio—urgent, prefer one with PSF training.” As he talks, my heart begins to throb painfully in my chest; it’s so real, I can barely feel Mia’s broken nails clawing into my arm as she grips it.
“Ashland? Why Ashland?” she’s asking.
“Ohio?” It’s the first word we’ve gotten out of Liam in a while. He breaks his gaze on the road again and shoots Ruby a pleading look that she acknowledges by brushing her fingers against his cheek. I realize I’m staring, and force my eyes back on the forest sailing by us.
“Ohio’s on the way to Indiana,” Nico points out. “And—yeah, another requisition just came in for a unit to meet them at the safe house with Grade Five restraints.”
Grade Five restraints. I can’t let myself imagine what those look like, but Mia clearly is. Her breathing grows harsh, uneven.
“Then they do know what he is,” Ruby says, confirming my fear. “Dammit. Is there any kind of address listed for the safe house?”
“I’ll find it and text it to you, but—I don’t think you’ll make it back in time, not if you go to Ohio. It’s a six-hour, twenty-eight-minute drive between there and Salem, and that’s a direct route, without having to figure out how to get back through the zone blocks—”
Salem. Ruby has to be home in time for something, and while she clearly doesn’t seem worried about it, the others are.
“No,” Charlie and Liam thunder together, the second she clicks off the call. Even Ruby looks taken aback by the force of the words. Vida straightens, leaning away from Charlie, with a look of calm, cool murder on her face that makes me wince. She likes them trying to make a decision for Ruby about as much as I do.
“Neither of you have to be involved—” Ruby starts.
“Do not pull that with us,” Charlie says. “Don’t act like we’d ever choose to separate. Look—” He turns back to us. “I’m really sorry about your brother. I am. If you want to try to go find him, you should know you’re dealing with armed soldiers who will happily take you back into custody and put you through the procedure. You’ll be back where you started. But you are not dragging us any further into this than we already are. It’s too big of a risk.”
I think I’m going to be sick. My guts have knotted themselves so tightly, I can barely breathe.
“We don’t need your help,” Mia spits back. “You can pull over right here. Go ahead. Let us out. If you think my brother is a risk, then you won’t want to spend another second with me.”
“It’s not that,” Ruby says quickly. “We—I—want to help.”
“Same,” Vida says, to my surprise. “All I’ve done these past few weeks is listen to old white people talk about what to do with us. I could use a good fight—and no, Charlie Boy, you don’t get to decide that for me.”
“Ruby, I know…I get it, all right?”
Liam says, dividing his attention between her and the road. “But it’s too dangerous. You know that. Think about yourself for once.”
“Why do you get to decide whose life is more important?” Mia demands. “It’s because he’s a Red, isn’t it? You have no idea who he is, or what he’s like. He’s the kindest—” Her voice cracks. “He’s the best person in the world, and you’d leave him there for them to kill. You’d let them take him back in and break him more than they already have, break him until there’s nothing of him left!”
There’s one of those old-fashioned rest stops up ahead, the kind that are meant to look like brick ranch houses, I guess. Without another word, Liam pulls us off the highway, turning into its empty parking lot. Throwing the brake on, he unbuckles his seat belt and twists around in his seat, clearly struggling to keep his voice and expression in check.
“You don’t have one damn idea what you’re talking about,” he says, his voice low.
“Liam—” Ruby tries, clearly reading his temperature on this. “She just wants us to help her brother. I want to help. I know why you’re against it, but you also know why it’s important to me.”
He glances at her, takes in an unsteady breath, and gives a curt nod.
“Girlfriend has the power to melt brains and underwent extensive combat training,” Vida says, as if she’s reminded him of this a hundred times.
Extensive combat training? Ruby?
She won’t look at me, acknowledge this.
“And if I’m there, you know we’ll get in and out quickly,” Vida continues, as if it’s simply the truth, and not arrogance. And maybe it is, because the others don’t exactly contradict her. “You need to stop with this stupid, smothering, protective bullshit—”
“Oh, I’m sorry!” Charlie says, raising his voice, “But if you’d been this close to getting killed and there was nothing I could do to stop it, if you were getting buried under death threats, if you had a multimillion-dollar bounty on your head, then, yeah, I’d be a little mistrustful of the world, too! I’d shoot anyone who gave you a wrong look and then destroy their bodies with lime!”
Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) Page 29
