with a line of wildflowers leading up to it. There was something there—a kind of monster?”
Lucas had woven any number of stories with monstrous hearts at the center of them. I’m too scared to breathe. To move. I’m too close to exploding with the hope that unleashes inside me. Mia…Mia was right all along?
“Do you remember what it looked like?” I ask.
Charlie and Vida turn back toward Ruby, intrigued, as she says, “It stood on two legs…very hairy, horns on either side of its head, like this—” She demonstrates, cupping her hands over her ears and letting the fingers curl away from her skull. “A nose like a hound’s?”
I press my hand against my chest, trying to pin my heart in place. I know what monster she’s talking about.
“That’s an old one,” Mia says quickly. “I don’t really remember it, though. Do you?”
I let out a small, harsh little laugh. I have a perfect memory, but only since I’ve been a Green. My box of memories, all perfectly organized and formed, waiting to be recalled at any given moment, only extends as far back as when my ability manifested. And that was after the Orfeos had moved. After Lucas had told it to me.
“I tried to follow the image through since it was so different than all the others, but I got shut out completely from that part of his memory when I tried to push past it.” Ruby raises her brows. “That’s not something that happens very often. Almost never. There’s a lock on whatever it is, and he’s protecting it with everything he has left.”
Mia and I look at each other. I see the victory crashing across her face, the tears that she has to cover her eyes to hide.
“It’s…there’s a tree house in their old backyard we used to play in,” I say, and it’s almost painful to distill what Greenwood is to us into such simple terms. “When we were little. He’d make up stories for us to act out.”
“He responded before—yesterday, just a little,” Mia says, choking on the words, “when I told him a story about it.”
“But you can’t remember that specific one?” Ruby asks.
“What are you thinking, darlin’?” Liam asks, uneasy. His eyes dart over to her again. “I see the wheels turning, but they need to be turning in the direction of home. I’m pretty sure that we’re going to have a hard time explaining him if we just roll up to your house.”
“So you want to dump him off somewhere?” Mia challenges. “Wash your hands of him?”
“I’m trying hard as I can to not add to the tally of things they’ll hold against her if we get caught,” he fires back.
Her jaw juts out. “Then don’t get caught.”
Vida actually laughs, but she’s the only one.
“I’m not sure if this is a good idea or a terrible one, but I really think it could work. Not just on him, but the other Reds, too,” Ruby says slowly. “From what I saw of the Reds’ training, the Trainers cut into their memories and detached emotions from them by associating certain images and names and places with intense pain and deprivation. I wonder if everything is just so deeply repressed in their minds that they can’t function when they’re removed from their environment of orders, except to retreat further.”
It’s confirmation of what both Mia and I have figured out, but the knowledge only drains a little bit more of my hope away.
“No shit?” Vida breathes out. “Damn.”
“That image, that monster, felt like a path in,” Ruby says. “A key that could fit into a lock. If he retreated there because it was a safe place, he might not know how to get himself back out.”
“And you think hearing that story again will call it to the front of his mind, and you can access the other memories he’s suppressing through it?” Charlie ventures. “Kind of like what you did with Lillian?”
It sounds to me like she’s talking about some kind of mental Trojan horse, that there are paths inside his mind that she can wander down.
“Can we try an experiment?” Ruby asks us. “Can you tell him about Greenwood? Tell a story you do remember?”
I exchange a look with Mia. This is her theory. I want her to be the one to try.
“Hey, Luc,” she begins, “do you remember that time we got trapped up in the tree during that freak thunderstorm? The way the whole backyard turned into a swamp…”