Blackout (Darkness Trilogy) (18 page)

I
step forward.

The
hallway is lined with white doors and a pristine white floor. Each door has a number on its front, beginning with #100. Now, the message makes sense. I hear the door bolt again behind me as I realize this is where I will find the mysterious #328.

I walk down the lon
g hallway with quick steps. Faster. Faster. Suddenly, a door at the end of the corridor swings ajar. As it opens to face me, I see #321 displayed. Two doctors in lab coats emerge. To keep them from seeing me, I turn the handle of the nearest door and dash inside. The outside is labeled #316.

In the room,
a redheaded boy my age lies on a hospital bed. His green eyes are open, but there is a blankness behind them, as if he’s watching a world without meaning. The brass nameplate above his bed reads Flint Wilson. Flint, a DZ name. As my loafers squeak across the floor, he turns his head toward me. His mouth hangs open and I can see his teeth are cracked and crooked—definitely a DZ. When the door shuts, he jerks his attention back to the door.

“Who’s there?” he
calls, frightened.

He struggles against
the white belts that cross his body horizontally to bind him. He looks frantically from side to side, searching for me. Right in front of him, I feel hidden. I wave my hand through the air—in small circles at first, now bigger and bigger swoops—but he doesn’t turn in my direction. He doesn’t look at me at all. It’s as if he can’t see me—and now I realize that’s exactly it: He’s blind.

“
Shh,” I say, trying to soothe him.

“Who are you?” he asks
.

“
I am Phoenix of Dark DC,” I whisper. “I’m not here to hurt you.”

“
You have to get me out of here,” he says. His voice chokes up with growing sadness. His Adam’s apple bobs up and down nervously in his throat.

“Calm down,” I say. “Just tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I lost the Carnival last year, and they threw all forty-six of us in here. Look at me, Phoenix. This is what they mean by
isolation quarters
. First, they chained me to this bed, and then they started giving me these shots. In one day, my vision was gone. Just
gone.
Things went blurry and then they disappeared. All I see is black. They turned the lights out in my eyes,
Phoenix.”

My hand is shaking slightly. I’m glad he can’t see my fear.

“Why?” I ask.

“They’re testing us for something,” he says. “I don
’t know what. The players who won a prize didn’t get thrown in here, but the rest of us did. When they say you lose, they’re talking about your
eyes
.”

I hear the doctors pass by
Flint’s room and walk to the end of the hall. The bolted door opens. A pause grows, and now the door has shut again. They must have just left. I have to make it to #328 before they come back.

“Flint, I have to go,” I say.

“Don’t go, Phoenix!” he calls.

I shouldn’
t have told him my real name. I slip out of the door, and I lean against the wall for support. The Easies lied
to us again. The stakes are even higher for winning than I thought. I need to know more. I swallow my fear and hurry toward room #328. Lightly, barely touching the handle, I push down and walk through the doorway. Two beds lie before me, one with a girl and one with a boy. Both are my age and strapped with the white bands. Both turn to look at me as I walk in. They—whoever they are—are not
blind.

“Who are you?”
the girl asks fearfully.

Her heart-shaped face sits beneath curly blonde hair pulled back into a neat
, low ponytail. She looks into my eyes and seems strangely familiar, but I can’t remember where I’ve seen her before. Stepping slowly to the side, I watch as her clear blue eyes follow me. She looks at the boy in confusion, wrinkling her faint eyebrows together.

“Are you
a prize this year?” she asks.

“No, I’m
a player,” I say warily.

“A DZ!” they say together.

“I need to know something, but I don’t have much time to stay,” I say. “Dr. Fletcher gave me the number of this room and told me to ‘be like #328’ if Mr. Chauncer ever got me. Do you have any idea why he might have told me that?”

I look back and forth between their
pale faces as they nod their heads in understanding. Now the boy seems familiar, too. He has a sharp chin and a wide jaw. His shaggy black hair is long, and also pulled back into a low ponytail. But I feel too pressured to try and figure out how I know them. I put my hands on my hips and wait. Time is ticking.

“
He said that,” she says, “because we’re immune.”

“Immune
to what?” I ask.

“The blindness,” she says. “They officially declared us immune last week.
Laser and I are the only ones who haven’t gone blind. We’re both from Dark Charlotte. Dr. Fletcher was one of our doctors until he left for the Frontier…”

“Why did he go to the Frontier?” I ask.

“We had three main doctors,” Laser says, his voice slow and deep. “Dr. Fletcher, Dr. Harris, and Dr. Travers. They weren’t like the other doctors we’ve seen. They cared about us. Anyway, when they found out we were immune, they thought something about our city had protected us. The water, I think. But they wanted to test their theory first.

“
Mr. Chauncer wouldn’t let them do it. He said the Dark Zone was uninhabitable, and he wasn’t about to let his best doctors die looking for a panacea. Mr. Chauncer said he would send a team down there, but he needed time to build it. Our doctors didn’t want to wait, so Dr. Fletcher and Dr. Harris staged a crash by Dark DC. Dr. Travers was able to pass through the hole they created in the Frontier while everyone was distracted. He’s still loose down there somewhere, trying to test their theory.”

The breach was a distraction after all.

“There’s a virus spreading,” Laser adds.

“What?” I ask in horror.

“It hasn’t reached this coast yet, but it will,” she says. “Every state west of Montana has been lost to the disease.”

The news almost knocks me over as I put everything together, and it’s all eerily making sense.
There’s a virus causing blindness spreading north of the Frontier.
That’s
why the Easies really started the Carnival. The Frontier forms a natural quarantine, so no one in the Dark Zone has been infected yet. I clench my fists. The Families never cared about giving back—they cared about getting their test subjects. That and they wanted their children to have dates without getting infected. That would explain the No Touching rule, too. All this time, it was because they didn’t want to get infected.

“Thank you, Laser,” I whisper, “and…”

“Sunshine,” she says.

Now I remember how I know them.
From the magazines. Laser and Sunshine got disqualified from last year’s Carnival for being in love, and they ended up in the Chauncer Laboratories. I shiver. Star and I could still end up here, and God only knows if we’re immune.

There’s so much more I want t
o know, but I’m too nervous to stay any longer. Getting caught could be the end of me. I slip outside and jog back down the hall. I reach the door at the end of the hallway and bang on it with my fist. I want to get out of here.

The Suits let me out. I drop my coat and mask on the
aluminum floor. Before they can tell me to pick it up, I run upstairs. Higher. Faster. As I move, the lights in the stairwell start to flicker. I ascend in flashing white and black light. Jumping up the stairs, I realize Mr. Chauncer was telling the truth about one thing: The world
is
getting more dangerous. We might have lost our electricity in the Dark Zone, but the Easies are losing their vision. The lights around me suddenly flicker back on completely, and my eyes sting in the brightness. My phone buzzes once to interrupt my thoughts. I don’t stop climbing and raise it to my ear.

“Players,” Mr. Chauncer says.
My jaw tightens. “The tri-state area has just suffered a temporary blackout. All power has been restored. The Carnival will
continue, and your schedules have been altered accordingly. All players who are not currently in The New York will be caught and promptly disqualified…”

I
drop my phone and stop for a moment before reentering the door to my floor. The Carnival is back on, but for me, it’s become a different game. Burn’s words repeat in my head for the second time today. “If you love something, you set it free.” The phrase doesn’t just apply to Star. It applies to every DZ stuck in that goddamn basement. I’m going to set them free, too. I’ll win this electricity and then I’ll take them all back with me to the Dark Zone. We’ll leave the Easies alone to suffer in the blackest darkness of all.

END OF BOOK ONE