Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (41 page)

“You know, the most poisonous thing about the camps wasn’t really our time there,” she begins slowly, “it’s how they tricked us into being afraid of the world outside of them.”

“The world
is
kind of rotten, as far as I can tell,” I argue.

“It is and it isn’t, but it’s always been that way, even before all this. We just were conditioned into a routine, so everything else feels overwhelming in comparison.” Ruby shifts so her weight is off her walking cast. “When I got out of Thurmond, I could barely stand to be around the others: Liam, Chubs—sorry,
Charlie
—our friend Zu. I couldn’t stand their attention, or to be touched.”

“No problem there anymore,” I note.

She gives a little smile, lifts one shoulder into a shrug, as if to ask,
Do you blame me?
“Part of it was being trapped in the fear of what I could do, but when I think about it now, I realize it was an issue of control. I couldn’t control my abilities, I couldn’t control the way the world reacted to me, I couldn’t even control whether or not I lost the people I cared about. The thing is, there’s plenty about life none of us will
ever
be able to control. You have to let uncertainty become your normal. And that just takes time. You have to give yourself permission to let it take time, without beating yourself up about it.”

“I don’t
have
time,” I remind her.

“You will, but I get it.” Ruby glances over. “When I was having a hard time, when I didn’t think I was ever going to find solid ground, the only thing that helped was focusing on the people around me, instead of whatever fears were chasing each other in my head. If I couldn’t find the courage to protect myself, I could find it for
them
, protect them the way you protected me, the way you protected all the girls in our cabin.”

I barely remember that Sam.

“You want to know the real reason they never let us touch or talk to each other if they could help it? It made us strong. If you have people who love you, you can fall back on them when you’re afraid.”

She reaches over, takes my hand, waits until I’m looking at her before she says, “It may feel like you’re alone, but we’re here with you now. We will always be here for you.
That
is a certainty.”

The promise hollows me out at my center; isn’t the fact that she’s here now, that she had someone watching for my name to appear in a system, that she came without being called, proof enough? It takes away whatever weight has had my stomach in its grip for the past few weeks, and leaves room for something else to come rushing in. “Ruby—”

The sound of a rattling engine cuts me off and sharpens Ruby’s attention on the world around us. She motions for me to get down, and—walking cast and all—crawls over to the edge of the fence, where it meets the open driveway at the house’s garage.

I try to stay as low as I can without losing my own view of the white van as it comes down the road, its brakes screeching to a stop just outside of the safe house. There’s a single beat of stillness before the front door opens, and an older soldier tromps across the porch, down the steps. His National Guard fatigues are rumpled in a way that hints at how often he’s had to sleep in them, and he can’t seem to stop his hands jittering at his sides. There’s a jumpy swing to his steps as he comes toward the van, gun drawn, and that sets my panic trilling.

Two more men, both dressed in beat-up black clothes, step out of the van and shut the doors quietly behind them. The driver stays where he is at the wheel, obscured by the window’s dark tint.

They aren’t PSFs despite the colors they wear, and they aren’t UN—so who are they? The medics?

That innocent, rosy little guess is stomped out when I see Ruby’s face, the fury carved into it. She recognizes them—or at least what they are.

“You’re late—Christ, we’ve been waiting
hours
.”

“Traffic,” deadpans one of the men wearing black. “It’s a bitch. Where is it?”

“Give me what I asked for first—I need to count it before I let you in.”

The one who spoke before, his hair buzzed short and his whole body stiff with obvious impatience, shoves the small duffel bag in his hand at the soldier’s chest. I take a closer look at the other, what he’s swinging around in his hands. It looks like a plastic mask, only it’s attached to chains and handcuffs.

Grade Five restraints
. The words bloom a bloody red inside my mind.

I know those restraints.

I saw them at Thurmond.

I saw the Reds shuffle around in them through the mud, in the months before they disappeared.

“Medic did what he could. Hope you packed ice to transport the body,” the soldier says, unzipping the duffel bag, rummaging through it.

The body
.

Mr. Orfeo explained to me once that the light we see from distant stars travels years and years and years to reach us, and that, after that time, some of them may no longer be burning. He said that when certain kinds of stars die, they burn themselves through, collapse under their own gravity, shrink to a core that explodes into a blinding supernova. And what’s left, when all of that energy, that stardust, is gone, is nothing but a sucking void.

I know that feeling. I am alive with it; the pain as my ribs seem to contract in around my heart is staggering. But it’s the power of my fury that pushes me up over that fence, even as it feels like the world is collapsing in on me. I am halfway across the damp, empty street before the men on the porch register me, before any of them go for their guns.

I don’t care
.

What was the point? I want to scream, beat my fists against the ground until I split it open and fall through the crack. I don’t care what happens to me now, if Lucas is gone then—

No one else will be there for Mia.

The thought brings me up short, almost stops me dead, but I’m too far into this to pull back, to run. I don’t stop, not even as shots ring out behind me, and the soldier and one of the men in black fall, clutching wounds that are pulsing out more blood than I’ve ever seen in my life. A car revs and peels away, shrieking. More shots explode from the street, as if chasing it.

One day I will think about this, that my friend has just sent two men to their deaths without a second thought, but that day is a long way off from this one.

“What the fuck—” the last man snarls, aiming his gun at my head. I don’t care, I don’t care what he’ll do to me now—there’s nothing that can be worse than this. I see my hand outstretched, my fingers curled like claws, and I think,
I will tear you apart, I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care anymore
—

He goes rigid, straightening up like a kite that’s suddenly caught the wind. I turn, only to find Ruby is right behind me, her chest hauling in breath after breath, face flushed, her cold focus on the man’s face. It’s like she’s released a valve in him; his expression drains away from his face, leaving slack, roughened skin.

She tilts her head to the side. A small movement. Tiny. But it sends him running, his gun clattering onto the porch as he disappears into the sunset at the far end of the street.

“Stop where you are!”

There are soldiers on the other side of the screen door, rifles trained on us through its fine silvery netting. Three in all, eyes wide and dark like beetles. The one in front risks a glance down at the duffel bag that exchanged hands. A stack of green bills has spilled out into the pool of blood collecting at my feet.

It’s more money than I thought existed in the world, and it damns them all, not just in my eyes, but Ruby’s.

I have never been afraid of Ruby, never once in all of the years I’ve known her. But now I see that I should be; that, if she was anyone other than my friend, I should be following after that man, running as fast and hard as my lungs would let me without bursting.

She might not have had control before, but she does now. It takes a single look from her, and the soldiers, all three, step back as one, set their weapons down, and then move again, pressing their backs to the hallway walls.

There’s yelling, voices behind us.

“Ruby!
Ruby!
”

“Sam!”

I shove my way inside, grateful beyond words that it is the two of us alone right now, and Ruby turns and tells Vida, “Keep her outside!”

“Sam!”
I hear Mia yell again.

The body.

The body.

The body.

Mia can’t see this—I’m sobbing so hard, the rooms in front of me disappear into blotches of color and light as I move through them, searching, and I’m calling for him, I’m calling, even though I know he can’t call back.

The kitchen is littered with clear, empty IV bags. There’s still one hanging from a thin, silver stand beside where they’ve stretched out his dark form on the wood table. And my first thought, the one that rises above all the others as I catch myself in the doorway, is that it looks exactly like the one we ate on hundreds of times in the Orfeo kitchen.

“Sam,” Ruby says from behind me, “Do you want me to…?”

Do you want me to see? Do you want me to tell you for sure?

I love her for this, I do, but it has to be me. It should be me. I can be strong enough to do this, to force my legs to solidify under me, to wipe my face. I don’t want anyone else’s hands to touch him.

Liam’s voice carries down the hall, through the house, followed by heavy steps on the porch.

“Here,” Ruby calls back, “We’re…we’re all right.”

I am not all right.

Lucas is so, so still on the table, his normally rich skin a sickly gray ash. His too-long dark hair has fallen across his forehead and I start to reach out, to brush it away, but I catch myself. I have to…I have to know for sure, but I can’t…

The body
.

It’s the kind of touch I’d use to brush away a stray eyelash on his cheek: light, quick. His skin is still warm.

Somewhere inside he is still burning.

I lower my head down, and in that instant before I give in, close my eyes and scream, I see the slightest movement of his chest rising. I hold my breath, too terrified to move and disturb the moment—but there it is again. There it is.

He is breathing.

I choke out a gasp, a laugh, a sob, all rolled into one. When I look up, it’s Charlie pushing into the kitchen, picking up Lucas’s wrist, feeling for his pulse.

I want to cover him so they can’t see him like this, so weak, so gaunt, not when my Lucas is as bursting with life and light as the first morning of summer. Liam looks as stricken as I feel, and Ruby has her eyes shut. When she opens them, I see the relief there. I know we three have confirmed it in our own ways.

“Lucas?” Mia’s panicked voice breaks through the breathtaking relief that swamps me. It pushes everyone into action. I catch a glimpse of Vida’s bright hair as Mia slips past Ruby and Liam and rushes over to grab her brother’s other hand.

“We need to make a pass through the house, grab any of the camera feeds’ hard drives,” Liam says. “They can’t know we were here.”

“The exterior cameras were already switched off, so no worries there,” Vida says. “They must be knee-deep in something sketch to risk that.”

A deal. An under-the-table deal to sell Lucas to snatchers.

“I’ll have the soldiers deal with the…” Ruby trails off before she says
bodies
. God—she’s broken all of the rules they set for her, for
me
, and now she’s killed
soldiers
.

“It’s okay,” Ruby says, seeing the terror pull down my face. “It’s taken care of. I’ll give them a story to explain it. Chubs, can we move him?”

The boy rubs his forehead. “Yes, but he—”

“Good enough for me,” Vida says, looking at Liam. “You take his legs. We’ll carry him out—and someone grab one of the AK-47s for me, yeah? Cate took mine away.”

“I wonder why,” Chubs mutters, unhooking the IV bag from the stand and tucking it into the front of Lucas’s shirt for now. He turns and grabs the red bag on a nearby counter, the one with the white cross printed on it, and peers inside. “Ooh! Coagulant!”

“Chubs!” Liam grunts, adjusting his grip on Lucas. “Focus!”

“Right, okay, sorry.”

The soldiers are gone. So are the bodies. We trample through the blood like it’s a puddle of sun-warmed rain, moving at a pace that’s slower than a run but faster than a walk and it is agonizing, every second of it, not just for my stupid limp, but because we have him out in the open for anyone to see. All of us are moving targets.

“Get in the back,” Liam tells Mia and me when we finally reach the car. “We’ll get him laid out between the middle seats.”

If he wasn’t so thin, there’s no way Lucas would ever fit, but he is, and we are running out of time. I keep my hand on him at all times, just to monitor the tiniest movement of his breathing. The car rocks as Liam helps Ruby into the front seat and climbs into the driver’s. He doesn’t wait until we’re buckled up before he speeds us out of there. Mia flies against my side and I have to fight to keep us both upright.

“Way to fuck up my plan, boo,” Vida says, reaching forward to punch Ruby’s shoulder. “Want to enlighten the rest of us about what the hell just happened?”

Me
. I happened. Old Sam came back, as brave and stupid and reckless as always. Ruby was right. I couldn’t do it for myself, but I could do it for him.

“Plan changed,” Ruby says, looking back to meet my gaze. My heart is still thundering hard enough that I swear I can feel the echo of my pulse in my teeth. Did we get him out—did this really work?

“Who were those men? The ones in the van?” Mia asks. “What were they doing there?”

No one seems to want to tackle that one, so I venture a guess. “Snatchers?”

“Looks like it,” Ruby says bitterly. “The reports about the freak market have been all over the press. They must have realized what a gold mine they were babysitting. I’m sure they had the story all figured out for the report on what happened to him.”

Liam shakes his head, running a hand back through his hair. “This is turning into a goddamn epidemic.”

“Preaching to the fucking choir,” Vida says. “Anyone get a plate number off that van?”