The Darkest Minds (30 page)

“Who taught you how to sew, anyway?” I asked. Apparently it was not the right question to ask. Chubs’s back went stiff and straight, like I had dropped an ice cube down the back of his shirt.

“I don’t know how to
sew
,” he snapped, “I know how to
stitch
. Sewing is for decoration; stitching is for saving lives. I don’t do this because I think it’s pretty or fun. I do it for practice.”

He stared at me over the rims of his glasses. Waiting to see if I got what he was trying to say.

“My dad taught me how to stitch before I went into hiding,” he said, finally. “In case of emergencies.”

“Is your dad a doctor?” I asked.

“He’s a trauma surgeon.” Chubs didn’t bother to hide the pride in his voice. “One of the best in the D.C. area.”

“What does your mom do?”

“She used to work for the Department of Defense, but got fired when she refused to register me in the IAAN database. I don’t know what she’s doing now.”

“They sound great,” I said.

Chubs snorted, but I could see him warm to the compliment.

The minutes dragged by, and the conversation waned. I found myself reaching for Zu’s notebook and flipping it open to the beginning. The first few pages were mostly sketches and doodles, but those gave way to page after page of math problems. Liam’s handwriting was neat and precise, and, surprisingly, so was Zu’s.

—Betty traveled 118 miles in three hours. How fast was Lee driving?

—You have five Snickers bars to share with three friends. You cut them in half. How many will each friend get? How can you make sure the leftovers get shared equally so Chubs doesn’t complain?

And then I got to a page with completely different handwriting. Messy and smeared. The letters were darker, as if the writer had been pressing down on the paper too hard.

I’m not sure what else can be said about this book that hasn’t already been said. I’m

out of clever things to say, I’m afraid. Jonathan Swift has always been a favorite, but I

can’t get over how clever his wordplay is throughout the novel. I really can’t

get over how similar it is to
Robinson Crusoe
at times, especially when he’s on the ship

to Lilliput. Though his interaction with the Lilliputians wasn’t the strongest section,

you would be hard pressed to find equally clever interplay of parody and originality. I

can see why the book has been studied so carefully by scholars over the years. We

meet Gulliver as a dreamy young man in search of adventure, trying to get

anywhere that would involve sea travel, and see him evolve masterfully. If I had to

name the best section of the book, it would probably be the Laputians section, a

place I would greatly like to visit, because my own head is often stuck in the clouds,

and to be able to study philosophy and mathematics all day—a dream. There was a

time or two over the course of the novel that I felt Swift had gone overboard and

missed some opportunities to drive home his idea of what the ideal society should be.

You, as the reader, are left to figure it out for yourself. This book is perfect if you

love thought-provoking literature from an objective, rational viewpoint, or if

you dream about one day traveling the world yourself.

“Umm…” I held the page up for him to see. “This yours?”

“Give me that,” he said. His face was wild with panic. Not just panic—by the way his nostrils flared and his hand shook, it was almost like I had scared him half to death. Guilt shot through me. I passed it back to him and watched him tear that sheet of paper out.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said, worried about the tinge of green coloring his face. “I didn’t mean anything by it. I’m just wondering why you’d practice writing essays when you said you didn’t think we’d ever get to go back to school.”

He continued to stare at me for several seconds, until something in his stony expression finally gave. Chubs blew out the breath he’d been holding.

“I’m not practicing for school.” Instead of tucking the sheet of paper inside the briefcase, he laid it out between us. “Before…before camp, my parents thought the PSFs were investigating them, which, you know, they were. They sent me up to my grandparents’ cabin to hide, and—you remember what I said about the Internet being policed? We had to find a way around it, especially when they started putting pressure on Mom at work.”

I glanced down at the sheet of paper again. “So you used to send book reviews?”

“I had a laptop and a few wireless Internet cards,” he said. “We would post book reviews online. It was the only way we could think of to talk without them catching on.”

He leaned over, covering the paper so only the first column of words was visible.
I’m out can’t get to you can meet anywhere name place and time missed you love you.

“Oh.”

“I wanted to write it out now,” Chubs said. “In case I can get online, but only have a few minutes.”

“You’re pretty genius,” I said slowly. “Your whole family.”

I got a snort in response.
Duh.

The question I really wanted to ask him was inching its way up my throat when he pulled a deck of cards out of his briefcase.

“Want to play a few games?” he asked. “We’re going to be here a while.”

“Sure…but I only know Old Maid and Go Fish.”

“Well.” He cleared his throat. “We don’t have the right deck for Old Maid and, unfortunately for you, I excel at Go Fish. I won the Go Fish tournament in fifth grade.”

I grinned, waiting for him to deal my cards. “You are a star, Chubs, a—” His nose wrinkled at the name. “I can’t call you by anything else if I don’t know your real name.”

“Charles,” he replied. “Charles Carrington Meriwether IV, actually.”

I tried to keep my face as straight as possible. Of course he would be named something like that. “Okay, Charles. Charlie? Chuck? Chip?”

“Chip?”

“I don’t know, I thought it was kind of cute.”

“Ugh. Just call me Chubs. Everyone else does.”

I figured it out.

It must have been half past five in the morning, well after several delirious games of cards and charades that had been brought on by too much candy and too little sleep. Both of us had been waiting for the other shoe to drop, to be proven right about the other boys. We kept the baseball bat beside us and never once turned our backs to the tents. When exhaustion finally set in, we took turns curled up on the ground, trying to steal a few minutes of sleep here and there.

I picked up Zu’s notebook again in an attempt to avoid being lulled to sleep by Chubs’s rhythmic snores, and added a few clouds and stars to the first page of doodles. The pages fanned out under my fingers as I flipped through the notebook again, not catching until I found what I was looking for.

540.

It
was
an area code for this part of the state, I was sure of it. Grams had lived down near Charlottesville for a time, and I had a very vague memory of standing in the kitchen of my parents’ house, staring at her number printed on a notepad beside the phone. But the area it covered—that was no small bit of land, and there was no real guarantee that it was supposed to represent an area code in the first place.

It was easier to think of it now without three eager sets of eyes on me, but slightly complicated by the fact that I was running on fumes, sleepwise. With more than enough time to kill, I started in again—rearranging them, trying to create anagrams, substituting different letters for others.

The feeling snuck up on me slowly, crawling back up through the crowded, tired portions of my brain. The other number—540—where had I seen that? Why did it feel like—?

When it came to me, I almost laughed. Almost.

I had seen the number on the radio in Greg’s memory only a few hours earlier, burning brightly through even the murkiest clouds of his thoughts.

It was 540 AM—a radio station.

Shaking Chubs back awake wasn’t enough for me, not when I thought I would actually burst at the seams with excitement. I all but pounced onto Chubs’s back, both scaring him senseless and kneeing him in the kidney in the process. I’m not sure what sound he made when I landed, but I was fairly certain it wasn’t human.

“Wake up, wake up, wake up!” I hissed, hauling him huffing and puffing and cursing to his feet. “When they gave you EDO, did they say anything else?”

“Green, if I can still walk tomorrow, so help me God—”

“Listen to me!” I hissed. “Did they say anything about tuning in, or picking it up?”

He fixed me with a baleful look. “All they said was to check out Edo.”

“Check out?”
I repeated. “Those exact words?”

“Yes!” he said, exasperated. “Why?”

“I was wrong before,” I said. “I don’t think the number has anything to do with a phone number. We were right before. The last letter isn’t a letter at all—it was supposed to be a zero. Five forty. It’s some kind of radio station.”

“How in the world did you reach that conclusion?”

Ah. The tricky part in all of this. How to B.S. the fact I had cheated and seen the answer, rather than being in possession of brain power to actually work it through. “I was trying to think of what else uses three digit numbers, when I remembered hearing them—Greg and the others, I mean—talk about needing to find a radio here. I should have mentioned it to you guys before, but I didn’t think anything of it until now.”

“Oh my God.” Chubs was shaking his head, mildly stunned. “I don’t even believe it. We have honestly had such shit luck this entire trip I thought at least two of us were going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere before we figured it out.”

“We need a radio,” I said. “I think I’m right, but if I’m not…we need to test it before telling the others.”

“Betty?”

“No!” I wasn’t about to leave the tent unguarded, even for fifteen minutes. “I thought I saw a radio in the back—let me go grab it.”

The store was rushing around me in dark streams and fading colors as I ran, but I wasn’t afraid of what was lurking there, not now. I hadn’t imagined the radio after all. It was back in the small cluster of rafts and blankets that Liam and his friend had set up the last time he was here.

Chubs was pacing in front of the shelves by the time I got back. I set the small device up on a shelf that was about eye level and began to fuss with its buttons, searching for the
ON
switch.

I had to be the one to start it up—and the one to fumble with the volume knob when it just about blew our eardrums out with static. The thing was ancient, a beat-up silver box, but it worked. The speakers jumped between voices, commercials, and even a few old songs I recognized.

“It has to be AM,” Chubs said, taking the radio in his hands. “FM frequencies don’t go up past 108 or so. Here we go—”

My first thought was that Chubs had somehow tuned it to the wrong station. I had never heard a sound like the one sputtering through the speakers—a low growl of static pierced by what sounded like a tub of broken glass being tossed around. It wasn’t painful like the White Noise, but it wasn’t pleasant, either.

But Chubs was still grinning.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked, and was all too happy to explain when I shook my head. “Have you heard that there are certain frequencies and pitches that only kids with a Psi brain can pick up?”

I braced a hand on the shelf to keep from doubling over. I had. Cate had told me as much, when she explained the camp controllers had embedded a certain frequency in the White Noise to root out any of the dangerous ones still hiding out in the other cabins.

“It’s not so much that others can’t hear the noise, it’s that their brains translate the sounds differently than ours do—really fascinating stuff. They did some testing with it at Caledonia, to see if there were any pitches that certain colors couldn’t pick up and others could, and it always sounded like this when we couldn’t—”

No sooner had the words left his mouth, than there was another sharp
click
, and the noise cut off altogether, replaced by a soft, male voice whispering,
“If you can hear this, you’re one of us. If you’re one of us, you can find us. Lake Prince. Virginia.”

That same message, three times, before it clicked again and switched back to the frequency we had heard before. For a long time, Chubs and I could only stare at one another, speechless.

“Oh my God!” Chubs said,
“Oh my God!”
And then we were saying it together, jumping up and down, arms flung around one another like two damn fools—like we had never, ever wanted to reach over and slap each other multiple times on multiple days. I hugged him without any kind of fear or self-consciousness, fiercely, with a rush of emotion that almost brought tears to my eyes.

“I could kiss you!” Chubs cried.

“Please don’t!” I gasped out, feeling his arms tighten around my ribs to the point of cracking them.