Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (43 page)

T
HE HOUSE SITS LIKE AN
abandoned castle at the end of Greenwood Lane, slowly drooping into mulch and mud. The early morning light casts it in a soft glow of colors, but I’m too tired and cranky to appreciate the effect. The others took turns driving and napping, but Sam and I didn’t sleep at all. I’m too anxious about running out of time—I don’t know how long this will take, only that Ruby is risking her freedom for us. She says we have until noon, five hours, but what if this takes longer? What if she has to leave before the job is finished?

What if she can’t come back because she’s displeased the government?

One side of the house is covered in the overgrown vines that Dad spent years heroically trying to cut down and rip out, only to have them return each spring with a vengeance. The trees have grown so close together that their limbs seem locked in an embrace, and what’s left of Mom’s carefully—
meticulously
—cultivated flowerbeds have scattered into the lawn, mingling with the bright heads of wild milkweed and thistle, the white, frothy patches of Queen Anne’s lace.

If the missing strips of wood siding and the busted-in door aren’t enough of a sign that the place is empty—
vacant
—the fact that the sign, the one I hated so much, is still there at the end of the driveway is proof enough for me:
FORECLOSURE: FOR SALE BY BANK
.

Sam’s memory is perfect. She knew exactly which streets to take to find our old neighborhood, and then our street. I let all of that information bleed out of my head when we drove away that last time because I never thought we’d come back.

I never told Lucas that. He believed Mom when she promised we would; he was still crying a little about having to leave Sam behind. Luc could be blind to things, and I think he honestly thought he could will that happy ending into existence, if he only wished hard enough.

Here we are, though, at a house that isn’t a home. The upstairs windows are broken, the garage door is half-collapsed, and the old red mailbox has disappeared completely. I used to lie in my bunk and close my eyes, strain to remember exactly what this place looked like, try to catch that last image I had of it looking back through the rear window as we drove away. It’s been frozen in time inside of my head, like the cursed sleeping kingdom in Lucas’s story about Greenwood. Seeing it now in this state pries my chest open. We have aged, and so has the house. We grew up without each other.

“How are we looking, Vi?” Liam asks, killing the car’s engine.

“All clear, as far as I can tell,” she says. “I’m going to take a few laps around the block, just to be sure.”

“I know it’s pointless to say this to you,” Charlie says as she opens her door, “but if you see trouble, at least entertain the thought of running away from it.”

I cannot figure these two out, and her response—blowing him a kiss and then immediately giving him the finger—does nothing to help me there. It feels like watching a hawk snuggle up to an owl.

“Hey—hey, darlin’, we’re here.” Liam reaches over and brushes Ruby’s hair behind her ear. She doesn’t stir or yawn; I see her eyes open in the rearview mirror and realize that she hasn’t been sleeping at all. If anything, she looks even more exhausted than before.

“Anything?” she asks, turning back to us hopefully.

Sam grabbed Lucas’s hand the moment we crossed into Virginia, and she hasn’t let go since. She shakes her head. “The same.”

“Okay,” she says, straightening up in her seat. “We’ll find the notebook, then.”

So Ruby has been…
working
, I guess? No one came right out and said it—almost like that word,
Orange
, has a power to it that no one wants to summon—
invoke
—but I’ve got enough pieces to fit the puzzle together. This whole drive, she’s been inside of Lucas’s head.

“Chubs and I will have a look around the house, make sure no one is poking around or squatting,” Liam tells her, reaching into the glove compartment for something—oh. A gun.

They have this system down to an art. These kids, they came stocked with food and water, extra canisters of gas so we wouldn’t need to stop at one of the overcrowded stations. They know which roads to take to avoid unwanted eyes, someone always watches to make sure they aren’t being tailed, and, honestly, they don’t seem to feel a fraction of the fear that’s rocking every last one of my nerves. I’m jealous—I’m so jealous of what they have, and how surviving seems to come so easy to them when Sam and I failed so miserably at it.

I don’t like Liam, but I like the way he looks at Ruby, the way they seem to be able to hold conversations without words. I like that he kisses her hand sometimes, the way knights do in the old legends, or heroes do in Mom’s favorite movies.

But he’s not happy about helping us—helping
Lucas
—so I’m not happy with
him
.

“Which one was yours?” Ruby asks Sam.

“That one, right there.” Sam nods at the stumpy brick house on the next lot over. It gives me a little evil swell of satisfaction to see their perfect—
manicured
—lawn looking just as feral as ours. To see Mrs. Dahl’s perfect white fence in pieces on the wild grass. I’ll never forget the way the witch grabbed my right ear and gave it a yank, sharp enough to turn it red for hours, after I accidentally knocked into the fence with a soccer ball. After that, and the screaming terror Mom unleashed on the cold woman, I made sure to have loads more “accidents.”

“I barely recognize it.” Sam rubs her thumb over the curve of Lucas’s hand absently.

“I tried to find them after the press conference, to see if they’d picked you up without anyone noting it,” Ruby says carefully. “I couldn’t find a record of address for them.”

There isn’t a
FOR SALE
sign out like every other house on this street, but all the windows are boarded up and the carport is empty.

Sam shrugs. “It’s…whatever.”

I wish I could think of something to say, but I’m not so sure that Sam really needs to be comforted. I get it now; this is what I needed to see to slam the point home. She’s as much of an orphan as Lucas and I are—but our parents didn’t
want
to leave us. They didn’t have a choice. Hers did.

And I threatened to leave her, too. The idea makes my stomach go sour.

“It’s sort of sick,” Sam says, “but Thurmond felt like more of a home than this place.”

“That’s because home isn’t four walls,” Ruby says, “it’s the people you’re with.”

Sam lets out a soft laugh. “I guess so. Are the other girls okay? Did they ever find out what happened to Ashley?”

Ruby smoothes her dark hair back, a shadow passing over her bright green eyes. “The girls are all fine. Everyone’s just been worried about you. I’ll tell you about Ash later—after we get Lucas on his feet, okay?”

“That bad?” Sam says, shaking her head.

It’s late afternoon now, and the warm light almost tricks my eyes into thinking some color is back in Lucas’s face.

“Does he have to remember?” Sam asks suddenly. “When all of this is over and he comes out of this, does he have to remember what the Trainers did to him?”

Why wouldn’t he? Unless Ruby…my suspicion solidifies into a real answer. Ruby
can
affect someone’s memory. Vida and I were too far away from the house to really see what was going on, but we did pass one of the men as he ran away. Vida didn’t seem worried about it—no one seemed worried about the blank faces of the soldiers, or how they would explain the dead bodies.

Because Ruby gave them a memory they didn’t have
?

“I’m worried about…the feelings,” Sam continues. “Even if the images are gone, will he still feel that pain?”

Ruby gives her this small, heartbreaking smile I don’t understand. “I’m better than I used to be. When he comes out of this, I can suppress everything—if that’s what he wants.”

“Can’t you just do it right away? Before he remembers it?” I ask.

“Sometimes protecting yourself from the pain only makes it harder to face in the long run,” Ruby says. “He’ll be the one to make the choice.”

I look to Sam, trying to get her read on this. She lets out a soft, tired breath, but nods. Outside of the SUV, Liam appears at the front door, Chubs trailing behind him.

“Are you sure you can do it?” Sam asks.

“I can sure as hell try,” Ruby says. “It’ll just take time.”

Which, judging by the empty IV bags Sam unhooks, and by the way Luc’s skin has shrunk around his bones, we might not have much of after all.

I can’t stand to be in the house.

I step through the front door, and it’s like a portal into some strange mirror world where things are the same, but horribly—
hideously
—different. My skin itches, tightening over my skull. The air in my lungs is full of mildew and damp air, but there’s a trace of us still clinging to it. Mom took so much pride in our home that seeing it like this turns my fingers to claws again. It is filthy. The outdoors has come trampling in, leaving muddy stains on the walls and floors. A tree branch has broken through the living room window, spreading glass all over the sunny yellow armchairs and the empty space where a piano used to be.

It’s the holes that I see first: the pictures that Mom and Dad took off the walls to bring with us, the pots and pans hanging over the kitchen island, little porcelain trinkets here and there. When we left, we only took what we could fit in the car. A lot of stuff was tossed out, but the rest belonged to the house, which now belonged to the bank, which would then pass it on to whoever could afford it. The house didn’t sell, obviously, and no one cared enough to come in and cover the furniture. The heirlooms and electronics have been picked over, stolen, and whoever took them left the back door wide open.

Both Ruby and Sam watch me move through the kitchen, then the living room, like they’re waiting for me to blow my last fuse. I walk over to the back door to slide it shut, only to find the glass pane is missing entirely from it.

I’m sorry
, I think, squeezing my eyes shut.
I’m sorry
….For the first time in my life, I am grateful that my parents aren’t alive to see what’s left of our lives.

Home isn’t four walls, it’s the people you’re with.
I repeat Ruby’s words over and over until I can feel the truth of them working under my skin.

“Where should we put him?” Liam asks. He and Chubs have followed us in, Lucas between them. “I maybe wouldn’t recommend upstairs. We found a family of raccoons that were not particularly happy to see us—whoa—!”

Lucas dips dangerously to the ground as the boys both seem to jump slightly back, fighting the instinct to drop their hands and let him fall. Ruby and Sam both rush over.

His eyes are open, seeing everything and nothing.

There is a second of silence; we’re all stunned stupid, I think. But then his expression contorts—contracts into an ugly snarl, and whatever strength is left in his too-thin limbs flares. He thrashes at them weakly, trying to twist out of their grip—or trying to attack them?

The air blows out of my lungs. My chest closes up. The world shrinks to the wall that he’s facing, the one lone picture that we somehow missed in our last sweep of the house. The little family portrait hangs crookedly, all of our dusty smiles slanting down to the floor.

“Help—
a little help, please
!” Charlie says to Ruby, his voice high and thin with the effort of holding onto Lucas. “Turn him off!”

The picture bursts into flame.

The fire spills across the wall and, with nothing to stop it, catches the thin, brittle fabric of the ragged curtains. Liam swears loudly as he and Chubs both drop Lucas to the floor and begin to shake out their hands, which look blistered red. He tries to catch Ruby’s arm to pull her back, but she kneels down and puts a calming hand on Lucas’s chest, even as he tries to knock a fist into the side of her head.

“Oh,
hell
no!” The front door slams behind Vida. She sprints through the smoke and stoops to pick up a pillow from the couch, tossing one to a frantic Sam and taking the other for herself. She and Sam start beating the flames with them, trying to keep the fire from spreading to the carpet.

And me, I…

They did poison this place for him
.

Our home.

They made him hate us
.

I can’t stand here—I can’t stare at the evidence of my world crumbling to ash. I am the biggest fool in the world. I’m an
idiot.
He’s never going to snap out of this. We never should have brought him back here. All we’ve done is upset him, cause him even more pain than he’s already in.

I just need…

I need air that’s cooler.

I need…

I push past Sam and Vida, ignoring their voices as they call after me. I
run
, and I don’t know where I’m going, only that it’s not back into the house, not yet, maybe not ever again.

The backyard is worse than the front. It’s a maze of hedges and trees, and for a moment, I feel too overwhelmed by the unfamiliar sight to move.

And then I hear Lucas’s voice; I hear it in the wind that moves through the chimes he and I made out of cans and old silverware for Mom’s birthday when we didn’t have money for anything else. The smell of sap and damp earth and green life curls on it, drawing me forward like a beckoning finger. I want to fight it, but I can’t.

Place your steps inside the footprints left behind by the giants….

I find the stepping stones Dad laid out, and kick the dirt and dead leaves from them. I used to have to hop from one to the next, but now I’m tall enough to walk over them, step by step, until the path curls toward the side of the house.

Don’t drink the water, the sorceress poisoned the well….

I cut around the old stone birdbath we inherited from the woman who owned the house before us, stepping carefully through the brambles trying to tug at my jeans.

Walk toward the place where the sunlight turns the leaves to green glass….

The trees grow so tall, so close to one another, that they create a canopy over my head. There’s still enough sunlight to warm the leaves, turning them almost clear—
translucent
—until I can see the dark ridges of their spines and the veins that web across them.