Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (33 page)

For a second, I just
look
at him. Luc was so bundled up before, came at me so fast, I didn’t even have a moment to really study him and try to sort through the changes. His face is almost the same as I remember it, though it’s not as round or soft as it used to be. Always tall, it looks like he’s grown a solid foot, maybe more, and the process has left him stretched and way too thin. He reminds me a lot of Dad, the shape of his nose, his ears, though we both got Mom’s coloring. I don’t know why I like that—why it makes me feel better to see evidence of people who are gone. The reminders should hurt more than they do.

“Is he…always like this?” I ask, my voice low.

Sam glances up at my face before turning back to Luc. Her shoulders rise on her next deep breath in. I already know I won’t like her answer. She bites her lip so hard, it makes the scar from her cleft palate bright red.

“No…in the beginning, right after I left Thurmond with him, he was…he responded a lot more. Faster, too. He would take care of himself—things like, he’d know that he was hungry and that he should eat when I put food in front of him, and now I have to beg him. His eyes were still blank then, but there was something moving behind them.”

“What happened?” I ask. “What changed?”

Sam rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know. I can feel him just…drifting away, no matter how hard I try to pull him back in. The only way to get him to acknowledge you, just
look
at you, is if you try to touch him. He
hates
that.”

He smells a little like unwashed clothes. It’s not horrible, but I see what she means about him not caring for himself. I imagine it is hard to bathe someone who doesn’t want you to touch him.

“What else sets him off?”

“For a while, right at the beginning, I tried to talk to him about your family. I told him about your parents and he just…he lost it. Maybe that was it? Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to try to get him to remember. Whatever they did, they made him break from that.” Sam swallows roughly. “Mia…I think they really hurt him. He has these scars, all up and down his arms, like they cut him bit by bit.”

My view of him blurs. I take a second to push back against the tears. I don’t want to cry. Lucas is right in front of me. We haven’t lost him totally. We can figure this out, how to help him, but it doesn’t involve throwing another temper tantrum like I’m five, not fifteen.

“I’m sorry…” I say. “I’m real sorry, Sam. I was just…”

She holds up a hand. “Everything you said was true.”

“No—it wasn’t,” I say. “I was upset and just kind of freaked out on you, and it wasn’t fair.”

Sam can’t look at me, or won’t. It takes me a minute to work up the courage to touch her, to put a hand on her shoulder. I’m scared I messed this up, and if she pushes me away, then I really will have no one—

She doesn’t. Sam puts her hand over mine.

“He’s getting worse,” she says. “Every day. I keep thinking, did I make the right choice? Should I have let him go with the other Reds? Someone must be taking care of them…right? Helping them?”

“No!” I say sharply. “I mean—I mean
yes
, you should have gotten him out. You don’t know what they’re doing to the other Reds. If they did this to them—hurt them so bad—then who knows what they’ll do to them now? I wouldn’t put it past them—the PSFs, the government, whoever—to just try to…”

The unfinished thought sends me into a kind of tailspin—the smoke, the fire, the stairwell, being crushed, being knocked down, and down, and down…

I don’t realize I’m shivering until Sam stands up and wraps a blanket around my shoulders, forcing me down into her still-warm seat.

“Try to what?” she asks, crouching down beside me.

When I can, I form the words on my numb lips. “Destroy the evidence. They…the people in charge of my facility, Black Rock…they burnt the control room to try to destroy all of their records. The military guy who came for us made it sound like they’d been doing that to all of the camps since yours was closed.”

Sam’s lips part, and her face goes as gray as a thundercloud. She starts to shake her head, like she can shake the idea loose before it can get its claws in.

“You know they would do it,” I say, “you know it’s a possibility….”

“I don’t know anything anymore, apparently,” she says bitterly.

I’m not sure where she’s going with that, and I’m not sure Sam does either. She seems relieved just to be talking to someone other than herself.

“Lucas beat this before,” I tell her, and it’s good to remind myself of that, too. “He can do it again. He just needs our help.”

“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” Sam says, turning her eyes back on him. “He doesn’t even really sleep, Mia. He just gets to the point of being so exhausted he passes out. I’m afraid one of these days he just won’t wake up.”

“We’ll figure it out,” I insist. “We have to. We have everything we need right here.”

She releases a shaky breath, taking my hand when I offer it. Her skin is freezing.

We will get through to him by persevering, by not giving up on him, by showing him love when everyone else only showed him fear and pain. And if Sam can’t have faith, then I’ll believe enough for the both of us.

Sam shakes me out of unconsciousness before the sun is even up.

“Hey,” she whispers, “sorry…”

I roll onto my back on the mattress, tugging the scratchy gray blanket down from where I’ve pulled it up over my head. It takes a second for my eyes to focus on her.

And then I remember where we are.

What happened.

Lucas.

“What’s wrong?” I ask, sitting straight up.

Sam holds up her hands. “Nothing—nothing, I promise. I just need to take the car out and find an open gas station and some food. I didn’t want to leave without telling you.”

I nod, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. There’s a sour taste in my mouth I recognize as hunger. “How are you going to do that?”

“I have vouchers for the gas. We’re good for at least a few more tanks….Food will be harder.”

“Vouchers?”

Sam stands up for a moment, tugging something out of her back pocket. It’s a small wad of silver paper with black type on it. She’s angled it just enough that I can read the words
GASOLINE VOUCHER
and a barcode with numbers filling the space beneath it. Printed over everything is a kind of iridescent ink with the words
UNITED NATIONS
printed over and over again, the way you sometimes see images and words printed on money.

“How’d you get this?” I have a hard time imagining they’d just give it to a kid, especially one who’s just out wandering around, not getting the procedure, not under the thumb of any adult.

For a second I just stare at her, watch her look away and stuff the vouchers into her pocket again. I can feel the guilt coming off her in waves. She’d told me before, towards the end of her story about getting Lucas out of Thurmond, that she didn’t want to go back to her parents—she didn’t even want to think about them. But I can see in her face that she’s doing exactly that now. She’s dueling with one of their Sunday school lessons.

“How do you think?” she gets out between gritted teeth. “I stole them. I took them out of someone’s pocket. They left their jacket on the back of a chair, and I just…”

Survival is a choice,
the monster whispers.

“Whatever,” I say, “we need them more. That person is an idiot for leaving them.”

The monster is right about this one. It would be one thing if the usual rules still applied, but there’s nothing usual about life now. We have a temporary government that’s been appointed, not elected, that serves governments from a half dozen other countries and their combined militaries. They’ve chopped up the country into four zones to try to manage it. No one wants to drink from our poisoned wells. Everyone is on some kind of journey—trying to get home, trying to find their families, trying to get to that place where they can start again. We are all trying. But sometimes you have to cheat to get there. Just a little.

Sam shakes her head. “Everyone is having a hard time right now, not just us.”

“Whatever you say.” I shrug. “How long are you going to be gone?”

I don’t love the idea of her going out by herself, but this will give me a chance to study Lucas, try to find some kind of hidden seam I can use to crack him open.

“It might be a while,” she admits. “There’s still some canned soup left for dinner, and Lucas will probably sleep most of today—”

“I’ll be okay,” I promise.

She starts to rise, but reaches down at the last second, ruffling my already insane hair. My curls always spring out in every direction, like they’re trying to escape my head. “Go back to sleep.”

I do. I crash back down into the Never Never Land of sleep with ease, and the next time I open my eyes, the sun is coming through the bedroom’s lace curtains, warming the blanket. I throw it back, straining my ears to catch Sam’s voice. Nothing. She’s still not back.

Of course not, stupid
. She said she probably wouldn’t be back until it was time for dinner.

I’m not scared of the quiet, and I’m not scared of my brother; it’s just so strange to feel so alone when there’s someone else here with me.

Lucas is still on the couch, turned onto his side. I can’t tell what he’s looking at as I pass him—the painting of the flowery meadow above the bricked-over fireplace, maybe? I head out through the door in the kitchen, hugging my arms against my chest, trying to firm up my armor against the cold. Sam warned me about the lack of running water—that if I needed to go, I had to find a place outside in that tiny pocket of trees—but the actual thing is even worse than I imagined it being. At least we had functioning
toilets
at Black Rock.

I give up on trying to scrape the frozen mud off the bottoms of my shoes, and bring it inside with me.

Good ol’ Sam has left the can of soup out for me, along with two water bottles. There’s a note, too, on the back of a grocery store receipt dated three years ago:
If something happens, take Lucas and go. I’ll find you. xx S

It chills something inside me, giving it real, tangible weight. What does she think is going to happen? She’d looked reluctant to go this morning, but I’d thought it was just because she didn’t want to leave me to take care of Lucas….

I find the can opener in a nearby drawer, and a pot to heat the soup with—but there’s no gas, apparently, to light the stove. So, cold soup it is.

My stomach feels like it’s eating itself, I’m so hungry. I don’t bother with a spoon, just tip the contents back into my mouth and drink it down before I can think about how weird it tastes without the usual warmth. I need a second to force a smile on my face before I walk back into the small living room. I don’t know what he can hear, if he can understand what’s happening, but I want him to know that I’m not scared, and that I love him no matter what.

“Hey, Luc,” I say, making sure to keep my voice even and quiet. I claim Sam’s seat, my toe brushing against another uneaten sandwich half. “You gonna finish that?”

He stares over my head, chest slowly rising and falling.

“You should, you know,” I add. “Sam’s going to worry, and you have to make sure you keep your strength up.”

Inhale, exhale.

I don’t want to do it, but…“Eat.
Eat
.”

I get nothing, even from that order. Just a flutter of the fingers on his left hand, the one half trapped under him.

Is it possible to be too tired and hungry to find—
muster
—the energy to move? I lean forward slowly, carefully picking up the sandwich. Lucas might be still, but leaning in close to him actually makes his whole body go
stiff
, like he’s…

Like he’s bracing for some kind of a hit.

I bring the peanut butter sandwich up to his lips. Press it there. He turns his head into the pillowed armrest.

It’s not what I want, but it’s
something
. It’s a reaction. Sam said he doesn’t have many of those, not anymore.

“Come
on
, Lucas,” I say, pressing it against his lips again. His leg straightens, but his lips are pressed in a hard, tight line. My brother is doing the exact opposite thing I want him to be doing, but at least he is
fighting back
—in this small way, he’s pushing back against what I want him to do. I try to focus on that, not the idea that he’s willfully starving himself in the process.

“Okay, then we’ll talk instead.” I sit back down, putting his sandwich on a plate in my lap. If he’s pulling away from us, I need to find some kind of hook to lure him back out. The more I roll this plan over, tossing it around inside of my mind, the more it feels like
he
is the only one that can really break this spell that they cast on him. Lucas has to be his own hero.

“After…after they took me away, they brought me to a facility in—I didn’t know it at the time, but it was in South Dakota. We’re in Iowa now, if you didn’t know. Never thought I’d ever go to Iowa, but I also never thought I’d have real powers, so…” I clear my throat. Ten seconds in, already rambling. “Because I hadn’t gone through the change yet, they couldn’t classify me. They had a whole bunch of other kids like me. A lot of them were orphans. Some said they were taken from their parents while they were out shopping or at parks—how sick is that? Anyway, it was almost like going to preschool. There weren’t soldiers watching us, just these women who used to be teachers. I’m a Blue, did you know that?”

Lucas blinks. Keeps staring at that painting

“Do you remember Mom and Dad? Anything about them? I wish I had pictures of them….I wish that more than anything. Sometimes it takes me longer than it should to remember what they looked like—what they sounded like. Melissa and Peter Orfeo—do you remember, Lucas?”

He does
not
like those names. He does
not
like the words “mom” and “dad” and he lets me know the only way he knows how. Lucas manages to get his left arm free from under him and reaches out, pushing me farther back into my seat. It feels like his blood is boiling under his skin, and his right hand does this little twitch—I don’t know what it means, but I know it means
something
by the knife-sharp expression on his face.