In The Afterlight (The Darkest Minds 3)

“Oh, believe me, this isn’t even close to how low I’m willing to sink to get you to understand what I’ve been trying to tell you.”

“The issue isn’t that I don’t understand, it’s that I don’t agree.”

“I know,” he said, “God, do I know that. There have been so many times I wished you could—that you hadn’t let them crush you the way they did at Thurmond. You’re so unkind to yourself, and you can’t even differentiate the actual truth from the warped version of it that they fed to you.”

I was so sick of these speeches that if I hadn’t come in here with a purpose, I would have left before he could get started. But this was my price of admission. I had to listen to his bullshit excuses for why he treated everyone around him with as much thought as the grass beneath his shoes.

“Never once, in the whole time I’ve known you, have you ever referred to what we can do as a gift. You snarl and snap your teeth if the word gifted is so much as whispered in your direction. There’s a stubbornness in you I just don’t understand, no matter how much thought I put toward it. I can’t imagine how exhausting it must be to use your...what do you call them? Abilities. You punish yourself if you fail to control them, and you punish yourself if you succeed. One of the things I find most fascinating about you is that you’re somehow able to mentally separate your gift from yourself—like it’s a whole separate entity that you can beat back into submission.”

He stood up and came toward me, his arms crossed over his chest in a mirror of my pose. The air conditioning clicked on overhead, breathing out a hiss of cold air. The chill stroked its icy fingers over my bare arms, my neck, my cheeks. It was a caress. For a moment I was sure I was standing somewhere else, the smell of evergreen and spice filling my nose.

“Stop it.” I didn’t know how he was doing it, but I wasn’t the same Ruby I’d been at East River. I wasn’t blind to his tricks; this is how he consistently wormed his way into my head, by unsettling me.

His eyebrows rose. “I’m not doing anything.”

I let out a small noise of disgust, and made a show of starting to turn back toward the door, testing how desperate he was for me to stay. How hard it would be to play this little plan of mine out.

“Don’t you wonder why it’s so easy for Blues to control what they can do?” he called. “It’s because each time they move something, it’s a natural manifestation of their will—something they want to happen. It never turns off for the Greens, because their gift is like a net over their minds; they see it as their mind working and nothing more.”

Whereas, for someone like Zu, a Yellow, or me, or even Cole—we had to know we could turn it off, and completely, other wise we’d destroy everything and everyone around us. We used our minds like weapons clenched tightly in our fists, struggling to return them back to their holsters without injuring ourselves in the process.

“It must be torture for you to be around those three Blues constantly, to have them tell you everything will be all right and that you can control what you do—and then see them lift a finger and have it work perfectly. You spent six years at Thurmond, scared to so much as breathe the wrong way in case it made them give you a second look. You know what they’ll do if they ever catch you and bring you back to that camp. They’ll keep you there long enough to run their tests and confirm what they already know. You saw how quickly and quietly they took the Reds, Oranges, and Yellows out. The Reds, they went to Project Jamboree. The Yellows, to one of the new camps built specifically to keep their abilities at bay. But what happened to the Oranges? Where did those kids go?”

My throat had closed up on itself. What little courage I had left was draining out of me as fast as the familiar dread was rolling in.

“Do you want me to tell you?” he asked, his voice quiet as he leaned his shoulder against the glass.

I surprised myself with a breathless, “Yes.”

“Some of them went to Leda’s research program, the one that Nico and I were brought into after they closed the first one at Thurmond,” Clancy said. “The others, if you believe the word of some of the PSFs stationed there at the time, are two miles north of the camp, buried a few hundred feet away from the railroad tracks.”

“Why?” Why kill them, why waste their lives, why do it like they were animals that needed to be put down, why—why them—

“Because they couldn’t be controlled. Period. It was the neatest, easiest solution to their headache. And because they also knew, if the kids were to ever be released from the camps, they could explain it simply by saying that IAAN was the root of it, that they were susceptible to a non-existent second wave of the disease. Our gift manifests in few enough kids that it won’t raise many, if any, red flags.”

The birth rate was low enough these days—few people would take the risk of a child being claimed by IAAN—that it seemed impossible to guess.

His dark eyes slid toward me. “I’ve seen the military orders—the explanations for how to do it ‘humanely’ so the child only registers the smallest amount of pain. I’ve never been able to reach any of them in time to save them.”

“You don’t save anyone,” I said bitterly. “You only help yourself.”

“Listen to me!” he snapped, striking a palm against the glass. “You are your abilities and they are you. I can’t put it to you more plainly. Do you know why I hate this cure? It’s a statement that what we are is inherently wrong. It’s a punishment for something that isn’t our fault—all because they can’t control their fear about what we can do, any more than they can control their resentment that there are people out there stronger and more powerful than they are. They want to strip you of yourself—your ability to protect and enforce your right to make decisions about your life. Your own body. Mark my words: in the end, it won’t be a choice. They’ll decide this for you.”