to finally stop us before we can go plowing through the front of the nearest drugstore.
This time I do throw up. I barely get the door open fast enough to lean out. The emptiness in my stomach is only compounded by the gaping hole left behind from unleashing all of that terror in those few seconds. I’m so tired and rattled that I’m shaking as I look over at my passenger.
“Are you okay?” I rasp out.
Mia is leaning her forehead against the glove compartment, breathing like she’s just made a run for her life. Her rich, warm complexion has gone as white as milk. As white as the patches of snow melting on the sidewalk beside us.
We can’t sit here, not with what’s happened, but I can’t bring myself to move.
“Sam…” Mia’s voice drifts over, sounding as small and scared as I’ve ever heard it. “Just tell me…is he…is Lucas dead?”
I lean back against my seat, squeezing my eyes shut. Not yet, not yet, not yet…
But then, when? If our seats were reversed and Mia was the one in control, I wouldn’t stop, I would fight the information out of her. It’s not fair for me to keep it from her, even if I can justify it by thinking I’m protecting her from the pain. It’s no different than all the secrets the government kept about us, it’s no different than the parents who left their kids at their schools on Collection days without telling them what was happening. Like my father did.
“No,” I say finally, watching the last bit of sunset play out across the sky. “It’s so much worse than that.”
The truth is, I don’t even remember making the decision to do it.
I woke up that last morning in Thurmond with a head stuffed full of thoughts and memories that had…been blocked, I guess. I’d asked Ruby to undo whatever she’d done, fill the empty spaces she’d left behind, and she did. And then some. Each memory rolled through my mind like bursts of static shock. A thousand little bridges grew between all of the disconnected hazy images and feelings. Like eating a full, satisfying meal when you didn’t even realize you were hungry in the first place.
Not Green. Never Green. Hiding. For years, hiding.
Dangerous one. Ruby was one of the dangerous ones….Orange. If she could play with my thoughts that way, then she was Orange. And it was so strange, because the second that this realization sank through me, the traces of trembling anger I felt toward her evaporated. It made sense why she had been the way she was: as much my scared little shadow as my friend. All of those times she shrank back, stayed silent, left me to deal with the PSFs, were cast in a new light. We all knew what happened to the dangerous ones at Thurmond.
I spent my last day at camp beside a girl who didn’t look anything like my memories. She didn’t flinch and fold up into herself to try to fight off the cold. Ruby had been so stark when we were younger: black hair, white skin. Thin limbs and sharp joints. The spectrum of her emotions consisted of only calm and terror. She came back to us in full color. Even Ruby’s quietness had a different tone—when I looked at her, I could see thoughts moving behind her hard eyes, not fear. It was unnerving, actually, the way Ruby wore such a serene expression. Most of the girls were so caught up in her miraculous return from the dead, the fact that she had seen the outside and had lived there for months and months, that they didn’t see the charge building in her, like a thundercloud forming beneath her skin.
I was so distracted sorting through the new set of memories, shuffling them, categorizing them, re-adding them to my mental box, that I didn’t realize Ruby had something planned until it was already underway. Until they dragged her away at dinner.
The two Reds assigned to escort us that night, both girls, marched us back through the drizzle of rain to our cabin. For the hundredth time that day, I caught myself looking for Lucas, and saw the back of him as he led the way for another group of Greens. My eyes tracked him until I saw him step up to Cabin 40 and unlock it. Then I went back to looking for Ruby. A PSF had walked her out of the Mess through the kitchen, which