The Darkest Legacy (Darkest Min - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,83

Priyanka coming toward me, her arms crossed tight against her chest, her head down. Her whole body shook, and her face looked as if every emotion had been wrung out of her.

“Are you all right?” I jogged toward her.

She shook her head, momentarily unable to find the words. Priyanka looked…not helpless, but lost. “I couldn’t…I wasn’t enough. I couldn’t make her stay.”

I didn’t know what to say other than “I don’t think anyone could have.”

“I could have. I should have. But I promised Roman not to take it too far.” Even though she didn’t repeat them, I saw the echo of the words on her face. I wasn’t enough.

“I thought she’d head back toward the lake for the helicopter extraction,” Priyanka explained, her voice betraying her exhaustion, “but it’s like she became the darkness. She must have gone a different direction. I couldn’t make her stay…I couldn’t make her stay.”

The words, how she kept repeating them, made Priyanka sound like she was drifting away. I gripped her arm, trying to steady her.

“Do you want to look for her?” I asked. “The ground’s damp enough that we can probably track her with better light.”

In truth, I didn’t want to go after the girl who had just tried to hard-boil my brain. But I couldn’t take the thought of her out there, doing what she did to another Psi. It hadn’t just been the way she’d hurt us. It had been the way she’d relished it.

“No. If we keep chasing her, she’ll run farther and faster,” Priyanka said miserably, rubbing her forehead. “We have to find a way to get her to come to us.”

When I didn’t answer, Priyanka must have read my thoughts on my face. “Listen…Lana is…She’s different.”

“I missed that part,” I said wryly.

She bit her lip. “She’s not herself. That’s not her. I don’t know what they’ve done to her, but that’s not the Lana I knew.”

“Let me guess, she’s usually a ray of sunshine.” I remembered the nickname Priyanka had used a second too late to stop myself. “Sorry.”

She lifted a hand, waving it off. When I started back toward the house, she followed.

“But clearly there’s a connection between her and the kidnappers,” I pressed. “So what’s the story there?”

Priyanka looked like she might be physically ill. “I…think that the kidnappers might have actually been after me and Roman. I’m sorry—I’m so sorry. I wasn’t sure until I saw Lana here. He…they must be trying to drag us back.”

I wasn’t sold on her theory. There were still too many pieces to this that didn’t fit together. The warning on the teleprompter, for one. And if the kidnappers were just after Roman and Priyanka, why stage a whole explosion? But a larger question loomed.

“Who’s ‘they’?” I asked. “The Psion Ring? She mentioned a ‘he’ too. That ‘he’ made her stronger.”

Her expression was so distant, I wasn’t sure she’d heard me until, at last, she said, “I don’t know. Someone could have…someone could have taken over the Psion Ring. Changed things. They didn’t use to work with non-Psi, but things…they change. We weren’t supposed to leave. Ever. Someone wants us back.”

Priyanka seemed to be genuinely struggling to pull herself together enough to speak. “When we left, she didn’t come with us. We never should have left her, but it was unavoidable. It was, I swear.”

“I believe you,” I said, startled by how badly she seemed to need me to understand. Her eyes were haunted.

“We tried to make contact with her, but we couldn’t reach her. And in the meantime, they’ve done this to her….” Her hand slid up, clenching in her hair.

“Are you talking about her power?” I asked. “It seemed like she could be some kind of Orange, but how could she do that?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know—they’ve—Lana was a gentle, sparkling person, not—not whatever that was.” Priyanka looked near tears. “Somehow, they’ve trained her to hurt people. I shouldn’t have left her.”

I couldn’t keep my family together, Roman had said. I couldn’t save my sister in the end.

In a way, he’d tried to tell me the truth. As much as he’d been able to while still protecting her. At the time, I thought he meant that his sister had died, so I hadn’t pressed him on it, knowing the exact degree of pain that came with blaming yourself for another person’s death.

“She’s still in there,” Priyanka said. “I know she is. She hasn’t taken off my mother’s necklace—that little gold flower, did you see? I know she