The Darkest Legacy (Darkest Min - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,105

with a tremulous one of my own.

The quiet snip, snip, snip of the scissors was soothing, almost hypnotic. As each long strand fell away, I no longer felt that anxious tug that was trying to pull me apart from all directions.

When she finished, Priyanka put a comforting hand on my head, running her fingers down through my wet hair again.

“Are you all right?” she asked, serious this time.

All right had become relative.

“I don’t know why it still gets me so upset,” I said, my throat aching. “It shouldn’t. I hate them—I’ve hated my parents for years. It wasn’t even just what they did to me, it was what they didn’t do. Even after the camps fell, I kept thinking…maybe? Maybe now? They’ll have seen that I was a good girl, and that I wasn’t a danger to them. But they never came. They never called. Not until they needed me.”

“What happened?” Priyanka asked. “What did he mean when he said Cruz intervened on your behalf?”

It had been the one rule Cruz had been willing to bend for me, and I’d felt guilty about it for years now—I’d felt like I owed it to her to do whatever she asked in return.

“You know how there was a policy put in place for reclaiming kids after the camps fell?” I asked. “Many of us were teenagers, a good number older than sixteen, and most felt like they shouldn’t necessarily have to go back to parents who had turned them over to the government in the first place. Who had made them feel unwanted.”

“I can understand that.”

I nodded. “The UN and Cruz’s people felt strongly that parents still had legal claims on those of us under eighteen. The compromise was that, if the parents didn’t come to claim their kids, and their kids didn’t want to go back, they wouldn’t force the issue. Parents would be allowed to file claims of guardianship at any point, but in the interim, the government would re-home them.”

Something flickered in Priyanka’s expression when I said that.

“What is it?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head.

I watched her for a moment, waiting to see that same hesitation again. It never came. “Well…for a number of years, I lived with a friend—Cate—and the other kids she’d been looking out for. Then one day, I got the call. My parents wanted me. They wanted me. They applied to restore their guardianship and sent a letter to me along with the paperwork, saying how sorry they were, how frightened and confused they had been. My cousin, Hina, and her parents had been pushing me for years to try to talk to them. But I didn’t want to go. Not really. The last time I’d seen them, they’d been so angry with me—I’d caused a horrible car accident in the middle of a busy highway, and it almost killed my mother.”

“Shit,” she breathed out.

I nodded again. “But…I had to set a good example. I had to show other kids that this could be a fresh start for all of us, and old wounds could be healed—insert whatever clichéd phrase you like there. I went. I got in a car, and I was driven to Falls Church with all of my things. We were about two miles from the neighborhood when I saw the first sign.”

“A Stop, Don’t Come Any Closer, These People Are Bullshit sign?”

“Kimura for Delegate. A Better Tomorrow with Kimura.”

Priyanka caught on quickly, and I loved her for her look of complete outrage. At the time, I’d felt like maybe I was making too big a deal out of it, that it was just a coincidence. It had been Agent Cooper driving me that day. He’d realized what was happening and had offered me the choice that no one else had. He’d risked disciplinary action over it.

“We parked a ways back from the house because we had to. There were so many news vans parked up and down the street. A nice little crowd, too. Everyone was waiting. He even had a banner hanging over the house’s garage door: Reuniting our families, reclaiming our future!”

“I can’t decide if I want to punch something or scream,” Priyanka said. “What did you do?”

“We backed up and returned to DC,” I said. “I never had the guts to read the news coverage from that day, but it must have been everywhere. I got questions about it for years, even after Mel put a ban on them.”

Chubs and Vida had been waiting for me the second I