I tripped over the tips of my tennis shoes as I made my way around the front of the van. With a cloud of bright spots bleaching out my sight, I pulled the driver’s door open the rest of the way. Liam was also still out cold, and no amount of shaking was able to stir him up into consciousness. Zu began to whimper, her cries muffled as she pressed her face against her knees.
“You’re okay, Zu,” I said. “We’re all okay. We’re gonna be fine.”
I untangled Liam’s arms from the gray seat belt and half pushed, half rolled him off the driver’s seat. I wasn’t strong enough to deposit him into one of the back seats, not right then. So he ended up on the ground, wedged between the two front seats. With his face turned up toward me, I could see the muscles around his mouth twitch, every so often turning the corners of his lips up in an unnatural smile.
I stared at the wheel, trying to bring to mind the right steps to getting the van to work. Trying to remember what Liam had done, what Cate had done, what my father used to do. Sixteen, and I couldn’t even figure out where the goddamn parking brake was, let alone if it was actually on.
In the end, it didn’t matter. I could drive with it on or off, apparently, and all I really needed to know was that the right pedal was go, and the left was stop, and there really wasn’t a whole lot more to it than that.
Betty tore through the thickest heart of the smoke, and chased it down the open road until we were finally, finally, finally free of the wreckage, and the air coming through the vents no longer carried the echo of the White Noise into our heads, or smell of smoke into our lungs.
ELEVEN
I GOT MAYBE TEN MILES BEFORE THE BOYS BEGAN TO ROUSE. With Zu still crying in the backseat and me having no idea where we had been headed in the first place, to say I was relieved was an understatement.
“Holy crap,” Liam croaked. He pressed a hand against the side of his head and startled, sitting straight up. “Holy crap!”
His face had been inches away from Chubs’s feet, so his hands went there first, yanking at them like he was making sure they were still attached to something. Chubs let out a low moan and said, “I think I’m going to be ill.”
“Zu?” Liam crawled toward her, earning another yelp out of Chubs as he kicked his leg. “Zu? Did you—?”
She only cried harder, burying her face in her gloves.
“Oh my God, I’m sorry—I’m so sorry—I—” Liam sounded agonized, like his guts were being torn straight out of him. I watched him press his fist against his mouth, heard him try to clear his throat, but he couldn’t get another word out.
“Zu,” I said, sounding strangely calm to my own ears. “Listen to me. You saved us. We wouldn’t have made it without you.”
Liam’s head jerked around, as if just remembering I was there. I winced, but how could I be upset that he would check on his real friends first?
I felt his eyes on the back of my neck as he worked his way back up to me. When he reached the driver’s seat, he collapsed into it, his face drawn and pale. “Are you all right?” he asked, his voice rough. “What happened? How did you get us out?”
“It was Zu,” I began, already well aware of the narrow line I’d have to walk between the truth and what I could actually tell them—both for myself and for Zu’s sake. I wasn’t sure how much she actually remembered from what happened, but I wasn’t about to confirm any of her fears. In the end, all I said was, “She sent one car crashing into the other. It knocked one of the guys out and sent the other one running.”
“What was”—Chubs was having a hard time breathing—“that horrible noise?”
I stared at him, my mouth trying to push the words past my disbelief. “You’ve never heard that before?”
The boys both shook their heads. “Jesus,” Liam said, “that was like hearing a cat go through a blender while being electrocuted.”
“You really didn’t have White Noise? Calm Control?” I demanded, surprised by the anger licking at my heart. What camp had these kids been in? Candy Land?
“And you did?” Liam shook his head, probably trying to clear the ringing.
“They used it at Thurmond to . . . disable us,” I explained. “When there were outbursts or problems. Keeps you from being able to think long enough to use your abilities.”
“Why are you all right?” Chubs wheezed, half suspicious, half jealous.
That was the question of the day, wasn’t it? My long, sordid history with the White Noise included several episodes of fainting, vomiting, and memory loss, not to mention my most recent experience with bleeding profusely out of my eyes and nose. I guess once you’d had a taste of the worst, pretty bad isn’t all that terrible. If it was their first time dealing with it, that would at least explain why they wilted like dead grass after only a few seconds.
Liam was searching my face, and I wondered what he was seeing. All of it? I thought of how his jacket had felt against my cheek, the curve of his spine, and something calm and warm settled in my chest.
“I’m used to it, I guess,” I said. “And Greens aren’t as affected as Blues and the others.” I remembered to add this. A truth and a lie.
Liam offered to trade seats as soon as his face lost that familiar pinched look, and a healthy color began to return to his cheeks. The kid deserved a round of applause for how well he was hiding the tremors in his hands and legs from the others, but I had a trained eye. I recognized the nasty after-bites of the White Noise as the old friends they were. He needed a few more minutes.
“Come on,” he said as the dashboard clock clicked off another minute. “You’ve done . . .” His voice trailed off.
I looked down at him, only to realize he was looking at me—or, more accurately, my bony, busted knees. A moment later, after I returned my gaze to the road, I felt something warm hovering just above my leg and jerked away.
“Ah—sorry,” Liam whispered, pulling his hand back. I watched the tips of his ears go a bright cherry red. “It’s just—you’re all cut up. Please, can we stop for a second? We should regroup. Figure out where we are.”
But I didn’t want to just pull over alongside some random stretch of fence and pasture; I waited until we had found an old rest stop, complete with its red-brick colonial-style finish, and turned the van off the road and into the deserted parking lot.
Chubs took the opportunity to try to empty the contents of his stomach onto the ground but accomplished little more than some enthusiastic dry heaving. Liam stood and patted his back. “Will you help Ruby when you’re done?”
Chubs might have hated me, or wanted to scare me off, but he at least recognized I had played some small part in saving his skin. He didn’t say yes, though, only crossed his arms over his chest and blew out a long, martyred sigh.
“Thanks,” Liam said. “You’re the best, Mother Teresa.”
He went out the sliding door behind my seat and made a beeline for the small cluster of silver water fountains that stood between him and the restroom entrances. Zu followed him out, bounding across the distance with a pink duffel bag in hand. By the time I turned my attention back to him, Chubs had collected himself enough to start poking and prodding me.