The Darkest Minds - "I'm a red,"

2.

After being taken off the bus, a couple other SUVs show up, enough to take all of the kids from the bus.

The one I go in has Catherine in it, she's asked me to call her Cate. She sits next to me in the back.

For the drive back to Los Angeles, she explains everything'. Why she came and the organization they're apart of. What I'm about to become apart of.

Cate is apart of the organization called the children's league, the leader is John Alban, ex-homeland security.

The goal of the organization is to reveal the truth about the camps and how the kids are being treated in them. Their hope is to garner enough outrage to take the president out of office. Something I can get behind.

There are plenty of agents in the Los Angeles headquarters, all joined to get more information or because they hate Gray.

Cate is a minder- an agent who is assigned a team of PSI kids. They have some small teams made up already, but they're all made up of one colour. Cate's team is mixed, having Vida, a blue, and me, a Red.

The other one, Vida, came in a couple weeks ago and hasn't started training yet. They were never really supposed to start training. The league never planned to have kids within it but after that truck load, they realized they needed to do something.

But after the raid on my bus, she wants to start training us for tactical fieldwork, including all the other kids. The program is kind of experimental, using the kids from Vida's group and mine, labelled the Virginia 7.

The entrance to HQ, as Cate calls it, is in a parking garage. All the kids and agents take turns, it's choreographed as to not look suspicious.

She takes me first, walking to the end of the garage and tapping her ID against a black scanner.

An elevator rumbles up from somewhere below, opening its doors to let us in.

Once we're inside, the doors close and it starts its descent.

A couple seconds later the door opens and we're hit with heavy, damp air. This must have been a sewer at one point.

We trigger a motion detector, as the small bulbs on the side of the tunnel illuminate, showcasing the drab and mouldy walls.

"It's not much, but you'll get used to it. I promise it's not as bad as it looks," Cate says, leading me through the Tube.

I thought it would be one block of this acrid smell. Nope. It's four blocks of walking and trying to refrain from gagging.

But finally, I can see the end of the tunnel, two steel doors. Cate waves at the camera as we near the entrance to the rest of HQ.

The access pad by the door beeps three times before it flashes green. Cate clips her ID back onto her belt. She sighs as the doors open, treated air comes blowing out.

She grabs my arm and with a kind, smile says "Welcome to HQ, Jia. Before I give you the full tour, I'd like you to meet Vida, the rest of our small team,"

"Okay," I respond, looking at the yellowing papers in the long hallway.

"Those are all of our agents draft notices," she tells me. Gray started the conscription at the start of the crisis. The age has moved up to anyone in their thirties or below.