Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) (8 page)

It’s not until later, when we’re sitting a few blocks from the diner I’ve just bought us sandwiches from, with the windows rolled down and the Rolling Stones screaming out of the stereo, that I remember I never put a new zip tie around her wrists. I remember she took the gloves off to eat and never put them back on.

I remember, and I don’t really care.

“What’s your name, Dorothy?” I ask. “Your real one?”

She dips her finger into the ketchup that’s dripped onto the paper her sandwich was wrapped in and writes, in even, delicate strokes,
ZU
.

“Zu?” I say, testing it out. “What the hell kind of name is that?”

She reaches over and punches me in the arm—
hard
. I manage to wince only a little, but it’s an all-out inner war not to reach up and rub the throbbing muscle. Meanwhile, she’s looking at me, motioning like I need to exchange my name for hers.

But man, I don’t know. I don’t know what the point is, or what I’m even doing. It’s starting to feel hard again, all of it. It was nice to forget, for ten whole minutes, the reason we are sitting here together in the first place. The kinds of thoughts my brain starts turning over feel dangerous. Like: How can they be so bad? How can anyone not human like sandwiches and Mick Jagger and know how to change a tire? I start to wonder if maybe the things we’re so afraid they’ll do to us are the things they have to do to survive the tidal wave of hatred and fear we send coasting toward them.

“Sorry,” I say, just because I know it will annoy her, “you’re still Dorothy.”

I feel like I’ve been swept up and dropped on my head in a world that looks like mine but is slightly different. Brighter, more vibrant—or at least missing some of the dust and grime that’s collected over our lives after years of neglect. I can’t tell which direction is right or wrong anymore, but I know I want to stay.

O
UR NEXT STOP IS A
lonely little gas station in Deer Valley, just south of Anthem and Cave Creek. I doubt Zu is familiar enough with Arizona to know how close we are to Scottsdale, and that from there, it’s spitting distance to Phoenix. But with no warning other than a sharp intake of breath, she seizes the steering wheel and nearly gets us into an accident as she jerks it toward the exit.

“Jesus—! What the hell?”

One hand points to the gas light and the other points to the gas station next to the off-ramp.

“With what money, Dorothy?” I ask. “I barely have enough for a gallon, since I still haven’t been able to turn your ass in.”

Trust me.
I narrow my eyes, but she meets my gaze head-on.
Trust me.

Unsurprisingly, we’re the only ones here. I navigate the truck around, picking the pump farthest from the small convenience store and the worker peering out his window at us. The gas tank is on the driver’s side, which means that Zu, when she follows me out, jumping down from the door, is blocked by the body of the truck.

“Now what’s your plan?”

She mimes putting a credit card into the slot, but I could have told her before that the pumps don’t take card payments anymore. You have to pay up front in cash.

Zu doesn’t look fazed. Instead, she jerks a thumb back toward the store and the man still watching me and then does that jibber-jabber motion with her hands, pressing her four fingers against her thumb repeatedly.

Distract him!

I shake my head, stuffing my hands into the back pockets of my jeans, but I do like she asks. Because there’s no chance
that
could go horribly wrong.

It’s already about thirty degrees warmer than it was in northern Arizona. I come down here so rarely that the hundred-degree heat always feels like opening an oven door and leaning in. The station attendant at least has the fans cranked up behind him, even if the owner is too cheap to shell out for real AC.

The bells above the door jangle. I glance back over my shoulder, surprised to see the formerly blank-screened pump suddenly light up with numbers. I don’t know what the attendant can tell from watching his register’s screen, and I don’t know what the hell the girl is doing, but a quick plan comes together in my head. It’s as dumb as it is simple.

I feign a big trip, crashing headlong into the shelves of candy. I thrash my arms out, knocking most of it to the ground in mess of epic proportions. The attendant must think I’m having some kind of a seizure, because all of a sudden, he’s at my side where I’m sprawled out on the floor, checking my pulse, shoving a thick candy bar between my teeth, like he’s afraid I’m going to bite my tongue off.

“Sir? Sir? Sir?” I don’t know that anyone has ever called me
sir
before, much less three times in fewer seconds. “Are you all right? Can you hear me? Sir?”

I make a big show of moaning, clutching my head as I turn onto my side. Just past the attendant’s hip, I can barely see the pump Zu is working, the way the numbers are spinning and ticking up, like she’s somehow pumping gas without paying for a cent of it.

“I’m going to call for an ambulance—”

The poor guy is so old and so genuine that I do feel a little sorry about all this, until he has the nerve to say, “It’ll be okay. You’re okay, kid.”

“I’m just…It must be the heat,” I say, grabbing his arm as he starts to pull away. “I’ll be okay. Do you have…Can I buy a bottle of water from you?”

Please say I have enough left to buy a water bottle.

“No, no, no,” the man says, rubbing what little white hair he has left off his sweaty forehead. “You wait here. I’ll get you a cup of water from the cooler in the back.”

I know it takes more than a few minutes to fill the truck’s tank, but whatever Zu’s managed to pump is going to have to be enough. I wait until the old man staggers onto his feet, straightens his ugly polyester blue uniform, and disappears into the back before I jump up and go running for the truck.

The timing is just right. She sees me coming around and jams the nozzle back onto its resting place. I give her a boost up into the cab, glancing at the pump’s screen. She’s somehow just stolen over three hundred dollars’ worth of gas.

The tires squeal as we go tearing out of there. I’m whipping around corners, looking for the on-ramp back to the I-17, laughing, laughing, laughing because I can’t seem to get rid of the adrenaline any other way. Zu reaches over and buckles me in, then does the same for herself. Her round face is flushed, but I think she looks pretty smug. I would be, too.

“Your brother teach you how to hijack a pump like that?” I ask when I can breathe normally again.

She shakes her head. No—it’s a new trick. I want to think about all the thousand ways that could have gone wrong, how there’s a good chance if the store has cameras, my face and the car is likely on them. I don’t know how this works, though—if that old man is going to shuffle back over to his register and see that someone’s been pumping gas without paying. And who’s going to smack the law down on me? Would the police really have time to follow up on this when they already have enough trouble to deal with in Phoenix?

Who cares? If they come after us, they come after us. They can try.

I’m not thinking straight—I know I’m not because the next words that come out of my mouth are so batshit crazy I almost don’t recognize my own voice. “If you help me find another kid, I won’t have to turn you in.”

But really, is it
that
crazy? She’s already proven herself to be a hell of a lot more resourceful than I am. She’s handy and basically means an unlimited supply of gasoline whenever and wherever I need it. And who knows? Maybe they have some kind of psychic link to one another. They can move cars and start fires and move a grown man across the length of a field. How is that any crazier? It doesn’t have to be her.

The smile slides down her cheeks bit by bit, and the disappointment I see in her eyes tells me the answer is no, long before the shake of her head.

It doesn’t make sense to me. I’m giving her a way out—I’m saving her life, and she doesn’t even pretend to act grateful? Maybe I was right before and she really
does
want to be taken in. She’s tired of running, tired of being hunted, and she just wants to walk back into the arms of the nearest black uniform and be done with it. That would at least explain why she didn’t run all of the times she could have. She wasn’t staying with me because she liked the company, obviously.

Look, I’m not a proud guy. I’m nobody’s favorite. I’m just getting by and have been for pretty much all my life. I’m not interested in college because I want to go on and be a doctor or a lawyer or one of those assholes who sit around with their heads in their hands on the stock market floor. On the scale of winners to losers, I know I fall somewhere in the middle.

I’m just trying to get myself to the point where I at least have
options
. I don’t understand why little Zu doesn’t feel that need, too, why she’d throw her freedom away like this. I don’t know anything about these camps, but I know if nobody is allowed to whisper a word about them, they can’t be good. If she can’t see that, she’s too trusting—she’s that man in the gas station offering to give me water while we’re robbing him blind. People like them, they can’t see the world for the wreck it is.

I mean, okay, I will admit it stings a
little
bit to know she’d rather be locked up than with me. Maybe—It could be she just doesn’t understand what she’s throwing away here. Maybe I need to explain it to her?

We’ve been sitting in the parking lot in front of the PSF station for almost ten minutes now. Unlike the one in Prescott, there’s a steady flow of people milling in and out. This includes the clusters of PSFs and the National Guardsmen they brought in to help smother the food riots that started the last time they tried to pass out rations to the growing population of homeless. Because, hey, guess what? When your average summer temperatures are over 105 degrees, people are going to do whatever they possibly can to get bottles of water, including trying to knife one another.

The generic-looking building is in the shadow of a number of empty skyscrapers, including the silky blue glass column of Chase Bank’s former hub. The baseball field named after the company was closed even before all the professional sports drizzled from a few games a season to none. I’ve heard rumors that a number of homeless have overrun the field; it’s constantly being fought over by gangs looking to expand their territory. At least, those are the rumors. Heaven forbid any of these government clowns ever give us real information about what’s going on, outside instructions to “avoid central Phoenix whenever possible.”

Three beige stories of tiny windows—it looks so harmless. You’d never know it was a military base from a distance, and I know it probably wasn’t built to be, but it just adds to the feeling that I’m about to go in and make a business transaction.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I tell her. “That’s all these people think you’re worth.”

She doesn’t say anything. The afternoon sun is low and gives her ivory skin a warm glow. The bandages I applied yesterday are starting to peel. Every now and then she has to reach over and smooth the edges back down. I can tell that Zu is thinking hard about something. Her throat is bobbing, like she has to swallow the words one by one.

“You did this to yourself,” I say, my voice going hoarse. Jesus—I can feel my stomach turning as I look back out across the cracked asphalt. A car pulls into the space to the right of us, one of those white, windowless vans that serial killers seem always to use.

Out comes this woman with this head of bleach-blond hair that’s been so fried by chemicals there are these horrible kinks in it. She’s wearing acid-wash jeans and a leer as she catches sight of Zu in the passenger seat. When she spots me, her smile falters a little, but she recovers and bends down to Zu’s eye level. The little condescending wave she gives the kid makes my stomach twist and turn over.

And then Zu shoves the door open as hard as she can, right in the lady’s smug face.

“Holy
shit
!”

The skip tracer goes down in a limp, unmoving heap. Zu, meanwhile, is all action. She shoves the door open the rest of the way and steps over the woman to get to the van. By the time she wrenches the sliding door open, I have enough sense to start crawling after her.

The woman is out cold—you’d have to be to stay on the burning asphalt that long willingly. I glance around, horrified that someone’s witnessed this, but Zu only has eyes for the small figure that’s curled up in a little ball of leather straps and chains in the middle of the van. She waves me over impatiently, like,
Can you catch up with the rest of the class, please,
and I jump from our car to the other, only bending down to pluck the keys from the unconscious woman’s hands.

The kid—this boy who’s twelve, maybe thirteen at the most—stops struggling the minute Zu takes the blindfold off his eyes. I’m not really believing what I’m seeing. The van smells terrible, and it’s clear from the stain that the boy’s gone and wet himself like the baby he really is. He’s shaking, screaming something at her around his gag. I let Zu take the keys and undo the handcuffs around his wrists and ankles herself.