Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (36 page)

“Get down, hands behind your backs!”

I look toward Sam in question, but she only shakes her head and starts lowering Lucas to the ground.

There are too many people for me to fight.

Too many chattering radios and guns. Every part of me—every
atom
—screams in protest as I drop onto my stomach on the cracked road, as my cheek is licked by its rough tongue. The plastic zip tie the soldier puts around my wrist eats at my skin and what little control I’ve got left over my fear.

I twist around as the soldier hauls me up to my feet, trying to see what’s happening with Lucas. Another man is carrying him over his shoulder, and all I can think is
Don’t let them find out what he is, don’t let them hurt him, not again, not again
—

All Sam can say is “I’m sorry,” over and over.

She’s right.

This isn’t a fairy tale.

But we’re somehow still the villains.

T
HE SOLDIERS WHO PROCESS US
into their custody use zip ties to secure us, but their hands are careful, and they ask in accents I’ve never heard before if they’re too tight. They watch us out of the corner of their eyes as we sit on the curb, not to make sure we won’t run, but because I doubt most of them have seen one of us up close. When they pull out a small handheld device and fumble to turn it on, I know to look straight into it as it takes a photo.

The soldier working it, a young Asian woman, relaxes when my identification file comes up on the screen. Of course. Like the snatchers demonstrated, no one is ever scared of a Green. They don’t think we’re fighters.

But I’m not…am I? I can’t claim I’m one, not anymore. I lean forward and press my forehead against my knees, ignoring the way it pulls my shoulders painfully with my hands behind my back. I drove around and around for an extra hour, wasting gas to lead the snatchers off my trail, and I still managed to bring them home with me. I basically surrendered to the snatchers instead of trying to get us all out of there. I didn’t try to fight these soldiers.

I wanted to bring Lucas back to the people who made him this way. I am a coward. I’m not a lion, I’m not a knight. Out here, I’m nothing. I hate myself.

I turn, watching as the paramedics take Lucas’s vitals and put an oxygen mask on him. I don’t know if I should be grateful or terrified that he’s still passed out. He was already weak from exhaustion, from not eating nearly enough, and I know the fires must have taken what strength he had out of him, but…

What if he doesn’t wake up?

What if they do take him away?

What is wrong with you?

It might be the smoke still coating my lungs, the aftershocks of what happened, but my stomach heaves, and I have to close my eyes and swallow hard to keep from throwing up.

He saved us. Lucas…he
…I shake my head. No—there wasn’t anything in his expression. He was just reacting to the sound of gunfire. His instincts told him to fight and protect himself.

“—to the hospital!” One of the paramedics has been fighting with the soldier in charge for the last fifteen minutes, since they tried to run Lucas’s photo through the system and nothing came up. After hearing the officer in the hotel tell Mia that there was no record of Lucas that he could find, I’m not sure why I’m so surprised by this. I guess I’ve always thought of the government and military as one big body; I didn’t realize that they could wall off sections of themselves when it came to keeping secrets.

It makes me think that Mia is right, though. Maybe there is no record of him because the other Reds have already had their records purged, and the kids have been…dealt with.

And you wanted to give up and give him back.

I squeeze my eyes shut harder.
I want him to live. I don’t care how. I want him to live, and I can’t help him
—

“No, not until he’s been positively ID’d.” I don’t know what the soldier’s rank is, but he’s lording it over everyone else around him, to the point that even the woman who identified me stops to stare at him. He’s broad-shouldered, tall, a huge presence with his red hair. The neighbors actually scrambled back to their homes when he barked at them to stop gawking at us. If I hadn’t dealt with his type every day for seven years, I might have been impressed.

Firemen are still fighting the blaze across the street. Mia ignores the woman snapping her photo and watches as the flames devour the small house. She won’t look at me, and I can’t think of anything to say to her. So neither of us try.

I did this
.

The skin on my neck and arms still feels like it’s on fire, burning down layer by layer. When I was a little girl, my mother once tried to pretty up my hair with a curling iron before church. I couldn’t sit still long enough for her to finish, and the barrel accidentally brushed my neck; all Mom could say was
You did this to yourself.
I feel the same small agony with each burn on my skin now.

It must have happened when I was trying to push myself onto my feet, after I got out of the back of the truck. Holding on to Lucas was like embracing a furnace, but there’s no way his skin could have been that hot…right?

I don’t know what I believe anymore—I can’t shake the idea that there is someone out there, a God that created us. My father used the Bible as an instruction manual for how to earn the right to Heaven. He saw everyone’s life as split between that destination, and another very different one below. I guess some of his words have burrowed into my heart deeper than I imagined, sinking in like thorns, because there was a moment before I reached him, when Lucas was standing in the middle of a ring of fire, and all I could think was
I’ve already lost you.

Hell isn’t a place you go; Hell is where we live now. Hell is being helpless to protect the people you care about the most, and save them from themselves.

We will never have that Lucas back,
I think. Not the one we grew up with. Even if I can shake him from this, the last thing to heal will be his soul. It will break his heart, and no matter how many times I’m there to help piece it back together, the cracks will always be there, the mends will only harden it. But then again, am I the Sam he grew up with? Is Mia the same sister? How can we fit together, now that this world has snapped and bent our edges?

“Girls!” The word is barked at us from across the street.

I sit up again, bracing myself. The soldier in charge is cutting a path toward us, shouldering aside anyone who stands in his way. The woman who processed us with the device makes a quick, quiet report to him, and both of their eyes shift to Mia, who is glaring back at them from under a mass of curly black hair.

“Girls,” he says again, standing over us, hands on his hips, “I need to know who the young man is.”

Here is something else that’s different: they ask us questions like they expect to believe us. And, well, the PSFs would have already had us rolling in the direction of the nearest camp. I wonder for the first time if the only reason we’re still here is that these people literally have no clue what to do with us now, or who should make that call. With the PSFs, at least I knew what to expect. I have no idea what these people are capable of, what they’re willing to do, and that’s a whole new flavor of fear.

Closing the camps didn’t knock the players off the game board. It didn’t even rearrange them. It just added unknown rules and elements; now we have to learn how to live all over again, and it’s still not even on our own terms.

“He’s no one,” Mia says.

“Yes, apparently,” he says, impatience rushing the words. “There isn’t a record of him. No ID, either.”

“He’s no one,” Mia repeats, daring the man to ask her one more time. He senses the challenge in her voice and shifts the full weight of his attention to her. I can barely make out his face in the dark.

I know what Mia is trying to do; if he’s no one, then they won’t send him wherever they’re sending us. But that’ll only last as long as he’s unconscious. When he wakes up, and he’s surrounded by people in a hospital he doesn’t recognize, then what?

“He’s her brother,” I say, and my shoulders hunch at Mia’s hiss. At this point, I don’t think she could hate me more than she already does. But this might be our only chance to stay
together
. “He’s a Green. There’s no record because he was never taken into a camp.”

“That so?” The soldier glances back at the ambulance, and I think,
Is that a hint of admiration in his tone?
“What happened to him?”

“He tripped as he was coming down the stairs, knocked his head,” I say. “We were running to avoid these people…they were trying to kidnap us.”

He looks like he can’t quite believe this.

“Didn’t you see them?” I ask. “Two men and an older woman.”

The man shakes his head and my fragile little piece of hope starts to splinter. I’m so used to thinking about life in terms of action and reaction, crime and punishment, that I can’t take my eyes off his sidearm, or the baton hanging against his thigh. A new thread of worry weaves in and out of the mass already choking me.

“We didn’t mean…the fire was an accident,” I continue, and I can’t believe he’s let me say this much. “We were just trying to protect ourselves.”

“You could have destroyed this whole neighborhood,” he says sharply. “You shouldn’t be out here running around—this isn’t a game!”

I’m so stunned by this—that of all the conclusions he could have drawn, it’s that we’re out here
for fun
. That they think we would actually choose this for ourselves.

They’re going to punish us,
I think, fear battering my anger. How do I stop this? What can I say? If I say
I’m
the one that set the fire, me and me alone, then will they let Mia off? I will work the rest of my life to pay off the damage if I have to.

“You’re lucky that someone called this in and our patrol was close enough to answer.”

Lucky
is not the word I would have chosen in this situation, but I nod anyway, feeling my stomach flip.

“There’s no family contact listed for either of you,” he begins.

How completely unsurprising that my parents have figured out how to legally wash their hands of me. I’m “unclaimed,” too.

“But I have a notation that
you
”—the man nods toward Mia—“at least, are the ward of the government. Officer McClintock has been notified of your whereabouts.”

“My parents are dead,” Mia says, her voice wooden. “I’m with the only family I have left.”

I know she means her and Lucas, but the man seems to lump me into that
family
as well.

Another soldier, a young man, jogs up to us from behind one of the Humvees with a large cell phone in his outstretched hand. “Sir, there’s a call for you—”

The man swings around, and I can only imagine the expression on his face, judging from how quickly the blood drains from the young soldier’s.

“I’m sorry, sir, but it’s from Washington.”

I lean forward, trying to catch every one of the man’s gruff words as he presses the phone to his ear and strides away, back in the direction of the ambulance. Mia sighs and rests her forehead against her knees, closing her eyes, but my mind is spinning itself sick, churning out one horrible theory after another, each a tiny needle moving through my veins. I can’t make out his words, but I can read the language of his body—the way he storms toward the paramedics and begins to gesture between Lucas on the gurney and something else, and they begin to gesture back.

The younger blue beret is standing a few feet away from us, his gaze fixed on that same scene, shifting his weight between his feet. My anxiety deepens to outright dread.

They know
.

They know about Lucas. What he is. Where he should be. I don’t know how, but they found out, and now they’re going to take him away—

The man ends his call, gripping the phone in his hand for a moment. When he turns back toward us, it’s like Mia can feel the wave of furious heat pouring off him. She sits back up, her spine as rigid as the streetlights around us. She swings around toward me, eyes wide.

The man barks, “Load them!” to the soldier still standing over us. He windmills one arm, and it’s the signal that sets the gears around us into motion. The soldiers scatter, stomping out flares, packing up supplies.

“What’s going on?” Mia asks. “Hey—
ow
!”

We’re hauled up and deposited onto our half-frozen legs. I lean back, trying to see around him, see the ambulance. Doors are slamming, people are shouting; the buzz and crackle of radios electrifies my nerves until I think my blood is humming. The muscles in my right calf are so stiff, they send a lance of pain shooting up my knee, my thigh, my hip. The younger soldier has us both by the arms and all but drags us forward, toward the back of a black van. I try to drag my leg to slow us down, but Mia is the one who’s doing most of the work.

“Where are you taking us?” she’s shouting. “Where is Lucas? Lucas!”

“You can’t separate us, please,” I’m begging, “he’s a good person, he’s not what you think, don’t separate us,
please
!”