Sparks Rise

by Alexandra Bracken

  “Work faster.” His voice makes me think of the way condensation collected on walls of my parents’ unfinished basement. The stones are so dark and the lighting is so bad, you don’t feel the cold drip until it’s already on your skin. You can’t avoid it.

  I see his reflection in the screen of the next phone I pick up. His body is hot and damp and it repulses me more than even the sight of his face. How can someone who looks so normal, like the man who’d delivered our mail each afternoon, be this way? I want to know what hole he crawled out of, and how I can send him straight back into it.

  There are others watching this happen, from above, from around me. I feel their eyes, can sense the attention in the room shifting the longer he stands there, smelling my hair, pressing against me. Even as the hatred boils over in me, shame is right on its heels. It’s the stupidest thing in the world, I know it is, but I am ashamed of what he is doing to me and that others are seeing it.

  When I still don’t react, he grabs my wrist, wrenching it back up into the air. “Search!” he calls out, clearly delighting in the word. “Assistance!”

  It was quiet in the Factory before, but now I can actually hear the rain bleeding through the cracks in the ceiling. Rain and sleet slash against the walls and glass overhead, washing against them like waves. I think I am drowning; I am actually choking trying to get air to my chest. Before today, I would have stood there and just taken it, but I know now that there’s something he’s looking for. Something he wants to see.

  He’d lie about me stealing something from the bin just to strip off every last layer of clothing and shred of defense I have left in front of everyone. When we were kids, this was nothing. A female PSF would lead us to the far corner of the room and stand over us as we took off our uniform to prove that we weren’t hiding anything. I’m not a kid anymore, and none of the women seem to be coming forward. I see one in the rafters, older, thick at the waist, and she’s watching this all play out with a pinched look on her face. She isn’t walking toward the stairs. None of them are.

  But they don’t look surprised.

  So he starts the process for them, tugging my shirt the rest of the way out of my shorts. I hear Vanessa let out a startled gasp, swinging around and bumping the table.

  I push my elbow back, trying to dislodge him.

  “Careful,” he warns.

  Hot shame washes through me. I’m furious at myself for showing these other girls I won’t fight back. Ava is watching me with eyes that are pools of helpless horror, and I realize, with sudden clarity, that if it were any one of them, any of the girls in my cabin, I would have done something immediately, said anything to have made it stop. I need to do the same for myself.

  Because I know where this is heading. Before the Green girl told us, we’d heard whispers in the wash houses and out in the Garden. I know what language his touch is trying to speak, and I feel old Sam, the lion, roaring through my blood again. No one gets to believe that I won’t fight.

  I know that pride is a sin, but I would rather be dead than let him—any of them—think for one more second he’s allowed to do this to me.

  When I feel him lean forward again, I don’t hesitate. I drive both elbows back into his gut, catching him off guard. I know it doesn’t hurt him—that’s why I throw my head back and make sure to nail him in the face, too.

  And I feel like I’m spinning, spinning, spinning, reckless with delight in the small power I’ve managed to take back.

  Vanessa and Ava both scream. Out of the corner of my vision, I see a blur of red coming toward us and I realize that my vision is hazy because my eyes are watering from the blow. My blood is thrumming in my skull, but I can’t feel any pain. I barely hear Tildon when he starts cussing and spitting out one vile word after another. A PSF stands a short distance away with bugged-out eyes, looking between us and a soldier talking into his radio, saying, No, and, Calm Control, and Handled—

  I swing around to face Tildon as he gasps out, “Little...bitch!”

  He’s clutching his nose, the words muffled by fingers and blood. He fumbles for the small White Noise machine at his side and I lash out with my foot, kicking it away. I feel a thousand feet high, like I could land another hit on him before the soldiers in black reach me. So, I do. I haul my hand back and slap him as hard as I can across his face, curling my fingers at the last second. The nails I’ve broken working day after day in this Factory cut into the slick, fleshy part of his cheek. The breath goes out of him like a blown-out tire; the blood dribbling down his lips sprays out, sending a fine mist of it onto my sweatshirt.

  He is scarlet with rage as he stumbles toward me, swinging his free arm to try to club me with his meaty fist. The girls around me have crawled under the tables; I’m dimly aware of the voices and wait for the White Noise, the gunshot, the end to my story. It’s been so long since any of us tried this that I wonder if they’ve forgotten what they’re supposed to do.

  They come out of the stunned haze soon enough. The swing of a nearby baton registers as a change in the flow of the air around me. It whistles as it swings down. By the time it’s there to connect with my skull, I’m already falling forward. The weight that’s slammed into me from behind drops me to the floor. My chin connects with the concrete and I taste blood. There is not a single part of me that isn’t throbbing in pain, but somehow I’m not done yet. The figure on top of me is feeding the fire. I kick back, trying to catch him—he can’t have me, I won’t let Tildon do this.

  My hands are wrenched from under me and pinned with difficulty against my back. The hand that closes around them is large enough to capture both wrists at once and secure them with plastic binding. I toss my head back, rearing up like a bucking horse, and the warmth at my back shifts, leaning closer to my ear. He breathes out one word.

  “Sammy.”

  TWO

  LUCAS

  HE IS going to kill her.

  You spend time living inside anger, you start recognizing its varying violent shades. He huffs and puffs like the Big Bad Wolf, and he’s so slow to recover from that first blow to his chest, he can’t avoid the back of her skull as she sends it sailing straight into his face. Between the blood that’s rushed to his face, and the blood that’s come rushing out of his crooked nose, the PSF’s skin looks blistered by his own rage. This is the kind of anger that cracks bones. Crushes windpipes.

  It’s not until she turns around and claws him across the face that the realization sinks my heart like a stone. The trickle of recognition turns into a roar as the girl turns back in my direction, breathing hard, harsh lines turning a beautiful face defiant. She looks like some kind of warrior with her thick, honey-blond hair falling out of its tie, her face flushed with grim satisfaction. This is the face of a girl who once jumped out of our tree and broke her arm, just to prove to me she wasn’t scared like I was.

  This is Samantha Dahl.

  You fucking idiot, I think savagely, my hands pressing tight against my legs to keep from curling into fists. Shit, shit, shit. I’ve seen her before as she was walking toward the Factory—well. Before that. I saw her this morning going into the Mess. I saw her inside the Mess. I saw her every step of the walk over here, feeling every bit as creepy as I must have looked hovering nearby. My eyes kept skipping back to her, drawn to her face like a lone candle flame in the dark. I’m so damn stupid that even when I saw the faint scar above her lip, curved toward her nose, I thought, She must have had a cleft lip like Sammy. I was so damn busy looking around, searching for one particular face, that I missed the one right here.

  He touched her. I watched him do it. Draping himself over her like that—I thought he wanted to intimidate her, push her around like they do with all the kids here. But the look on his face was like a snake’s—eyes glassy, mouth in a permanent, smug smirk, skin gleaming under the milky lights. He looked drunk on the feeling, turning his face toward her ear. I had to concentrate on controlling my breathing. Up in the rafters, the PSFs hovered like hawks, unsur
e whether or not to intervene with the hunt happening below. I don’t know what they thought when they looked at each other, but I do know they didn’t do one damn thing to stop it when he got a hell of a lot bolder. Useless pricks. I know what “search” means. He was going to strip her right here, in front of everyone. Use it as an excuse to demean her. Control her totally.

  And Sammy—she was never going to let that fly. I see it in her face. She knows exactly what’s going to happen to her, and she just doesn’t care. She is a fighter against the ropes, ready to go down swinging.

  I can’t do a damn thing.

  They haven’t given me the order to move. To restrain her. To do anything other than stand here like a scarecrow, trying to keep the fluttering kids at bay with nothing other than their own fear. To the camp controllers and PSFs, our minds have been drained of will, of impulse, of that fluid connection between the head and the heart that lets you make decisions. The Trainers know the fire in us is bottomless. They took care to beat the flames out early into the program, leaving us little piles of embers that respond only to their hands adding fuel to turn sparks into a blaze.

  The PSFs need to think I don’t feel a thing as I watch the scene play out like a car crash in front of me. I’ve survived this long under the government’s “care” because I have followed the only rule I have: Don’t react. I must stand as blank-faced as the others even as the temperature spikes to a thousand degrees in the center of my chest, and I sweat with the effort it takes to control myself to be still. I can’t throw years of work away in an instant, let them drag me out back and put me down like a dog—the way they did to the other kids who didn’t take to their training methods. The ones who burnt themselves out, too hot, too volatile for even the most skilled Trainers to approach. Some resisted the training for weeks—months. I could see the light moving in their eyes when everyone else was checked out, vacant, scratching at their lives like dull pencils until the Trainers handed them a sharpener. I am the last one. I know it. The others are standing right in front of me, but they’re gone.

  I protect my fire the only way I know how.

  There’s a place deep inside of me that no one can reach. I keep the things there I won’t let the Trainers take, locked up tight where no knife can cut them out, no lash can slice them, and no shock of electricity can void them. When I was a kid, a little one, it was a place where stories took shape—where Greenwood really existed. In class, I’d be listening to the drone of our teacher one minute and, the next, fighting giants with Sammy, running from wizards, defending our tree from monster rats. If Mrs. Brown called on me, forget it. I was gone. When I snapped out of it, either because someone kicked my chair, the other kids were laughing at me, or the bell went off, I still left the room smelling the damp dirt in the forest, feeling scratchy bark on my palms. My heart would still be slamming against my ribs.

  There’s that phrase: getting lost in your own thoughts. Well, I disappeared. Mom gave me the dumb, horrible nickname Turtle because of it. She’d catch me sitting at the kitchen table staring at my notebook, not moving, just playing some crazy idea through, watching a full-on film of imagination play behind my eyes, and have to physically shake me back into reality. Same with reading. I lost so many hours to books with the world blanked out around me. Maybe different parents would have tried to break the habit, but mine let me slide into my shell when I needed to. I was the one that stopped letting myself go. When things got...when they got bad, I had to grow up. Stop dreaming.

  But damn if the first time the Trainers had me down, hands tied, feet tied, I was scared so shitless I just instinctively went to that headspace. It was like jumping into the deep end of the pool, letting myself sink to the bottom as they hammered away the surface of the water. I was deaf to their voices, even as they screamed in my ear. I felt the echo of the pain they gave me later, when my skin stained itself with bruises and I tried to knit the open pieces back together. They pulverized us early on, turned us to raw meat. Easier to shape that way. It was a cycle. Show fear, get pain. Show anger, get pain. Show humor, pain. Happy, pain. Sadness, pain. Want, pain. In the spaces between eating and pain, they drugged us. Sweet, black nothing.

  That’s what’s left in the others. Nothing. Their armor wasn’t as strong as mine. They couldn’t get lost in a maze of memory the way I could. I write myself different pasts. I write myself different futures. The scenes feel real enough that I let myself stay locked inside my head for hours as the Trainers drill me with threats, rake poison words down my back.

  Whenever they eased off, gave me food, water, medicine for the hurt, I didn’t think thank you, thank you, thank you, I will listen to you now I will never let you down again I need you thank you thank you the way I heard the other kids sobbing until they were silenced with more pain. I didn’t even notice. I was safe inside memories of Mom and Dad dancing as they cooked dinner together, forcing us to sing with them. Mia making me watch her perform a play she’d written about unicorns and fairies. Sammy. Sammy in the sunlight, laughing. Sammy racing me to the top of the tree, then again to let me win once. Sammy insisting I press my lips against hers just once as we sat up in our tree. Ten and eleven, three days before the move, my heart beating so hard, so fast I thought she could hear it, too. She wanted to know what was so great about kissing, and I couldn’t ever say no to her when she turned those determined dark eyes on me.

  Seven years I’ve been coaching myself for a moment exactly like this. I knew that I would find Mia in a place like this, and I’d need to be able to keep a lid on my anger until I figured out how to get us out. Laying on my cot at our facility, I imagined her shivering, pale, starving. I imagined them hitting her for one of her signature comebacks. I practiced the mask of apathy that came to the others so easily, killed my heart just enough to play the game.

  It was pointless. I should have known my weak-ass heart better than that. Right now, I feel like I’m about to detonate. The heat under my skin is hot enough to melt my bones. My left arm gives a sharp jerk, and the humiliation of losing control over my body’s horrible tic only makes the burn worse. I can’t make it seem like I’m helping her, I can’t lose this chance to find Mia and be sent back to the facility. But he can’t do this to Sammy.

  He called for assistance, I think, mind scrambling to put together the logic. I hear the camp controllers’ voices chirping in my ear, asking for a status. And even though I can hear one of the PSFs, a woman, reply, no one up in the rafters is moving to give the man any sort of assistance. The command hangs in the air, waiting for someone to accept it. The Trainers told us our primary purpose here was to keep the other kids from acting out. Save fire, we were allowed to use force when necessary to meet that goal.

  Good enough.

  My body lurches forward. I jump over the tables between us, sending the girls working there flying back like a startled flock of pigeons. By the time I reach her, the PSF has the baton in the air, swinging down toward her, and the others are finally moving, taking aim. I slam into her from behind, too hard to really brace herself from the impact of hitting the ground, but I try to maneuver one of my arms beneath her. The PSF’s baton catches the side of my skull and pain explodes behind my eyes.

  Sam’s body goes limp with shock and then, even after everything, she starts to fight again. It’s the last gasp of energy from an animal that knows it’s pointless, but still won’t surrender. Not easily, not willingly. I admire the hell out of her for it.

  “Restrain her!” I hear one of the PSFs shout.

  Glad to, asshole. She’s trying to buck me off, and the movement is enough to hide how bad my hands are shaking. I manage to get her arms behind her and reach for one of the zip ties in the pouch of my belt. Even the rain outside disappears under the PSF’s hollering to the others, his wild gesturing, as the woman I saw before, her stance and face rigid, listens with one hand on his shoulder. The girls, the poor kids, are braced on the ground with their hands over their ears, like they’re waiting for a bomb t
o drop. If they weren’t scared of the Reds invading their hellhole, they are now.

  I know it’s a risk, but I have to try—if she keeps thrashing and struggling to knock me off of her, someone will take my place. And that someone won’t care whether she walks out of this building in one piece.

  I lean down, pressing a hand harder against her bound wrists. When did Sammy get to be so much smaller than me? Her wrists are like flower stems. I feel how easy it would be to break them.

  Damn. I don’t know if God still listens to me when I try talking to him. I don’t know if he really knows the thoughts inside our heads or hears silent prayers. But please—please let this work. Let me get Sam out of here.

  “Sammy.” It’s one word, spoken so quickly, so quietly near her ear, I don’t know that you could count it as a whisper.

  But she hears me. Her long body relaxes under where I’ve straddled her, and I pull back just as the woman PSF comes forward. Psi Special Forces Officer Olsen. Her dark skin is taut against the bones of her face as she cuts off Tildon’s path toward us and looks between my carefully arranged face and where Sam’s is pressed against the filthy floor. There are two horns that come over the speakers, one long, one short, and the two girls next to us each suck in a shuddering breath.

  My head jerks up. I scan the room for the other Reds and see them reaching into the pouches on their belts—earplugs. Dammit. I was right. I release my grip on Sam long enough to pull mine out, jam them into my ears as far as they can go, and brace myself for impact.

  A hit of Calm Control is like taking an icy cold bath where the water’s been spiked with razors. The Trainers used it on us in the beginning, on and off and on and off for hours, but stopped a year in, when they realized daily use was making too many kids crack. And, let me tell you, you can reset broken bones and stitch up too-deep cuts, but you can’t piece a mind back together after it shatters into a thousand, flaming, furious pieces.