In Time (The Darkest Minds, #1.5)(16)

I crouch down next to her as she uses the small tool kit and lift to remove the hubcap, then each nut holding the tire in place. She works quickly, methodically, but slow enough for me to keep track of what she’s doing.

“Who taught you how to do this?” I have no idea why the words escape. Maybe it’s because it’s such a nice day out; the sun is warm, not sweltering, and there’s a nice, cool breeze stroking down the sides of the nearby mountains and cutting across the valley. We ditched the evergreens a while back and have hit the full-fledged desert, but I swear the air still has that fresh flowery smell. This is the kind of landscape everyone sees when they think of Arizona. The part I grew up in might as well be Colorado in comparison.

“Your dad?” I ask. She shakes her head. “Brother? Yeah, your brother?”

Dorothy takes a break from what she’s doing and holds up two fingers. I’m surprised I know exactly what she’s trying to say. “Two brothers? Where the hell are they?”

Wrong thing to ask. A shadow passes over her face, and I get a stiff shoulder turned toward me in response.

“Was that other Asian chick your sister? The one who ran?” I ask, waiting for her answer. “No? Really? But you have one?”

Okay, two brothers and a sister. Interesting. If they aren’t with her, they must be too old to be affected by the Psi virus, in camps, or dead. Somehow, judging by the way her face lights up when she “talks” about them, I don’t think the latter is the case.

But where the hell are they? If I had a little sister, I’d be taking care of her. I would have clawed my nails down to broken stubs trying to keep her safe, not let her go running with a group of other kids. Where were they even going? Just bouncing around the country, from one place to another?

I think about the way she cried in the bathroom when she thought I couldn’t hear her, and I hate the way my heart seems to lurch down to the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t have asked her those questions, no matter how curious I was. Because you take these freaks and you stop thinking about what they can do and instead focus on the people in their lives, where they come from, what games they liked playing with their friends, and you find yourself on unsteady ground all of a sudden. You start to let all those things seep in, and suddenly they’re kids again with bony skinned knees, grass-stained clothes, and hands always in something they shouldn’t be. They’re just…little kids.

And they have even fewer choices than I do.

Dorothy shoos me away, motioning with her hands that I should take the SUV’s license plate and get on with switching it out with mine. I don’t know how she knows I’m supposed to do this, other than from experience. Maybe that’s how those kids went undetected: any time they thought they’d been spotted, they’d switch cars, and when they couldn’t, they’d switch plates.

Smart. How many other tricks does she know?

Not only does that tire fit, it inspires us to replace the other three. Might as well—they were looking worn and low on air. I doubt Hutch ever thought to get them rotated or had the funds to buy new tires every few years like I know you’re supposed to. Stuff like that becomes a luxury rather than a necessity when you get down to the bare bones of life.

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.





[page]FIVE


OUR 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.