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.
But they’re nothing compared to our tree.
It seems impossible, but it’s still in one piece. The platform that stretches between the old tree’s sturdiest limbs, the walls Dad painstakingly measured and cut. Even the thick rope we used to climb up is still hanging, swaying with each faint breeze that rushes up behind me, teasing my hair.
I close my fingers around the rough hemp and give it a tug, testing to see if it’ll still hold my weight. I’m not tall by any means, or even that big, but we didn’t come all this way for me to fall and break my neck, thank you very much.
It’s harder to climb than I remember, even with my feet braced against the rough trunk. The muscles in my arms, shoulders, and back are burning by the time I reach up and grip the lip of the entryway cut into the floor of the tree house and, with one last heave, slip up through it. Two birds scatter, flying out through the small porthole window in a flurry of feathers and wings.
The tree house, the heart of Greenwood, is exactly the same. I know now for sure that Sam took care of it after Lucas and I left, kept everything in its right place. There are old, yellowed books piled up in the far corner, their pages wrinkled and dried stiff after too many rainstorms and water gun fights. The old rug we dragged from the living room is coated in thick dust, but brushing a hand across it is enough to reveal the vivid blues, reds, and gold woven into its pattern.
It feels like I’m in a dollhouse—like Alice trapped in Wonderland after she drinks the potion that makes her grow so big. I can’t believe we used to fit in those small chairs. That any of us, least of all Lucas, used to be able to stand up in here. I draw my knees up, tucking them against my chest, waiting to feel it, that trace of magic that was scattered over this place like fairy dust.
But I keep thinking of what Ruby said about home, that it’s not an actual place you leave or return to, and I think I see her point now. All of my memories of this place are colored by the old, perfect magic of imagination, made even brighter by the complete and utter lack of it at our camp in South Dakota. The world outside—the one I dreamt about—was all vivid flowers, streams that curled like slick-scaled serpents, clouds that held idle, happy conversations with each other as they passed by.
The world I see today is bruised with poverty; it is filled with people who are like us, wandering, trying to recapture what they used to have. Maybe they will come back to their old homes now, too. Maybe they will learn what I’ve learned: you can’t. The way that every gentle breeze feels the same, but you can’t capture the same one twice.
Greenwood was never the tree house or the woods around us, it was me and it was Sam and it was Lucas. I wanted to come back here for Lucas, but there was another selfish reason, too—I wanted to come back home and find some thread of my parents, the family I had, that I could pick up and knot around my heart. I wanted to find some part of them still here.
But they are gone.
I feel…is there a word for this? I look for my dictionary in the corner with the other books, wondering if all of the pages are still flagged the way I liked. And on top of them all sits a stack of spiral-bound notebooks, just where Sam said they’d be. I’m too scared to touch them, to prove that I’m not imagining them there. Is it really possible no one has come back to this place in all the years since we left it? Since Sam, its last guardian, was taken away?
There’s a sound, a whistle that comes from below. I lean over the tree house’s entrance, and spot the intruder right away.
“This is some set-up you guys had.” Liam’s hands are stuffed into the pockets of his leather jacket. Some of my irritation disappears when I realize he’s not poking fun at me for coming here—he’s serious. There’s real admiration in his voice.
“My dad built it,” I tell him proudly. It took him months, and he almost broke his leg when he fell out of it.
“I always wanted something like this,” he says, doing a lap around the trunk. “We didn’t have any trees big enough to support the big, strapping Stewart boys, though.”
I roll my eyes. “Uh-huh.”
“Can I come up? Take some notes on how he put it together?”
I hesitate, catching the instinctive No! You don’t have a key! before it can pass my lips. “Why? Thinking about building your house in a tree somewhere?”
He shrugs. “I was just thinking I might build one for my kids one day.”
That…is not what I expected him to say. I lean back, which he takes as permission to climb up. I’m too surprised by how far his vision of the future extends, and too curious about why.
“Whoa,” he says as his blond head pops up and gets a glimpse of our old set-up. His blue eyes go wide. “Cool!”
“Didn’t all those scientists decide the freak mutation would pass itself on?” I blurt out, watching as he runs his hands over the supports holding up the roof and along the walls. He’s serious—he really wants to understand how this thing is standing.
“That’s what everyone says,” he replies. “But with a few notable exceptions, I like us freaks just fine. They won’t have to go through half of what we did, and at least they won’t have to figure out how to control their abilities alone like we did.”
“Unless everyone is forced to get those implants—the procedure,” I point out.
“We’ll see about that,” is his only answer.
After he’s had his fill of exploring the tiny space and peering out our window, he sits down across from me, crossing his legs. “I’m thinking we maybe got off on the wrong foot….I had a real knot in my tail this morning, and I’m sorry.”
It’s not okay, so I don’t let him off the hook by telling him it is. But I do believe him. The guilt is plain on his face, like it’s been gnawing on him.
“Lucas is okay now,” he promises. “Ruby got him calmed down again.”
I nod, throat thick.
“I think you and Sam are incredible for making it through and protecting him. Keeping each other safe.”
I don’t know about incredible, but I would definitely classify us as strong-willed—recalcitrant. “Thanks, but I know why you were upset and I get it. I do.”
His brows lift at that. “You do?”
“I like Ruby, and it’s dangerous for her to be out in the world right now. But we really would have been screwed if you hadn’t come and risked it.” Lucas especially. He would have been lost to us forever. I am grateful, and I understand better why he wanted her back in Zone 1 as soon as possible. If the snatchers have some kind of “in” with soldiers to cut these deals, the way they did with Lucas, there should be a small army around Ruby at all times to protect her, to keep someone else from stealing her away from the life she deserves.
He scratches at the stubble on his jaw. “It’s…Christ, it’s so bad. The threats are one thing, but the asking price for her on the black market isn’t just a million dollars, it’s hundreds of millions of dollars. She is…one of a kind. In every way. And I’m the one that let the world know about it. This is all my fault.”
Wow. I didn’t realize anyone still had that kind of money. But—not the point, Mia. The point is th
at I can hear the pain vibrating in his voice, no matter how he tries to brighten it. I can tell he wants to talk about this exactly as much as he doesn’t want to, and I make the decision for him.
“What do you mean?”
“I made a huge mistake letting the reporter we worked with do such a huge profile on her,” he explains. “Chubs and Vi were both worried, but it felt so important to me. Ruby says it’s fine, but it’s not. I thought it would show people how brave and amazing she is, but for a lot of people in this country, it’s had the opposite effect. If they’re not scared of her, they want to hunt her for her skin. We might have been able to keep what she could do a secret from the public—the government could have sealed her records. But it’s out there now, and it always will be, and I regret the hell out of it.”
“If she says it’s fine, you should believe her,” I say. It hasn’t seemed like she’s holding any kind of grudge to me. I’m sure there’s a swirl of emotions churning beneath her calm surface, but from what I can tell, she’s the calmest—the most serene—of all of us. It’s easier to feel braver when I see the steady courage in her. “You can’t make decisions about her life for her.”
“I know, I know—I just want her to think twice before making these calls, really put the danger into context,” he explains. “She’s made peace with what she can do, but she had to fight so damn hard to get there. I know I was the definition of an ass earlier, but I just don’t want her to feel like she has a responsibility to help every single person she comes across, or that she owes it to Cruz or whoever to fight for them.”
He takes a deep breath, raking his hand back through his shaggy hair, muttering to himself now more than to me. “She’s fought enough. We’ve all lost enough, haven’t we?”
I can’t argue with him there. If anyone deserves a warm cup of milk, a nap, and a lifetime supply of cookies, it’s probably these kids.
“What did you lose?” I ask him, and no sooner are the words out of my mouth than my brain fires, connecting two wandering dots in rapid succession: newspaper articles, Stewart.
In the back of my mind, I’d thought he looked familiar. That I’d seen his face somewhere, and just chalked it up to the news. But now I have context, and understanding blooms in my heart.
“Was your brother the one that was killed?” I strain back into my memory for the name. “Cole?”
“Ah…” Liam swallows hard, rubs his hand over his face. “Yeah. Yeah, he was.”
“So we have something in common,” I say. “Your brother was like Luc, right?”
He nods, glancing up at the ceiling of the tree house. And now I’m the one who feels like crap, like an idiot, for snarling at him in the car.
“But…not like Luc?” I press.
“Not from the sound of it,” he says finally. “We didn’t really have…I guess we didn’t really even have a relationship? I don’t know. He was never straight with us. He didn’t even tell me he was a Red until the day before he was…until he…”
“Don’t say passed away,” I tell him, drawing from my own terrible well of experience. “Say he died. Death is horrible. We shouldn’t give it a pretty name. I only know what was in the paper and on the news, but from the sound of it, it was horrible. Those people stole his life.”
“I stole it.” He breathes the words out like a secret he’s kept too long. “He died protecting me. Covering me so I could get out. There’s not a day—” Liam sucks in a sharp breath. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to get angry—this isn’t the reason I came out here.”
“You should be angry!” I tell him, and the monster inside me nods in agreement. “You should be furious!”
“But I’m angry with him,” he confesses. “That’s what’s so wrong about it. I am furious that he hid what he was and felt shame over it, when our family would never have loved him less for it. And I can’t even tell you how unfair it is that I only got ten hours with him—ten hours—after I finally found out.”
I can’t begin to imagine this. The second we found out what Lucas was, what he could do, the only thing that changed in our lives was Mom scraping together money to buy spray to make our blankets in the car more fire-resistant. And Dad saying, in his Dad way, “At least we won’t have to learn how to start a campfire by hand!”
“Did your brother have a temper?” he asks. “Sorry, I mean, does he have a temper? Does he feel at odds with himself?”
“He might now,” I say, “I’m not sure. We didn’t have that much time together after he went through the change. But no…he really didn’t have a temper. He’s—he was a big softie. I think he was scared of what he could do, though, just a little bit. Was your brother like that?”
“I think he pretty much hated himself,” Liam says, voice flat. “He hid it in plain sight and used it to his advantage when he had to, but I’m still not really sure he was ready to admit he was one of us. I guess I shouldn’t expect all of the Reds to be the same. Lord knows I’m not like every other Blue on the planet. But I do think there’s another layer that comes with being Red—being Orange, too.”
“Like the fear that you’re not just wrong, but you’re extra wrong?”
He nods. “Which isn’t true, but it doesn’t invalidate the way they feel.”
I wonder if Lucas thought—thinks—about himself like that?
“Well, if you’re wrong, then I’m wrong, too. I’ve never admitted this, but…sometimes I blame Lucas for not fighting harder. When I’m really angry about it, I even wish he had killed the PSFs that took us.”
It feels weirdly good to admit this to someone, like draining an infected wound.
“That’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he says.
“It is if you know Lucas,” I explain. “He’s not a fighter or a killer. He doesn’t have it in his heart. I’m mad at my parents, too. I’m mad they made us leave this house. Sometimes I’m even mad that I survived. Do you ever feel that way?”
“I used to,” Liam says slowly. “At the beginning. Before I was ever in a camp, I was living rough outside—cold, miserable, alone. But you have to weigh that against what you’ve done with your time, and and what you can do now. Make it count.”
“What if you have no idea what you’re supposed to do?” I ask. “I want to be useful, I don’t want to sit around and wait for things to change. I’m not exactly great at surviving out here, or fighting, but I want to help other kids.”
“Well, let’s think about this, because there are ways to help beyond what you’re saying. And I think the time for fighting—the kind of fighting we were doing, at least—is over for now, and we need to get creative in the way we go after what we want,” he says. “Is there something you really love? Something that speaks to you?”
Were we really allowed to think about this now? “I like…stories. Words.”
“Well, good news, buddy, there are plenty of us terrible at those exact things.” Liam lets out a faint laugh. “And if there’s one thing these months have taught me, it’s how crucial it is to be able to tell our story in our own words, and not let anyone else warp the truth around us. You definitely have a skill for drawing it out of people. Look at how much I’ve managed to unload on you already—sorry about that, by the way.”
It startles me how much I love this idea—how it does feel like striking back against a world that’s quickly trying to erase the evidence of what we’ve been through.
“Are you serious? Do you think kids would want to tell me their stories, and I could help them record it in some way?”
“Definitely,” Liam says. “Sometimes people need help putting what they’ve been through into words. They can’t articulate how they feel.”
I feel so bright hearing this, like a star has just formed in the center of my ribs and is blasting out for all the world to see; this small idea spirals into a thousand little ones about how I could make this work. My monster will eat the pain of others. It will devour their hurt as it pours out of them.
“Thank you fo
r trying to help my brother,” I say. “I’m really sorry about what happened to Cole….I can’t…” I don’t finish my thought, because I can imagine how it would feel to lose Lucas. I am right on the edge of that gulf of pain.
“Do you think the memory of someone should dictate how we live going forward?” he asks, threading and unthreading his fingers together.
“It depends,” I say. “I think you can probably honor someone’s memory, but you can’t live for them, because that means living in the past. Does this have to do with Ruby wanting to help the other Reds? She knew your brother too, right?”
He nods. “If Cole couldn’t help them, then isn’t it my responsibility to finish the job for him, make sure those kids are safe and treated right? But then I start to think…isn’t it time to let someone else take care of things? Does it always have to be Ruby?” Liam messes up the hair he’s just smoothed down. “I know I don’t have the right to make the decision for her, but I can’t get the thoughts out of my head every time we take a risk. What happens if we go, and something happens to Ruby—God, what happens if I lose her, too? What happens if the government tries to punish her, and I’m not fast enough or strong enough to help her?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But what’s the alternative? You two run off and go into hiding for the rest of your lives? You have a little herd of kids and build tree houses for them?”
He lets out a choked laugh. “Sounds nice.”
“Sounds kind of boring,” I say. “But I guess what I mean is, being afraid can’t be a reason for us not to do something now. It’s going to be dangerous anywhere we go, and all those people in Washington are trying to establish rules and laws, and we have to make sure that we’re part of shaping that, too.”
“Our voice will only get louder the more of us we bring together,” Liam agrees.
“So I guess our role now is to do the best we can to make sure we don’t lose anyone else,” I finish. “No matter what.”
Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) Page 33