Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (35 page)

The
bang
sends me shooting straight up off the floor, flying over the mattress.

“There you are, pet!”

Inside, they’re inside
—

“I don’t know who you are—I don’t care, but—y-you can take the food, you can take it!” Sam is clearly struggling to sound calm, and it’s not working, not really. “I have bottled water, too. It’s clean.”

The men laugh. I press my ear against the door hard enough to hurt, my hand is curled like a claw around the knob. This doesn’t make sense to me. Sam is a fighter. She’s the one who won’t take an insult, who always got a second punishment for reacting to her first punishment. She’s not fighting them.

She won’t fight them.

She’s going to go with them so they don’t come farther into the house.

She’s distracting them.

She’s not fighting them because she’s protecting
us
.

They are going to hurt my friend
.

“Take the water?” This is a new voice—a woman’s. “I think we will. You can carry it out for us. That’s right, nice and easy. You don’t want my finger to slip, do you? We don’t need you unhurt, just alive. Remember that.”

“There’s been some kind of mistake—”

“Aw, pet, don’t cry about it. We ran your li’l face through our system. Samantha Dahl. That’s your name, ain’t it?”

System
? How could they know her name?

“You’ve got the wrong person—”

“You’re just a Green, but, lucky girl, there’s plenty of people willing to pay to get a look inside that brain of yours,” the man continues. “Nothing to be ashamed of. We all know that you got nothing to hit us back with. Now come on, pet….”

I’m going to be sick.

There aren’t skip tracers anymore, not according to the news. There are just snatchers and a whole new illegal market for people to buy and sell freaks—turn them into personal weapons. Study them.

They’re going to take her
.

The floor creaks as I shift my weight, a quiet sound, but it blows the conversation in the kitchen out like a candle.

“Someone else here, pet?” that same man asks. “You go check—I got this one—”

“Come on, girlie, you don’t really want us to hurt you—that’s it, grab her, Bill—grab her!”

No, no, no, no, no, no
—what am I
doing
? They’re taking Sam and any second they’re going to find
Lucas
and I’m in here
letting it happen
—

“Stop!
Please!
” Sam is yelling, her voice hoarse. “I’m not her! I’m not! I’ll come with you, but you—”

There’s a heavy
thud
, and I hear her ragged gasp.

“Don’t make me do it again!” the man grunts out.

I reach down, unlocking the door.

Heavy footsteps.

Harsh breathing.

Hate
.

It boils the air like a spell, thickening the darkness around me.

Now, Mia
.

The look on the woman’s face as I fling the door into her is almost funny. She looks like she could be someone’s grandma—a halo of rough, choppy silver hair, eyes set deep with wrinkles, sweatpants. She looks like she should be going to the grocery store, not staging a kidnapping. “You—”

I don’t let her finish.

I wasn’t lying to Sam before. When I pushed Officer McClintock, it was the first time I’d ever tried to hurt someone with what I could do. When I was in the Blank Room, trying to hide that I’d changed, I’d accidentally move things around. I’d want the glass of water from across the table, and suddenly it’d be zipping toward my hands. There’s a learning curve, I guess, for controlling the intensity of it, but no one has to tell you how to do it. I look at something, I want it to happen, and somehow it does. The answer is in the ask.

I want to hurt this woman; so I do.

I fling both hands out and she shoots back into the hallway with a scream, against the wall. The impact cracks the plaster, leaves her limp. I jump over her legs and run the short distance to the living room. Lucas is still there, moving beneath the blanket, but they’ve already dragged Sam out through the kitchen door. They kicked it in so hard, it broke off its hinges.

“Sam!” I scream.
“Sam!”

They’ve pulled a hood on over her head, bound her hands in front of her like she’s some kind of criminal. I feel the last of my calm burst into ash. She’s struggling, not making it easy for them, but not fighting—not until she hears my voice.

The two men are built like football players—one with dark skin, the other light, one with no hair, one with a ponytail, both in the same camo jackets you see some hunters wear. I take in all these details in the span of a blink. The only thing that really matters is that they both have guns; one has a small one pointed at Sam’s head. The other has a shotgun pointed at me.

“What do we have here—?”

I don’t let the man holding Sam finish.

“Don’t—!
Run!
” she chokes out, trying to turn back toward the house. My hand is out again and the night air tackles the man holding her, drags him back toward the trees. It’s panic, or it’s an accident, I don’t know, but the gunshot cracks the second before I knock the gun out of his hand.

I’m not fast enough with the other man. I should have hit them both at once. Sam is screaming, trying to get her hood off, calling my name over and over again, and I barely have a second to dive back into the house before he fires the shotgun in my direction.

“I’m fine only taking one of you!” he yells.
“Bitch!”

He’s taken a whole section of the doorframe out—literally—he’s blown it into splinters around me. I stare at it, ears ringing, reaching up to touch a warm, wet cut on my cheek. When he fires again, the shot whips through the wall over my head, smashing into the cabinets.

I don’t even see the old woman come up behind me until she has an arm locked over my throat and is dragging me up.

“I got her—I’m coming out! Stop shooting, you idiot!”

I thrash, twisting, trying to drop low out of her arms as she drags me forward. The broken glass and wood whirls around us. I can’t focus on any one thing long enough to use it to defend myself. The man with the shotgun is still aiming it at me, and he doesn’t take kindly to being tossed violently to the side. Before I can turn to the man limping back from the trees toward their pickup truck, the old lady is already cutting into my skin with some kind of knife. I can barely move without the edge biting into my throat.

“Be a good girl, now….” The old woman smells like coffee and stale sweat, and the hand she uses to cover my mouth tastes even worse when I bite it.

The knife digs in harder.

“Brat!” she spits. To the men, she says, “Make sure that one’s secure. We’re going to have to drug this one.”

One of them tosses Sam so hard into the truck that the whole thing dips. I hear her scream around her gag as she lands on her bad leg, and my vision flashes red. The closest man must see it in me, because he launches his fist into my face and the world dissolves into black around me.

I can’t…

…think…

…hurts…

Mom
…I want my mom….

“—come on, let’s go—wait—Bill, wait—
look
.”

My vision can’t seem to focus. The whole right side of my face aches, and it’s getting harder to open that eyelid.

“Three! Anyone else want to come out and play?” the old woman says, laughing. “Anyone else hiding in there?”

Three?

There’s a fog around my thoughts and a strange rainbow halo around my vision. It makes it harder to focus on reality—on the dark shape standing in the battered doorway of the house.

Lucas
.

“Boy, too,” says one of the men behind me. “Even better.”

“No…wait….”

Sam starts screaming in earnest now. I think for a second that she’s scared for him, that they’ll take him and hurt him, too. The realization crawls up my neck, and I start to shiver.

She’s scared for these people.

Lucas stands there, motionless, as he always is. His shirt collar is stretched out, and standing upright it’s even more obvious that he’s lost too much weight. The bones look like they’re popping out of his skin. I’m too far away to read his steely expression, but the tendons in his neck are bulging, and I see that his right hand is jerking at his side.

I see it happen out of the corner of my eye. The man with the shotgun is standing, in one piece, and then he’s not. The gun explodes in his hands. Both me and the old woman are rocketed back by the force of it, the spray of blood and embers that follows the man’s screams.

The second I’m out of her grip I crawl forward, toward where Sam is rolling herself out of the bed of the pickup truck, hitting the ground
hard
. She doesn’t stop, just keeps rolling until the hood is off and she manages to get the cloth gag out of her mouth.

“Lucas!” she shouts. “Stop!”

Crack
—

Crack
—

Crack
—

The other man shoots fast and wild in Lucas’s direction, screaming,
“Get ’im! Get ’im!”
to the old woman, who’s still on the ground. I swing my arm out in the snatcher’s direction, knocking him back against the truck. The second he loses his balance, so do I, and I stumble down again. A hand clamps down on my ankle and rips me back across the dirt and gravel. I hear the sound of barking dogs and sirens, and none of it registers, nothing beyond the fury etched into my brother’s face.

The scene comes into focus, and it takes me too long to understand why: the area is lit—
illuminated
—by fire. It circles the man who’s still screaming on the ground, cradling the burnt remains of his hands and arms. It’s jumped up to the trees, spread like a carpet across the wild grass, caught the other man’s pants and jacket sleeves and—

The car.

Smoke is pouring from under the hood, and all I can think of is the facility, how the glass blew out—

If the truck explodes, we’re all dead
.

He’s…I’ve always known who Lucas is, and he didn’t try to hide it from us when he changed, but this isn’t him. This is a weapon. I don’t understand. Is he protecting us? Or is he just lashing out at a threat?

“Lucas! Look at me!
Lucas!
” Sam forgets her rules, all of them, as she stumbles toward him. The doorway is ringed with fire, and smoke pours out of the house behind him as it catches and tears through the wood and old, moldering fabric.

I kick at the woman’s head but she’s already letting go, her attention on the driveway and her last route out from the fire. I push myself up onto my feet, chest tight from the smoke, just as Sam reaches him—

There’s no hesitation.

No fear.

Her hands are still tied together in front of her, but it hardly matters. Sam loops them over his neck and then around his shoulders. She doesn’t let go. She holds onto him.

The fire flares white-hot around me, and I have to run forward to avoid being caught in the same wave that’s sweeping toward the men and the old lady as they scurry away like the rats they are.

“Sam!” I shout. “Come
on
!”

I’m not stupid enough to think that Lucas will try to hug her, return her touch.

He’s going to hurt her—and for Lucas, there’s no coming back from that. Even if I can draw him out later, if he does what it looks like he’s about to do, he will never forgive himself. He will let the shadows eat him again. And I am too shocked to move.

Already he’s bucking and thrashing in the circle of her arms. Sam’s lips are moving, but I can’t hear what she’s saying to him over the crackles and pops of the fire roaring through the trees.

Lucas is yelling now, not words, just—screaming, his hands clenched at his sides, his eyes squeezed shut. There’s smoke rising from Sam’s coat, but she doesn’t let go, even when I would have.

He kicks at her, his ragged fingernails coming up to rake the backs of her arms. She doesn’t let go.

He goes limp in her arms and my heart stops dead.

She doesn’t let go. Her back bows under his weight, the effort it takes to keep both of them upright. The gravel shoots out from under my feet as I scramble to get to them.

“Are you okay?” The words tumble out of me. “Are you hurt?”

“He’s passed out,” Sam says, ignoring my questions. “Can you find something to cut my hands with?”

A piece of glass is sharp enough to cut the plastic tie. Sam gasps as her hands are released, and we both stoop to take Lucas’s arms, looping them over our shoulders. Lucas is so hot to the touch, I wonder if the fire is moving through his blood, too.

“The car is…a few streets over…we can make it….” Sam has to stop and adjust her grip on Lucas again before we start down the curve of the driveway. Lucas really is out of it; he’s so much taller than both of us that his feet drag and bob against the ground, and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We’ve just reached the street when a wave of heat and pressure knocks us forward. The truck goes up in a ball of fire, streaking into the night sky.

“This way—” Sam starts to tug us left.

No.

I blink, eyes watering, as the wind finally starts playing games with the thick gray smoke, tugging it down the street. I think I’m imagining it at first—spots in my vision that just need to clear after staring so long at the flames.

A single word forms in my mind:
No.

I can’t squeeze out the rest. My mind is shutting down, turned to ash by shock.

No. Way.

No way out.

No way forward.

The dark spots in my vision take shape, sharpen into something so much worse.

Neighbors, their coats pulled over pajamas, talking to each other in tight circles of concern. Soldiers in their baby blue berets and armbands, guns in their hands, shouting. A fire truck, firemen rushing past us with a hose. I think about the sirens I heard earlier; I stare, hypnotized by the red, blue, red, blue lights, and I don’t understand how I have been so stupid to let this happen. To not know what would be waiting for us.

This town isn’t empty at all. It’s full of people who stare at us like the monsters we are.

It won’t matter what we say to defend ourselves. It won’t matter now if we try to protect ourselves the only way we can. It doesn’t matter that I can’t see the snatchers, the ones responsible for all of this.