Through the Dark (A Darkest Minds Collection) (A Darkest Minds Novel) Read Online Free PDF Page B

I’m putting on the gas, but it gets the job done. I watch the other beard run out of the charred trees, waving his arms through the air. The first one snags the rifle off his shoulder and brings it up to eye level, but we’re too far away. I finally let my eyes drop from the mirror and realize I’m driving down the middle of the road again.
    We’re out of there.
    I don’t know why the relief comes out as a laugh. This is zero percent funny. Zero percent. The gas light is glowing like a red demon and those guys have a car that’s about twenty years younger than mine, but as the minutes tick on, I realize they’re not following. They would have caught me by now.
    Then I remember.
    I glance to my right, at the kid—the freak sitting next to me staring out the window. There’s something almost…I don’t want to say that she looks broken, because I know she is. They all are; otherwise we wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place. It’s more that her face has gone completely blank, and she’s staring at the passing forest but not seeing it. The reflection I see in her window, with the blood caked beneath her nose and across her forehead, makes me feel like she’s kicking me all over again.
    It is kicking me all over again. I can’t even get that part right. It is not human. It is a living creature with needs, but it is not one of us.
    “Did you do something to their car?” I ask, surprised at how rough my voice sounds. I worry for a second I was somehow screaming without hearing or feeling it.
    She nods.
    “That makes you what?” I almost don’t want to know, because I know the answer is not going to be Green. My luck is never, ever that good. I can barely keep the stupid color system straight. They tried to model it after the old terrorist warning scale. That whole threat level is orange, so you should feel above-average levels of fear that someone is going to blow up your plane . That system. I think Red is when the kid can explode things or start fires, Blue means they can move shit around, Yellow is…
    Shit. Yellow is messing with electricity. Like frying cars. Holy shit.
    “You’re Yellow?” I ask.
    It’s only when she nods that I realize I haven’t heard a single word out of her.
    “What? You too good to talk to me?”
    She looks at me like, Give me a break, her dark eyebrows drawing sharply down.
    “You can’t?” I press. “Won’t?”
    She doesn’t answer and I have to tell myself to stop. This whole not-talking thing works for me. It’s easier to think of her as a freak if she can’t or won’t whine about being hungry or start screaming until her lungs burst. And anyway, I don’t care. I definitely do not care. Ten grand, sitting next to me.
    “Any chance those guys can come after us?” I ask, because, in the end, that’s really all that matters.
    Nope. I see the answer in her face. There’s a bit of pride there, too.
    It takes five full miles for me to realize that whatever she did to the skip tracers’ car, she can just as easily do to mine. If I’m remembering right, the handbook says that they can manipulate electricity only through touch, so I just need to keep her hands in one place and her mind convinced she won’t be able to escape. I jerk the car onto the shoulder and throw the parking brake on. My “supplies kit” is nothing more than an NAU duffel bag full of whatever crap I could buy off the policemen who got let go in the economic crash. Handcuffs. Some zip ties. A Taser that doesn’t work but I feel could be a pretty good threat.
    My hands are still shaking, and it’s embarrassing and awful, and it makes the fact that I can’t figure out how to use the zip ties that much worse when the girl has to do it herself. I feel her silently judging me as she slides the flat end through the end with the nub. She puts her hands through and then tightens the loop by taking the flat end between her tiny pearls of teeth and pulling. When she finishes, the kid puts