Never Fade (The Darkest Minds #2)(72)

Knox stood slowly, tapping the ash from his cigarette out on the ground.

Come here, I thought. Come here and let me end this.

The trickle began at the back of my mind, turning to a full-on roar. I could do this. One step closer, and I’d show him why they ranked my kind as Orange, and his only as Blue.

I would tear him down.

Knox’s hair slid forward, past his ears. When he pushed it back, I saw he had woven together bright pieces of paper into rings around each finger. They almost looked like… They almost looked like the project a bored kid would make with a candy wrapper. I didn’t know what the hell they were or why he was wearing them, but it gave me an idea.

“How about a trade?” I asked. “No work, no food, right? You let me join one of those hunting teams so I can eat, and I provide enough food to feed everyone for the winter.”

Knox scoffed, rolling his eyes.

“I’m not lying,” I said. “You saw what we had in our packs. That’s just what we could fit in our bags. We had to leave tons of it behind.”

Vida’s full, petal-pink lips parted, a silent question dripping from them.

Of course I was lying. She knew that. Come on, I thought. He’d have to accept. I could feel the mood of the kids around us shifting in eagerness. They watched me with a new light in their eyes.

“There was canned food, walls of it—and gallons of clean water. Toilet paper, even,” I added, because, let’s face it, there are some things you want but don’t necessarily need. “Clothes, blankets, you name it. You could stock this place nicely.”

By the time I finished speaking, it was so silent I could hear the plink, plink, plink of water dripping from a nearby leak in the roof.

“Oh, yeah? And where is this wonderland? Half past nowhere, straight on into your imagination?” Knox was pacing across the stage again, still blocked by the kids sitting at the edge of it. If he didn’t bite soon, I was going to have to jump up there myself.

“Why would I tell you?” I asked. “When you won’t give me what I want?”

That was how relationships worked these days. No one did anything for each other unless it benefitted them in some way. Knox had clearly seen enough of the world we lived in to have figured this out, too.

But he didn’t like it.

Come on, I thought, fuming. Come on!

With one jump, he was off the platform and I was shoved back by an invisible set of hands onto the cement. My teeth clacked against each other, and I just missed losing the tip of my tongue between them. Michael’s laughter boomed around me, like it was echoing off the timid, silent figures circling us.

“You think I need to trade you something?” Knox spat. “You think I don’t have other ways of making you and your friends talk?”

My hands pressed flat against the ground, wrists throbbing from the impact. This kid had more pride than greed—something I hadn’t expected. He didn’t even see that more food and supplies at his disposal meant more power for him. All he saw was a little girl who claimed to know better than him, who was giving him a solution to a problem he had created and stirring up unwanted questions in the kids around him. Even if the kids didn’t believe me, they wanted to.

“Sure you do,” came Vida’s voice. “But are you willing to risk waiting when the National Guard is going to be back to clear the joint out?”

She had made herself comfortable in Knox’s seat, to the visible horror of every kid nearby.

Michael whirled back around, fury rising from his shoulders like steam. “Knox! You gonna take that from her?”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared of a few little soldiers,” Vida continued, inspecting her broken fingernails. “Is that why you keep trying to prove her wrong? Because you’re scared of what’ll happen if she’s right?”

“C’mon,” came Brett’s voice somewhere near my right. “You have to admit it sounds too good to be true. We’ve been up and down the river a million times looking for food and never found so much as an empty bag of chips.”

“So you’d blow an opportunity like this?” I asked. “After you already saw the proof?”

For his rough exterior, Brett was surprisingly reasonable when it came to hashing things out. “I could go with her—make sure she’s not trying to pull a fast one. I’d be happy to take another trip back with a team and get the supplies—”

“Oh, you could?” Michael snarled. “You’d be happy to? Whose team are you talking about—mine? You think I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, dickhead? That I haven’t been watching your weak-ass attempts to steal my game—?”

Knox held up a hand, stopping them before they could start circling each other like starving feral cats. “The answer is no. Not now, not ever.”

“I should have known,” I said, pushing myself onto my feet. “You left those kids out in the freezing cold to die. Why would you ever care enough to give everyone here the food and supplies they need?”

You can push someone’s button over and over again to get what you want, but there comes a point when your finger slips and you finally hit the wrong one.

“Michael,” Knox murmured, suddenly very quiet. Vida had worked enough of a spell over the room that it took calling his name twice to get him to snap out of it. “Take these two…pearls of girls outside.”