Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (46 page)

“What can’t I face, knowing that in the end, we made it?” Lucas turns back to Ruby, tapping his temple. “Think you can stand poking around in that many minds? It seems like it would be like picking up a thousand splinters of glass.”

She seems surprised by this, as do the others, even Liam. I wonder if they haven’t understood this one key element—
facet
—of her abilities. That, as powerful as she is, Ruby still is burdened by thoughts and memories and images that don’t belong to her. She relives other people’s nightmares every time she does this.

“We’ll go through it together,” she tells him. “And it won’t be so bad. Are you sure?”

“Won’t he relapse?” Charlie asks. “Go back to his earlier state? No offense, but there is such a thing as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Everything in me grinds to a halt. It never even occurred to me that he
could
go back to the way he was, now that he has come through.

Lucas shrugs. “No offense taken.”

Ruby takes a moment to consider this before meeting Lucas’s worried gaze. “No, but you have to face any memories of the training head-on. No matter how much they hurt, you can’t pull back from them again.”

We can all see the scars on his neck, his arms, some still knitting themselves back together. And even I wonder if he’s ready for this—if he’ll ever really be. The thing about Lucas is, he’s never had the kind of obvious, outward strength that all the stories prescribe—the kind that comes to easily to Sam. His touch in life has always been softer. It is a quiet determination, one that wants to believe in the good of things, even as the bad is breathing down his neck. He sets his jaw and nods.

“Can you fill me in on what’s happened, though?” he asks. Lucas’s right hand jerks. He clasps the wrist hard with his left hand, stilling it. “Is Gray still alive?”

“As far as we know,” Liam says. “He’s in hiding. Why?”

“The Reds…we were made to understand from the beginning that it was
his
program, that we were serving him directly. I just…want to make sure that they’re far away from him.”

“Shit,” Vida says. “I didn’t even think about that. He could just as easily use that compound as a place to gather up a resistance force, give the peacekeepers a real fight.”

I see my own dread reflected on everyone’s face, even Ruby’s.

But then Chubs says, “Let’s operate under the assumption of hope that he’s smart enough to know he’s been beat. I have to imagine his number one priority at this point is not getting caught. He’s probably halfway around the world, hiding in some cave.”

Operate under the assumption of
hope
. What a novel idea.

Vida looks at the time on her cell phone, then holds it up for us to read. Eleven o’clock. If it really is a forty-five minute drive to Salem, we’re cutting it close. “If we’re going to do this, we need to jet back over to Ruby’s.”

“Drop us off,” Liam says. “You and Chubs have to go back to D.C. to check in with Cate and Zu and Nico and let them know what’s going on.”

“We’ll wait until you get there to deal with Cruz.” Vida looks over at Lucas. “Would you be willing to make a video we can show her?”

“You won’t need to,” Lucas says. “I’m going with you. I’ll meet her in person.”

“Lucas…” Sam starts.

“I know, I know,” he says, “I promise I won’t be a burden. But she needs to see me—
really
see me, to understand that Ruby can help them. I want to be part of this. I think I have to be. It’s going to be hard enough for the Reds to understand what’s happening to them—they need to see proof they can get to the other side. I couldn’t help them before, but if I can now…”

My eyes don’t find Lucas’s, they drift over to Liam’s. I’m not surprised to see the rising wave of emotion that crashes through them, over his face, stealing his breath. Because his brother’s dream is here, alive. It has survived death and destruction; it hasn’t blown away with the ash that settled after his fire was put out. It will go on.

“Then I’m going, too,” Sam says, in a voice that shuts down any kind of argument.

“And me, too.”

Because where they go, I will always follow.

I
REMEMBER.

There is a secret in the woods, on a small street in a small Virginia town. A town, like so many others, that’s waking from the spell of a long sleep.

I think of it every time another kid sits down in front of us, or, if they’re too weak to stand, we sit beside them. It’s like a charm I wear inside of my heart. Knowing it’s there, that it’s safe, is enough to beat back the darkness that tries to come sliding back into my heart like a shiver. I think of it every time Ruby goes to work caging the monsters instead of them. I want to tell the men and women in suits and uniforms, the ones who watch us from behind the protective mirrored glass, that the monsters inside us may have teeth, may have claws, but when our monsters stick their heads up and begin to scent the air around them, it’s not because they’re angry, or out for blood. They are lost, trying to find their way home. They are screaming in pain. And when the pain is silent, when they forget what they’ve lost, or they touch a memory not tainted by the Trainer’s razors, it is the fire that speaks to them, whispering, making hushed promises of relief in smoke and ash. There is a burn mark on their hearts that won’t heal, not yet.

There are three facilities, and there are a hundred of us left. The others find this number unbelievable, almost amazing. The word Mia uses is
astonishing
. I don’t have the heart to tell them about the graves out back, the ones filled with the Reds who burned out during training and were put down. I know it is the same for the other two facilities without needing to be told—there are too many empty cells, missing kids who singed their walls and floors. I do not tell them the Trainers made us dig the graves, pave over them, for no other given reason than we
needed the exercise
. Instead, I burden one of the men in suits with the weight of it; I want the kids found, what’s left of them returned to their families. Buried right and proper like the humans they are. The end of their lives should not be a question mark that lingers in the hearts of the people who loved them.

My facility is the last one we visit after months of healing and reconditioning at the other two. They’ve brought the Thurmond Reds back here, back to their old cradle, to live again with the younger, unfinished Reds, the ones that weren’t broken and rebuilt into loaded guns. Pennsylvania. I lived in Pennsylvania for seven years, and I never knew it.

On our second day here, when Ruby needs to rest, to take time alone to swallow the pain and smoke and claws down to wherever it is that she can lock them inside herself, I wander the halls. The freedom of it—to go through the doors that used to be locked, to take a left turn down a hall instead of a right—makes me feel queasy. I push through the feeling and go looking for my old room.

My cell.

It’s at the very end of the hall, a heavy metal door with only a small grate to pass food through. It’s already open.

Sammy is inside.

She sits, her back as stiff as armor, on my cot. She stares at the wall that was the beginning and end of my everything for seven years. She sees the dents and clawed scratches I left behind, the evidence of cruelty, when I had to pretend to be as damaged and tortured as the others; and then from when I was brought back for reprogramming, when I was sure she was dead and I had killed her. There’s a gap in my memory, from when I came back here to when I woke up on the sofa of our old house, and no one seems all that eager to fill it, least of all Mia and Sam.

I hesitate in the door, watching her. She sees the last piece of me I haven’t already given her, and she doesn’t turn away from it. And it’s only then that I feel it: that heady, quick freedom that slices through me to the old pain at my core.

I sit beside her, and it is a small miracle, it is something I will never take for granted, that she leans her head against my shoulder. Her hand finds mine. I let the soft warmth of her skin melt into the fire that burns beneath mine.

“Tell me a story,” she whispers.

No more stories. No more fairy tales.

“I love you.” It is our beginning, our middle, and one day—please God, a long way away from here—our end. And it is the truth.

I only want the truth.

I want the future.

If I craft words, if I imagine a new world into being, I want it to be the one that we live in—me, Sammy, Mia, our friends.

My sister asks me why
that
story, why the monster? I tell her because no matter what they made me, no matter how far they dragged me away from home, how ugly they made me, some part of me always knew Sam and Mia would find me. I don’t know if that’s the truth, if we’re all just lucky as hell, but I want to believe it is.

There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of kids who need to be found, too; who need us to rewrite the endings the world tried to give them. We talk about it, me and the others, late at night after our military escorts bring us back to a hotel or safe house to sleep. I think that is our future—how we’ll pass our days. We are a unit now. Somehow, impossibly, we three—the ones born in Greenwood—have been absorbed into a group that fiercely protects each other, that closes ranks when the world closes in.

We will hunt the snatchers, search for the kids never sent to camps, track down the runaways who couldn’t readjust to life on the outside. If these suits won’t give us permission, then we won’t ask for it. We will
go
.

We will not let them force us into the procedure.

We will not let them create boundaries, carve out stretches of empty land where they can install more barbed wire fences and designate it as
home
.

My home is here. Mia’s laughter and the fireworks of her temper. The laughter of our friends. Sam’s thick honey hair falling around us, her warm breath on my neck as I hold her. When we left the house, Dad said something to me that I’m only now understanding, that home is wherever there’s love; that as long as we’re together, we carry it with us. It will grow as we do.

It will grow as we bring others in, as we bring the lost ones together again, gather up the embers scattered from the same fire. One day, we will ignite and create a blaze that no one can put out, ignore, hurt. We will move forward as one, and in time, rise like sparks beyond the night.

But there is a secret in the woods, a place where old dreams still live.

It’s a place that has to be guarded. Protected.

But they will never take it. They can’t. It is ours forever.

It is there, waiting for new dreamers to fill its walls with stories; and maybe one day, they will.

But we will always know the way back.

We will always know where to find it.