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  BOOKS BY ALEXANDRA BRACKEN

The Darkest Minds Serial

The Darkest Minds

In Time (an eBook original novella)

Never Fade

Sparks Ascent (an eBook original novella)

Copyright © 2014 by Alexandra Bracken

Cover design and photograph illustration past Sammy Yuen

Chains, textures © Thinkstock

All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No function of this volume may exist reproduced or transmitted in any form or past any ways, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For data address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023.

Designed past Marci Senders

ISBN 978-1-4231-8701-1

Visit world wide web.hyperionteens.com

Contents

Title Page

Books by Alexandra Bracken

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Vii

Eight

Nine

Ten

11

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Xviii

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-3

Twenty-four

Xx-5

20-six

Twenty-7

Acknowledgments

Virtually the Author

For Merrilee, Emily, and the countless others effectually the world who take worked tirelessly to put this series into your easily, with my dearest and gratitude.

In our youth, our hearts were touched with fire.

—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

BLACK IS THE COLOR THAT is no color at all.

Black is the color of a child's all the same, empty bedroom. The heaviest hour of night—the one that traps you in your bunk, suffocating in another nightmare. It is a uniform stretched over the wide shoulders of an angry young man. Blackness is the mud, the lidless eye watching your every jiff, the low vibrations of the argue that stretches upwardly to tear at the sky.

It is a road. A forgotten night sky broken upward past faded stars.

Information technology is the barrel of a new gun, leveled at your heart.

The color of Chubs'due south hair, Liam's bruises, Zu'southward optics.

Black is a promise of tomorrow, bled dry from lies and hate.

Betrayal.

I run across it in the confront of a broken compass, feel information technology in the numbing grip of grief.

I run, but information technology is my shadow. Chasing, devouring, polluting. Information technology is the button that should never accept been pushed, the door that shouldn't have opened, the dried claret that couldn't be washed away. It is the charred remains of buildings. The car hidden in the woods, waiting. Information technology is the smoke.

Information technology is the burn.

The spark.

Black is the color of memory.

Information technology is our color.

The only one they'll use to tell our story.

THE SHADOWS GREW LONGER THE farther I walked from the heart of the city. I headed westward, toward the sinking dominicus that ready the residual of the twenty-four hours on burn down. I hated that well-nigh winter—night seemed to reach earlier and earlier into the afternoon. Los Angeles'southward smog-stained sky was painted with dark strokes of violet and ash.

Under normal circumstances, I would accept been grateful for the boosted cover every bit I navigated the like shooting fish in a barrel grid of surface streets dorsum to our current base of operations. Only with the debris from the attack, the installation of military stations and detainment camps, and the congestion of now-useless, abandoned cars fried by the electromagnetic pulse, the face up of the city had been altered then dramatically that to go even a half mile through the wreckage was enough to become completely lost. Without the city'south light pollution casting its usual foggy glow, if any of us scouted at dark, we had to rely on distant lights from military convoys.

I bandage a quick glance effectually, pressing a hand against my jacket pocket to make certain the flashlight and service pistol were still in that location; both were courtesy of one Private Morales, and would just exist used in accented emergency. I wasn't letting anyone option me up, spot me running through the night. I had to go back to base.

An hour agone, Private Morales had had the unfortunate luck to cross into my path, coming off her patrol of the expressway lonely. I'd been at that place since earlier sunrise, positioned behind an overturned car, watching the elevated roadway shimmering like an electric current under a constant flood of artificial lite. Every hour, I'd counted the number of tiny uniformed figures moving along the section nearest to me, weaving in and out of the trucks and Humvees lined up bumper to bumper like a secondary barrier. My muscles cramped, but I fought the urge to wait it out somewhere else.

Information technology had been more than than worth it. 1 soldier had been enough to arm me not only with the tools I needed to return to base of operations safely, but also with the cognition of how we could finally—finally—become the hell out of this damn urban center.

I looked back and forth twice before climbing over the fallen heap of brick that had once been the face of a banking concern branch, and allow out a hiss of hurting between my teeth as the side of my hand scraped on something jagged. I kicked the object—a metal C that had fallen from its logo—in irritation, and immediately regretted it. The clattering and grating dissonance bounced off the nearby buildings, nigh masking the faint voices and shuffling steps.

I threw myself into what was left of the building's interior, dropping downwards into a crouch behind the nearest stable wall.

"Articulate!"

"Clear—"

Twisting around, I watched the progress of the soldiers moving along the other side of the street. I counted helmets—twelve—as they bankrupt off to investigate the different smashed-glass entryways of role buildings and stores. Cover? I looked around, quickly taking stock of the overturned, singed article of furniture, my body moving toward i of the dark wood desks and sliding beneath it. The scrape of loose debris against the outside sidewalk overpowered the sound of my own ragged animate.

I stayed where I was, nose burning with the olfactory property of fume and ash and gasoline, tracking the voices until they faded. Anxiety kept a grip on my tum as I edged my fashion out from under the desk-bound and along the floor toward the archway. I could all the same see the patrol unit weaving through the wreckage halfway down the avenue, but I couldn't expect, not even a few minutes longer.

When I'd dug through the soldier's memories, stitched together the information I needed, it felt like a block of cement had finally rolled off my chest. She'd shown me the gaps in the motorway's defenses equally surely as if she'd handed me a map and marked them in thick, black strokes. Later on that, it had just been a matter of washing myself out of her retentiveness.

I knew the former Children's League agents would be pissed that this had really worked. Nothing they tried themselves had succeeded, and in the meantime, the hauls from their food scouting had dwindled. Cole had pushed and pushed them to let me try, but the other agents but agreed on the condition that I go solitary—to avoid whatever additional "risks" of capture. We'd already lost ii agents who'd been careless while walking out in the city.

I wasn't careless, simply I was getting desperate. It was time to make a move now, or the milit

ary would starve us out of hiding.

The U.Southward. Army and National Guard had created a virtual barrier around downtown Los Angeles using the elaborate throughway system. The snaking cement monsters formed a tight circumvolve around the inner metropolis, choking u.s.a. off from the outside globe. The 101 was to the north and e, the I-ten to the due south, and the 110 to the west. Nosotros might have had a chance of escaping if we'd left immediately later on climbing back up to the surface from the wreckage of HQ, but...there was that word that Chubs always used: shell-shocked. He said it was amazing whatsoever of united states were capable of movement at all.

I should accept. I should have forced us to go, instead of falling autonomously at the seams. I should take—if I hadn't been thinking about his face up trapped down in the dark. I pressed the back of my hand confronting my eyes, steeling myself against the nausea and stabbing pain in my skull. Call up most anything else. Annihilation. These headaches were unbearable; and so much worse than the ones I used to have after trying to control my abilities.

I couldn't stop. I pushed through the hollow feeling in my legs to a steady jog. I felt the ache of exhaustion at the back of my throat, the heaviness of my eyelids, just adrenaline kept me moving, fifty-fifty as parts of me felt like they were on the verge of shutting downwards. I couldn't call back the last fourth dimension I'd fallen into a deep plenty sleep to escape the waking nightmare effectually usa.

The roads were blistered with peeling asphalt, strewn with piles of cement the regular army had yet to clear. Hither and at that place I passed brilliant dots of color—a cherry-red high heel, a purse, someone'south bike, all dropped and forgotten. Some objects had blown out of nearby windows; the rut from the nearby blasts had charred them black. The wastefulness of the devastation was sickening.

As I ran beyond the next intersection, I stole a look upward Olive Street, my eyes drawn to the glowing field of low-cal that was Pershing Foursquare 3 avenues over. The former park had been transformed into an internment army camp; hastily thrown together, while the rubble of the city still smoldered. The poor people within its fences had been working in the nearby buildings when President Gray launched his attack against the Children's League and the Federal Coalition, the modest band of old politicians united against him. He'd supposedly retaliated because i or both parties had played a office in his almost contempo bump-off endeavour. We'd kept watch on each of these camps, searching for Cate and the others, watching equally the numbers inside swelled as more and more civilians were picked up and held against their volition.

But no Cate. If she and the agents who left HQ before the attack hadn't made it out of the urban center, they were hiding themselves then well that we couldn't find them—non even with our emergency contact procedures.

Another small military convoy—the fizz of radios and growling tires tipped me off two blocks in advance. I bit back a noise of frustration as I took encompass behind the crush of an SUV until the soldiers passed me past, their boots boot upward a cloud of chalky gray dust. I stood up, brushed myself off, and started running.

We—the League, or whatever was left of us—moved locations every few days, never staying in one warehouse long. When nosotros ventured out to detect food and h2o, or went to lookout man the camps, if in that location was even a hint of suspicion someone could have followed us dorsum—we moved. It was smart, there was no denying that, but I was starting to lose track of where we were at any given time.

The silence, thicker now that I had crossed into the eastern one-half of the urban center, was so much more unnerving than the symphony of machine-gun fire and weapons discharging that had filled the air shut to Pershing Square. My paw clenched around my flashlight, but I still couldn't bring myself to accept it out, even equally my elbow scraped against the stucco wall I stumbled into. I glanced up at the sky. New moon. Of course.

A feeling of unease, the same 1 that had been perched on my shoulder whispering night things in my ear for weeks, became a burning knife in my breast—sinking slowly, tearing everything in its path. I cleared my throat, trying to get the poisonous air out of my lungs. At the next intersection I forced myself to stop, and ducked into an old ATM alcove.

Accept a breath, I ordered myself. A real one. I tried shaking out my artillery and easily, only the heaviness remained. Closing my eyes, I listened to a afar helicopter slice through the air, moving at a furious footstep. Instinct—insistent, baiting instinct—was nudging me to swing an early on right on Bay Street, non stay on Alameda Street until I hit its intersection with Seventh Street. The latter was a more than-directly route to our electric current base on Jesse Street and Santa Fe Artery; the quickest style to give the others the details, class a program, and get out.

But if someone were watching or tracking me, I'd be able to lose them on Seventh Street. My feet took charge and pushed me east toward the Los Angeles River.

I got a cake and a half before I saw the shadows moving upward Mateo Street toward Seventh Street. My punishing pace came to an abrupt end—my hands flew out to grab myself against a mailbox before I spilled out into the middle of the street.

A sharp breath blew out of me. Too close. This is what happened when I didn't have the time to slow down and actually make sure the street was clear. I felt the repeat of my racing pulse behind my temples and reached up to rub them. Something warm and sticky smeared against my forehead, but I just couldn't bring myself to care.

I kept my head and body low equally I moved, trying to see which direction the troops were headed in now. They were already way also close to our base—if I doubled back, I might be able to outrun them to the warehouse and warn the others to bond.

But they had but...stopped.

At the corner of the intersection, they'd walked right up to the smashed-in facade of some kind of hardware store and stepped over the busted windows and into the building. I heard a express mirth, voices—and my blood slowed to a crawl in my veins.

They weren't soldiers.

I moved upward the street toward the store, running a hand along the side of the building until I reached the windows and dropped downward into a crouch.

"—where did yous find this?"

"Expert shit, man!"

More laughter.

"Oh, God, I never thought I'd be then damn happy to meet bagels—"

I looked over the ledge. Within, 3 of our agents—Ferguson, Gates, and Sen—were hunkered downwards, a pocket-sized spread of nutrient in front of them. Gates, a quondam Navy SEAL, tore into a bag of potato chips so hard he near carve up information technology in one-half.

They have nutrient. I couldn't become my head around it. They're eating food here. The disbelief was so numbing I had to work it through 1 thought at a time.

They aren't bringing the food back for the rest of united states of america.

Was this what was happening each fourth dimension a group went out? The agents had been then insistent on going to spotter for supplies themselves; I'd assumed it was because they were afraid if whatsoever of the kids got picked up, they'd immediately rat out the grouping's current location. But was this the real reason? And then they'd go showtime dibs on whatever they turned upwardly?

A cold, icy fury turned my fingers into claws. My broken nails cut into my palms; the sting of hurting but added to the churning in my tum.

"God, that's good," Sen said. She was a beast of a woman—alpine, with muscles packed under taut, leathery pare. There was e'er this expression on her face like...similar she knew where all the bodies were cached considering she'd put them there herself. When she deigned to speak to any of the states kids, information technology was to bark at us to shut up.

I waited through the silence that followed, anger flaring with each second.

"We should get back," Ferguson said, starting to rise.

"They're fine. Even if Stewart beats u.s.a. back, Reynolds is there to make sure he'south not shooting his oral cavity off again."

"I'thousand more than worried nearly..."

"The leech?" Gates supplied, with a belly express joy. "She'll be the last one in. If she fifty-fifty makes it dorsum."

My brows went right up at that. Leech. Me. That was a new 1. I'd been called so

many worse things, the only part I found offensive was the idea that I couldn't handle a trip back and forth across the metropolis without getting caught.

"She'southward far more valuable than the others," Ferguson argued, "it's just a matter of—"

"It's not a matter of anything. She doesn't obey u.s.a., and information technology makes her a liability."

Liability. I pressed a fist against my mouth to keep the bile down. I knew how the League handled "liabilities." I likewise knew how I would handle any amanuensis who tried.

Sen leaned dorsum, bracing her hands on the tile. "The plan stays the same regardless."

"Adept." Gates balled up the purse of chips he'd just demolished. "How much of this are we bringing back? I could become for another bagel..."

A tub of pretzel sticks and a bag of hot canis familiaris buns. That's what they were bringing back for seventeen kids and the handful of agents that had been stuck behind babysitting while the others went out to collect food and intel.

When they started to climb back onto their feet, I flattened myself against the building, waiting for them to step through the window and glance each way down the intersection. My hands were still clenched when I stood and started abaft them, keeping a good half block betwixt the states until the warehouse finally came into view.

Before they crossed that final street, Sen held a lighter up higher up her head, a single flame that the agent posted on the roof could meet. There was a faint whistle in response—the bespeak to approach.

I ran, closing the final bit of distance before the woman could start climbing up the fire escape afterward the others.

"Agent Sen!" My voice was a harsh whisper.

The woman's caput swung around, one hand on the ladder, the other reaching for the handgun tucked into the holster of her combat gear. It took me a moment to realize I'd had my ain paw clenched around the gun in my jacket pocket the whole fourth dimension I'd been stalking them downward the street.

"What?" she snapped, waving to Gates and Ferguson to go along up the fire escape.

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