The Darkest Minds (9 page)

“What are you doing?” Cate asked.

She had pulled over because she wanted me to get out, hadn’t she? I would have done the same thing if our situations had been flipped. I understood.

I leaned back away from her arm as she reached over, but instead of pushing the door open, she slammed it shut and let her fingers linger over my shoulder. I cringed, pressing back against the seat as hard as I could, trying to avoid her touch. This was the worst I’d felt in years—my head was humming, a sure sign I was dangerously close to losing control of it. If she had any thoughts about hugging me, or stroking my arm, or anything my mom would have done, my reaction was more than enough to convince her not to try.

“Listen to me very carefully,” she said, and it didn’t seem to matter to her that at any moment a car or a PSF could come charging up the road. She waited until I was looking her in the eye. “The most important thing you ever did was learn how to survive. Do not let
anyone
make you feel like you shouldn’t have—like you deserved to be in that camp. You are important, and you matter. You matter to me, you matter to the League, and you matter to the future—” Her voice caught. “I will never hurt you, or yell at you, or let you go hungry. I will protect you for the rest of my life. I will never fully understand what you’ve been through, but I will always listen when you need to get something out. Do you understand?”

Something warm bloomed in my chest, even as my breath hitched in my throat. I wanted to say something to that, to thank her, to ask her to repeat it again just to be sure I hadn’t misunderstood or misheard her.

“I can’t pretend like it never happened,” I told her. I still felt the vibrations of the fence under my skin.

“You shouldn’t—you should never forget. But part of surviving is being able to move on. There’s this word,” she continued, turning to study her fingers gripping the wheel. “Nothing like it exists in the English language. It’s Portuguese.
Saudade.
Do you know that one?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know half of the words in my own language.

“It’s more…there’s no perfect definition. It’s more of an expression of feeling—of terrible sadness. It’s the feeling you get when you realize something you once lost is lost forever, and you can never get it back again.” Cate took a deep breath. “I thought of that word often at Thurmond. Because the lives you had before—that we all had before—we can never get them back. But there’s a beginning in an end, you know? It’s true that you can’t reclaim what you had, but you can lock it up behind you. Start fresh.”

I did understand what she was saying, and I understood that her words were coming from a true, caring place, but after having my life broken down into rotations for so long, the thought of dividing it up even further was unimaginable.

“Here,” she said, reaching inside the collar of her shirt. She pulled a long silver chain up over her head, and the last thing to reveal itself was the black circular pendant, a little bigger than the size of my thumb, hanging from it.

I held out my hand and she dropped the necklace into it. The chain was still warm from where it had been kept against her skin, but I was surprised to find that the pendant wasn’t anything more than plastic.

“We call that a panic button,” she said. “If you squeeze it for twenty seconds, it activates, and any agents nearby will respond. I don’t imagine you’ll ever need to use it, but I’d like you to keep it. If you ever feel scared, or if we get separated, I want you to press it.”

“It’ll track me?” Something about that idea made me vaguely uncomfortable, but I slipped the chain on anyway.

“Not unless you activate it,” Cate promised. “We designed them that way so that the PSFs wouldn’t be able to accidentally pick up on a signal being transmitted from them. I promise, you’re in control here, Ruby.”

I plucked the pendant up and held it between my thumb and index finger. When I realized how dirty my fingers were, and how much dirt was still packed under my nails, I dropped it. Me and nice things didn’t go well together.

“Can I ask you another question?” I waited until she had finally nudged the car back onto the road, and even then it had taken me a few tries to get the words out. “If the Children’s League was formed to end the camps, why did you even bother getting me and Martin? Why didn’t you just blow up the Control Tower while you were there?”

Cate ran a hand over her lips. “I’m not interested in those kinds of operations,” she said. “I’d much rather be focused on the real issue, which is helping you kids. You can destroy a factory, and they’ll just build another. But once you destroy a life, that’s it. You never get that person back.”

“Do people have any idea?” I squeezed out. “Do the people know that they’re not reforming us at all?”

“I’m not sure,” Cate said. “Some will always live in denial about the camps, and they’ll believe what they want to believe about them. I think most people know there’s something off, but they’re in too deep with their own problems to call into question how the government is handling things at the camps. I think they want to trust that you’re all being treated well. Honestly, there are…there are so few of you left now.”

I sat straight up again. “What?”

This time, Cate couldn’t look at me. “I didn’t want to have to be the one to tell you this, but things are much worse now than they were before. The last estimate the League put together said that two percent of the country’s population of ten- to seventeen-year-olds were in reform camps.”

“What about the rest?” I said, but I already knew the answer. “The ninety-eight percent?”

“Most of them fell victim to IAAN.”

“They died,” I corrected. “All the kids? Everywhere?”

“No, not everywhere. There have been a few cases of it reported in other countries, but here in America…” Cate took a deep breath. “I don’t know how much to tell you now, because I don’t want to overwhelm you, but it seems like the onset of IAAN or Psi powers is linked to puberty—”

“How many?” They really hadn’t learned anything new in all the years I was trapped in Thurmond? “How many of us are left?”

“According to the government, there are approximately a quarter of a million children under the age of eighteen, but our estimate is closer to a tenth of that.”

I was going to be sick. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned forward, putting my head between my legs. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cate’s hand come down, as if she was going to rest it on my back, but I twisted away again. For a long time, the only sound between us was the tires turning against the old road.

I kept my face down and eyes shut long enough for Cate to worry. “Are you still feeling queasy? We had to give you a high enough dosage of penicillin to induce seizurelike symptoms. Trust me, if we could have done it any other way we would have, but we needed something serious enough for the PSFs to actually bring you back to the Infirmary.”

Martin snored behind us until eventually even that faded into the sound of the tires rolling down the old road. My stomach twisted at the thought of asking exactly how many miles we were from Thurmond, how far away the past really was.

“I know,” I said after a while. “Thank you—I mean it.”

Cate reached over, and before I could think to stop her, her hand ran a smooth path from my shoulder down my arm. I felt something warm tickle at the back of my mind, and recognized its warning trill. The first white-hot flash from her mind came and went so fast, I saw the scene like a photo negative. A young girl with white-blond hair in a high chair, her mouth frozen in a toothless grin. The next image stayed, lingered long enough for me to recognize I was seeing fire.
Fire
—everywhere, climbing the walls of the room, burning with all the intensity of the sun. This…memory? It trembled, shuddered hard enough that I had to clench my teeth to keep from getting nauseated. Inside Cate’s memory, a silver door with 456B stamped over it in black lettering slid into view. A hand flashed out, reaching for the handle—Cate’s pale, slender fingers, outstretched—only to pull away at its molten hot touch. A hand lashed out against the wood, then a foot. The image wavered, curling at the edges as the door disappeared behind the dark smoke that spewed through its cracks and joints.

The same dark door shut, and I jolted back, pulling my arm out from under hers.

What the hell?
I thought, my heart racing in my ears. I squeezed my eyes shut.

“Still?” Cate said. “Oh, Ruby, I’m so sorry. When we switch cars, I’ll be sure to ask for something to help ease your stomach.”

She, like all the others, was oblivious.

“You know…” Cate said after a while. She kept her eyes on the dark road, to where it met the brightening sky. “It was brave of you to take the pills and come with me. I knew there was more to you than the quiet girl I met in the Infirmary.”

I’m not brave.
If I had been, I would have owned up to what I really was, no matter how terrible. I would have worked, eaten, and slept alongside the other Oranges, or at least stepped out of the shadow of the Yellows and Reds.

Those kids had been so proud of their powers. They made a point of harassing the camp controllers at every turn, hurting the PSFs, setting their cabins and the Washrooms on fire, trying to talk their way out of the gate or driving the adults insane by putting images of murdered families or cheating wives in their heads.

It was impossible to miss them, to not step aside and turn away when they passed. I had let myself sit like a coward in the dull, endless stream of gray and green, never drawing attention, never once letting myself believe that I could or should escape. I think that all they wanted was to find a way out, and to do it themselves. They had burned so bright, and fought so hard to get free.

But none of them had made it to sixteen.

There are a thousand ways to tell if someone is lying to you. You don’t need to be able to glimpse into their mind to catch all of the little signs of insecurity and discomfort. More often than not, all you have to do is look at them. If they glance to the left while they’re talking to you, if they add too many details to a story, if they answer a question with another question. My dad, a cop, taught me and twenty-four other kids about it in second grade, when he gave his presentation on Stranger Danger.

But Cate had no tells. She told me things about the world that didn’t seem possible, not until we were able to pick up a radio station and a solemn voice bled through the speakers to confirm it all.

“Yes!” she cried, slapping her palm against the wheel. “Finally!”

“The president has reportedly refused an invitation from Britain’s prime minister to discuss possible relief measures for the world economic crisis and how to pump life back into the sagging global stock markets. When asked to explain his decision, the president cited the United Kingdom’s role in the UN’s economic sanctions against the United States.”

Cate fiddled with the tuning again. The newscaster’s voice faded in and out. At the first burst of static, I jumped.

“…forty-five women were arrested in Austin, Texas, yesterday for attempting to evade the birth registry. The women will be detained in a corrections facility until their children are born, after which the infants will be removed for the safety of their mothers and the state of Texas. The attorney general had this to say…”

Another voice came through, this one deep and raspy.
“In accordance with New Order
15
, President Gray issued an arrest warrant for all persons involved with this dangerous activity
.…”

“Gray?” I said, glancing over to Cate. “He’s still the president?”

He had only just been elected when the first cases of IAAN appeared, and I couldn’t really remember anything about him, other than that he had dark eyes and dark hair. And even that I only knew because the camp controllers had strung up pictures of his son, Clancy, all over camp as proof to us that we, too, could be reformed. I had a sudden, sharp memory of the last time I had been in the Infirmary, and the way his picture had seemed to watch me.

She shook her head, visibly disgusted. “He granted himself a term extension until the Psi situation is, and I quote,
resolved so as to make sure the United States is safe from telekinetic acts of terror and violence
. He even suspended Congress.”

“How did he manage that?” I asked.

“With his so-called wartime powers,” Cate said. “Maybe a year or two after you were taken, some Psi kids nearly succeeded in blowing up the Capitol.”

“Nearly? What does that mean?”

Cate glanced over again, studying my face. “It means that they only succeeded in blowing up the Senate portion of it. President Gray’s control of the government was only supposed to last until new congressional elections could be held, but then the riots started when the PSF started pulling kids from schools without their parents’ permission. And then, of course, the economy tanked and the country defaulted on its debt. You’d be surprised how little voice you have when you lose everything.”

“And everyone just let him?” The thought turned my stomach.

“No, no one just
let
him. It’s chaos out here right now, Ruby. Gray keeps trying to tighten his control, and every day more and more people are rioting or breaking whatever laws we have left just to get food on the table.”

“My dad was killed in a riot.”

Cate turned around to face the backseat so quickly the car actually swerved into the other lane. I had known Martin was awake for at least ten minutes; his breathing had become much lighter, and he had stopped doing his weird little lip licking and grunts. I just hadn’t wanted to talk to him, or to interrupt Cate.

“The people in our neighborhood robbed his store for food, and he couldn’t even defend himself.”

“How are you feeling?” Sugar coated Cate’s words, almost as sweet as the vanilla air freshener twirling around in front of us.

“Okay, I guess.” He sat up, trying to pat down his floppy brown hair into something presentable. Martin was round all over; his cheeks drooped and his uniform shirt might have been a size too small, but he hadn’t started growing like the other kids in his cabin. I had maybe an inch or two on him, and I was short, with an average build. He couldn’t have been more than a year younger than I was.