Page 1 of Blue Arrow Island (Blue Arrow Island #1)

There’s a cost to what I do. It’s too heavy at times. But I’ve brought that cost on others, so I suppose the least I can do is bear it, even if it eventually crushes me.

Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Randall McClain

I’m alive. At least, I think so. Surely the afterlife doesn’t smell like diesel fumes and salt water. It’s been a long time since I breathed in anything but the musty decay of a prison cell.

I shift and raise my fingertips to my cracked lips, a bolt of pain zinging through one of my shoulders. When I open my eyes, overpowering light makes me squeeze them shut again. I’ve been in the dark for weeks; my eyes can’t handle the brightness.

Something nudges my leg. I ignore it, gently running my fingers over my wrists. I’m not tied up anymore. The welts left behind by the binds ache, but it’s nothing compared to my raging headache.

“Wake up,” someone whispers urgently, nudging my leg again.

I squint against the sunlight that floods my eyes, getting into a sitting position. A gust of thick, humid air blasts my ripe, unwashed scent straight into my nostrils.

I’m on the dingy white fiberglass deck of a boat, one of about two dozen people. Some of them are still sleeping.

No, not sleeping. The last thing I remember is guzzling the jug of water guards brought to my cell. My painful, swollen lips and intense thirst tell me I haven’t had water in a long time, and I’m groggy. I was unconscious. And the other people lying on the deck are too.

“We’re here,” the person who nudged me whispers.

I turn to look at the woman sitting next to me, my eyes starting to adjust. Her black, shoulder-length hair has dried blood crusted in it and I can feel the dread in her golden-brown eyes. She glances down at my wrists, and I assume she’s looking at my rope burns.

Then I see them in clear light for the first time—the thick black X tattoos that stretch from knuckles to wrist on the backs of both of my hands.

It’s been several weeks since I was branded with the marks, but I couldn’t see them in the darkness.

It’s like I’m looking at someone else’s hands, the skin familiar but the ink foreign.

She holds out her wrist, bearing the same tattoo. “I’m Amira.”

“Briar.”

“They’re taking us to an island.”

I fight to swallow against the dryness in my throat. I had no choice really, between exile and death for my so-called crime, but I thought exile meant a remote prison where I could plan an escape. How the hell will I escape from an island?

“Get up!” a deep male voice booms. “You shit sacks are jumping off this rig in about two minutes. Stand up so we can get a good look at you.”

I count the guards, all men wearing dark uniforms with the New America flag emblazoned on a large patch on the shoulder.

The flag’s stripes are vertical now, the resemblance to a cell a fitting metaphor.

The guards are a motley mixture of big and small, shaven and unshaven, fastidious and disheveled, because there are only two qualifications to serve in President Soren Whitman’s rapidly growing empire: be male and believe in Whitman’s brutal reshaping of society to serve his twisted biblical agenda.

There are eight of them, all strapped with multiple weapons. One of them, a bulky man with his finger casually resting on the hilt of a dagger sheathed at his waist, studies several of us and calls out, “I’ll do a hundred credits on the biter.”

I force myself to look down and appear demure, though it’s a little late for that. He’s talking about me—I bit the thumb of one of the guards so hard he had to get it stitched up. He was trying to carry a girl out of our cell, and there’s only one reason guards come alone to cells late at night.

I’m sure that same guard, or maybe a different one, got that girl another time. But not that night. That night, she was safe.

“Fifty on that little Hispanic one,” another guard says, leering at Amira.

“I’m fucking Egyptian,” she says under her breath.

“Don’t,” I caution her.

Whitman’s soldiers take extra glee in being cruel to women, and we can’t give them a reason to quietly cut our throats out here, where no one will ever know.

While one guard finishes taking bets, another walks around, kicking the people still lying motionless. Two of them groan and move. Six don’t. He kicks them again, pulling his foot back farther this time to inflict more pain.

“Six dead,” he says flatly. “You want us to throw them over?”

Why are six prisoners dead? What the hell did they do to us?

“Yeah, I’m not burying those fucks,” another guard says. “Toss ‘em.”

I keep my expression neutral as guards grunt from the weight of the bodies they’re dragging across the deck.

One guard has his hand wrapped around a woman’s ponytail.

He pulls her to the edge of the deck and shoves her body into the water, rubbing his palm on the thigh of his pants to wipe off the grease from her hair.

What used to be cruel is now commonplace, and staying impassive to it is how I survive.

We’re approaching a large island, the shoreline ringed with pristine sand the shade of bone dust. A mountain looms on the island’s far side, an ominous sentinel overlooking a thick jungle.

“Can you swim?” Amira asks me in a hushed tone.

I flick a glance at the gently lapping teal waves. “Yeah. You?”

“Well enough.”

Nineteen prisoners remain on the deck—eleven men and eight women. If we work together, we have a better chance of finding safe water to drink and setting up a camp to protect ourselves from whatever’s in that jungle.

One of the guards holds binoculars to his eyes to gaze at the shoreline. “I see ’em. The locals are waiting to welcome you.”

His tone is amused. I close my eyes, take a deep breath in and let it out. Even though I’m weak and dehydrated, I’m only twenty-four years old and in good physical shape. I can make the swim.

I’ve beaten the odds in the six years since the virus hit. Life in New America is brutal for women, and that brutality has sharpened my will into a deadly point.

And as long as Lochlan Murphy lives, so do I.

The head guard gestures to the driver at the helm, and we immediately speed up. I steady my feet as a nearby prisoner falls and knocks another one to the ground.

“On our own or with the others?” Amira murmurs.

“Let’s try the others.”

She nods. We both study the shoreline, looking for the “locals” the guard mentioned.

“Shit,” a man close by mutters.

It takes me a few more seconds to see what he does. My heart falls into my stomach when I make out a person nocking an arrow on a bow. A figure next to him is holding what looks like a spear.

“Who are they?” a prisoner asks from the other side of the deck, cupping a hand over his brows to shield against the sunlight.

“Welcome to Blue Arrow Island,” the head guard says. “Our great leader tried to take care of you fucks and you spit in his face. So now you get to play a little game.”

I cut my gaze back to the island, seeing more people with bows and arrows. Many more. Panic catches in my throat and I have to force myself to breathe.

“We’re dead,” Amira whispers.

But it doesn’t make sense. Why would they bring us here to die when they could have just shot us back in Carson City, where we were imprisoned?

Scanning the entire shoreline, I search for options. Rock formations I can swim to for cover. A quick entrance into the jungle.

“Wait …”

Two people are fighting on the beach. One has a spear and the other is using her fists.

A swift right hook drops the spear holder to the ground, and he doesn’t get back up.

The woman retrieves his spear and drives it into him, more than a foot of the weapon sinking into his stomach.

Then she yanks the spear out of him and walks toward a group of people, unfazed by the murder she just committed.

That’s one hell of a strong woman. I couldn’t drive a spear into someone that deep and then pull it back out like it’s a toothpick in a glazed meatball.

At the other end of the beach, people are yelling and gesturing angrily. I think it’s because of the man who was just killed.

“There are two different groups,” I say in a low tone meant only for Amira.

“Are they prisoners, like us?”

“I don’t know.”

If everyone on that beach is united in trying to kill us, we don’t stand a chance. There are a lot more of them than there are of us, and we don’t have any weapons. But if they’re also fighting each other … that wouldn’t be a bad thing.

The roar of the boat’s engine cuts off, the vessel rocking in the water.

From its sleek design, I can tell this was someone’s prized yacht before the virus.

Now it’s a charter, transporting people to their deaths.

A guard pushes a button, the links of a massive chain clanking as he lowers the anchor.

I look between the two groups on the beach again. A tall, broad man with dark hair stands at the front of the first group, his hand wrapped around a spear.

There’s a woman at the front of the other group, her blond hair blowing behind her in the breeze. She doesn’t have a weapon, but many of the people behind her are holding primitive wooden spears.

A choice between groups led by a man and a woman is an easy one for me. I consider telling Amira which group looks safest, but I stop myself. She seems nice, but it’s always best to share as little as possible. I have to take care of myself; assuming anyone else will could be a death sentence.

Something arcs through the air, drawing my gaze up to the pale-blue sky. It’s an arrow, fired toward the boat by someone on the beach. The guards don’t even acknowledge it. It plunks into the water, out of range.

“Inmates, you have thirty seconds to get off this boat before we start removing you,” the head guard says.

Amira jolts forward and I instinctively put my fingertips on her arm to stop her. Her eyes bulge with worry.

“We have to jump,” she whisper-hisses.

“Wait.”

I don’t want to be one of the first inmates to reach that shoreline. If we hang back, maybe we’ll be able to see what’s going on before we get there.

Someone murmurs a prayer and the thunking splashes of people plunging into the water begin. Amira takes deep breaths as we approach the boat’s edge, nearing the gaps where a protective railing used to be.

She reminds me of Ellery, the first friend I made after the virus hit. We watched each other’s backs and survived in the shadows for more than four months until she was shot while keeping watch as I checked houses for food.

My first post-virus lesson on making friends was short. Don’t .

Sweat trickles down my spine beneath my shirt as I leap off the watercraft’s edge, my instincts screaming to get away from the people behind me and the ones in front of me at the same time.

You’ve survived worse, Briar. Pressure builds diamonds.

For five years, my humanity has been stripped away, piece by piece. If fate wants me to die on this beach, at least the last of it will be taken all at once. I’ll be able to rest.

The cool, crisp water infuses me with new energy. I swim cautiously, keeping my head above the surface. The others are doing the same. No one wants to get within range of the arrows.

We move toward shore in a cluster until we get close enough to make a choice about where we want to exit the water. Most people are going for dead center between the warring groups, probably hoping to make a run for the jungle.

“I’m a hunter!” a man yells from the water. “I can help you!”

My feet find sandy footing and I slow down, looking in every direction. Amira moves with me. We watch as the first person walks up to the beach, quickly going from waist-deep in the water to mid-thigh, to calf-high.

“I’m not your enemy!” he calls out, his hands in the air.

The guy with the spear runs toward him, his brows lowered in a determined expression. Others follow.

“Shit.” Amira’s voice rises with panic. “What do we do?”

The attackers are everywhere. They’re even coming into the water after us now.

I shove my feet into the soggy sand in a bogged-down run, eager to have full control of my legs again. People are screaming. My stomach churns as hands reach for me and I barely evade them.

I grab Amira’s arm, fear clawing up my throat. “Run.”