The Darkest Minds (51 page)

The connection was instant and powerful. It seemed that some part of what he had said was true, after all. I needed to
want
to use my abilities. I had to
want
to have control over them. And God, did I want to. I wanted to tear his brain to shreds.

The images that churned up from the dark waters of his head were so unlike what I had seen before. Instead of the bright glare and the sharp, controlled edges, they were sketched in a kind of watery charcoal. Unfocused, fuzzy. I saw faces, bloated and distorted, rise up from the murky surface. His mind had gone limp; I felt like I could reach both hands up and reshape him.

“Let her go,” I said, my grip on his throat tightening. I threw the image of him sending Lizzie away, and a moment later he was mumbling the words, “Lizzie, go…outside.”

She bolted for the door, and I felt a thrill run through me. He was shaking under my hands, his eyes blinking, but I held on to him.

“Now,” I said. “Now you’re going to let us go, too.”

But even as the words left my mouth, I felt the unraveling. I gripped harder, my fingers digging into his skin.
Not yet
, I begged,
not yet, I need—I need to—

As quickly as I had slipped in, I was thrown out, and that damn white curtain swept between us. I tried to throw myself at it again, but Clancy’s hand lashed out to snatch my wrist, and I felt every muscle in my body thicken to stone.

“Nice try.” Clancy let me fall to the ground like a board, and actually stepped over me to examine his scratched cheek in a pot’s reflective surface. “Didn’t even draw blood.”

I couldn’t even move my jaw to tell him off.

“Good to see my lessons were of some benefit to you,” Clancy snarled, raking a hand through his disheveled hair. He turned back to face the shelves, hiding his face, but I saw his hands clench at his side, bunching up the fabric of his pants. I hadn’t ruined him, but I had rattled him. “I like to see my students applying themselves, but don’t mistake a few weeks of practice for years of it.”

I focused on trying to untangle whatever mental block he had thrown on me. I started with my toes, imagining them moving one by one. And…nothing.

Maybe I could erase memories, but he could turn people into living stone.

The first scream came only a second after I heard the first whirring engines. An unnatural wind stirred up the trees outside. Their branches scratched against the side of the building, insistent, as if to get our attention. I saw Clancy cringe at the high-pitched shriek of sirens, too, but he straightened himself up from his core. His face was lit with eagerness, and that’s what frightened me most of all.

“That’s it, then,” he said, brushing his jacket off. “They’re finally here.”

I couldn’t squeeze my eyes shut. The air was burning them, and then the air itself was burning. The telltale smell of smoke filtered in through the open windows. Gunfire, more screaming, more struggling. I imagined myself moving, on my feet and running for the door, to the others, to safety, but I got no farther than a blink. But that was something. I could work with that.

“You’re okay,” Clancy told me as he sat down next to me. One of his feet began to tap out a rhythm against a stool. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”

The blood roared in my ears. The kind of yelling that was coming from outside didn’t sound human; more like live animals having their skin torn clear off the bone. It sounded like pain, and terror, and desperation. The pitch of the metallic whine coming through the walls increased in intensity as each minute ticked on.

Rabbits need dignity and above all the will to accept their fate.

I felt, rather than heard, the footsteps thundering down the hall. I couldn’t tell how many there were. They were all moving in perfect time. The storage room door burst open in an explosion of smoke and heat.

I had never been so grateful for anything in my life as I was that I was looking at his face when the PSFs barged in. The anticipation there gave way to blank incomprehension and then to pure, unadulterated rage. Whatever Clancy had been expecting, it wasn’t two Psi Special Forces soldiers.

He didn’t even have to touch them. “Shut up!” Clancy hissed, throwing a hand out in their direction. “Get out! Tell your superior that there was no one here!”

The man in front, his body hidden under layers of fabric and body armor, held a gloved hand against the device in his ear and said, in a monotone voice, “Building clear.” The signal he gave to the other two was a simple, mechanical wave. As they jogged out of the room, I realized that they were the ones that had been letting off the smoke.

That the fires had started with them.

“Damn it—God
damn it
!” Clancy was shaking his head. A fist flew out and smashed into the nearby shelf, its impact drowned out by the rattling of gunfire outside. “Where are my Reds? Why didn’t he send
them
?”

He brought a bruised knuckle to his lips and began to suck on it, pacing the short length of the room. His breath came out in short bursts, and seemed to reflect the rapid turning of his thoughts.

My Reds
. His—the way that he spoke about them left no doubt in my mind what the implication was there. Project Jamboree, his father’s program.

No, I thought. Not his father’s.

I could see the different shards of the fractured full picture in front of me now. When he had first explained the program, I hadn’t known him all that well, or seen what he was capable of doing—not enough to piece together the clues he had unintentionally left for me to uncover.

There really wasn’t a single person in the world that was immune to his abilities, not even President Gray.

Clancy was still stalking across the room like a caged panther, the muscles of his back rippling with each spray of gunfire. Then he stopped, looking up at the windows and the smoke that was swirling against them.

“Who told you, you bastard?” he said, in a low enough voice that I wasn’t sure he knew he was speaking aloud. “Which one of them broke my influence and figured it out? I was
so
careful. So goddamn careful—”

He turned on his heel and stalked back toward me, and I saw the truth of it all written on his face. The same hand that bled with newly split skin had been the same one to coax his father, his advisers, anyone and everyone it took, to consider Project Jamboree. Hadn’t he said that before his father realized he was controlling him, Clancy had had some hand in making sure the program ran smoothly, and that the kids were treated well?

He clearly could have done more than that. If he had all of East River under his sway, what’s to say he couldn’t have controlled a small army of Reds, too?

Clancy must have seen the realization in my eyes, because he let out a low, humorless laugh. “I forget sometimes, you know, that he’s not stupid. Even after he finally figured out I was manipulating him, he never put it together that Project Jamboree came from me. I made sure of it after I escaped—I even left East River to check on them from time to time, to make sure my influence was still there. I timed the leak of East River’s location
perfectly
with the end of their training program.”

One hand came up to fist in his hair, and there was something breaking in his voice when he spoke again. “I grew up idolizing him, but when I saw what he really was—what he could do to his
own son
—” His words choked off slightly. “
Who
was it? Who tipped him off? How would he have known to send the PSFs instead? I should be controlling my Reds right now—and we should all be marching up toward New York to take him down—”

Clancy bent suddenly, grabbing the front of my shirt and hauling me up from the floor. He shook me, hard enough that I almost bit my tongue clean off, but he didn’t say a single word. The bullets and screams outside didn’t touch his stony features, or his thoughts. Smoke began to crawl along the floor, rolling, heaving, seizing everything in its path. With no warning, Clancy’s hands released my shirt and glided up my shoulders in a lover’s caress; his fingers closed around my neck, and I was sure, so damn sure, that he was either going to kiss me in his rage, or kill me.

More footsteps, lighter than before, but no less urgent. Clancy looked up, annoyance creasing his forehead.

I didn’t see what happened next, only the aftermath. Clancy went flying back into the shelves, hard enough that there was an audible crack as his head connected with the back wall. His body tore down the shelves of pasta and flour, landing in a messy pile on the floor.

Chubs’s upside-down face appeared over mine. His glasses were scratched and bent, and his face and shirt were stained with soot, but he didn’t look like he was hurt.

“Ruby! Ruby, can you hear me? We need to run.” Why did he sound so calm? Gunfire roared in my ears, an endless stream of tiny pops and explosions. “Can you move?”

I was still too stiff to do anything other than shake my head.

Chubs gritted his teeth and slipped his arms around me, making sure he had a good hold. “Hold on, I’m getting us out of here. Move when you can.”

Outside the safety of the Office, there was no escaping the noises. My heart lurched to life, pounding against my rib cage.

Tear gas and smoke coated the air in thick layers. Everywhere there was fire—on the ground, climbing the trees, dropping onto cabin roofs. My face and chest felt like they had caught, too. The wind blew the fire so close to us that Chubs had to pat my jeans down so I wouldn’t go up in flames. He grunted, and I knew he was struggling to keep us going under my weight. I wanted to tell him to drop me, to take the letters in Liam’s jacket and run.

Liam. Where is Liam?

Through the swirling ash I saw the lines of black uniforms marching the kids from camp down the path to the cabins. I saw a girl thrown out of her cabin and into the dirt, only to be yanked up by her hair. Two kids I recognized from the camp’s security detail raised their guns at the PSFs, who blew them away in a cloud of fire.

“STOP WHERE YOU ARE!”

The air was knocked from my chest as Chubs dropped me to throw that same soldier up into a tree. When his arms circled my chest again, we were moving faster than before.

And then we were falling, tumbling down the hill. Chubs let out a surprised croak as we rolled, picking up brush and embers along the way. The back of my hand smacked against a tree, but I couldn’t see where we were going. The smoke blinded me.

I came to a slow stop at the base of the hill, sinking face-first in the muddy bank. My hands and legs all convulsed as the feeling began to return to them.

I felt hands on the back of my jacket. Chubs dragged me on my back, choking and coughing.

We are going to die. We are going to die. We are going to die.

Rabbits need to accept their fate, rabbits need dignity and above all the will to accept their fate, their fate, their fate, their fate—

The water was freezing and swallowed me whole. Shock cut straight through my limbs, waking them with a slap. I struggled against the water, flapping my arms to break to the surface. The orange-stained sky was waiting as I broke into the night, coughing up water and poisoned air.

Chubs found me again. One hand clung to a wood post, the other reached out for me.
The dock
, I thought,
our dock
. I kicked toward him and let Chubs draw me under the cover of the old wood. The helicopters flying overhead beat the lake into a frenzy of waves and patterns. I could barely keep my head above the cold water, but I was alert enough to see the searchlights from above dancing over the lake’s surface.

I kept one arm around Chubs’s shoulders and used my free hand to reach up and grab hold of the dock’s algae-slick supports. He did the same, and waited until the sound of boots and guns had cleared from overhead before whispering,
“Oh my God.”

I moved my arm to draw us closer together, and hugged him as hard as my muscles could. We didn’t dare to speak, but I felt him shake his head. He knew what I was trying to say, I knew what he wanted to ask, and neither of us could find the words to choke out amid the smoke and screams.

TWENTY-NINE

M
Y LEGS WERE HALF FROZEN
when we were finally brave enough to move. It had been silent for some time—since the sun began to warm the sky. The helicopters disappeared first, then the sound of gunfire. Between the two of us, there was only breathing and whispered fears about what had happened to the others—to Liam.

“I don’t know,” he said. “We split up. He could be anywhere.”

I had wanted to get us out of the water two hours before, but we kept hearing the sound of falling trees and the crackling remnants of the terrible firestorm.

My muscles were so stiff that it took me three times as long to pull myself onto the dock than it normally would have. Chubs collapsed beside me, shaking with each cold breeze that slashed over our wet clothes. We crawled our way back up the path, staying low to the ground until we were sure, positive beyond measure, that we were the last ones left.