Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (26 page)

O
NCE UPON A TIME, THERE
was a girl named Mia Orfeo.

She lived in a sweet little house surrounded by a family who loved her. They played games every Friday and she cheated ruthlessly whenever it seemed like her brother was going to beat her. He always let her. She ate three meals a day, one of them usually burnt, because her mom would start reading a book halfway through baking it and would forget to check the timer. Her parents let her repaint the walls of her room hot pink on her seventh birthday when she claimed that the current color, peach, was too “bromidic” and “dispiriting.” She liked looking up big words in the dictionary and saving them for the perfect moment.

After wasting hours at school that she could have used to write her next work of dramatic genius, or to experiment with her mom’s makeup while she was downstairs trying to placate their cantankerous cats, you could more often than not find her outside, trailing behind her brother and his best friend, the girl next door with hair like gold thread. And there, in the vast backyard of the aforementioned sweet little house in a small town in Virginia, among the overgrown barberry bushes, was a secret place; a happy place. They called it Greenwood, and it belonged to them and no one else.

The girl, Mia, found out that she could slip into any skin her moods and whims demanded—bear, princess, sorceress, mermaid, tiger. Sometimes she just wanted to be Mia. Mia of the untamable curly black hair. Mia of the woods. Mia bored-with-real-life.

Mia Orfeo.

Now there is no girl; just a
thing
. And the thing goes by the number that is spray-painted on the back of its thin blue uniform: 6575. The thing does not have a house; it has a room inside of an enormous concrete building that is slowly sinking into the mud. The thing does not have a family; it has twenty-nine other things stacked into bunks around it. It works. It sleeps. It eats. From its top bunk, it can see the colors of the sky changing pink, orange, sapphire, violet, all melting into one another. It does not get to go outside.

But it remembers.

I know the smell of smoke, and I know the smell of blood.

There’s a memory attached to both that I don’t like to touch. It’s hidden beneath years of overcast skies and black-and-white monotony, compressed, smashed into slivers and splinters. But every now and then, it sneaks out. It tiptoes up while I’m sleeping and spreads itself over my chest, the way Luc and I used to dogpile on Dad in sneak attacks.

Everything was a game to us back then.

It stuns me, each time I feel that weight settle over me again. A girl doesn’t get over something like that. She doesn’t move past the flash of a bullet streaking out of a gun. She doesn’t get to purge the sound of her mom’s screams. Her hand—the one the men in black uniforms broke, to get her away from her brother—still hurts whenever the camp’s electricity goes out on winter nights and there’s no heat. It’s easier to be the
it
, the little monster that they think I am.

Monsters can devour nightmares.

Monsters aren’t ashamed if uniformed soldiers are afraid of them. Monsters think their fear is delicious.

Monsters shred, with their razor claws, daydreams of being a princess locked away in a castle, waiting for rescue.

Monsters save themselves.

Tonight it’s different, though, and the moment I open my eyes to the low ceiling inches above my face, I know why. The smoke isn’t trapped in my head, staining the ugliness of that day in the parking garage. It’s burning my nostrils, curling down my throat and into my lungs.

I can’t move, I can’t get out of bed without one of the eight black-eyed cameras seeing it. The coughs rip out of me as I turn onto my side. My eyes water and burn in the darkness; girls slam into awareness around me, their voices bubbling with panic and fear.

Trepidation,
I think. That’s a better word than simple “fear” and plain “panic.”

“What’s happening—?”

“—that smoke?”

“Fire!”

The long fluorescent lights snap on, burning white-hot. Some of the other girls scream, but most are staggering to their feet, trying to shield their eyes and then their ears as the alarm above the door goes off. It sounds like metal piercing metal. It cuts up the inside of my skull, makes me feel slow, stupid, even as the first touch of panic lances through me. I’m watching the alarm’s flashing light, the red, the blue, the red, the blue, as it whirls around. Red, blue, red, blue, Red, Blue…

Lucas, me.

A dark hand reaches up through the silvery white smoke and clamps around my ankle, hard enough for the nails to break the skin.

“Mia!”

It’s Elise, all tear-streaked and fluttery. She’s out of breath, like the fear has ripped it out of her.

“Mia, come on!”

I climb down from my top bunk stiffly. It’s been my tiny slice of space since I moved out of the Blank Rooms five years ago, when the monster in me finally decided to grow teeth, and sent one of the Camp Controllers shooting across the room with its abilities a week after my tenth birthday. I was sorted into the last space left in this room. Bare walls, bunk beds built into the walls, girls who still occasionally wet the bed despite being fourteen, fifteen, sixteen: my consolation for surviving the change. If I’d known what it was like over here, I would have tried harder to turn my two years in the Blank Rooms into three or four—shocker, I didn’t have a lot of foresight at eight years old. I didn’t even appreciate how good and quiet and calm it was over there. They played us
music.
Now the only songs I get to hear are Elise snoring in the middle bunk, and Alice sniveling in the bottom bunk.

Here is all you need to know about Alice: she is currently in the middle of what little space we have at the very center of the room, curled up into a ball, hands clasped over her head like the building is about to drop down on top of her.

The sprinklers burst open with a
whoosh
, and there are shrieks as we’re drenched with ice water. I can’t shield my eyes; there’s a sharp metallic tang to the water when it gets into my nose and mouth. There’s got to be a real problem, something must be genuinely wrong, if they’re letting us do this; if the girls can cling to each other, talk to each other, get out of their beds, without them sending in one of the PSFs to leash us again.

Is this some kind of sick trick? Force a reaction to teach us some kind of lesson with baton strikes or Calm Control? I wouldn’t put it past them—mind games are second nature to these people. But…my mind is folding over and over on itself, trying to sort out the possibilities. That wouldn’t make sense. They’ve never needed an excuse to punish us, to pick a little lamb to roast so the rest of the flock learns not to stray. My jaw clenches to keep my teeth from chattering. Elise is shouting something to me, and I don’t hear her. Some of the girls start to line up, shifting into alphabetical order out of habit. I’m tugged in front of Alice, who leans forward and cries into the back of my uniform.

My whole world narrows to the solid metal door in front of me; it’s like I can feel something shift, some charge running through it. I straighten up, the muscles in my lower back aching, cracking the bones and joints that have been bunched up for too long.

Open sesame,
I think.

The door pops open.

Just.

Like.

That.

I don’t know why it surprises me. We had one fire drill two years ago, and this is exactly what happened. Well—okay, no it’s not. There weren’t any sprinklers or smoke, but the alarm went off, and we assembled in the center of the room. A PSF appeared there and marched us to the end of the hall. I think we all thought they’d take us outside.

They didn’t.

But this time, there isn’t a PSF standing at attention, clutching a rifle. When the electronic lock releases, the familiar hiss and click is drowned out by the flood of voices carrying down the hall. All of the doors have opened, and the sound of the alarm is now amplified by a hundred. It pours down through the ceiling from the floors above us. It seeps up from the floors below. If I didn’t know better, if it wasn’t totally contrary to every single thing they’ve done up to this point, I’d say they were trying to smoke us out. Like exterminators do with pests.

None of us move. I wonder if there’s something racing in the pit of everyone’s stomach, like there is in mine—if they feel like their hearts are simply going to tear themselves into pieces. The sprinklers sputter and belch out buckets of water, which rises up to our bare ankles, and still none of us move.

And then two kids race by the doorway. The Green girls, their ponytails streaming out behind them, are weaving in and out of smoke that looks as thick and solid as cream.

Even as all signs point to our world burning down around us, only two kids—two out of the two hundred on our floor—are following their instincts. The rest of us are all standing here stupidly, waiting for an announcement to tell us what to do. We would rather risk being burned alive than tempt the Camp Controllers into action. We know what will happen.

But the monster
also
knows what it should be doing, what
we
should be doing. I feel the snarl curl my lips, the lick of anger curdling my blood. I like that word:
curdling
.

I take the back of Elise’s shirt in one hand and Alice’s arm in the other, and I drag them forward.

“Let’s
go
!” I shout, when it’s clear no one else will. I glance back over my shoulder at the pale faces, dripping with sprinkler water and tears. “I’m not waiting here to suffocate!”

“No!” Alice is crying, trying to yank herself free—and I almost let her go. I can feel my fingers slipping against her slick warm skin, and the monster bares its teeth and thinks,
survival is a choice you have to be strong enough to make.
But I can be strong enough for the whole room if I have to be.

“There’s no one coming!” I say, coughing around the words. “Don’t stay here and wait until there’s no air left to breathe!
Go! Move!
”

In some ways, life is easier when you surrender control to someone else. It doesn’t surprise me that half of them don’t move until I bark at them, until I turn it into orders. The PSFs made our shells too tough to let any of us feel a soft touch. We only respond to hard, sharp, vicious.

The temperature under my skin reaches a thousand degrees as I step out into the hall. Elise and Alice follow, and I wait half a heartbeat to see if the rest of the girls will, too. They do; it’s a slow spill of blue uniforms. We cough our way down the white tiled path to the staircase at the very end. Faces pop into the cloud of smoke around us, kids peering out of the doorways. I don’t need to try to wave the cloud of steely gray away to know that every room looks exactly like ours. The Camp Controllers never tried to give this facility a sweet complexion, hide its ugly metal joints and cement bones.

More girls stumble into the hallway behind us, shouting to be heard over the screeching alarms. I don’t realize we’ve reached the stairwell until someone nearly pulls the door open in my face. Again, no locks.

No PSFs.

Unease begins to fizz in my blood. The stairwell is small, packed with kids descending from the facility’s six upper levels. The smoke rises up, curling around their shock-stiff faces, scorching my throat dry. Boys, girls, Greens, Blues. I manage to squeeze my way inside, blindly feeling for the nearest step with my foot, using the girl next to me for balance as I risk a look back at the other girls from my room. A flare of pain rips through me as someone steps on my foot.

Flipping shoes,
I think. Of course, I’m the idiot who forgot to put on her shoes.

There’s no way back up now. The crush of bodies has practically lifted me off the ground, and I’m being carried forward by the urgent flow. Fear feels like a second layer of smoke, and none of us can escape it.

One floor down, two—how are we still moving so slowly? How many flipping kids are in this facility—

The lights flicker. There’s a clanking groan, something grinding to a stop. A
clang, clang, clang
…and then, nothing at all. The overhead lights, the whirling colors of the alarms mounted on the stairwell landings, blink out as one.

The screeching sirens choke off.

In all the years I’ve been in this nameless place, I have never felt a moment slant around me like this. It feels like the air has evaporated, and every last trace of sound has gone with it. Hot wet breath licks at my skin, clinging to the back of my neck and shoulders.

And then the screaming starts, and it doesn’t matter where the fire is, or how it started. Panic incinerates us.

Elbows, feet, knees bunching and driving and shoving—I swear something snaps in my chest just as Elise’s skull is shoved toward me, cracking against my cheekbone.

“Stop—!” I shout. The crushing dark—it’s a black tide and it’s rolled over all of us—no air—forward—
forward
—

Mia is going to be crushed.

The monster is going to roar.

I can feel the itch, the need, racing up and down my arms like I’ve wrapped them in thorns. I can get these kids out of the way, I can
push
them without ever touching them, clear a path for my girls—

But someone else has the same wicked idea and we, all of us on this set of stairs, seem to explode forward. We’re flung against the cinderblock wall with all the gentleness of speeding cars hitting a cement barrier.
Pain
—
slap
—
crunch—screams
—

I manage to lift my head out from under someone’s leg in time to make out the form scurrying over us like a little rat. It’s
Alice
. I-puked-when-a-PSF-looked at-me-funny Alice.

The little monster finally grew some claws, and is climbing over us without missing one flipping beat.

I’m one of the lucky ones—I’ve landed on top, my hands are pressing down on someone’s neck, cheek, as I struggle to stand, to get off the boy who’s wailing under me. The sound—it’s the crying that tears at me, tears
me
in two, three, four, not his hands as he scratches up at my arms and legs. All those times I called us little monsters, somehow I never thought we’d be capable of this. It’s like the others don’t even see us on the landing. Their feet stamp us back down every time we manage to get up.