In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(144)

The camp controller turned back to another woman sitting nearby. “Key up the Calm Control.”

“Group C is still in the Mess Hall,” she said. “Should they be ordered back to their cabins first?”

“Key. It. Up.”

She turned back to her screen and typed furiously, ending with a stroke of her pinky against the return key. “Wait—”

One by one, the monitors on the wall winked out, then each computer screen, the images blacking out with a sinister electronic hiss.

“Start the fail-safe protocol,” he said.

“Sir?” she said, startled, but tried—she tried. “I’m locked out—”

“Of what?”

“Everything!”

“Me too—”

“—Same—”

I knew it was pointless, even as I got my feet under me, but I didn’t want to admit it—I wasn’t done, I wasn’t ready for it to be over. The guns around me were a dozen different ways to die. I was boxed in on all sides by black uniforms. My ears rang and the ground rolled beneath my feet, but I let the invisible hands in my mind go streaming out to the minds around me, I sent them sailing in every direction like arrows seeking targets.

O’Ryan pulled his arm back and punched me in the face.

I couldn’t get my hands up fast enough to block him. Couldn’t get them down fast enough to catch me. I slammed into the ground, my vision bursting with static as my skull cracked against the tile. He leaned over me, unclipping a small device from his belt, holding it next to my right ear. I spit in his face and he only laughed, switching on the White Noise.

The world shattered around me. Hands seized my arms and hauled me up from the ground, dragging me through the tangle of legs and chairs. I couldn’t see straight, couldn’t clear my brain from the sounds polluting it. Every muscle in my body was seizing up, making me jerk, my feet thrash against the floor, and inside I was screaming, I was screaming I’m not done, but I couldn’t hear myself think. The White Noise took me by the shoulders and shoved me down beneath the darkness, holding me there until I drowned.

26

THE SLAP WHIPPED ACROSS MY FACE, ripping away the shroud of unconsciousness. My vision blurred as my eyes flew open, squinting against the light. My mind felt swollen and tender, as wrung out as the rest of my body. I was half-conscious of the fact that my arms and legs were still spasming, the muscles twitching. The residual pain left me dumb and slow, and I couldn’t remember why, how it had happened.

The noise blistering my mind shut off abruptly. Slowly, slowly, the room solidified around me. Tile floor. Four dark walls. One lamp. Two figures in black, moving in and out of the shadows, speaking in low tones. I heard a faint metallic clicking as one of them came closer. I smelled the mint as he smacked his gum.

“Little bitch...”

And just like that, memory slammed into me.

Tower.

Out.

Run.

I twisted, trying to pull out of the chair they’d put me in, but my hands and ankles were zip-tied to the metal frame. The jolt of fear-induced adrenaline cleared my mind just in time for O’Ryan to backhand me.

“Now that we have your attention...” he snarled, rising to his feet. Cold air bit into my shin, and I looked down to find that he’d rolled both of my pant legs up to the knee. They’d stripped the PSF uniform jacket off me, taking the knife, the weapons, anything I could have used to fight back. The boots, too, though I didn’t understand why, not until O’Ryan motioned for the baton the PSF behind him carried.

The other man took that as his signal to hold up the handheld White Noise machine. I reared like a wild horse, trying to escape it, the way it blanked out my mind. I can...I can do...what could I do? What?

“Who sent you?” O’Ryan asked. “What was your purpose here?”

“To...to tell you...” The words didn’t sound nearly as furious coming out of my mouth as they did in my head. The camp controller leaned forward, eyes narrowing into slits. “To go...f*ck yourself.”

The White Noise came on, louder, higher, a bullet that slammed through my temples. I couldn’t keep the cry in. Sweat streamed down my back, my chest. It became a pattern—on agony, off pain, on agony, off pain. I couldn’t catch my breath. I had to fight to keep the sweet nothing of unconsciousness away. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t leave this moment. They would kill me. I wouldn’t be able to...I wouldn’t be able to...

“Who sent you?”

“Fuck you!” I shouted right back in his face.

I braced myself as he swung his arm back, but it did nothing—nothing—to prepare me for the explosion of white-hot agony that rocketed through me as his baton struck my exposed shin. I screamed, jerking against the restraints. I heard the crack, felt it inside of my head like it was my skull splitting apart. The PSF behind the camp controller only watched impassively as O’Ryan struck the broken bone again, smiling as I vomited onto the floor.

He swung again, stopping just short of my leg, a mocking smile on his face. He gave a silent wave of his hand toward the PSF, who reached for the White Noise device again.

“Not the Children’s League,” O’Ryan said over the hurricane of sound shredding my overloaded nerves. “It couldn’t be them. So who?”

I heard the echo of it even when it switched off, white spots sparking behind my eyelids.