The Darkest Legacy recap

Previously: a disease killed most of America's children, and the survivors were left with abilities the government answered by locking them in rehabilitation camps, sorting them by colour. Ruby Daly, an Orange able to enter minds and rewrite memory, hid inside Thurmond for six years, escaped, and fell in with the runaways Liam, Chubs and a small mute Yellow girl called Zu, who could draw and release electric current. They found the settlement at East River, run by the president's son Clancy Gray, and lost it when the government destroyed it; Zu was put on a truck heading west and separated from the others for years. Ruby gave herself to the Children's League, later broke with it, and after the League collapsed she, Liam, Chubs, Vida and Cole Stewart allied with an adult opposition movement led by Senator Cruz. Zu found her way back to them. The children's recorded accounts of camp life were broadcast, the assault on Thurmond opened the camp and freed the children in it, and President Gray's administration fell. The camps were closed and the survivors were returned to their families. The cost included Cole, Jude and many others, and the country the Psi were released into had not stopped being afraid of them.

Years have passed since the camps were opened. Suzume Kimura, the girl everyone once called Zu, is sixteen, has her voice back, and works for Interim President Cruz as the public face of the Psi, travelling with an official delegation to events and interviews. The job is genuine and it is also a performance: she is expected to be reassuring, presentable and grateful, and to represent every Psi in the country while doing it. Public feeling toward the Psi has soured since the early relief that followed the camps' closure, and there is real hostility at some of the stops. Vida is part of the security around her, unimpressed by politics and protective in her own abrasive way. Then material damaging to the administration becomes public, and Zu, who had access and a reputation for speaking her mind, is the one blamed for leaking it.

Accused of the leak and unable to prove otherwise from inside the administration that is accusing her, Zu runs. She is a fugitive with a face the entire country recognises, pursued by federal agents, and cut off from the people who would ordinarily protect her. On the road she falls in with two Psi teenagers, Priyanka and Roman, who are travelling on their own business and are careful about how much of it they explain. Priyanka is quick and easy to like, Roman is guarded and unconvinced that Zu is anything but a liability, and neither of them has any reason to trust a girl who was working for the government a week earlier. Zu goes with them anyway, because the alternative is being taken back, and because whatever they are running from appears to be connected to what has been done to her.