84 pages • 2 hours read
Alexandra BrackenThe Darkest Minds
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2012A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 28-31Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 28 Summary
As Ruby and Chubs are tending to Liam’s injuries, Lizzie bursts in to say that Clancy was hurt and needs Ruby’s help. Ruby knows it is a trick, and Liam tells her not to go, but she is determined to face Clancy and free her friends from East River on her own. When she arrives, Clancy is fine, having manipulated Lizzie’s mind to make her think he is lying on the floor. Ruby points out that he wouldn’t have come running if she were injured. He quips he at least “would have walked” (445). He says he’ll keep Lizzie nearby to hold Ruby there a while because Ruby “won’t do anything if it means hurting others—not intentionally at least” (445). Ruby unexpectedly scrapes his face with her nails and is able to use her abilities to tell him to let Lizzie go outside. When she tells him to let them all go, though, she loses control of him.
He freezes her movements, and he acts dismissive about her success at controlling him, but she can tell he is also thrown she was able to do it. There are screams and sirens outside, and Clancy seems to have expected someone to have invaded camp, but he says Ruby will be safe. PSFs come into the building, which surprise him, and he uses his abilities to get them to believe no one is there. Clancy says he is frustrated they didn’t send his Reds, and Ruby realizes that Project Jamboree, the Red military unit, was really his program, not his father’s. She realizes he has power over President Gray, too. Clancy admits his control over his father, but he is angry that someone evidently realized his plan and sent PSFs instead of Project Jamboree after him.
Chubs bursts into the building, using his abilities to knock Clancy down and unconscious. Chubs and Ruby flee the Office. They see that the camp is on fire and that PSFs are marching kids from camp away. Choking from the smoke, they go into the lake and hide together under the dock.
Chapter 29 Summary
After hours of waiting, Ruby and Chubs decide it is safe enough to come out from under the dock. Cold and wet, they worry about what has happened to Liam. Most of the camp has burned down. They go to the Office, which is empty, and they sit in Clancy’s room. Ruby thanks Chubs for coming to find her, and she wonders why Clancy betrayed the camp. Chubs observes that Clancy isn’t a leader like Liam or Jack; he needs to feel powerful and thinks only of himself. Chubs says Jack gave up his life protecting him.
Ruby finds a note on Clancy’s computer referring back to their conversation from Chapter 28 about whether he would come running if she were injured. He writes: “I lied before. I would have run” (457). There is 15 minutes’ worth of battery life left on the laptop, and Chubs uses it to try to find Jack’s family and send his family a message. Ruby looks out the window and pictures what camp looked like during a campfire dinner, with Liam sitting by the fire. She then actually sees Liam walking below. She rushes downstairs and hugs him.
In Clancy’s office, the three friends eat food from the supply office and discuss how Liam escaped with other kids but returned for Ruby and Chubs. They decide to leave again soon in case the PSFs come back, and they pack food. Ruby uses the laptop to search for Gram and finds her living in Salem with her parents. She makes an online call to her parents’ house and listens to the voicemail message, which is her mother’s voice. Realizing her mother and father are now living together with her grandmother, who is also named Ruby, makes Ruby cry.
Chapter 30 Summary
Ruby, Liam and Chubs leave camp, and they find an abandoned car they decide to use to drive to Annandale, where Jack’s father lives in a Days Inn motel. The motel is housing for construction workers rebuilding Washington, D.C. after damage from attacks. Chubs is eager to deliver the letter to Jack’s father himself, and Liam tells him to be careful. Ruby and Liam watch from the car as Chubs walks to the door and hands it to Jack’s father, who yells, pulls a gun, and abruptly shoots Chubs.
Liam and Ruby run to Chubs, who is bleeding. Jack’s father shouts at them. A neighbor calls for an ambulance, but Chubs fears being taken by PSFs. Liam and Ruby carry him to the car. Chubs tries to hold in the blood with his abilities, and he asks them to take him to the hospital where his dad is a trauma doctor, but it is too far away. Ruby sees Jack’s letter, which indicates that Jack’s father was always bigoted against his Psi son. Fading in strength, Chubs begs Ruby to make sure Liam reads his letter. Ruby realizes that there is little choice left, and she presses the panic button Cate gave her in hopes that it will save Chubs’s life.
Cate shows up, along with several SUVs of League agents. Liam promises Cate they will do whatever she wants if she will help Chubs. They load Chubs into one of the SUVs, and Liam embraces Ruby, who is still upset. She feels a hood go over her head, and she loses consciousness.
Chapter 31 Summary
Ruby wakes up in a safe house with Cate at her bed assuring her she will be fine. Martin is also present. After confirming Liam is also in the house somewhere, Ruby immediately begins to plan how to escape, but Cate shows her the agents each have Calm Control speakers. Cate also says they would kill Liam as punishment for her attempt to leave. Ruby asks about Chubs, and Cate says she thinks he made it to a hospital.
Ruby tells Cate she has been at East River, and Martin scoffs, saying he has been more productive. Curious to see, Ruby holds his wrist and witnesses his memory: while planting a bomb in an office building, he was disgusted when a girl he worked with felt regret about people dying. Ruby wipes Martin’s memory and instructs him to leave, telling Cate she thought “he could do with an attitude adjustment” (477).
Ruby hates the idea of sweet-natured Liam being forced to stay and commit acts of violence with the League. She says she will stay voluntarily if Cate will let Liam go. Cate is hesitant but agrees. Ruby warns if Cate goes back on her promise, she will destroy Cate’s life.
Ruby goes to see Liam in his room. She tells Liam to read Chubs’s letter—that Chubs wanted him to. When they open it, it is blank. Ruby realizes that Chubs didn’t write to his parents because he believed he would get home in person, a demonstration of his faith in Liam. Liam and Ruby hold one another. Liam tells her his fantasy narrative of meeting her in an alternate life, without the camps and IAAN, where they are typical teenagers. She listens and cries. She kisses him, and she intentionally takes away his memory of her. She also alters his memory of Chubs, letting him think he made it home.
When Cate returns, Liam doesn’t remember Ruby. Ruby tells him he had a car accident, and the League picked him up. As he is leaving, Ruby tells him to be careful, and she watches him jog away, seemingly happy, from the building through the window. Ruby feels like two people now, the angry person there with Cate, and a person who went secretly with Liam.
Chapters 28-31 Analysis
The last section of the novel, which features faster pacing and a build to the climax, is centered around the three friends’ escape from East River, followed by the unexpected turn at Jack’s father’s that leads them to the Children’s League. It ends with a choice that is the culmination of Ruby’s fears throughout the novel, her deliberate removal of herself from Liam’s memories.
In Chapters 28-30, Bracken’s pacing is fast, with several significant plot developments unfolding in a short period of time to sustain a feeling of momentum and urgency. Within only two chapters, Ruby is tricked by Clancy into returning to the Office, she struggles for power with him, Chubs saves her, the camp is invaded and burned, and Ruby and Chubs find Liam and plan to leave. Both Ruby and the reader have the impression that these changes are occurring quickly.
Throughout the novel, Chubs and Liam have been motivated by the desire to bring Jack’s letter back to his father, something they both viewed as a way to remember their dead friend. In fact, one reason Chubs resented East River is that he viewed it as an obstacle keeping them from this task. Back in Chapter 17, Liam became short-tempered with Ruby for accidentally reading part of Jack’s letter, an indication of how seriously they have taken the letters as sacred, symbolic memorials. When Jack’s father rejects his letter and reacts violently to the memory of his son and to Psi kids altogether, it is a painful reversal of the loving response they had expected from him. It is another example of how adults—even parental figures who should be trustworthy—consistently prove unreliable and treacherous.
In an emotionally intense and climactic scene in Chapter 31, Ruby makes the choice to erase Liam’s memories of her in order to convince him to leave the League (and leave her behind). Bracken juxtaposes the grimness of her actions with the sweet and tender moments before she does it, when she and Liam are especially close, imagining together the life they might have had if they had gotten to live normal lives with their families. That Ruby decides she has to intentionally erase herself from Liam’s head is an ironic turn on one of her greatest fears: that she will accidentally erase herself from the memory of someone she loves. Her actions at the end show her taking power over an anxiety that has haunted her the entire novel, stemming from what happened with her parents and Sam—but taking power in a tragic, painful way. This moment, as well as others in the final chapter, are indicative of Ruby's character development. She is not only unafraid to use her power, but she utilizes it to threaten Cate and to see Martin's memories. Her experience with Clancy has given her confidence in herself, and her sense of community with the Black Betty gang gives her motivation and purpose.
The novel ends on a cliffhanger, with Chubs’s fate unknown, Ruby unhappily committed to the League and feeling unattached to a community she has chosen again, and Liam leaving for home without knowledge of most of the events of the plot, nor any closer to achieving his plan to free the camps. In addition, Clancy is, as far as the reader knows, still at large and still manipulating the president. Because the narrative continues on in additional books in a series, Bracken leaves these plot points open-ended to generate interest in finding out what happens next.
