The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds #1)(57)

“What are you doing?” I didn’t bother to hide my shock.

His free hand hovered over the length of the hose, gliding it back in our direction. It was almost like he was tugging in a line, or at least motioning someone forward. A few drops of pungent liquid began to drip from the free end of the hose.

Siphoning gas, I realized. I’d heard about people doing this during the last gas shortage, but I’d never actually seen it done before. The liquid began to fill the can in a smooth pour, filling the space between us with a sharp odor.

“Gas crisis,” he said with an unapologetic shrug. “Times are a little desperate, and we were running on fumes for a while yesterday.”

“You’re Blue, right?” I said, nodding toward the hand guiding the gas into our red can. “Could you just move Betty along without it?”

“Yeah, but…not for long.” Liam sounded shy. When he pressed his lips together, they turned an unnatural shade of white and highlighted a small scar at the right corner.

When I realized I was staring, I squatted down beside him—more to hide my embarrassment than actually help. Stealing gas was, surprisingly, not all that complicated.

“I guess I’m just impressed you can use your abilities at all.”

A part of me wondered, then, if I hadn’t had it backward this entire time. The way things were at Thurmond…the camp controllers were so vigilant about making sure that we were terrified of getting caught using our abilities, and we were made to understand from the beginning that what we were, and what we could do, was dangerous and unnatural. Mistakes and accidents were not excuses, and punishment was not avoidable. There was to be no curious testing, no stabbing at limits to see if there was a way to push through them.

If Liam was so accomplished with his abilities, it probably meant he had taken years to practice, most of those spent outside of camp walls. It never occurred to me to think that other kids, safe at home, hiding out—that the others, who had never seen the inside of a cabin, experienced the grave and still nothing that was life at camp—might have managed to teach themselves amazing things. They weren’t afraid of themselves; they weren’t crippled by the weight of what they didn’t know.

I had the strangest feeling—like I had lost something without ever really having it in the first place—that I wasn’t what I once was, and wasn’t at all what I was meant to be. The sensation made me feel hollow down to my bones.

“The whole thing’s pretty straightforward for us Blues,” Liam explained. “You look at something, concentrate hard enough to imagine that object moving from point A to point B, and it just…does,” he said. “I bet a lot of the Blues at Thurmond figured out how to use their abilities. They just chose not to. Maybe something to do with that noise.”

“You’re probably right.” I hadn’t had enough interaction with the Blue kids to know.

Liam jerked the hose back and forth as the stream of gas slowed to a measly drip. I glanced up, searching the parking lot and motel doors for signs of life, and didn’t settle back down until I was sure we were alone.

“Did you teach yourself?” I asked, testing my theory.

He glanced my way. “Yeah. I went into camp pretty late and had plenty of time alone, bored out of my mind, to figure things out.”

Naturally, the next question was: Were you in hiding? But I wouldn’t be able to ask that without him asking about my history and how I was caught.

This had to stop. My hands were shaking like he had just told me he was about to strangle the life out of me. Nothing he had done up until now had proven him to be anything other than nice. Hadn’t he shown me, time and time again, that he was willing to be my friend if I was willing to let him?

It had been so long since I’d even wanted a friend that I wasn’t sure I even remembered how to go about making one. In first grade, it had been stupidly simple. Our teacher had told us to write down our favorite animal on a sheet of paper, and then we had to go around the room until we found someone with a matching animal. Because making friends was supposed to be that easy, apparently—finding someone else who liked elephants.

“I like this song,” I blurted out. Jim Morrison’s voice was soft and barely reached us from where it was filtering through Betty’s speakers.

“Yeah? The Doors?” Liam’s face lit up. “‘Come on baby, light my fire,’” he crooned in a low voice, trying to match Morrison’s. “‘Try to set the night on fire.…’”

I laughed. “I like it when he sings it.”

Liam clutched his chest, like I had wounded him, but his recovery was quick. The radio DJ announced the next song; it was like Liam had won the lottery. “Now this is what I’m talking about!”

“The Allman Brothers?” My eyebrows were inching up my face. Funny, I had pegged him for a Zeppelin fan.

“This is the music of my soul,” he said, nodding his head in time with the music.

“Have you ever actually listened to the lyrics?” I asked, feeling the anxiety lift off my shoulders. My voice was growing steadier with each word. “Was your father a gambler down in Georgia that wound up on the wrong end of a gun? Were you born in the backseat of a Greyhound bus?”

“Hey now,” he said, reaching over to flick my hair. “I said it was the music of my soul, not my life. For your information, my stepdad is a mechanic down in North Carolina and, as far as I know, still alive and well. But I was born in the backseat of a bus.”