In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(24)

The shot of pure, unwavering joy hit me like a bolt of lightning. It sang a sweet song in my head, warmed me down to my toes. I was so wrapped up in the feeling that it was a full minute before I realized how hard she was shaking, how cold she was to the touch. She was crying, small gasps of sound that didn’t signal happiness. I set her back so I could see her face and she only gripped my sleeves harder, shaking her head.

“I think this is yours?” I said, holding up her shoe. She let me try to wipe the mud from her bare right foot before I slid it back on and tightened it. It must have fallen off as she ran toward those trees. They’d heard us coming and panicked.

“Zu?” Liam came toward us so fast he slid through the last few feet of mud, landing on the ground with us. “Zu?”

All she had to do was turn her head and the elation on his face faded to panicked concern. He took her hands when she reached out to him, studying every inch of her for bruises, cuts, anything to explain why she was looking at us like we were back from the dead, why she was holding onto us like we might vanish with her next breath.

“Is it her?” Chubs called desperately, stumbling toward us. “I can’t see—”

“Here—slow your roll—” Vida turned back and retrieved him from behind the car door, guiding him around. He patted his front pocket, reaching in for one of the lenses.

“Hey, what’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” Liam asked, letting her small hands run over his wet hair, cup his face.

Chubs dropped to his knees, sending a spray of mud over all of us. He held out his arms in what he must have thought was her direction. “You’re not alone, are you? You know what happens when you try to travel by yourself, there’s—”

Zu tackled him to the ground. The mud smacked against his back at the same moment the air went out of him.

“Well...all right,” he murmured, carefully tucking her against his shoulder. “You are freezing. We need a blanket before she goes into hypothermic—”

Zu reached up and put a hand over his mouth, making Liam laugh and laugh. The smile she offered back was trembling, small, but still there. I felt like crying myself, seeing it.

I studied her, trying to align this new vision with the image I had tucked safely away in my memory. Her hair had grown back in long enough to curl around her ears. Everything else about her had changed, too. She was taller, but thinner. Painfully thin. The skin on her cheeks had sunken in. And even in the dark, I could see the same was true for the others who came out from behind the trees. They stumbled toward us, blinking against the cars’ lights. I counted twelve in all, different heights, different shapes, but all kids. All kids.

Kylie and Zu’s cousin Hina came out of the trees next. It only took seeing Lucy for me to remember the dozens of times I’d taken food she’d spooned out at all of East River’s meals. She made me think of fire smoke, of pine, of the sunset reflecting on the nearby lakes. And the three of them—all of the kids, really—looked at us like we were blinding them.

“I’m sorry,” Kylie said. “I didn’t realize it was you, otherwise I wouldn’t have fired, we just...the skip tracers and the soldiers and everything—”

Behind me, I heard Cole let out a long sigh.

“We’re going to need to find another car,” he said. “Aren’t we?”

5

FOR ALL THE HOPE I HAD that we’d find her, I’m not sure I ever thought about what would actually happen to Zu if we did. But it became clear, from the moment Liam saw her, that it was the only thought running through his mind.

“I thought you’d be at her uncle’s house,” I said. “What happened? Why did you leave?”

“He wasn’t there. We would have stayed anyway, but there was...an incident just after we got there,” Kylie was explaining as we walked. The trees pulled back to reveal a small clearing, ringed with darkness. When they heard our cars coming, they’d smothered the fires, but the clearing was still filled with the smell of smoke.

“What kind of incident?” Liam asked.

“A bad one. There was a guy, turns out a good guy. He...never mind, it doesn’t matter.” Kylie shook her head of dark curls, smoothing down the front of her ripped shirt. “We’ve been moving from town to town since then. When I saw the trail of road code I picked it up, hoping we’d find some other kids, but they’re not having an easy time of it, either.”

I felt my eyes widen at the sight of the soaking-wet makeshift tents they’d strung up using bed sheets, and the old food cans and buckets they’d left out to catch water.

“You drove in, right?” Liam asked. “Where did you stash the car?”

“Behind the shed at the back of the house.” Kylie tried to wring her shirt out, without much luck. The others standing around her had introduced themselves in a blur. I didn’t recognize any of them. Lucy had been quick to specify that two of them, Tommy and Pat, had left East River a few months before we’d ever arrived. The other three members of their tribe had split when the going had gotten too rough for them, and they hadn’t heard from them since. The other ten teenagers, all about fifteen, were strays they’d picked up as they moved across the country.

Tommy was as long and narrow as the tree flanking him, his shocking head of copper red hair mostly hidden under a beanie. Pat was about a head shorter, and walked and talked with a frantic, bumbling energy that made it almost impossible to keep up with him.