The Darkest Minds (The Darkest Minds #1)(89)

“What do you want to do?” I whispered.

“I’ve got to wake the others up,” he said. “We have to keep moving. On foot.”

My hand stilled, but it was clear that he had made his choice.

“What’s the rush?” I asked, lightly.

There, at the right corner of his mouth, where his scar met his lips—a faint smile. “I think we could let them sleep, at least for a few more hours.”

“And then?”

“We’ll hit the road.”

Two hours rolled right on by around us. We both must have fallen asleep at some point, because by the time I opened my eyes, the condensation was shrinking against the glass, and a few rays of morning light had made it to the forest floor.

As I stirred, so did Liam. For a while, we said and did nothing beyond working out the cricks and kinks from the awkward positions we slept in. When it came time to finally let go of his hand, I felt the first touch of cold air work its way in from outside.

“Wake up, team,” he said. His shoulder popped as he reached back to slap Chubs’s knee. “Time to carpe the hell out of this diem.”

Less than an hour later, we were standing in front of the black minivan, watching as Zu did one last check under the seats. I buttoned my plaid shirt up to my throat and wrapped a red scarf I’d picked up around my neck three times—not because I was all that cold, but because it helped hide the disturbing bloodstain smeared down my front.

“Yikes.” Liam’s expression was grim as he leaned over and pulled my hair out from where it was trapped beneath the collar. “Would you rather wear mine?”

I smiled and zipped his coat up for him. My forehead was still tender to the touch, and the stitches were as ugly as sin, but I was feeling better. “Was it really that bad?”

“Evil Dead II bad.” Liam bent down to add a few of his clothes to my backpack. Something red appeared in his hand. “Just about gave me a heart attack, Green.”

“You can’t really call her Green anymore,” Chubs pointed out. He was making the difficult decision about which books to abandon and which to take with him, and had seemed to settle on Watership Down, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and some book I had never heard of called Howards End. Left behind: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and The Sound and the Fury, which Chubs had taken to calling The Snore and the Just Kill Me.

“Yeah,” I said. “No more Green…”

“All done?” Liam called to Zu. When she gave him a thumbs-up, he threw her pink bag over one shoulder and my backpack over the other. “Any day now, Marian Librarian. I thought you were the one that wanted to check out.”

Chubs gave him the finger, leaning forward to put his full weight into closing the briefcase. I leaned over to help him, trying to avoid the look on Liam’s face as he stood there staring at Betty’s mangled black shell. Zu was crying without making a sound; Liam had his hands on her shoulders, holding her steady. Even Chubs looked at the car with a rare softness, his fingers bunching up the fabric of his pants.

I understood why we were parting ways with Betty now; the other skip tracer that had been with Lady Jane was still out there, and there was some chance that the woman had reported the car to whatever bounty network the skip tracers used. But I also understood why Liam had been so reluctant to do it. Unlike the abandoned and withered small towns we had driven through in western Virginia, the nearby cities and their populations were still holding on, which meant there would be more folks on the road, and Betty, with her bullet holes and cracked windows, was not exactly inconspicuous. Then there was the fact that we had little to no gas left, and no easy way of finding more, aside from going up and down and siphoning it from the abandoned cars along the nearby highway. There was too much traffic—too many potential eyes—running down the road to do it.

Liam had gotten us as close as he could to Lake Prince, but it was anyone’s guess how long it would take us to walk there.

“It feels like we should do something,” he said. “Like, send her off on a barge out to sea and set her on fire. Let her go out in a blaze of glory.”

Chubs raised an eyebrow. “It’s a minivan, not a Viking.”

Zu pulled away from his grasp and headed for the trees to her left. Liam rubbed the back of his neck, at a loss. “Hey,” he started, “it’s okay, we’ll—”

But when Zu reappeared in our line of sight, she wasn’t empty-handed. Clutched between her fingers were four small yellow flowers—wild weeds, by the looks of it. The kind we always used to have to pull up in Thurmond’s garden every spring.

She walked over to the van, stood on her toes, and lifted up the closest windshield wiper. With delicate fingers, she positioned each flower in a row, keeping them straight across the cracked glass.

Something cold and wet caught on my eyelashes. Not tears, but a misty rain, the kind that soaked through you slow and sure, driving you crazy with chills in the process. And I realized then how unfair it all was that we couldn’t just crawl back inside of the car; that even if we made it to East River, we’d be soaked and sore for days.

This car—this had been a safe place for them. For us. Now we had lost that, too.

I shoved my hands in my pockets and turned away, heading for the trees. My fingers brushed again something hard and smooth in my pocket, and I didn’t need to pull it out to know that it was the panic button. In the beginning, I had kept it because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to protect them on my own, and now…I had half a mind to drop it and let the ground claim it. Liam had confirmed everything that I’d suspected, but it seemed foolish to toss it then, when there was a chance for us to use them like they would have used us. If a PSF or skip tracer caught up to us now, I could press the button, and the agents that showed up would be more than enough distraction for us to have a chance to get away.