The Darkest Legacy (Darkest Min - Alexandra Bracken Page 0,88

direction.

I glanced back at them—Priyanka, still showing the kids various parts of the drones, letting one of the Yellows zap what I assumed was a tracking device in it, and Roman, dropping a daisy chain he’d made onto Sasha’s head like a crown. She beamed up at him, the white flowers like stars in her dark hair.

“Yeah,” I said. “I think I can handle them.”

“Figured as much,” Miguel said. “You’d better take the getaway car.”

“Getaway car?”

“Liam stashed a Toyota sedan in the woods, about a hundred yards past that line of trees,” Lisa said, pointing across the field. “Bring one of the packs with you. It’ll have everything you need, including a burner and a charger for it.”

I shook my head. I’d already taken far too much from them. “I can’t—”

“You can,” Lisa assured me. “We won’t need it.”

That’s what it came down to in the end. Need. If nothing else, we needed the burner, both to communicate and for Priyanka to create another device to make the cameras blink. Need made us do things, take things, we never would have otherwise.

“Please,” Miguel said. “Just try to check in with us. If you get any information, to let us know you’re okay…”

“I’ll try,” I promised.

“Wait,” Lisa said suddenly, turning back toward the pile of items salvaged from the house. Digging under some of the drawings, she pulled out a singed photograph and handed it to me. “I thought you might want this. I grabbed it from their room.”

It was a picture from five years ago, taken by Vida, of me, Chubs, Ruby, and Liam standing in front of Betty the van, out in the middle of the forest near Lake Prince in Virginia.

At the time, Liam had wanted to go looking for Betty so he could bring her in and fix her up. But by the time we found the old van, nature had done its worst to her engine and undercarriage. It would have been a nightmare to try to get a tow truck in there to haul her out. So we left Betty behind, as a kind of monument to what we had done together—who we had been together.

Liam had taken one of the hubcaps, though; he tucked it under one arm and Ruby under the other.

I looked so young in the photo, dressed in bright pink, face beaming. My hair was in a long pixie cut and the way I was smiling so wide made me seem almost impish. Chubs had glanced up at the sky, clearly exasperated by something that Vida had said the instant before she took the picture. Liam was looking over my head, smiling in Ruby’s direction. She was still in a walking cast after what happened at Thurmond, and was leaning back against Betty’s passenger door for balance. Her smile was small, but…peaceful.

I thought Chubs had had the only copy of it. He’d shredded it an hour before he testified in front of Cruz, UN representatives, and interim members of Congress that he no longer considered them friends, and that he had no idea where on earth they’d gone.

I took the scrap of memory, tucking it into my back pocket for safekeeping.

“Are Lee and Ruby going to meet us there?” I heard a boy ask Lisa. He twisted his hands together, turning his fingers into anxious knots. “Are they going to be able to find us?”

They are, I thought, because I’m going to bring them back to you.

But before I went looking, there was one last person I needed to talk to.

Roman looked up as I walked by him and headed for the lone figure sitting a few dozen feet away.

Owen had scrubbed the soot from his face, but the attack had left its mark on him. His expression was vacant as he held a blanket to his chest despite the heat. It was obvious that even his small stature and quiet, almost doe-like nature wasn’t enough to fully counteract the fear others felt at learning he was a Red.

“Hey, Owen,” I said, kneeling down beside him. “We didn’t really have a chance to meet before. I’m Zu.”

Nothing. No movement. Not a word.

“Thank you again for what you did,” I continued. “I can’t say it enough. Thank you. None of us would be here now, safe and together, without you.”

His only response was a slight nod as he tucked his chin against the blanket.

“Are you all right?” I asked him. Even at dawn, the humidity was setting in, and the blanket looked