“I know, I know,” he says, “I promise I won’t be a burden. But she needs to see me—really see me, to understand that Ruby can help them. I want to be part of this. I think I have to be. It’s going to be hard enough for the Reds to understand what’s happening to them—they need to see proof they can get to the other side. I couldn’t help them before, but if I can now…”
My eyes don’t find Lucas’s, they drift over to Liam’s. I’m not surprised to see the rising wave of emotion that crashes through them, over his face, stealing his breath. Because his brother’s dream is here, alive. It has survived death and destruction; it hasn’t blown away with the ash that settled after his fire was put out. It will go on.
“Then I’m going, too,” Sam says, in a voice that shuts down any kind of argument.
“And me, too.”
Because where they go, I will always follow.
I REMEMBER.
There is a secret in the woods, on a small street in a small Virginia town. A town, like so many others, that’s waking from the spell of a long sleep.
I think of it every time another kid sits down in front of us, or, if they’re too weak to stand, we sit beside them. It’s like a charm I wear inside of my heart. Knowing it’s there, that it’s safe, is enough to beat back the darkness that tries to come sliding back into my heart like a shiver. I think of it every time Ruby goes to work caging the monsters instead of them. I want to tell the men and women in suits and uniforms, the ones who watch us from behind the protective mirrored glass, that the monsters inside us may have teeth, may have claws, but when our monsters stick their heads up and begin to scent the air around them, it’s not because they’re angry, or out for blood. They are lost, trying to find their way home. They are screaming in pain. And when the pain is silent, when they forget what they’ve lost, or they touch a memory not tainted by the Trainer’s razors, it is the fire that speaks to them, whispering, making hushed promises of relief in smoke and ash. There is a burn mark on their hearts that won’t heal, not yet.
There are three facilities, and there are a hundred of us left. The others find this number unbelievable, almost amazing. The word Mia uses is astonishing. I don’t have the heart to tell them about the graves out back, the ones filled with the Reds who burned out during training and were put down. I know it is the same for the other two facilities without needing to be told—there are too many empty cells, missing kids who singed their walls and floors. I do not tell them the Trainers made us dig the graves, pave over them, for no other given reason than we needed the exercise. Instead, I burden one of the men in suits with the weight of it; I want the kids found, what’s left of them returned to their families. Buried right and proper like the humans they are. The end of their lives should not be a question mark that lingers in the hearts of the people who loved them.
My facility is the last one we visit after months of healing and reconditioning at the other two. They’ve brought the Thurmond Reds back here, back to their old cradle, to live again with the younger, unfinished Reds, the ones that weren’t broken and rebuilt into loaded guns. Pennsylvania. I lived in Pennsylvania for seven years, and I never knew it.
On our second day here, when Ruby needs to rest, to take time alone to swallow the pain and smoke and claws down to wherever it is that she can lock them inside herself, I wander the halls. The freedom of it—to go through the doors that used to be locked, to take a left turn down a hall instead of a right—makes me feel queasy. I push through the feeling and go looking for my old room.
My cell.
It’s at the very end of the hall, a heavy metal door with only a small grate to pass food through. It’s already open.
Sammy is inside.
She sits, her back as stiff as armor, on my cot. She stares at the wall that was the beginning and