The Darkest Minds (23 page)

I fell forward, barely catching myself on the snow. Something—someone had caught my ankle. A Green girl on her stomach, crawling toward me, her eyes open, her mouth gulping at the air.
Help me
, she was sobbing, blood bubbling up over her lips,
help me
.

But I got back up and ran.

There was a gate at this edge of the camp; I could see it now that I was within a few hundred feet of it. What I couldn’t see was what was causing the backup of kids, why we weren’t dashing through the gate to get to freedom. With a jolt, I realized there were almost three times as many kids down in the snow behind me than there were in front of me.

The cluster of kids surged forward with a unified wail, hundreds of hands straining forward. My size made it easy for me to slip through legs and fight my way up to the front, where three older boys in blue uniforms were struggling to keep the crowd of kids back from both the gate itself and the one-man watch booth beside it, which was currently playing host to three people: an unconscious PSF, Liam, and Chubs.

I was so shocked at the sight of them, I nearly missed the blur of green that was a little kid rushing for the fence. He darted around the teenagers in his path and threw himself against the bright yellow bars holding the gate firmly in place.

He had only just touched it when all of the hair on his head seemed to stand on end, and a burst of light flashed under his fingers. Instead of releasing it, his hand only seemed to clamp down harder, frozen in place as thousands of volts of electricity sent his body into a frenzied fit of shuddering.

Oh my God.

The gate was still on. Liam and Chubs were trying to turn it off.

I felt my own scream bubble up in my throat when he collapsed to the ground, finally still. Liam yelled something from the booth that I couldn’t hear, not above the screams from the kids around me. The sight of that boy burst the temporary bubble of calm in a heartbeat.

The PSFs were closer now; they had to be, because when they started firing again, it was like shooting fish in a barrel. Each layer of kids fell down and away, peeling back to reveal a new, fresh layer for the kill—I couldn’t see the snow beneath them anymore.

Kids turned and bolted in every direction, some heading back toward the school, others following the edges of the electrified fence, looking for another way out. I heard dogs bark and the growling of engines. Combined, the noises sounded like a monster straight out of hell. I turned to look at the trail the animals and snowmobiles were blazing toward us, when something hard slammed into me from behind, throwing me into the thick snow.

I’m shot, I thought, half in shock.

No—that wasn’t right. The blow had come from an elbow to the back of the head. The Blue girl hadn’t even seen me as she turned and ran back toward the camp. I rolled over just in time to see her with her hands in the air, a clear surrender, and still—still—they shot her. She shrieked in pain and crumbled to the ground.

It wasn’t just the girl who hadn’t spotted me in the snow—no one did. I felt my arms, stinging with the cold, strain as I tried to push myself up and out of its freezing touch, but every time I made progress, another foot came slamming down across my shoulders and back. I had enough time to cover my head, but that was it. There was no getting air to my chest—I was screaming and no one could hear.

Rage and despair ripped through me. The crush of stampeding kids pushed me deeper and deeper into the snow, and I kept thinking, can you drown like this? Can you suffocate in the freezing dark? Would it be better to die this way?

Hands reached around my waist. Freezing air flooded my lungs in a single, painful gasp as I was lifted up and out of the snow.

The gate was open now, and the kids who had been steady and calm enough to remain—who had been lucky enough not to be hit—poured through, running for the dense cluster of trees ahead. There couldn’t have been more than twenty—of the hundreds of kids who had flooded through the halls of the old school—
twenty
.

I felt warm, impossibly warm. The arms holding me tightened. When I looked up, it was into Liam’s bright eyes.

Hang on tight, okay?

Zu woke with a gasp, coming up from her nightmare for a long drag of air.

I was thrown out of the dream, sent hurtling back into the freezing hotel room. Through the topsy-turvy vertigo that slammed into me, I turned toward Zu, my eyes adjusting just enough to make out her silhouette.

When I reached for her, I found someone else’s hands already there.

Liam shook his head, trying to snap himself out of sleep’s lingering grasp. “Zu,” he whispered. “Hey, Zu…”

I stayed perfectly still.

“Hey,” Liam said gently, “you’re okay. It was just a bad dream.”

My gut twisted when I realized she was crying. I heard a scraping sound, wood against wood, like he had taken something out of the nightstand.

“Write it down,” Liam said. “Don’t force yourself.”

It must have been the hotel stationery. I shut my eyes, waiting for him to switch on the cheap nightstand lamp, but he kept to his rule: no lights outside the bathroom.

“What are you sorry for?” he whispered. “The only one that needs beauty sleep is Chubs.”

She let out a shaky laugh, but her body was still tense next to mine.

“Was it…the same one as before?” The bed dipped as Liam sat down.

“A little different?” he repeated after a moment. “Yeah?”

The silence stretched a little longer this time. I wasn’t sure she was still scribbling in the darkness until Liam cleared his throat and said, in a rough voice, “I could never forget that. I was…I was really worried you had tried to touch the gate before Chubs figured out how to switch it off.” And then, so soft that I might have imagined it, he said, “I’m so sorry.”

The guilt and misery that coated the words were like a kick to the chest. I felt myself shift forward on the bed, drawn to the pain there, desperate to reassure him that what had happened there in the snowy field hadn’t been his fault. It scared me, knowing how well I understood him in that moment.

But I couldn’t. This was a private conversation, just like her memory had been private. Why was I always trespassing into places I didn’t belong?

“Chubs isn’t the only one that thinks it’s too dangerous. But I think Ruby’s tough enough to make it without us if she wants to. Why?”

More scribbling.

“The only thing Chubs wants is for us to be safe,” he said, still whispering. “Sometimes that gets in the way of him doing what’s good for others—seeing the big picture, you know? It’s only been two weeks since we got out. You got to give him more time.”

He sounded so confident then that I felt a small part of me give. I believed him.

“Oh, man.” I could practically see him running a hand through his hair. “Never be ashamed of what you can do, you hear me? If you hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t be here.”

The room settled back into a peaceful quiet, save for Chubs’s wheezing snores.

“You feeling better?” he asked. “Need anything from Betty?”

She must have shaken her head, because I felt the bed shift again as Liam stood. “I’ll be right here. Just wake me up if you change your mind, okay?”

I didn’t hear him say good night. But instead of lying down, I saw him sit, back flush against the bed, watching the door and anything that might come through it.

A few hours later, with the moon still visible in the gray-blue morning sky, I gently untangled Zu’s fingers from the front of my dress and slipped out of the bed. The red glow of the alarm clock on the nightstand burned the time into my mind: 5:03 p.m. Leaving time.

None of us had really unpacked our things, on Liam’s insistence, but I had to collect my toothbrush and toothpaste from where I had left them next to Chubs’s in the bathroom. There was one set of HoJo toiletries left out by the sink, next to the world’s ugliest coffeemaker. I stuffed them into my bag, along with one of the smaller hand towels.

Outside, it was only a few degrees warmer than it had been in the room. Typical bipolar Virginia spring weather. It must have rained the night before, too. A feathery white fog threaded through the cars and nearby trees. The minivan, which last night had been parked on the far end of the lot, was now stationed directly in front of the hotel room. If I hadn’t walked right by Black Betty, running my hand against her bruised side, I don’t think I would have seen Liam at all.

He was kneeling beside the sliding door, slowly scraping off the last of the
BETTY JEAN CLEANING
sign with his car keys. At his feet was the Ohio plate that had, at one point, been screwed into place. My feet drifted to a stop a few feet short of him.

There were dark circles under his eyes. His face was drawn in thought, his mouth set in a grim line that didn’t suit him at all. With his damp hair combed back and his face clean-shaven, he could have looked a good two or three years younger than he had the day before, but his eyes told a different story.

My shoes scuffed the loose asphalt, catching Liam’s attention. He started to rise. “What’s wrong?”

“Huh?”

“You’re up early,” he explained. “I usually have to drag Chubs into the shower and blast him with cold water to get him going.”

I shrugged. “Still on Thurmond’s schedule, I guess.”

He rose to his feet slowly, wiping his hands on the front of his jeans. The way his eyes flicked toward me made me think he wanted to say something, but, instead, he only gave me a small smile. The Ohio license plate was tossed into the backseat, and in its place was a West Virginia plate. I didn’t have a chance to ask where it had come from.

I dropped my backpack at my feet and leaned against the minivan’s door. Liam disappeared around the back of the car, reappearing a few minutes later with a red gas can and a chewed up black hose in hand. With my eyes closed and ear pressed against the cool glass, I soaked up the honeyed singsong radio commercial for a local grocery store. When the broadcaster came back on, it was with a grim forecast of whatever was left of Wall Street. The woman read the stock report like a eulogy.

I forced my eyes open, letting them fall where Liam had been standing only a second before.

“Liam?” I called before I could stop myself.

“Over here,” came the immediate reply.

With a quick glance to the row of aquamarine motel doors, I shuffled around the back of the van until I was a few feet behind him. I stood on my toes, leaning to the right to get a better look at what he was doing to the silver SUV parked next to the van.

Liam worked silently, his light eyes focused on the task at hand. One end of the hose was shoved deep into the belly of the SUV’s gas tank. He looped the excess length of the unruly hose around his shoulder, and let the other end fall in the red can.

“What are you doing?” I didn’t bother to hide my shock.

His free hand hovered over the length of the hose, gliding it back in our direction. It was almost like he was tugging in a line, or at least motioning someone forward. A few drops of pungent liquid began to drip from the free end of the hose.

Siphoning gas, I realized. I’d heard about people doing this during the last gas shortage, but I’d never actually
seen
it done before. The liquid began to fill the can in a smooth pour, filling the space between us with a sharp odor.

“Gas crisis,” he said with an unapologetic shrug. “Times are a little desperate, and we were running on fumes for a while yesterday.”

“You’re Blue, right?” I said, nodding toward the hand guiding the gas into our red can. “Could you just move Betty along without it?”

“Yeah, but…not for long.” Liam sounded shy. When he pressed his lips together, they turned an unnatural shade of white and highlighted a small scar at the right corner.

When I realized I was staring, I squatted down beside him—more to hide my embarrassment than actually help. Stealing gas was, surprisingly, not all that complicated.

“I guess I’m just impressed you can use your abilities at all.”

A part of me wondered, then, if I hadn’t had it backward this entire time. The way things were at Thurmond…the camp controllers were so vigilant about making sure that we were terrified of getting caught using our abilities, and we were made to understand from the beginning that what we were, and what we could do, was dangerous and unnatural. Mistakes and accidents were not excuses, and punishment was not avoidable. There was to be no curious testing, no stabbing at limits to see if there was a way to push through them.

If Liam was so accomplished with his abilities, it probably meant he had taken years to practice, most of those spent outside of camp walls. It never occurred to me to think that other kids, safe at home, hiding out—that the
others
, who had never seen the inside of a cabin, experienced the grave and still
nothing
that was life at camp—might have managed to teach themselves amazing things. They weren’t afraid of themselves; they weren’t crippled by the weight of what they didn’t know.

I had the strangest feeling—like I had lost something without ever really having it in the first place—that I wasn’t what I once was, and wasn’t at all what I was meant to be. The sensation made me feel hollow down to my bones.

“The whole thing’s pretty straightforward for us Blues,” Liam explained. “You look at something, concentrate hard enough to imagine that object moving from point A to point B, and it just…does,” he said. “I bet a lot of the Blues at Thurmond figured out how to use their abilities. They just chose not to. Maybe something to do with that noise.”

“You’re probably right.” I hadn’t had enough interaction with the Blue kids to know.

Liam jerked the hose back and forth as the stream of gas slowed to a measly drip. I glanced up, searching the parking lot and motel doors for signs of life, and didn’t settle back down until I was sure we were alone.

“Did you teach yourself?” I asked, testing my theory.

He glanced my way. “Yeah. I went into camp pretty late and had plenty of time alone, bored out of my mind, to figure things out.”