In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds #3)(56)

I waited until she was gone before leaning forward and resting my head against one of the empty desks. Closing my eyes didn’t make the headache any better. In fact, the glassy film over my thoughts thickened as I turned my mind back in the direction of Thurmond. I felt myself sit up, suddenly flooded with images of men in black uniforms tearing the camp down before I could do it, destroying every last piece of evidence before the world could see what had really happened there.

“—em? Ruby?” Cole was waving at me from further down the row of computers, an odd expression on his face. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said, rubbing at my irritated eyes. “Why?”

“You just...were staring around the room, but you didn’t—”

I was alert again, at least, pulling myself out of the slow, dulled, shapeless thoughts I’d sunken into. “I’m fine,” I interrupted him. “So the plans—the ones the kids made? You’ve read them?”

“Yeah,” he said, slipping into Nico’s seat in front of the laptop and clicking around. “They’re not bad, but I seem to remember a better one.”

“Whose?”

“Yours,” he said pointedly. “You put together a whole plan for hitting Thurmond, remember? Gave it to Alban behind Conner’s back.”

I had, hadn’t I? Three months ago might as well have been three years ago at this point. When they’d taken my plan and twisted it, wanting to use it to arm kids with explosive devices and send them into camps, it’d been like they’d cut off my legs at the knees. They’d turned a dream into a nightmare.

“This thing about Thurmond...it sucks. I know that’s a crappy word to express the magnitude of how terrible it is, but it just plain sucks and we’re going to have to work harder and faster now. We have until the beginning of March to get our act together. It would help to have a fully formed plan to run with so we can jump into action—the one you spent months thinking through.”

Cole picked up a small notepad he’d tucked into the folder of handwritten plans from the other kids and tossed it to me. “Here. Write it out—everything you remember from your original idea. I’ll work on combining everyone’s ideas into something cohesive and realistic for tonight’s meeting.”

I found a pen in one of the desk drawers at the front of the computer room and sat down to write. The first words were halting, and I was self-conscious of the loops and uneven lines of my terrible handwriting. The longer I wrote, the easier it felt—the words came trickling back slowly, like they didn’t fully trust that this time it would be different. That this was worth getting my hopes up for, all over again.

This is different. One kid enters the camp ahead of the assault with a tiny camera installed on a pair of glasses, so images of the interior of the camp can be relayed back to headquarters and the Op strategy can be mapped out. Cole promised this would happen. We take their own transportation in, blindside the PSFs and camp controllers, subdue them without killing them. If you can’t believe in this, then neither will they. We’ll leave one camp controller free under my influence, to report back in status updates until we’re all away.

It took up ten whole sheets, front and back, and my writing got more and more illegible as excitement started fizzing in my blood again and I could see each of these moments unfolding with perfect clarity. By the end, my hand was cramped and I felt drained, but my head was clear. I did feel better. Calm, at least, which wasn’t nothing.

I stood up and turned back toward where he was still sitting. Every now and again, I heard voices and sounds coming from his direction, and the part of my brain that wasn’t distracted by my work knew that he was watching the videos we’d downloaded. The crying, the soft begging, the questions that never had answers. They were the kinds of things I’d learned to tune out at Thurmond for my own self-preservation. I don’t know what it would have done to me to have nightmares every single night.

The light from the screen flashed across his face, thrown onto the wall behind him. I lingered by my desk, caught by his bleak expression. Moving a few steps back, I was able to see what he was watching reflected in the windows lining the wall. Fire streaked across the screen. Cole glowed orange, red, gold, as the light from the video bathed him in deadly color. And just like that, my small slice of peace was gone, washed out by sudden, cold understanding. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

The video zoomed in on the face of a young boy, no more than thirteen, strapped to some kind of metal post. He was panting hard, thrashing against the restraints that trapped his arms against his sides. There were small electrodes dotting his shaved head, ringing his scalp with a crown of wires. Revulsion rose in me, bile burning its way up my throat. I pressed a hand against my face and had to work up the courage to watch the terrible truth of it.

Cole glanced at me once as I stood behind him, then turned back to the screen. It was as much of an invitation as I was going to get. He started the video again from the beginning, and it was that much worse to hear the Red’s guttural sounds and screaming mixed with the scientist’s calm, dry notations to the camera.

“They were testing the kid to see what kind of emotional response triggers his abilities,” Cole said, staring at the last, frozen close-up of the boy’s face, streaming with sweat and tears. “Trying to map the way his mind processed it.”