In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(137)

The red vests were keeping track of the kids, devoid of any emotion. They were young, faces still round and full. My age maybe, or a few years older. They were inserted in the places where the dwindling PSF force should have been.

They were Reds.

24

THERE WAS AN HOUR BETWEEN the last work shift, whether it was in the Garden, the Factory, or cleaning in the Mess Hall or Wash Rooms, and when they served dinner. The kids would be returned to their cabins, and each group was allotted a specific time to walk the distance between the buildings. It was a song that only worked if the camp hit each note exactly right. The kids were streams of blue and green, so deeply entrenched in playing their parts that they never stepped out, not even once, to dare interrupt the pace.

Reds. God, the others had no idea. I had no way of warning them, and the closer I came to Cabin 27, the more it felt like this was already over.

Laybrook followed me up to the cabin, unlocking the door and holding it open for me with a forced politeness. I stepped inside, my eyes meeting his pale ones for the last time. I plugged memories in over the truth, dropped in scenes of him roughing me up, dragging me around, and made him think he was as tough as he wanted to be. The door shut automatically as he turned and walked back into the rain.

I knew, by the silence that had greeted me when the door opened, that the girls weren’t back yet. They would have switched, just recently, from Factory to Garden duty, and likely were still trudging back through the mud, or waiting at the low fence for permission to move.

The cabin—my cabin—was small enough to take in with a single turn. Brown upon brown, broken up only by the yellowing white sheets on the bunk bed. The smell of mildew mixed with a natural body odor, covering even the bland hint of sawdust from the wood. Patches of silver light streamed in through the cracks in the paneling. The wind whispered through the cabin, drawing me around the first few sets of bunks, toward the back wall.

I stared at my bunk, a familiar hopeless despair crashing over me. I bit my lip again to keep from crying.

Rain had come in through the nearby wall, slanting in to dampen the mattress. I moved toward it like I was underwater, barely feeling it as I sat down. My breath caught in my throat and stayed there as I looked up at the bottom of Sam’s mattress. My fingers traced the shapes I had peeled off at night when I couldn’t sleep.

You left them here. A hand rose up, pressing against my chest, making sure my heart was still beating. You left them here, to live in this hell.

“Stop,” I whispered. “Stop.”

There was no way I could ever make up for it. There was no way to go back and change the decision I made that night to swallow Cate’s pills. The only way out was forward.

I am going to walk out of here. I am going to take every single one of them with me.

The door to the cabin popped open. They were silent as they came in, lining the narrow space between the nearby bunks.

The PSF came in, counting them off. Then, with a faint smirk, she turned and added me to the tally. The others knew better than to move before the uniform left and locked the door behind her, but nothing could have surprised me more than seeing Sam whirl around, something like hope on her face.

Her honey-blond hair had been hastily braided back, and her face was streaked with black dirt. She looked tired, pushed past the point of exhaustion; but her stance, the hands on her hips, the expectant tilt of her head—that was Sam. That was all Sam.

“Oh my God.” Ellie, one of the older girls. She and Ashley had always tried the hardest to take care of the younger girls. Without her best friend standing shoulder to shoulder with her, I barely recognized her. There was a beat of stillness and then she was rushing toward me, climbing over the bunks that separated us. A good thing, too. I’m not sure I could have moved if I’d wanted to. How was it possible to be bursting with happiness at the sight of them, and still terrified about what they’d think?

“Oh my God.” Those three words over and over again. Ellie crouched down in front of me, her green shirt splattered with rain. She took my face between her freezing hands, a light touch that turned into a fierce grip once she seemed to accept I was real. “Ruby?”

“I’m back,” I choked out.

The other girls bottlenecked the path between the bunks, and some, Sam included, simply crawled over the mattresses and frames that stood between them and me. Vanessa, Macey, Rachel, all of them, reaching out, touching my face, the hands that were limp in my lap. Not angry. Not accusing. Not afraid.

Don’t cry, I told myself, smiling even as my eyes burned behind my lashes.

“They said that you died,” Ellie said, still kneeling in front of me. “That it was IAAN. What happened? They took you away that night, and you never came back—”

“I got out,” I told them. “One of the nurses planned the whole thing. I met other kids like us and...we hid.” The abbreviated truth would have to do—for now. I’d never bothered to ask Cate if the cameras could record sound in addition to video, but the sight of them gathered around me would be dangerous enough. We weren’t supposed to touch each other.

“But they found you?” This from Vanessa, dark eyes still wide with disbelief. “Do you know if they took Ashley, too? Have you heard anything about her?”

“What happened?” I asked, careful to keep my tone measured.

“They pulled her in to work in the Kitchen...maybe two months ago?” Ellie said. That wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. If there were specific, small tasks, or if they needed an additional hand somewhere like the Kitchen or the Laundry, they would pull from the older Green kids, thinking they were trustworthy, I guess. “That night, they wouldn’t let us eat in the Mess. And then she just didn’t come back. Do you know if someone got her out?”