Sparks Rise by Alexandra Bracken Page A

washed out of its deep hole by this winter’s rain and made a shelter of this place, and then a home when he realized how many mice risked running wild to get to the dog food. I wasn’t anything more than a heater to it. It stretched out to try soaking in what warmth I had to offer. To—
    Waves of nausea churn in my stomach. I was a Girl Scout for all of two years before the change, and they taught us to identify the poisonous ones, how to avoid them on hikes, what to do if you can’t. But I can’t remember any of it. There’s nothing in the box. My mind is scrambling back through the years, but none of it matters because it happened before I went through the change. I can’t remember how to tell one snake apart from the other, and, in the end, it doesn’t really matter. It’s too dark to see anything. The only thing I know is that I don’t feel right.
    I can’t pretend it didn’t happen, and, for the first time in years, I don’t want to lay here and let luck roll the dice on whether I have to hang around, or if I’m finally getting off this ride. I see now that there’s something for me at the end of all of this. When I get out, no matter how many years it may be from now, I know there is someone who’ll care. If Lucas can’t escape this demented program they’ve set up for Reds, then he’ll need me to find him. I will help him find Mia, and even though I have no idea what to do or where to go from there, none of it matters because we’ll be speeding away, the darkness disappearing into the dust the wheels will kick up. I will outrun this place and protect them both from ever feeling the pain of loss again.
    I shift onto my knees, mind and leg throbbing with my pulse. I need to get someone’s attention—in our cabins, if anything were to happen, we had an emergency button to push. That’s how they knew to come and get Ruby. I don’t have that luxury, and I haven’t understood that it is a luxury until this moment when every single part of me is shaking and panic is making it hard to focus on anything. I gasp in a deep breath, feeling my leg again. My fingers don’t even brush the bite, but my leg feels waxy to me, and aside from the shooting pain, there’s barely any sensation outside of the feeling of sand pouring into my bones.
    What I have is a dark room, and one lone camera somewhere on the wall behind me.
    I stick my hand through the opening that Tildon created in the metal bars. Each time my mind brings up the image of a snake, I stubbornly turn it back to Lucas’s face. No one is coming becomes He’ll come, he’ll come, he’ll come to get me . I don’t want to be a realist. I don’t want to pretend like I’m okay living in this gray numbness anymore. I want to get out of here. I want to live. I want to feel every ounce of pain and happiness life can serve up, because it’ll mean I’ve survived. It’ll mean I’m alive.
    I fit my arm as far through as it’ll go and wave it up and down. Minutes tick down, second by second, until I can’t ignore the way the metal is cutting into my arm and that nothing has happened. I tug on the lock but my hands are shaking too hard to keep my grip. Shuffling back along the metal bottom of the kennel, I pull off my shirt and expose my skin to the cold. It feels good, actually. There’s something boiling just under my skin; I feel it bubbling in my stomach, too, until it starts to cramp. The shirt is pushed out the hole first, and I reach down to grip it, hoping beyond hope that they’ll be able to see the color moving in the dark better than my arm. I wave it frantically up and down.
    Nothing happens, and no one comes, and the longer it takes for me to realize it, the worse I feel. It’s too dark here. Unless the cameras can see in the dark, they have no idea anything is wrong. I could try to scoot the crate back, get close enough to the stacked crates to try to send them crashing to the ground, but it wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t see