The Darkest Legacy (The Darkest Minds, #4)

by Alexandra Bracken

“Nothing about failure is final unless you accept it.

“Sounds nearly impossible,” he said. “So, all in a day’s work for you.” For the first time in days, I smiled.

“Zu? Priya?” he called. “I think you’d better come here. . . .” “Every time someone says that, it’s bad news,” I said, taking in a steadying breath. “Well, we didn’t blow up just now,” Priyanka said, dropping an arm over my shoulder as we stepped inside. “How bad can it be?”

Was I really that desperate for friendship, for any real connection, that I’d stopped questioning and analyzing everything that was happening? Had it been worth it to trade control and survival for a few minutes of laughter and living?

“I’m willing to hear your explanation, but I can’t promise I won’t interrupt you with a hard punch,”

“You can. If it’ll make you feel better. Priyanka tells me there are moments I am highly punchable.”

Roman said he hated feeling like he’d been marked as someone’s possession, but I never saw it that way—to me, it was always more of a unifying symbol. A sign that we were family. Now it’s a reminder that nothing is all good or all bad.”

My heart is a wheel. It breaks all the damn time, but, most days, it just rolls on.”

Now . . . now I wondered if they had actually cut out the rot at all, or if they’d only applied a fresh coat of paint over it. Something is happening in America, I thought. And no one wants us to know.

“No. No one’s doing any kind of falling. If someone pulls a gun, and, this being Texas, they likely will, immediately put your hands up and get on the ground.” “How long have you been waiting to say that?” Roman asked Priya. “Pretty much from the moment I forgot to say it while we were on the Turner job.” “That was three years ago.” “It calls for a very specific kind of situation, Roman. I have to feel the moment—”

“Get down!” one of the armed women growled. “Right now, before I plug one into your freak brain.” “Well, you don’t have to be rude about it,” Priyanka muttered.

The smaller girl swallowed, a fat tear rolling down her cheek, silently taking her place in front of me. Doing as she was told. Listening, like school, her parents, and society had taught her to.

There are moments in your life where your consciousness just . . . fades. You disappear into some dark place inside yourself that protects you, even as your body goes through the motions. It’s pure survival, that quiet place. It had kept me from breaking at Caledonia, and it was the only thing keeping me from it now as I slowly unlaced my boots, as I stripped off my jeans, my shirt, every layer until I was nothing but shivering, bare skin. I remembered this.

All that was left was a single truth: I’m not fine.

The scars of what had happened were still there, not glued together to try to minimize the appearance of them, but glowing with thin rivulets of gold—more beautiful for having once been broken.

I had survived, when so many other kids hadn’t. And if I couldn’t at least acknowledge what I had gone through, I was never going to truly be able to prevent another nightmare like it from crashing into the lives of more kids. I was still on my feet. There was still breath in my lungs. I wasn’t fine, but I was strong. And I was going to use every ounce of my power to get us the hell out of here.

“Lady, you have your whole life to be an asshole,” Priyanka said. “Don’t be afraid to take a day off now and then.”

“But if we make it out of here, I am going to kill you.”

It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been given the truth—I should have known to ask. To push. Instead, I’d bought into the lie out of hope, and I’d actively helped them spread it. I needed to question everything. Even myself.

Why was it more important to prove my innocence than it was to get justice for victims of the same system I’d been trying to preserve my place in?

The system wasn’t broken. It was working at full steam—against us. I understood everything so clearly then. We were never going to be given reparations for what they did to us, unless we reached out and took them for ourselves. And we’d never have that opportunity if we hid in the woods, or tried in vain to work with the people who were slowly, steadily, quietly trying to erase us. I didn’t know where that left us, but I was sure as hell going to figure it out. And when I did, someone was going to answer for all of this.

“Um,” Priyanka began, “I don’t know what school of evil you graduated from, but everyone knows you wait to give the overly long explanation of your genius after your plan is in play.”

Let the rooks live with the fear for now.” “No one’s going to be afraid if you give them advance notice!”

Doc, she pointed at me, as if in warning. I pointed at myself. “What? You want me to be your babysitter now?”

The camps and places like this relied on that resignation. That final surrender of your dignity in exchange for routine. Survival in these places often meant accepting the path of least resistance to food, water, safety.

“Did you seriously break into a black-site prison just to yell at me?” Max asked. “You shouldn’t have bothered. There’s nothing you can say to me that will make me feel worse than what I’ve been telling myself. I see them every single night, Priya. Every person we hurt. Every person he had me search for. So, yeah, I surrendered. I wanted the cure. I didn’t want to be used like that ever again. If that’s what you’re here for, you’ve wasted your time. I never took either of you for being fools, and yet, here you are.”

“We were set up to fail. These laws have been slowly knotting around us like a noose and now the knot’s too tight for any of us to escape. The more we struggle, the tighter it gets, the faster we die.”

There would be no going back now. I had seen too much and was too deep into the shadows. But I just needed to see the way forward little by little, until we were through the darkness, and heading toward whatever light was waiting on the other side.

“We need to burn this place down,” I said. “They need to know we aren’t going to just fade away.” “Is this a figurative or literal burning?” Priyanka asked. “Because I’m ready to start spitting fire.”

“Chill,” Priyanka said. “Unless you’re going out vampire hunting, those aren’t going to be necessary. We come in peace, or whatever.”

we’ve learned how to thrive in shadows and create our own light.”

We have the power. We outnumber them. We are in control. And if we couldn’t fix a broken system, we’d shatter it and remake it ourselves.

“See ya in the next shit hole, Rook.”

If they wouldn’t see us as human, I thought, we’d make sure they understood we were something more.

Now that I’d burned through the heat of anger and fear, what I’d found inside me again was quiet. The kind of quiet that didn’t keep you at its mercy, but clarified everything. The comfortable kind of quiet you’d find walking next to someone who no longer needed words to know your heart.

unless you want to swan-dive into my arms, Chubsie? You know how much I love a dramatic reunion.”

“I’m not going to say anything.” That seemed incredibly unlikely.

“I can’t say the thought didn’t cross my mind once or five dozen times.”

“Whatever superior thought is crossing your mind right now,” Liam said. “Whatever insult you’ve been holding back for the last two hours. You think I don’t know?”

This was the person who had lifted me out of the snow and carried me to safety. This was the person who had held me after every nightmare. This was a person I loved. Who I never wanted to disappoint, not ever. But the only answer I had to his offer was I’m not a kid. If I stayed here with them, it would always be this way.

I didn’t want to feel powerless anymore.

“That fucking drive through no-man’s-land, Oklahoma, was the icing on a seven-layer shit cake.”

“What’s in there?” “The last of my patience and a few assault rifles.”

“Why do you look like you missed the bus to the science fair?” He glanced down at himself. “You bought me this sweater.” “Not to wear with that awful shirt, I didn’t.”

“She’s not being careless. She’s desperate,” I said. “We know better than to trust that others have our best interests at heart, but we did it anyway out of hope. That’s the limitation of hope—everyone else’s agenda.”

“I realize this is a shitty system, but it’s our shitty system,”

We would never get back to what we’d been, because we were no longer those same people. That private world we’d created and filled with love and protection had to expand, had to grow and flex into something stronger. There was nothing in the world that would ever be powerful enough to keep us from being there to carry each other forward in those moments when our strength gave out.

If I could call down the lightning and burn out every last trace of darkness for my friends, I would. I would do it in an instant, even if it left me in ashes.

It had been easier to swallow the idea of her choosing to leave Haven behind than it had been to consider the government might have her. But even if I’d known everything from the start, what could I have actually done to help her? I’d only ever had the illusion of power and influence.

“The irony is that these people destroyed my life, but in the process they freed me,” I said. “They brought me to a place where I felt weaker and more afraid than I had in years, but it only forced me to recognize the strength I already possessed. They made me out to be a traitor and gave me the opportunity to discover all the right reasons to rebel. The way forward isn’t to choose the best of two bad choices, it’s finding a way to navigate between them. To create our own path.