Sparks Rise (6 page)

There are windows lining the top of the back wall, but only a faint gray-blue light manages to escape in. Olsen fusses with the light switch. Almost as if they’d been watching the struggle from the monitors in the Control Tower, a voice filters through our comm units:
“All units—we’ve lost the primary generator, back up is at 50 percent. Visuals are down. Return all Psi to their cabins and engage the locks manually. Status update in five.”

“Shit,” I hear her grumble, swiping at her face in irritation. “Falling apart—”

Falling apart is one way to describe what’s happening to this place. Falling to fucking shambles is probably more accurate. The last inspection deemed it unlivable, which also feels like a massive understatement. “You will participate in the relocation of the Psi at Thurmond to nearby rehabilitation facilities,” the Trainers had told us on the flight over. “You will assist them in monitoring the Psi as the Psi Special Forces officers and camp controllers make the arrangements, remove the materials held there, and dissemble the structures.”

When I first got here, I panicked at how little time there was to find Mia and get her out, but the swift guilt that came with the thought of having to leave the others boiled the contents of my stomach. But, now that I’m here, I am so damn elated that these kids are getting out, no matter the circumstances. Nowhere in the world is worse than this camp. No place as damp, cold, and filthy. I think the sun has forgotten this place exists.

“Put her down,” Olsen says sharply. I can’t drop her, but I can’t set her down with the care I want to. Sam slumps forward on her hands and knees at the center of the old kennel. Olsen cuts the restraints on her wrist. I’m actually stupid enough to think,
This could be worse.

“You know where to go.” It takes a second to realize that she’s talking to Sammy, not me. She tries to get up onto her feet, but pitches forward, off-balance. My body instinctively moves toward her. Olsen holds out an arm, blocking me—she watches, her face void of anything resembling emotion as Sam crawls toward the cage at the center of the bottom row. I don’t want her so close to it—the pile looks unstable, one small knock away from crashing down. The movements are stiff and agonizingly slow as she struggles forward. She doesn’t stop.

She hesitates a moment, then pulls the door open.

She crawls inside.

I am in shock.

I am...

Fire is calling my name. It is whispering words of encouragement, sweet things. It wants out, for me to fan the heat until it’s a vortex that can’t and won’t be stopped. Olsen’s back is to me, and there’s no power feeding the camera in the upper corner of the room. It becomes an option, a real one, to turn her, this place, to ash. I think I can overpower even the storm outside.

“You deserve this for provoking him. He—” Olsen catches herself before another word can slip out. She hooks a padlock through the crate’s door. Sam inches back, along the metal interior. The crate is just big enough for her to sit up with her back hunched over her knees. It’s as far as she can get from this woman, her dirty lies and accusations. “Don’t come into the Factory with your face clean. I will find you a larger uniform. Don’t look at him, don’t act like you want it. He will leave you alone if you stop tempting him.”

This has happened before.
Maybe not to Sam—maybe to a different girl. Many different girls? I’m surprised I’m not glowing in the dark. The pain in my head, in my chest, makes me sway.

“He likes your hair, I think,” Olsen says, almost more to herself than to Sam. “That’s easy enough to take care of.”

Sam doesn’t look up. Just nods. What choice does she have? This is a place that turns beautiful things into shadows. They’ll cut off her hair and the traces of sunshine in it. They’ll rough her up, make her harder, uglier, skinnier, instead of solving the real problem.

Olsen stands up, kicks at the door one last time to test it, and then turns back to me and inclines her head toward the exit. I set my jaw and follow, pressing my arms against my sides to hide the involuntary jerk my left shoulder gives. Shit. Twice in a single day. I need to cool it.

Just as I think she’s going to force me to leave with her, she turns her back toward the crates and murmurs, “Stay here until notified by Control that surveillance is operational, then return to your assigned posting.”

I don’t have to leave her here alone. I don’t know who to thank for tossing me this life ring of mercy, so I settle on God. Olsen waits for my curt nod before opening the door and ducking out into the storm, letting the door slam shut behind her.

For the first time in seven years, there is no one watching me. There is a camera in the corner of the room, but if the power is out in this craphole, what are the chances it’s feeding out to Control Tower? The weight bearing down on me from all sides pulls back, and I feel boneless as I lean forward against the door and press my hands against my face. I don’t want her to see me on the verge of losing it.

Minutes pass before a soft sound reaches my ears. I spin on my heel, mistaking it for moans of pain. But it’s...there’s a melody. It’s raw, carried out on uneven breaths, but she’s humming. The words come to me, rising up through bleak memories. I know this.
He’s got the whole world in His hands, He’s got the whole world in his hands, He’s got the whole world in his hands.
How many times did we sing this in Sunday school while kicking each other under our table?

I step closer and see her shaking, her whole body. From the cold, from exhaustion, from pain, it doesn’t matter. She tries to smother it by curling up tight, but her breath hitches and I know she’s trying as hard as she can not to cry. She’s fighting fear itself with both hands tied behind her back.

I know it’s not actually meant for me when I shuffle forward again, and the song dies on her lips. She looks up just as I crouch down, dark eyes flashing uncertainly. I brace myself for this. If she doesn’t remember, then—I shake my head.

“This little light of mine,”
I sing softly into the silence.
“I’m gonna let it shine...”

Her breath catches again, but the look on her face hardens and her words come out in a snarl. “If you’re making fun of me, you can go to hell with the rest of them.”

She doesn’t remember.
It’s pathetic how my heart gives a painful jerk. I force a small smile on my face, which only deepens her scowl. “The last time I made fun of Sammy Dahl, she beaned me with a sword and almost knocked me out of a tree.”

It takes her a moment to process what I’ve said. I can actually see the light come back into her brown eyes. The air leaves her chest in a shuddering, disbelieving laugh. “You remember. You remember me.”

My relief is mirrored on her face as she crawls toward me. A laugh or sob bubbles up in my chest at the irony of both of us afraid of the same impossible thing. It takes a sharp blade, a huge effort to separate one half of a coin from the other. It would take something a hell of a lot stronger and sharper to separate me from her.

“Lucas,” she whispers.

It feels so damn good to hear my name and not a number. To hear it from her. My mom and dad used to tease me so much about her—puppy love, they called it. I guess I must have been leashed, because I followed her around like one. I would have followed Sammy anywhere, led her out of any trouble she got herself tangled in. She made my little eleven-year-old heart actually flutter. She turned me dumb and shy with a single smile. Even this morning, before I made the connection, she had my full attention. Whatever it had been before, the feeling solidified, took root, blossomed. Having her on the other side of the metal bars, only inches away, suddenly feels too far. I didn’t appreciate it enough when I was holding her before. I didn’t recognize the miracle of it.
She’s real, she’s here.

It’s a mess inside me. She has cracked me, left me open and exposed. I’m suddenly terrified of how fast it can and will all disappear. I can’t stop trembling. The feelings that come roaring out are trying to wash me away from the moment. It’s been so long since I’ve let myself really—
really
—feel something other than anger that I’m not sure I can even remember the names of half of these emotions, only that they eat me up, they devour me whole, and I have never been so grateful as I am in this moment that I am capable of the simple act of
feeling
. I understand now, maybe in a way I didn’t before, what the other Reds have lost to the Trainers. They will never have this, will they? They might not ever know the feeling of cozying up to a lightning bolt, what it feels like to look at someone’s face and see your heart there.

The peace inside my head, the murmurs of happy memories, they’re pale compared to how it feels to live inside a real moment like this. I let my heart tune itself like a radio jumping between stations; I can’t move, but it feels like I’m careening around the room. I am bursting with that same breathless excitement I had whenever Sam and me would run through Greenwood. When I’d get myself lost and wait for her to come. She is singing a song that only I can understand, and I call back, I call back. She finds me where I’ve been hiding all along.

You are the biggest sap in the universe, Orfeo.

We’re not supposed to care about others. The Trainers want to leave nothing in our hearts but them. I focus on her face again, tired, pale, bruised, and think of sunlight, grass, golden hair, the feel of rough bark on my palms as we climbed up and up and up into the tree fort. The singe of sparks on the Fourth of July as they rose and showered down around us. I don’t speak until the bad feelings clear and my mind is blue skies again.

“Hey, Sunshine,” I whisper. My parents’ nickname for her, Sammy Sunshine. The word stuck in my throat, left it raw. “I’m sorry. God, I’m so sorry—I wanted to kill them, all of them—”

“You couldn’t,” she says, resting her forehead against the bars. I want to melt the hinges off the door, pry it open and scoop her out. Sam must read it in my face because she adds, quickly, “You
can’t
.”

Her soft breath fans across my face. I breathe in the smell of soap and detergent and rainwater.

“Are you in pain?” I ask, though I already know the answer.

“I’m okay,” she says, bravely. “I’ve had worse.” I shudder, because of course she has.

Her hands are small enough that she can slide one through the gap in the crate’s bars. She reaches for me and I seize it like I’m drowning and she is the only thing that can pull me clear. My other hand hooks on the door and, within an instant, she’s covered my fingers with her own. It’s not enough.

“You’re warm,” she whispers, a strange note in her voice.

“Red,” I say, trying to hide the flush of shame. “Comes with the territory. Megafreak.”

Sam pulls her face back, her eyes hard. “Who called you that?”

“No one. Everyone.” I smile, recognizing her indignation all too well. “What are you gonna do about it, Sammy?”

She looks down, her own small smile touched with sadness. “Let the air out of their bike tires. Set off fireworks under their window. Hit them with snowballs walking home from school.”

“My champion,” I say. “My hero.” I’d seen her do all that and more when some of the guys at school picked on me for no reason other than my best friend was a girl. Kids can be real dicks, even without the freak abilities.

Sam seems to remember where we are suddenly, breaking from her own daze. She tries to pull her hand back through the bars, but I won’t let her.

“The power is out,” I remind her, “the camera isn’t on. It’s just you and me.”

Her face is so flustered that I know it’s more than that. Sam has her pride. She doesn’t want me to see her like this, despite everything. This may be the one chance I have to talk to her; she has to know that the only thing I care about is that she’s safe and alive and that I hate that I can’t hold her and touch her and...

I almost can’t believe it, that it’s the first reaction I have, that it’s still there after everything that’s happened this morning.

It’s because you’ve been alone, it’s because everyone is gone and you can’t admit to yourself you’re scared, and because it feels like home, it’ll feel like nothing ever changed.
I know all of it is true, but I also know, on a very basic, human level, hers is the most beautiful face I’ve ever seen. They must have created art specifically for people like her, to try and fail forever to capture these small looks, all her various angles and the colors of her moods.

The urge is overwhelming, and I wonder...I wonder if she’s thinking about the same thing, because her eyes keep flicking down to my lips before finding my eyes again. It doesn’t make sense. She’s in pain, we are in actual hell, and none of it seems to matter.

But isn’t this how it always was with us? When we were together, the world shrank around us. Nothing else existed outside of that space between us. We took Greenwood with us wherever the two of us were together.

“Lucas,” she says again, “it’s...this isn’t...were you here? Before?”

I shake my head. “No—I don’t know where the Facility is, but I was never here. Mia, though—I overheard the PSFs say they’d bring her here.” I almost can’t ask. “Have you seen her?”

“No. What color is she? Do you know?”

For a moment, I can’t speak at all. I want to look at Sam’s face, the curve of her cheek, her eyes, until the blistering pain leaves. Sometimes I am suffocated by the memory of how helpless I was then, when I tried to get her away from the PSFs. I had fire, but they had Calm Control trapped in a little device. “I don’t know. They took her before she...before she changed. I had already gone through it, but they wanted to take her as a
precaution
. They kept saying that.
Precaution.
I overheard one of them say she would be taken here, but—” It’s the first time I’ve admitted this out loud, and it feels just as horrible and bitter as I knew it would. “I don’t know if she lived through the change. When it happened. What she is.”

Sam gives me a sharp look. “No. She survived. She would have. Mia was strong.”