The Darkest Minds (27 page)

Liam’s shoulder rammed into my chest, knocking the air out of our lungs. I tried to lift my head to see exactly what had happened, but there was this weight—this solid, invisible slab of stone—keeping me on my back, and Liam flat against me.

The floor was freezing at my back, but my entire focus was on the solid press of his shoulder against my cheek. Our hands were caught between us, and for a moment I had the uneasy sensation of not knowing where one of us began and the other ended. He swallowed hard, the pulse in his throat close enough for me to hear it.

Liam moved to lift his head, straining the muscles that lined the strong column of his spine. “Hey!” he shouted. “Who’s there?”

The only response was another shove from the invisible hands Suddenly we were shooting across the ground, Liam’s leather jacket squealing against the dusty floor as we slid. I watched the emergency lights beyond Liam’s head pass with dizzying speed, tracking together like a single beam. Riotous laughter followed us down the aisles, seeming to come from below us, above us, on either side. I thought I saw a dark shape move out of the corner of my eye, but it looked more like a monster than a person. We tore through ribbons of ripped shower curtains, the body lotion, the bleach, to the line of cash registers at the front of the store.

“Cut it out!” Liam yelled. “We’re—”

There are some sounds you hear once and never forget. A bone breaking. An ice cream truck’s song. Velcro. A gun’s safety clicking off.

No, I thought, Not now—not here!

We slid to a painful stop at the checkout lanes, the impact with the metal jarring every sense out of my body. There was a single moment of agonizing silence before the once-dead store lights surged into brightness. And then, the cash register flashed on, conveyer belt sputtering to life—first one lane, then the next, and the next. Every single one, falling to order like soldiers. The numbered signs above blinked between yellow and blue, like a dozen warning signals, faster than my eyes could follow.

At first I thought it was White Noise; all at once, the building’s security alarms, intercom system, and televised displays went off, a hundred different voices screaming at us. Block after block of ceiling lights snapped on, electricity pouring through them after years of existing as nothing more than hollow, dusty veins.

Liam and I turned to see Zu, her bare right hand splayed out against a checkout lane. Chubs was next to her, his face ashen.

After only a few seconds of Zu’s power surge, the lights on the registers began to pop like firecrackers, dropping streams of blue-white sparks and glass to the ground.

She had only meant for it to be a distraction, I think; a flash and a bang to draw the attention of our attackers away from us long enough for an escape. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her waving us toward her, but the machine under Zu’s other hand had heated to a terrifying molten glow. I felt the invisible grip on me slacken suddenly, but fear kept me still as the dead. She wasn’t letting go. Liam and I must have had the same thought—the same scorching fear—because we pushed to our feet, shouting for her to stop.

“Turn her off!” someone managed to shout over the alarms.

“Zu, let go!” Liam stood and stumbled over cans of sunscreen and bug spray from a nearby display. I saw him lift his arms, ready to yank Zu away with his abilities, but Chubs was faster. He tugged the glove off Zu’s other hand and pulled it over his own, then all but ripped her arm away from the metal.

The lights went out. Just before the overhead bulbs exploded, I saw Zu’s face as she came out of whatever trance she had been locked in. Her big eyes were rimmed with red, her short black hair on end, freckles standing out against the full flush of her oval face. The sudden darkness gave Liam the opportunity to knock both her and Chubs to the ground.

And then, by some small miracle, the emergency lights flicked back on.

The first sign of movement didn’t come from us. I saw our attackers clearly now, climbing over the mangled heaps of white shelves. Four of them, each dressed in layers of black, each with a gun raised and ready. My first thought, as it almost always was when I saw anyone in a black uniform, was to run. To get the others and bolt.

But these weren’t PSFs. They weren’t even grown-ups.

They were kids, like us.

FIFTEEN

A
S THEY CAME CLOSER,
I saw their mismatched dark clothes and the grime on their faces. They were all thin limbs and hollow cheeks, as if they had stretched out a great deal in a short period of time.

All boys, about my age.

All easy to take, if we had to.

“Christ on a cracker,” the one closest to me muttered, shaking his mop of red hair. “I told you we should have checked the van first.”

Liam’s blond head popped up from the wreckage.

“What the
hell
are you fools trying to pull?” he snarled. There was another sound, too, like the mewling of a kitten. Or a little girl crying.

I climbed over a bin of bargain DVDs to get to them. Zu sat on the floor, her pink palm facing up toward Chubs’s squinting eyes. Without the glasses perched on his nose, he looked like a different person. “She’s all right,” he said. “No burns.”

Liam was suddenly standing beside me, using my shoulder for balance as he climbed over one of the overturned shelves.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Fine,” I said. “Pissed. You?”

“Fine. Pissed.”

I thought for sure I was going to have to hold him back as we came closer to the cluster of boys, but his fury seemed to fall away from him with each step. The other kids had regrouped beside an overturned display of neon-colored pool noodles. The tallest one, his cloud of frizzy brown hair hovering around a pencil-thin neck, stepped in front of the others—the ginger kid who had spoken before, and two big-shouldered blonds that looked like brothers.

“Look, man, I’m sorry,” he said.

“Do you always do crap like this?” Liam said. “Attacking folks without even checking to see if they’re armed—if they’re like you?”

The leader bristled. “You could have been skip tracers.”

“And it was your Yellow that did all of—
this
.” The ginger kid gestured toward the shelves. “The girl needs a leash.”

“Watch your mouth,” Liam snapped. The blond brothers took a step forward, their eyes lighting at the challenge. “She wouldn’t have panicked if you hadn’t pulled guns on us.”

“We wouldn’t have had to use them if you’d paid attention to our warning back there and just left.”

“Because you gave us so much time to get away—” Liam snapped.

“Look, we could go back and forth forever and it won’t solve a damn thing,” I interrupted. “We were hoping to spend the night here, but if you’ve claimed it or whatever, then we’ll go. That’s the only reason we came—for shelter.”

“For shelter,” the leader repeated.

“I’m sorry, did I stutter?”

“No, but my ears are still bleeding from your Yellow’s meltdown,” he snarled. “Maybe you should say it again, baby, for good measure.”

Liam shot out an arm, cutting off my warpath before it could start.

“We just want to stay here a night. We’re not looking for any trouble,” he said flatly.

The leader gave me the once-over, his eyes drifting to a stop where my hands were fisted at my side, bunching up my dress.

“Looks like you already found it.”

The leader’s name was Greg, and he hailed from Mechanicsville, Virginia. The nervous ginger-haired kid refused to introduce himself but was called Collins by the others. I caught that he was from some town in Pennsylvania, but that was as much as he was willing to share with anyone. The blonds—who were, as I guessed, brothers—were Kyle and Kevin. The only thing the ramshackle group had in common, outside of their pool of food and an alarming pile of firearms and knives, was their camp in New York, which they lovingly referred to only as “Satan’s Ass Crack.”

They told the incredibly dramatic—and highly improbable—tale of their escape from PSF custody over our shared meal of fruit snacks, stale Pringles, and Twinkies.

“Let me get this straight,” said Chubs, his face etched with disbelief. “You were being moved from one camp to another?”

Greg leaned back against one of the glass freezer doors. “They weren’t taking us to another camp. They packed up as many guys as they could and said we were being brought to a testing facility in Maryland.”

“Only guys?” Chubs asked.

“We didn’t have girls there.” Greg’s voice was heavy with disappointment. That explained a lot—particularly why he still seemed to be inching toward me, no matter how far I scooted away. “Otherwise I’m sure they would have been loaded up, too.”

“I’m surprised they even told you that much,” I said, trying to steer the conversation back on track. “Do you think that’s actually where they were bringing you?”

“No,” Collins cut in. “It was pretty clear that they had orders to get rid of us.”

“And a storm flooded the road, flipping the bus and allowing you to escape?”

That was the part of the story I had problems with, too. It was that easy for them? A simple intervention of Mother Nature, and they were saved, washed out to freedom and a new life Biblical-style? Where was the detail of PSFs traveling with them?

“We’ve been holed up ever since. It took something like six months to get word to my dad that I was out and safe, and another three to get some kind of response from him.”

Chubs leaned forward. “How, exactly, did you get in touch with them? The Internet?”

“Nah, man,” Greg said. “After that terrorist business, you can’t even search for recipes online without the PSFs snooping and breaking down your door. All they need is one whiff of trouble.”

“What terrorists?” I interrupted.

“The League,” Chubs said. “Don’t you remember—ah.” He seemed to realize his mistake a second late, and, with more patience than I thought he possessed, explained, “Three years ago, the League hacked into the government’s Psi databases and tried posting information about the camps online for everyone to see. Other groups took that as their cue to hack into banks, the stock exchange, the State Department…”

“So they cracked down on it?”

“Right. Most of the social networking sites are gone, and all of the e-mail services are required to monitor the e-mails being sent on their servers.” He turned to the other boys, who were staring at me with varying degrees of interest and curiosity. I don’t think Kevin—or was it Kyle?—had stopped staring at me the entire time I had sat there.

“How, then?”

“Easy,” Greg said, with a highly unnecessary wink in my direction. “We used what was left. I put an ad in my hometown paper with a message only my brother would get.”

I didn’t need to look to know that Chubs had narrowed his eyes. He tensed beside me. “And who paid for this ad? The editors didn’t just let you put that in there for free, did they?”

“No, the Slip Kid paid,” Greg said. “He set everything up for me.”

I sat up straight, kicking aside some of the empty foil wrappers. “You’ve actually been in contact with the Slip Kid?”

“Oh yes. He’s like…a god,” Collins said, his breath rushing out. “He gathered all of us together. Kids from all over New England and the South. Every color. Older kids, young ones, too. They say that the PSFs stay away from his court in the woods because they’re afraid of him. That he set his camp on fire and killed all the PSFs sent to bring him back.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

The four of them grinned at one another, the jumping shadows from the emergency lights making them look even smugger.

“What else?” Chubs said, sucking all of this down eagerly. “How was he able to send the money for the ad? What’s East River like—where is it?”

I glanced back over my shoulder to Liam, who stood behind me, leaning against what used to be a TV dinner freezer. He’d been strangely quiet the entire time, his lips pressed tight together, but his face otherwise perfectly devoid of emotion.

“They have a sweet setup at East River,” Collins said. “But if you want to get to East River, you have to find it for yourself.”

“Sounds that way,” Liam said, finally. “Are there a lot of kids there?”

The four of them had to think about this. “More than a hundred, but not, like, in the thousands,” Greg said. “Why?”

Liam shook his head, but I was surprised to see a hint of disappointment there. “Just wondering. Most never were in camps, I take it?”

“Some.” Greg shrugged. “And some found it after dodging skip tracer or PSF custody.”

“And the Slip Kid—he doesn’t have…” Liam seemed to struggle to figure out how to ask his question. “He doesn’t have plans for them, does he? What’s his endgame?”

The others seemed to find the question as strange as I did. It wasn’t until Greg said, “No endgame. Just livin’, I guess,” that I realized I hadn’t once thought about the reason why Liam would be looking for the Slip Kid. I’d just assumed that he and the others wanted to find him to get home and to deliver Jack’s letter—but if that really was the case, what had sparked the fire in Liam’s eyes? His hands were stuffed in his jacket pockets, but I could see the outline of them curling into fists.