The Darkest Minds Read Free Page A

bulging out of her skull, the ripple of suddenly loose skin—stayed burned into the air like a photonegative far longer than the explosion of pink, misty blood and clumps of hair against the bus.
    The kid standing next to me dropped into a dead faint, and then there wasn’t a single one of us that wasn’t screaming.
    The PSF hit the ground the exact same moment the girl was tackled into the mud. The rain washed the soldier’s blood down off the bus windows and yellow panels, stretching the bloated dark lines, drawing them out as they disappeared completely. It was that fast.
    The boy was looking only at us. “Run!” he yelled through his broken teeth. “What are you doing? Run—run! ”
    And the first thing that went through my mind wasn’t What are you? or even Why?
    It was But I have nowhere else to go.
    He might as well have blown the entire bus up for the panic it caused. Some kids listened and tried to bolt for the fence, only to have their path blocked by the line of soldiers in black that seemed to pour out of the air. Most just stood there and screamed, and screamed, and screamed, the rain falling all around, the mud sucking their feet down firmly in place. A girl knocked me down to the ground with her shoulder as the other PSFs rushed for the boy, still standing in the bus doorway. The soldiers were yelling at us to sit on the ground, to stay frozen there. I did exactly as I was told.
    “Orange!” I heard one of them yell into his walkie-talkie. “We have a situation at the main gate. I need restraints for an Orange—”
    It wasn’t until after they had rounded us back up and had the boy with the broken face on the ground that I dared to look up. And that I began to wonder, dread tickling up my spine, if he was the only one who could do something like that. Or if everyone around me was there because they could cause someone to hurt themselves that way, too.
    Not me —the words blazed through my head— not me, they made a mistake, a mistake—
    I watched with a feeling of hollowness at the center of my chest as one of the soldiers took a can of spray paint in hand and painted an enormous orange X over the boy’s back. The boy had only stopped yelling because two PSFs had pulled a strange black mask down over the lower part of his face—like they were muzzling a dog.
    Tension beaded on my skin like sweat. They marched our lines through the camp toward the Infirmary for sorting. As we walked, we saw kids heading in the opposite direction, from a row of pathetic wood cabins. All of them were wearing white uniforms, with a different colored X marked on each of their backs and a number written in black above it. I saw five different colors in all—green, blue, yellow, orange, and red.
    The kids with the green and blue X ’s were allowed to walk freely, their hands swinging at their sides. Those with a faint yellow X , or an orange or red one, were forced to fight through the mud with their hands and feet in metal cuffs, a long chain connecting them in a line. The ones marked with orange smears had the muzzlelike masks over their faces.
    We were hurried into the bright lights and dry air of what a torn paper sign had labeled INFIRMARY . The doctors and nurses lined the long hallway, watching us with frowns and shaking heads. The checkered tile floor became slick with rain and mud, and it took all of my concentration not to slip. My nose was filled with the smell of rubbing alcohol and fake lemon.
    We filed one by one up a dark cement staircase at the back of the first floor, which was filled with empty beds and limp white curtains. Not an Orange. Not a Red.
    I could feel my guts churning deep in the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t stop seeing that woman’s face, right when she pulled the trigger, or the mass of her bloody hair that had landed near my feet. I couldn’t stop seeing my mom’s face, when she had locked me out in the garage. I couldn’t stop seeing Grams’s face.
    She’ll come, I