Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (42 page)

“Vi’s group is trying to figure out a strategy for the snatchers,” Ruby explains. “The Greens are trying to track down all of the different digital copies of the old skip tracer network they’ve made—that’s what they’re working from, unfortunately. There seems to be a large, central one that’s gone out internationally to bidders.”

“They’re actually smuggling kids out of the country?” Mia asks, but I can see the real question in her face:
They would have taken us out, too?

“Yeah, and once they’re gone, they’re in the wind,” Vida says. “And of fucking course, retrieving them isn’t priority number one when half of the countries buying them to study or use are the ones involved with the peacekeeper force.”

The SUV goes quiet again.

I don’t let myself picture it this time. I don’t let myself play through what would have happened to Lucas if we hadn’t come for him. All that matters right now is that he’s safe. That I got him out of that lion’s den.

“I need you to explain something me to me, if you can,” Ruby says. “I saw something in his mind while we were in the house—I don’t want to get your hopes up, but…”

“What was it?” Mia asks.

“His mind is…it’s…everyone’s mind looks a little different to me, but his is layered. At the top are the memories I’d expect to find, like his training. Thurmond. But there was this one thing—this one image. A tree. A tree house with a line of wildflowers leading up to it. There was something there—a kind of monster?”

Lucas had woven any number of stories with monstrous hearts at the center of them. I’m too scared to breathe. To move. I’m too close to exploding with the hope that unleashes inside me. Mia…Mia was right all along?

“Do you remember what it looked like?” I ask.

Charlie and Vida turn back toward Ruby, intrigued, as she says, “It stood on two legs…very hairy, horns on either side of its head, like this—” She demonstrates, cupping her hands over her ears and letting the fingers curl away from her skull. “A nose like a hound’s?”

I press my hand against my chest, trying to pin my heart in place. I know what monster she’s talking about.

“That’s an old one,” Mia says quickly. “I don’t really remember it, though. Do you?”

I let out a small, harsh little laugh. I have a perfect memory, but only since I’ve been a Green. My box of memories, all perfectly organized and formed, waiting to be recalled at any given moment, only extends as far back as when my ability manifested. And that was after the Orfeos had moved. After Lucas had told it to me.

“I tried to follow the image through since it was so different than all the others, but I got shut out completely from that part of his memory when I tried to push past it.” Ruby raises her brows. “That’s not something that happens very often. Almost never. There’s a lock on whatever it is, and he’s protecting it with everything he has left.”

Mia and I look at each other. I see the victory crashing across her face, the tears that she has to cover her eyes to hide.

“It’s…there’s a tree house in their old backyard we used to play in,” I say, and it’s almost painful to distill what Greenwood is to us into such simple terms. “When we were little. He’d make up stories for us to act out.”

“He responded before—yesterday, just a little,” Mia says, choking on the words, “when I told him a story about it.”

“But you can’t remember that specific one?” Ruby asks.

“What are you thinking, darlin’?” Liam asks, uneasy. His eyes dart over to her again. “I see the wheels turning, but they need to be turning in the direction of
home
. I’m pretty sure that we’re going to have a hard time explaining him if we just roll up to your house.”

“So you want to dump him off somewhere?” Mia challenges. “Wash your hands of him?”

“I’m trying hard as I can to not add to the tally of things they’ll hold against her if we get caught,” he fires back.

Her jaw juts out. “Then don’t get caught.”

Vida actually laughs, but she’s the only one.

“I’m not sure if this is a good idea or a terrible one, but I really think it could work. Not just on him, but the other Reds, too,” Ruby says slowly. “From what I saw of the Reds’ training, the Trainers cut into their memories and detached emotions from them by associating certain images and names and places with intense pain and deprivation. I wonder if everything is just so deeply repressed in their minds that they can’t function when they’re removed from their environment of orders, except to retreat further.”

It’s confirmation of what both Mia and I have figured out, but the knowledge only drains a little bit more of my hope away.

“No shit?” Vida breathes out.
“Damn.”

“That image, that monster, felt like a path in,” Ruby says. “A key that could fit into a lock. If he retreated there because it was a safe place, he might not know how to get himself back out.”

“And you think hearing that story again will call it to the front of his mind, and you can access the other memories he’s suppressing through it?” Charlie ventures. “Kind of like what you did with Lillian?”

It sounds to me like she’s talking about some kind of mental Trojan horse, that there are paths inside his mind that she can wander down.

“Can we try an experiment?” Ruby asks us. “Can you tell him about Greenwood? Tell a story you do remember?”

I exchange a look with Mia. This is her theory. I want her to be the one to try.

“Hey, Luc,” she begins, “do you remember that time we got trapped up in the tree during that freak thunderstorm? The way the whole backyard turned into a swamp…”

Her words take flight, weaving in and out and around our silence, as it becomes the story of a sinking ship and of us getting stranded on an island. She talks for an hour, at least, before her voice gets dry and thin, and she finally looks up at Ruby.

She opens her eyes. And, after a moment, shakes her head. “Nothing. He’s listening. What you’re saying is getting through—it’s like little fizzles of images here and there. I can’t hold onto any one of them long enough to chase it.”

“What are you saying?” Charlie asks.

He’s fading, he’s too far gone, he’s slipping away
—

“Do you think he needs that one story?” I ask, finally. It feels too much like a fairy tale for me to really invest much hope into it. Instead of the right prince coming along to wake a sleeping beauty with a kiss, we have a boy who needs the right recipe of words and ideas and images.

“You guys really don’t remember it?” she asks. “Is there anyone else who might?”

So it all hangs on this: the one memory I can’t touch. Of course.

“My parents, but they’re gone,” Mia says. “He wrote the stories down, but he—”

I sit straight up. “He wrote them down. He wrote all of the stories down.”

“Yeah, and?” Mia asks. “Mom probably threw out all of his journals with the rest of our stuff before we moved—”

“No, she didn’t,” I interrupt. “Lucas gave them to
me
before you left.”

Her dark eyebrows shoot up. “And you seriously think that your parents kept them? That they’re still in the old house, and they’ll be happy to have you come up and knock on the door?”

I know she doesn’t mean that last part to be cruel; it’s the truth and we both know it, but it goes down burning like unflavored cough syrup.

“I didn’t leave them in my house,” I say. “I hid them in the tree house.”

Silence sweeps through the car as everyone absorbs this.

“Ruby,” Charlie says, taking his glasses off to rub at his forehead, “don’t tell me we’re going to push back your check-in in the hope that a bunch of notebooks haven’t been moved or ruined.”

“We are going to push back my check-in in the hope that a bunch of notebooks haven’t been moved or ruined,” Ruby says.

“Really?” Mia asks, clinging to that thought with every ounce of desperation I feel. I know what Ruby did to me, the way she stowed away my memories of her and retrieved them with all the ease of someone pulling old, dusty file boxes off a shelf. I knew this, but somehow I never once considered that she could help
Lucas
.

I reach down, brush the hair off his face. I reach into his shirt for the IV bag and hang it from one of the car’s plastic hooks, watching the liquid drain down the long, thin tube again. It sways each time the SUV hits a rough patch on the road.

“Not to be the proverbial rain on this proverbial parade, but please, God, tell me this house is somewhere in the great commonwealth of Virginia,” Liam says. “We’re cutting it close as it is.”

He’s right—I’ve been the picture of selfishness in going after Lucas, in focusing on him and him alone, when, according to Nico, we have an almost seven-hour drive through the darkening evening ahead of us.

“Bedford’s about forty-five minutes from Salem,” Ruby tells Liam, and it strikes me all over again how strange it is that despite how close our old towns are, we never would have met in another world.

She looks back, catching my eyes in the rearview mirror. We communicated like this at Thurmond, all stolen glances and raised brows, we had to—no speaking, no touching, nothing. I thought, with all the time we’d been apart, this connection between us would feel brittle, splintered, now that we’re back together. But what connects my life and hers is a thread that knots itself back together each time it begins to break. There is a Sam that exists only with Ruby, and when she’s gone, that piece of me will disappear.

Are you sure?
she’s asking.

I hope my message comes through just as strongly.
Yes, please, do everything you can
.

Liam gives her one of those easy smiles, but it doesn’t diminish the tightness in his face. “Okay, copilot, you’re up.”

I don’t know if this will work. I have no idea what Ruby is planning to do, exactly, but I accept that things can’t always be in our control. The same way you can never get back the connections that were lost, the security you had, the innocence of being a dumb little kid in a world that caters to your every need. So you adjust. Uncertainty never becomes comfortable, but it becomes normal; we learn to deal with it the best we can.

It’s not enough for me to learn the rules; I want to be in a position to
make
them. Ruby is right—I feel stronger knowing I have kids to protect. Not just the ones in front of me, but everywhere. The unclaimed ones. The ones being wheeled in against their will to have the procedure done. The ones still out there, running wild, hiding.

I think there is some truth in the idea that gifts come hidden inside burdens. It is so easy for all of us to get caught in the net of wishing for things that were denied to us, to replay over and over the hurt and pain caused by words and hands and weapons. We have lived for too long inside a question the world has posed: if we’re even allowed to think of ourselves as human. We have asked ourselves this, and we have doubted. Every single one of us has doubted.

But we are stronger for what’s happened to us.
I
am stronger, even if I couldn’t see it at first. We have been given the gift of understanding that we can come through struggle and pain. We have built new families in place of the ones that cast us out. We have learned that life is one journey, and the purpose is not to reach some treasure at the end of it, but to find the courage to decide which paths to take, who to travel with, and to let things fall into place as they should and will.

I don’t know if this is faith, but I believe that I would never have found Lucas and Mia again if not for everything that happened. That I would never be in the position to help them now if I hadn’t taken Ruby’s hand all those years ago, when we were just little girls, and she was so scared. There are tests, but there are also small mercies. Life tossed us up into the air, scattered us, and we all somehow found our way back. And we will do it again.

And again.

And again.

A calming sense of gratitude washes over me as I sit back and look out at the approaching night. It stays with me, a warm glow in my veins, until Liam finally breaks the comfortable silence.

“We have company.”

There’s no one on the highway in front of us, and I doubt there will be for miles yet. But when I turn, I see exactly what he means. A white van, driving without its headlights, is tailing us about three car lengths back. The windows are tinted, too dark to see anyone or anything inside, but I know.

It’s the van from the safe house.

“Who wants this one?”

Vida smiles like she’s finally caught a fish after spending hours out on a lake. She cracks her neck, then her knuckles, and gestures for Mia and me to scoot aside so she can carefully climb over Lucas to sit between us for a better look.

“Oh, buddy,” Liam says, “you picked the
wrong
car.”

The van lets out a monstrous groan, a metallic whine as it’s lifted off its wheels and flipped onto its nose, its windows exploding out with the force of it. Liam floors the gas pedal and sends us lurching forward.

When I risk a look back, we’re far enough away that all I can see are the sparks from the van still smoldering on the road, but even those are swallowed by the light that seems to rain down from the curtain of stars spread across the sky.