The Darkest Minds

The White Noise cut straight through the music from the speakers, tearing at our ears. Not as loud or as powerful as I was used to, and not even close to as bad as it had been last time, but still there, still agonizing. My radio trick couldn’t drown it out, not completely.

The others crumbled around me, shriveling at the first piercing shriek.

Liam fell forward against the wheel, mashing his hands up against his ears. Chubs knocked his head into the passenger seat window, as if trying to ram the noise out of his head. I felt Black Betty began to drift forward, only to jerk to a stop when Liam hit the brakes instead of the gas.

The door opened beside me, and a pair of arms circled Chubs’s waist, trying to untangle him from the seat belt. I pulled myself up off the floor and lashed a hand out, catching the man’s cheek and raking my fingernails down as hard as I could. It was enough to startle the truck driver, the same one that had been nodding his head to “Free Bird” two seconds before, into dropping Chubs. He was left half hanging in his seat, half hanging out.

The driver stumbled back against the bed of his truck, his words drowned out by the thunderstorm of noise that had settled over the three cars. It was only then that I saw the badge hanging around his neck on a silver cord, and the bright red Ψ stitched there. They weren’t skip tracers.

Psi. PSF. Camp. Thurmond. Capture.

The man from the Volkswagen had opened the driver’s side door of the van and was trying to unhook Liam’s seat belt. He wasn’t large in any sense of the word—he looked like he could have been an accountant, with thick glasses and hunched shoulders from spending too many hours at a desk. But he didn’t need strength, not when he was holding the black megaphone in his hands.

Some of the PSFs at Thurmond carried the noise machines around with them, blasting them at small, rowdy groups, or just to see a few kids squirm. What did they care? They couldn’t hear it.

Every nerve in my body was singing, but I launched my elbow into the chest of the pickup truck driver. He fell back again, and I pulled the door shut and locked it. I only had a second to look back at Zu as I dove across Liam’s body, fist-first. I nailed Volkswagen in the glasses, knocking them off his face. Somewhere behind me, Pickup Truck had moved on to the sliding door, and this time he wasn’t empty-handed.

Zu didn’t flinch as the rifle was pointed in her face—by the way she was moaning, her eyes scrunched up and her yellow gloves curled over her ears in agony, I don’t think she was seeing straight.

I didn’t know what to do. My hands were on Liam, trying to shake him back into consciousness. His eyes flashed open, clear and so blue, but it was only for an instant. The megaphone was suddenly two inches from my face, and the White Noise sunk into my brain like an ax. My bones went to jelly. I didn’t register the fact I had fallen over Liam until I was there. The only thing louder than the White Noise, than the radio, than Chubs’s screams, was the sound of Liam’s heart racing.

I squeezed my eyes shut again, my fingers curling into the soft leather of Liam’s coat. Half of me wanted to push away, put enough distance between us that I had no chance of sliding into his mind—but the other half of me, the desperate part, was already trying to push through, to anchor myself to him and will him to move. If I could hurt someone, shouldn’t that mean I could help them, too?

Get up, I begged, get up, get up, get up, get up…

There was a high-pitched wail, a sound that couldn’t have possibly come from a human. I forced my eyes open. Pickup Truck had his rifle in one hand and the collar of Zu’s shirt in the other, and he was tugging both in the direction of the truck. I tried to scream for her, even as I felt Volkswagen’s hands in my hair, yanking me up and out of the door. He let me hit the ground hard, the loose gravel cutting open my legs and palms.

I rolled onto my side, trying to twist away from the PSF’s reach. From under Betty, I saw flutters of yellow dropping to the road like two small birds, and heard a door slam.

“Stewart—confirm Psi number 42755 spotted—” Volkswagen wrenched the driver’s side door open again, pulling something bright orange from his pocket. I swiped at my eyes, trying to force the double image of him I was seeing back into one. The orange device in the PSF’s free hand was no bigger than a cell phone, easy enough to maneuver in front of Liam’s face from where it was pressed against the minivan’s steering wheel.

Taking a swipe at the PSF’s ankle with my hand was pointless—he was so involved with whatever it was he was doing that he didn’t so much as notice.

Liam! My mouth wasn’t moving, it wasn’t working. Liam!

The orange device flashed, and a moment later, above even the wailing of the White Noise, I heard Volkswagen say, “That’s a positive ID on Liam Stewart.”

Something hot and sharp cut through the air, billowing out under Betty like a stinging cloud of sand. I felt it rub up against my bare skin and had to turn my face away from the blinding light that came next—a flash burn that erased anything and everything that stood in its way. I heard Volkswagen cuss from above me, only to be drowned out by the sound of metal screeching against metal, glass exploding so hard, so fast, that tiny shards dropped like hail onto the ground in front of me.

And then it was gone. The White Noise cut out sharply as something clattered to the ground and landed a short distance away. The megaphone.

I stretched my arm out, hand groping for the megaphone’s handle. Volkswagen was screaming something that I couldn’t hear over the ringing in my ears, and I was too focused on getting the bullhorn to actually give a damn and listen. A hand wrapped around my bare ankle and tugged me back across the ground—but not before my fingers closed around the handle.

“Get up, you piece of—!” There was a digital squeak, like an alarm, and the man immediately dropped my leg. “This is Larson, requesting immediate backup—”

I pushed myself up on my knees with a grunt, then my feet. The man had his back turned to me one second too long, and when he finally realized his mistake and looked over his shoulder, he was rewarded with a face full of metal as I swung the megaphone.

His radio clattered to the asphalt, and I kicked it out of his reach. Both of his hands went up, trying to shield his face from another hit, but I wasn’t going to go easy on him. I wasn’t going to let him take me back to Thurmond.

My hand closed over his exposed forearm, and I yanked it, forcing him to look down at me. I watched his pupils shrink in his hazel eyes before blowing back out to their normal size. The man had a foot of height on me, but you never would have known by the way he dropped to his knees in front of me. He hadn’t even been able to catch his breath, let alone keep me from walking straight into his mind.