In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(131)

I pivoted toward the storage room. The door was already unlocked, left partly open. My anxiety spiked and I couldn’t tell if the low growls I heard in the distance were actual helicopters or the product of my frantic imagination.

“—you promised! You promised you wouldn’t do this again!”

I bolted down the small hallway, through the open door, and into the scene already unfolding.

Nico’s hands were gripped in his black hair, destroying its slicked-back shape, making it stand on end. He was pacing alongside Clancy’s cell, his face bright red, as if he’d been crying. “And you did it to her! How could you hurt Ruby? How could you?”

Clancy sat cross-legged on his bed, looking annoyed but other wise unfazed by the breakdown Nico was having in front of him. His eyes shifted over to me as I entered, his arms coming up to cross firmly over his chest. Nico hadn’t gone into the cell, thank God, but I saw a copy of the same keys I had in my hand.

Cole’s set, I realized. We’d kept this area a secret from most everyone here at the Ranch, but Nico could have seen any one of us go inside, or found some kind of layout of the building on one of the servers. Hell, he could have just deduced it.

“Ruby—he can’t keep getting away with it! He can’t!” There were tears in his eyes. “You have to make him leave, just let him go, before—”

“Finally,” Clancy said to me. “Can you please get him out of here? I already have enough of a migraine.”

“If your head aches now, imagine how it’ll feel when I rip it off your neck,” I snarled.

Clancy smirked, looking me up and down. “It looks like you had an interesting night.”

“Shut up! Shut up! Ruby, he—” Nico sucked in a breath. “It’s like I told you—he can control other people’s bodies. He can move them around like puppets without them realizing it. He did it all the time, to all of the researchers, I know he can do it—and he made you—he made you send those messages through the server!”

For a moment, I was sure he’d try to deny it all, brush Nico aside as being out of his mind. But Clancy didn’t bother to hide the small smile tucked in the corner of his mouth.

“Really had you going there, didn’t I?”

“You...” The idea of it was almost too much. Coming into my mind while I was asleep would keep me from sensing the tingling rush down the back of my skull that came when someone tried to force a connection between our minds. He’d walked me around like a doll—listened in on conversations, stolen whole moments of my life. I’d been his eyes and ears, and I hadn’t even thought that it could be done, that there was the possibility of it.

“How long?” I demanded.

“How long have you been having those ‘stress headaches’?” Clancy folded his hands in his lap. “They’re the worst, aren’t they? I’m glad I haven’t been suffering through them alone. But you should know you only have yourself to blame. Every time you enter someone’s mind, you form a connection with them—their memories, thoughts, will become yours. Each time you came into my mind, each time I got you while your defenses were down, you let me reinforce our bond. You’re the reason I was able to do this.”

“What did the messages say?” I demanded, stepping up to the glass. Nico slumped down against the wall behind me, hiding his face behind his hands. “Who were they sent to?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Clancy said. “You’re both clearly too emotional to understand. You’ve been so stressed, Ruby. It’s harder to control your abilities when you’re so...frayed...”

...Isn’t it?

I heard the words like they had been spoken inside of my skull and immediately threw down a black wall between the two of us, clipping the connection before it could fully form.

This was how he’d played me again—he knew the symptoms of anxiety and lack of focus, and even the headaches could be explained away by the stress of our situation.

Again, and again, and again, I thought. Every time, I walk right into it. We were on different levels, and I needed to stop pretending like we weren’t. My mind hadn’t even been twisted enough to imagine he’d be capable of doing this.

“That’s better.” Clancy gave me an approving nod. “You understand now. Your role in this is over. The Red is gone. You’ve set this up so well, it’ll be easy to step in and finish it. You can rest now. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“You knew he’d be hurt—killed,” I said, choking on the words.

“Only because you guaranteed it,” Clancy said, victory making his dark eyes shine. “Who do you think sent a message to the trainers there, warning them to be on the lookout?”

There was a moment of skull-shattering pain and then I did scream. I screamed and screamed, slamming my hands against the glass until I had nothing left but a miserable, low sob to give. My fault. My fault. My fault.

“It’s a bit tragic, isn’t it? To give someone the one thing they desperately want, knowing that in the end, it only has the power to destroy them. He wanted so badly to know he wasn’t the only one like him—to fit in with us. It was pathetic.”

I lurched forward, vision flashing red, black, white, the invisible hands in my mind already driving toward him.