It’s a bedroom. I slam the door shut behind me and lock it, trying to block out Sam’s voice as she calls after me. I feel a fire burning under my skin as I thread my hands through my hair and start pacing that slice of space between the bed’s stripped mattress and the busted dresser. My fingers snare in the curls, but I don’t care. I want anything, anything, to distract me from the throbbing pain in my back. I can’t stop shaking.
She did this to him.
This is her fault.
I hate her, I hate her, I hate her—
I’m crying so hard I have to sit down, and I hate myself for it. I haven’t let myself cry in years. It was so bad at first, right when they brought me to the Blank Rooms, because I couldn’t stop seeing Mom and Dad, and the pain in my hand—the one the PSFs broke dragging me away from Lucas—kept me up all night. I cried until I thought I would drown in myself. The only way to pull myself up and out was to remember that I’d be out of there eventually. I knew Lucas would find me, and we’d figure out what to do, what happened to Mom and Dad…their bodies, if they were given a funeral, where they were buried.
There’s a sound I don’t recognize—it’s one I haven’t ever heard before from her. I turn toward the door, straining my ears to hear if she really is crying, too. But when she speaks, Sam sounds so calm it’s infuriating. “The people who did this to him…Lucas called them Trainers. I don’t know what they did to him and the others, but this is the only way he’ll respond. I’ve been trying to get through to him in other ways, but I haven’t had any luck.”
Of course, because she got to be with the real Lucas in her camp before they did…this to him.
No. I don’t want to think about her being in her camp for years. I don’t want to picture her parents just ditching her at school. I don’t care that she got that snake bite, that it almost killed her. I don’t want to feel sorry for her.
I stand up, my hands closing around the old brass handle of one of the dresser drawers, and just pull. There’s so much fury powering the movement that the heavy wood comes flying out and I stumble back. I let it fall, kicking it until one of the sides breaks. The drawer liner is covered with daisies, and a shower of brittle receipts and a few buttons scatter across the floor.
I reach for the next drawer and do it again, again, again, and there’s something here, there’s something good in wrecking this the way that I’m wrecked. I don’t stop until I run out of drawers, and then it’s only to see what I can smash next.
“I’m sorry…Mia, I know it’s my fault, I’m sorry,” Sam is saying. I think she’s been talking this whole time, and I just haven’t heard her over the thunder pumping through my ears. “I tried to get him to leave—”
“Not hard enough! You should have made him go!”
“I know,” she says, “I tried, he wouldn’t—”
“You should have tried harder! You should have done everything you could! And now he’s—he’s—”
Gone. He’s here, but a thousand miles away. He isn’t just disappearing into himself, the way he used to when he got tangled up in one of his daydreams. They’ve erased him, drained him of every piece of kindness and love that added up to who he is. They hurt him, and I couldn’t do anything about it.
“Don’t shut me out,” Sam pleads. “He’ll never forgive me if he knows you saw him like this…that he did that to you. I think he’s still there, I think he’s in there, and we just have to—” The Sam I grew up with would have shouted me right back down. This one just sounds like she’s been dragged off a cliff by her hair and left there to dangle. Exhaustion is grinding her words to dust, and I can feel them drifting down between us like sand in an hourglass.
“Stay with me, please—” Her voice catches so sharply it makes my own throat hurt to hear it. “I need your help. If anyone can figure out how to reach him, it’s you.”
I swallow the bitter words before I can throw them back at her, but they don’t go down easy. The truth is, if anyone can figure out how to help him, if there’s anyone he’d want help from, it’s her.
Sam and Lucas. I remember looking for a word to describe them. Inseparable. So close you’d say their names in one breath. SamandLucas. They spoke in a language the rest of us couldn’t even hear, let alone understand. I was just the annoying sister Mom forced them to hang out with, the one that was always pathetically desperate for them to notice her and like her and want to play with her. I followed them everywhere.
She was like the sister I never asked for. Mom and Dad called her Sunshine, even though they were the ones trying to brighten up her life, while her parents kept trying to lock her up in a tower and guard her like jealous dragons or something. I know what Mom told me once is true—that love multiplies love and there’s no limit on it, and that just because they loved her too, it didn’t mean they somehow loved me less. I know at fifteen that I shouldn’t still get that little ache at the thought that I’ve somehow been left behind again, but I do. I can’t help it, and I hate it.
“Are you hungry? There’s some food….”
What appetite I had is gone. “Just leave me alone.”
“Okay,” she says quietly. “Let me know if you change your mind.” The floorboards creak as Sam steps away, but not before she adds, in a tone that makes it sound like she doesn’t even believe herself, “It’s going to be okay. Everything will be better. We can do this.”
Her footsteps carry her farther away, until I can only hear the murmur of her voice as she says something to Lucas. The room is in pieces around me and when I bend down to start picking up the panels and fragments of the drawers, I get this twinge of pain in my tailbone, the spot I landed on when Lucas…
Threw me off him like I was covered in poison. Like he had no idea who I was.
I can’t hold it in a second longer. I press my hands to my face, trying to quiet—stifle—the horrible raw sound that comes from somewhere deep in my chest, the way I used to see the girls do in my room at the facility when they didn’t want the PSFs to hear them and come in to shut them up.
I climb up onto the bare mattress, curling my legs up around my heaving stomach, the hole at my center that can’t seem to fill itself. The tears are boiling hot against the freezing air trapped in this room; they spill out over my fingers, into my mouth, down my chin, into the fabric.
I want to go back—I want to go back to the facility, to Black Rock, to the routines and the rooms. I would give up being outside again, I would give up everything, to still be able to live inside the hope that Lucas was okay and that he was coming to find me.
There’s a part of me that wishes for sleep; I want proof that I’m not in a nightmare, someone else’s story. I just want to pass out and not think about any of this anymore, because if I keep letting these thoughts spin around me, they’re going to circle round my neck like a rope and choke me.
Calm down—I want to be the monster, not Mia. The monster doesn’t get hurt. Nothing can touch it. Not fear, not anger, not misery.
Not even guilt.
It sneaks up on me in the silent hour that follows, thickens the air until I have to sit up to suck in a deep breath. There’s a thought I’ve been pushing down—kicking down, really.
She didn’t do this to him. She didn’t ask him to help her.
But blaming Sam is easier than blaming Lucas.
The thing is, I know my brother, and I know the kind of person he is. He wouldn’t have left Sam, no matter what she said or did. It would have broken his heart. It wasn’t a choice between saving her or saving me, not to Lucas. He was always all ideas—he could imagine anything into reality—but Sam and I were the ones that used to have to figure out a way to make his Greenwood schemes actually work.
Sam didn’t have to risk getting Lucas out of the camp, knowing he was like this.
Sam didn’t have to risk getting me away from that hotel, knowing she could just as easily have been caught.
But if she hadn’t, where would Lucas be? Where would I be?
The bed creaks as I push myself off it. I’m a step away from the door when I realize the soft sound I’m hearing isn’t the old house shifting its bones, it isn’t the wind rushing around its rotting skin. There’s a rhythm to it. A melody.
“…little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…”
It’s Sam.
Sam is singing.
It’s that one from all those years ago. We had this game, you know, in Greenwood—our own version of Marco Polo. Lucas would get himself lost in the woods, or he’d pretend to be a prince and I’d be the witch who captured him, and Sam would sing and he would call back and they would meet each other halfway. It was all pretend, but…
I unlock the door and step out into the hall, moving toward her voice. A feather-soft hope rustles inside my chest. Is this how she gets him back to himself? Did she figure something out?
“…all around the neighborhood, I’m gonna let it shine…”
The house is dark, save for that single flashlight. Sam has moved it toward the couch. There’s a dark shape stretched across it, big feet dangling off the edge; Lucas, of course. He’s impossibly still, his face turned up toward the ceiling.
And just like that the hope dissolves, and I wish with all my heart that I could just disappear with it.
She’s in a chair she’s positioned near his head, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. In the instant before the floorboard creaks under me and she looks up, the flashlight perfectly lights—illuminates—her face.
Sadness.
Devastation, I think.
“Sorry—I just—” Sam jumps to her feet, but can’t seem to figure out what she wants to do with her hands. She smoothes her pale hair down before lacing them behind her back, like I’ve called her to attention.
“Why did you stop?” I ask.
Sam flinches, but I see the stiffness in her shoulders ease just a tiny bit as she sits back down. “It’s pointless…I don’t think it helps.”
I don’t either. His eyes are open, almost unblinking, and he doesn’t stir or look in our direction. I come around closer to her, hating the rapid strike of my heart, the way my feet seem to unconsciously take a wide path around the couch to reach her.
For a second, I just look at him. Luc was so bundled up before, came at me so fast, I didn’t even have a moment to really study him and try to sort through the changes. His face is almost the same as I remember it, though it’s not as round or soft as it used to be. Always tall, it looks like he’s grown a solid foot, maybe more, and the process has left him stretched and way too thin. He reminds me a lot of Dad, the shape of his nose, his ears, though we both got Mom’s coloring. I don’t know why I like that—why it makes me feel better to see evidence of people who are gone. The reminders should hurt more than they do.
“Is he…always like this?” I ask, my voice low.
Sam glances up at my face before turning back to Luc. Her shoulders rise on her next deep breath in. I already know I won’t like her answer. She bites her lip so hard, it makes the scar from her cleft palate bright red.
“No…in the beginning, right after I left Thurmond with him, he was…he responded a lot more. Faster, too. He would take care of himself—things like, he’d know that he was hungry and that he should eat when I put food in front of him, and now I have to beg him. His eyes were still blank then, but there was something moving behind them.”
“What happened?” I ask. “What changed?”
Sam rubs at her forehead. “I don’t know. I can feel him just…drifting away, no matter how hard I try to pull him back in. The only way to get him to acknowledge you, just look at you, is if you try to touch him. He hates that.”
He smells a little like unwashed clothes. It’s not horrible, but I see what she means about him not caring for himself. I imagine it is hard to bathe someone who doesn’t want you to touch him.
“What else sets him off?”
“For a while, right at the beginning, I tried to talk to him about your family. I told him about your parents and he just…he lost it. Maybe that was it? Maybe I shouldn’t have pushed so hard to try to get him to remember. Whatever they did, they made him break from that.” Sam swallows roughly. “Mia…I think they really hurt him. He has these scars, all up and down his arms, like they cut him bit by bit.”
My view of him blurs. I take a second to push back against the tears. I don’t want to cry. Lucas is right in front of me. We haven’t lost him totally. We can figure this out, how to help him, but it doesn’t involve throwing another temper tantrum like I’m five, not fifteen.
“I’m sorry…” I say. “I’m real sorry, Sam. I was just…”
She holds up a hand. “Everything you said was true.”
“No—it wasn’t,” I say. “I was upset and just kind of freaked out on you, and it wasn’t fair.”
Sam can’t look at me, or won’t. It takes me a minute to work up the courage to touch her, to put a hand on her shoulder. I’m scared I messed this up, and if she pushes me away, then I really will have no one—
She doesn’t. Sam puts her hand over mine.
“He’s getting worse,” she says. “Every day. I keep thinking, did I make the right choice? Should I have let him go with the other Reds? Someone must be taking care of them…right? Helping them?”
“No!” I say sharply. “I mean—I mean yes, you should have gotten him out. You don’t know what they’re doing to the other Reds. If they did this to them—hurt them so bad—then who knows what they’ll do to them now? I wouldn’t put it past them—the PSFs, the government, whoever—to just try to…”
The unfinished thought sends me into a kind of tailspin—the smoke, the fire, the stairwell, being crushed, being knocked down, and down, and down…
I don’t realize I’m shivering until Sam stands up and wraps a blanket around my shoulders, forcing me down into her still-warm seat.
“Try to what?” she asks, crouching down beside me.
When I can, I form the words on my numb lips. “Destroy the evidence. They…the people in charge of my facility, Black Rock…they burnt the control room to try to destroy all of their records. The military guy who came for us made it sound like they’d been doing that to all of the camps since yours was closed.”
Sam’s lips part, and her face goes as gray as a thundercloud. She starts to shake her head, like she can shake the idea loose before it can get its claws in.
“You know they would do it,” I say, “you know it’s a possibility….”
“I don’t know anything anymore, apparently,” she says bitterly.
I’m not sure where she’s going with that, and I’m not sure Sam does either. She seems relieved just to be talking to someone other than herself.
“Lucas beat this before,” I tell her, and it’s good to remind myself of that, too. “He can do it again. He just needs our help.”
“I don’t think it’s going to be that simple,” Sam says, turning her eyes back on him. “He doesn’t even really sleep, Mia. He just gets to the point of being so exhausted he passes out. I’m afraid one of these days he just won’t wake up.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I insist. “We have to. We have everything we need right here.”
She releases a shaky breath, taking my hand when I offer it. Her skin is freezing.
We will get through to him by persevering, by not giving up on him, by showing him love when everyone else only showed him fear and pain. And if Sam can’t have faith, then I’ll believe enough for the both of us.
Sam shakes me out of unconsciousness before the sun is even up.
“Hey,” she whispers, “sorry…”
I roll onto my back on the mattress, tugging the scratchy gray blanket down from where I’ve pulled it up over my head. It takes a second for my eyes to focus on her.
And then I remember where we are.
What happened.
Lucas.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, sitting straight up.
&n
bsp; Sam holds up her hands. “Nothing—nothing, I promise. I just need to take the car out and find an open gas station and some food. I didn’t want to leave without telling you.”
I nod, rubbing the sleep from my eyes. There’s a sour taste in my mouth I recognize as hunger. “How are you going to do that?”
“I have vouchers for the gas. We’re good for at least a few more tanks….Food will be harder.”
“Vouchers?”
Sam stands up for a moment, tugging something out of her back pocket. It’s a small wad of silver paper with black type on it. She’s angled it just enough that I can read the words GASOLINE VOUCHER and a barcode with numbers filling the space beneath it. Printed over everything is a kind of iridescent ink with the words UNITED NATIONS printed over and over again, the way you sometimes see images and words printed on money.
“How’d you get this?” I have a hard time imagining they’d just give it to a kid, especially one who’s just out wandering around, not getting the procedure, not under the thumb of any adult.
For a second I just stare at her, watch her look away and stuff the vouchers into her pocket again. I can feel the guilt coming off her in waves. She’d told me before, towards the end of her story about getting Lucas out of Thurmond, that she didn’t want to go back to her parents—she didn’t even want to think about them. But I can see in her face that she’s doing exactly that now. She’s dueling with one of their Sunday school lessons.
“How do you think?” she gets out between gritted teeth. “I stole them. I took them out of someone’s pocket. They left their jacket on the back of a chair, and I just…”
Survival is a choice, the monster whispers.
“Whatever,” I say, “we need them more. That person is an idiot for leaving them.”
The monster is right about this one. It would be one thing if the usual rules still applied, but there’s nothing usual about life now. We have a temporary government that’s been appointed, not elected, that serves governments from a half dozen other countries and their combined militaries. They’ve chopped up the country into four zones to try to manage it. No one wants to drink from our poisoned wells. Everyone is on some kind of journey—trying to get home, trying to find their families, trying to get to that place where they can start again. We are all trying. But sometimes you have to cheat to get there. Just a little.
Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) Page 24