Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (32 page)

There’s a bundle of blankets on the floor between the white sheet draped over the couch and the ancient TV set, and it’s so still, I look right past it at first. It shifts ever so slightly, like it’s being ruffled by a soft breeze from the nearby window. The room is dark, the whole house is, and it makes me feel like a shadow as I slip around the furniture and say, “Lucas?”

It would be wrong to say that his face is set in a blank expression—it’s not set at all, but soft, almost waxy, like it’s waiting for the right hands to carve a smile there. He is so still, it makes my insides bob up and down in my chest. Next to him is a bottle of water and a plate with a sandwich, both untouched. He’s wrapped the blankets around himself so many times, I don’t even know how to begin untangling him from them.

“Luc?”

His gaze is fixed on the floor, near the glow of a lantern flashlight. My brother doesn’t even look up as my feet pound across the floor and carpets. “Lucas?”

He must not recognize me—he’s probably so tired after everything he went through, and he just doesn’t—

“It’s me,” I manage to choke out, dropping to my knees in front of him. “Lucas…Luc, it’s Mia. It’s
me
.”

Nothing. A swift, jagged claw seems to cut me, neck to toes. He won’t look up, it’s like he doesn’t hear or see me, but that can’t be right. That can’t be. I’m right in front of him. It’s been years, and he needs to know that this is real.

“It’s me, Mia,” I say again, the words high, brittle.
Don’t cry, you can’t cry.
“Do you remember me?”

I think I hear Sam say my name, high and sharp, like she’s trying to slice through the air. But I’m already reaching toward him.

There are so many stories, you know, sweet little tales about princes and princesses who are turned to living stone, cast into eternal sleep. They breathe, they live, but their eyes never open. Until someone comes and breaks the curse.

Some stupid part of me thinks I’ve done it when his head jerks up the moment before I touch him. I don’t stop to think about the way his eyes harden as they fix on my face, like he’s taking aim.

I just hug him.

And I pay for it.

“Mia!”

Lucas throws me off him, knocking me back with the full force of his weight. The breath explodes out of me as sharp pain rips up my tailbone. He’s struggling to get his arms free from under the blankets—to, oh my God, hit me again? To hurt me worse than this? I scramble back. “Lucas! Lucas, stop!”

Sam limps over, coming to stand between us just as Lucas climbs up onto his knees and I catch the first hint of smoke coating the air.

“Stop!” she snaps. “M27, sit down!”

He fixes that same look of hatred on her, and I see her hands shake in the instant before she presses them flat against her baggy jeans. And apparently it is possible to hate her more than I do, because he listens. She treats him like he’s a dog, an animal, and he
listens
, settling back into his previous position.

Sam’s voice is thick as she says. “You didn’t eat. I told you to eat! Do you understand? Eat that. Drink that!”

“Shut up!” I yell. “Shut up, shut up, shut up! He’s not your pet! Don’t talk to him that way!”

“Mia—listen—”

I can’t. I won’t. Lucas has picked up his food and is eating it slowly, mechanically, just as she asked. I back up and even though Mia knows it’s a rotten thing to do, the monster shoves Sam with every ounce of strength in her, knowing it’ll be harder for her to get up and follow me with her ruined leg.

She goes down hard, with a gasp, and I ignore it, starting back toward the kitchen, only to change my mind at the last second and turn—
veer
—left, where I see another door. I don’t want to leave Lucas. I want to stay close, but I don’t want to deal with
her
.

It’s a bedroom. I slam the door shut behind me and lock it, trying to block out Sam’s voice as she calls after me. I feel a fire burning under my skin as I thread my hands through my hair and start pacing that slice of space between the bed’s stripped mattress and the busted dresser. My fingers snare in the curls, but I don’t care. I want anything, anything, to distract me from the throbbing pain in my back. I can’t stop shaking.

She did this to him.

This is her fault
.

I hate her, I hate her, I hate her
—

I’m crying so hard I have to sit down, and I hate myself for it. I haven’t let myself cry in years. It was so bad at first, right when they brought me to the Blank Rooms, because I couldn’t stop seeing Mom and Dad, and the pain in my hand—the one the PSFs broke dragging me away from Lucas—kept me up all night. I cried until I thought I would drown in myself. The only way to pull myself up and out was to remember that I’d be out of there eventually. I knew Lucas would find me, and we’d figure out what to do, what happened to Mom and Dad…their bodies, if they were given a funeral, where they were buried.

There’s a sound I don’t recognize—it’s one I haven’t ever heard before from her. I turn toward the door, straining my ears to hear if she really is crying, too. But when she speaks, Sam sounds so calm it’s infuriating. “The people who did this to him…Lucas called them Trainers. I don’t know what they did to him and the others, but this is the only way he’ll respond. I’ve been trying to get through to him in other ways, but I haven’t had any luck.”

Of course, because she got to be with the real Lucas in her camp before they did…
this
to him.

No. I don’t want to think about her being in her camp for years. I don’t want to picture her parents just ditching her at school. I don’t care that she got that snake bite, that it almost killed her. I don’t want to feel sorry for her.

I stand up, my hands closing around the old brass handle of one of the dresser drawers, and just
pull
. There’s so much fury powering the movement that the heavy wood comes flying out and I stumble back. I let it fall, kicking it until one of the sides breaks. The drawer liner is covered with daisies, and a shower of brittle receipts and a few buttons scatter across the floor.

I reach for the next drawer and do it again, again, again, and there’s something here, there’s something good in wrecking this the way that I’m wrecked. I don’t stop until I run out of drawers, and then it’s only to see what I can smash next.

“I’m sorry…Mia, I know it’s my fault, I’m sorry,” Sam is saying. I think she’s been talking this whole time, and I just haven’t heard her over the thunder pumping through my ears. “I tried to get him to leave—”

“Not hard enough! You should have made him go!”

“I know,” she says, “I tried, he wouldn’t—”

“You should have tried harder! You should have done
everything
you could! And now he’s—he’s—”

Gone
. He’s here, but a thousand miles away. He isn’t just disappearing into himself, the way he used to when he got tangled up in one of his daydreams. They’ve erased him, drained him of every piece of kindness and love that added up to who he is. They
hurt
him, and I couldn’t do anything about it.

“Don’t shut me out,” Sam pleads. “He’ll never forgive me if he knows you saw him like this…that he did that to you. I think he’s still there, I think he’s in there, and we just have to—” The Sam I grew up with would have shouted me right back down. This one just sounds like she’s been dragged off a cliff by her hair and left there to dangle. Exhaustion is grinding her words to dust, and I can feel them drifting down between us like sand in an hourglass.

“Stay with me, please—” Her voice catches so sharply it makes my own throat hurt to hear it. “I need your help. If anyone can figure out how to reach him, it’s you.”

I swallow the bitter words before I can throw them back at her, but they don’t go down easy. The truth is, if anyone can figure out how to help him, if there’s anyone he’d want help from, it’s her.

Sam and Lucas.
I remember looking for a word to describe them.
Inseparable.
So close you’d say their names in one breath.
SamandLucas
. They spoke in a language the rest of us couldn’t even hear, let alone understand. I was just the annoying sister Mom forced them to hang out with, the one that was always pathetically desperate for them to notice her and like her and
want
to play with her. I followed them everywhere.

She was like the sister I never asked for. Mom and Dad called her Sunshine, even though they were the ones trying to brighten up her life, while her parents kept trying to lock her up in a tower and guard her like jealous dragons or something. I know what Mom told me once is true—that love multiplies love and there’s no limit on it, and that just because they loved her too, it didn’t mean they somehow loved me less. I know at fifteen that I shouldn’t still get that little ache at the thought that I’ve somehow been left behind again, but I do. I can’t help it, and I hate it.

“Are you hungry? There’s some food….”

What appetite I had is gone. “Just leave me alone.”

“Okay,” she says quietly. “Let me know if you change your mind.” The floorboards creak as Sam steps away, but not before she adds, in a tone that makes it sound like she doesn’t even believe herself, “It’s going to be okay. Everything will be better. We can do this.”

Her footsteps carry her farther away, until I can only hear the murmur of her voice as she says something to Lucas. The room is in pieces around me and when I bend down to start picking up the panels and fragments of the drawers, I get this twinge of pain in my tailbone, the spot I landed on when Lucas…

Threw me off him like I was covered in poison. Like he had no idea who I was.

I can’t hold it in a second longer. I press my hands to my face, trying to quiet—
stifle
—the horrible raw sound that comes from somewhere deep in my chest, the way I used to see the girls do in my room at the facility when they didn’t want the PSFs to hear them and come in to shut them up.

I climb up onto the bare mattress, curling my legs up around my heaving stomach, the hole at my center that can’t seem to fill itself. The tears are boiling hot against the freezing air trapped in this room; they spill out over my fingers, into my mouth, down my chin, into the fabric.

I want to go back—I want to go back to the facility, to Black Rock, to the routines and the rooms. I would give up being outside again, I would give up everything, to still be able to live inside the hope that Lucas was okay and that he was coming to find me.

There’s a part of me that wishes for sleep; I want proof that I’m not in a nightmare, someone else’s story. I just want to pass out and not think about any of this anymore, because if I keep letting these thoughts spin around me, they’re going to circle round my neck like a rope and choke me.

Calm down
—I want to be the monster, not Mia. The monster doesn’t get hurt. Nothing can touch it. Not fear, not anger, not misery.

Not even guilt.

It sneaks up on me in the silent hour that follows, thickens the air until I have to sit up to suck in a deep breath. There’s a thought I’ve been pushing down—kicking down, really.

She didn’t do this to him. She didn’t ask him to help her.

But blaming Sam is easier than blaming Lucas.

The thing is, I know my brother, and I know the kind of person he is. He wouldn’t have left Sam, no matter what she said or did. It would have broken his heart. It wasn’t a choice between saving her or saving me, not to Lucas. He was always all ideas—he could imagine anything into reality—but Sam and I were the ones that used to have to figure out a way to make his Greenwood schemes actually
work
.

Sam didn’t have to risk getting Lucas out of the camp, knowing he was like this.

Sam didn’t have to risk getting me away from that hotel, knowing she could just as easily have been caught.

But if she hadn’t, where would Lucas be? Where would
I
be?

The bed creaks as I push myself off it. I’m a step away from the door when I realize the soft sound I’m hearing isn’t the old house shifting its bones, it isn’t the wind rushing around its rotting skin. There’s a rhythm to it. A melody.

“…little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine…”

It’s Sam.

Sam is singing.

It’s that one from all those years ago. We had this game, you know, in Greenwood—our own version of Marco Polo. Lucas would get himself lost in the woods, or he’d pretend to be a prince and I’d be the witch who captured him, and Sam would sing and he would call back and they would meet each other halfway. It was all pretend, but…

I unlock the door and step out into the hall, moving toward her voice. A feather-soft hope rustles inside my chest. Is this how she gets him back to himself? Did she figure something out?

“…all around the neighborhood, I’m gonna let it shine…”

The house is dark, save for that single flashlight. Sam has moved it toward the couch. There’s a dark shape stretched across it, big feet dangling off the edge; Lucas, of course. He’s impossibly still, his face turned up toward the ceiling.

And just like that the hope dissolves, and I wish with all my heart that I could just disappear with it.

She’s in a chair she’s positioned near his head, her knees drawn up, her arms wrapped around them. In the instant before the floorboard creaks under me and she looks up, the flashlight perfectly lights—
illuminates
—her face.

Sadness.

Devastation,
I think.

“Sorry—I just—” Sam jumps to her feet, but can’t seem to figure out what she wants to do with her hands. She smoothes her pale hair down before lacing them behind her back, like I’ve called her to attention.

“Why did you stop?” I ask.

Sam flinches, but I see the stiffness in her shoulders ease just a tiny bit as she sits back down. “It’s pointless…I don’t think it helps.”

I don’t either. His eyes are open, almost unblinking, and he doesn’t stir or look in our direction. I come around closer to her, hating the rapid strike of my heart, the way my feet seem to unconsciously take a wide path around the couch to reach her.