Page 24 of Blue Arrow Island (Blue Arrow Island #1)

We lost four of our thirty test subjects to the initial injection. We must move forward, though. All progress comes with a price.

- Excerpt from the journal of Dr. Randall McClain

We’re underground.

The concrete floor of the long, wide hallway we’re in has a gradual incline. The air is slowly getting thicker and warmer. That’s why it was cooler and there weren’t any windows.

“Feeling okay?” Ellison asks, glancing at me over her shoulder.

“Yeah, I’m good.”

“If you need to rest at any point in the next few days, speak up.”

I wonder if Virginia made it back to Rising Tide. Probably, she’s a cockroach. More than once since I got here, I’ve had nightmares about her killing me. Slowly. Quickly. With a knife. With her hands.

I was moments from death that day in the jungle, and vines saved my life.

Plants. They shot out of the jungle in a spectacle that looked like killer computer-generated special effects in a pre-virus movie.

But it was real. It was like when that massive snake came flying out of the jungle like a missile by the waterfall that day.

It might have even been airborne—it was moving so fast it was just a blur.

Impossible. But I saw it with my own eyes both times. Of all the weird shit I’ve experienced on this island, the vines were the weirdest.

Plants attacking a person? Everything I know about science says it’s not possible. And yet, those vines wrapped around Virginia and kept her from reaching me.

After a long walk, we reach a metal door that requires a code to be opened. There’s a slanted covering on the keypad that keeps me from seeing what Ellison keys in.

The door slides into the thick rock wall, sunlight illuminating a triangular opening about thirty feet ahead. I use a hand to shield my eyes from the brightness as we move forward.

Amira is waiting for us when we reach the end of the walkway, her smile taking the edge off my worry.

“You look so much better than you did the last time I saw you,” she says, taking one of my hands and squeezing it.

“Thanks to Ellison.” I give her a grateful look.

“I’m here for anything you need, Briar,” Ellison says. “I have other patients, so this is where I leave you.”

She goes back the way we came, Vance staying about fifteen feet from me and Amira.

She’s wearing the same thick canvas pants and white T-shirt the Tiders wear, and so is Vance.

Amira also has a quiver of arrows strapped to her back, though she doesn’t have a bow.

Her shirt is soaked through with sweat, and her hair, pulled back in a ponytail, is sweaty at her temples.

“I’ll show you everything I know, but I’m still learning myself,” she says.

We start walking. I’m torn between looking around the camp and focusing on Amira, so I can ask her questions.

“If there’s an order over the camp speaker to take shelter at the base, this is where you come.” She gestures at the tunnel entrance I just came out of. “If they say shelter in place, you take cover in the nearest building.”

“I saw Marcus grab you on the beach,” I say. “I thought they killed you. The Rising Tide people told me they kill everyone.”

She pushes her lips together in a thin line. “No. They brought us all to a shelter in the jungle and gave us water. Then Nova explained aromium to us and they gave us a choice to let them turn it off so we could come here, or leave it on and we could be on our own.”

“And you wanted it off?”

She nods. “I don’t want anyone controlling me. From what they said, people can start losing their minds. Killing each other. Did you see anything like that?”

I look over my shoulder, ensuring Vance is out of hearing range. “Yes. That, and the women all want to have babies they don’t even get to raise. They keep the kids in a separate place where they’re training them to be super soldiers.”

Amira’s lips pull down in a frown. “For Whitman.”

She stops walking and squares her shoulders. “See that perimeter wall? It goes around the entire camp.”

The wall is far away from us, but I can still see it. It’s made of massive logs that stretch more than twenty feet into the air. On top of the logs are long metal spikes that come to a point, jutting out in every direction like a porcupine’s quills.

“Damn,” I say softly. “Guess nothing’s getting in here.”

Amira hums skeptically. “You’d think so, but I’ve seen the security team fighting off animals trying to break the wall down or get over it.”

I give her an incredulous look. “What animals could do that?”

She speaks in a low tone so only I can hear her. “Ones with aromium implants.”

A gust of harsh reality blasts into me like a powerful wind.

The wolf that came to me before was much bigger than it should have been.

There’s also the jaguar that tore that Tider apart in the jungle.

I don’t have a clear picture of what Whitman is doing here—yet—but I have a fuzzy one that gets bleaker every time it becomes more focused.

“When they first brought us here, we were kept in a large cell on the outskirts of camp,” Amira says.

She points toward a metal sign on a stake that says “Garden” as we walk past it.

“That’s the camp garden. It’s huge and it has lots of vegetables and herbs.

I think around twenty people work there. ”

She’s trying to give me a tour while we exchange information, so I follow up on what she said before. “How long were you in the cell? Did they treat you okay?”

“More than okay. There were guards there around the clock and they fed us well.” She shakes her head and looks away, then back at me again.

“I guess I felt like everyone we came here on the boat with was on the same side as us, but some of them really are cold-blooded murderers and rapists. One guy attacked a woman in the night and they called Marcus. After some of us corroborated her story”—she takes a deep breath—“he shot the guy in the head right in front of us. He said respecting the other people here is a rule we were all told about and that guy had violated it.”

That’s sobering. Amira points to another metal sign on a stake that says, “Farm” and has an arrow. She follows the path.

“We were questioned individually. I was in the cell for two days, and then I got a room assignment and a guard.”

“Not anymore, though?”

We’re approaching the camp’s exterior wall, which has inset double metal doors, both of them wide open.

She shakes her head. “I had a guard for about ten days. Before the virus, I was an archer. I’ve been shooting my entire life; my mom was an Olympic archer and she made me into one, too.”

My jaw drops with surprise. “Seriously?”

“It’s how I stayed alive after the virus. When I told Marcus and Nova, they put me on the security team. That’s why I was in the jungle the day I found you—my partner and I were doing our daily perimeter check.”

We just walked through the open double doors, and I see that the Dust Walkers’ farm has its own security wall. It looks like the other wall, but the spikes on top of this one are made of sharpened wood.

The wind carries the scents of sunbaked earth, musky animals and sweet hay, along with the unmistakable acrid tang of manure. The ground is covered with a mixture of jagged wood chunks, the earthy scent fresh. Wood waste here must be put through a chipper.

“This place is huge,” I murmur.

“Yeah.” She gestures to the left. “Cows over there. Chickens ahead. Boars...somewhere. I don’t know, this is as far as I came when I got a tour.”

“The people in Rising Tide are starving,” I say softly.

We share a look, her surprise genuine.

“They don’t have anything like this?”

I shake my head. “They have nothing. We were eating algae and grubs.”

She pinches her brows together, looking pained. “And there are kids?”

“They’re kept separate, so I don’t know if they were eating more than everyone else.”

“Hey, keep it moving,” Vance calls from behind us. “I’ve got other things to do.”

“Is he an asshole?” I ask Amira softly, not moving my lips.

“I don’t know. Haven’t heard anything about him.”

We go back the way we came, Vance staying closer to us now. Sweat rolls down my spine, not a cloud in the sky to impede the scorching orb that is the sun. The heat here is oppressive all day, every day.

“Want your hair up?” Amira offers.

“That would be great.”

She reaches into her pocket and pulls out a small strip of fabric, then says, “Turn around.”

I feel her gathering my hair into a bunch at the crown of my head and then braiding it into a thick rope.

“Give me your hand,” she says.

I do, and she has me hold the braid she wound into a bun in place while she uses both hands to secure it with the strip of fabric.

A light breeze washes over the back of my neck, and even though the temperature is in the triple digits, it feels amazing.

“That’s so much better, thank you.”

We resume our tour, stopping at one of several wells around camp. She loans me her canteen and we both get drinks. When I’m drinking, a man and a woman walk past, both waving to Amira.

Unlike Rising Tide, there are trees in this camp that provide much-needed relief from the sun. In the shade of one, a woman is sitting on a stump, her face animated as she reads a book to several children.

A book. I haven’t seen one of those in too long. It looks homemade, the neat letters of the story handwritten and pictures drawn and colored with pencils.

“I didn’t order flies in my stew!” The woman imitates a deep, outraged voice, her face contorted dramatically.

One of the girls laughs and a boy covers his mouth with his hand, his eyes giving away his grin. Their happy expressions give me a light, warm feeling that brings tears to my eyes.

“You didn’t see much of that back in the mainland, either?” Amira asks.

That’s an understatement. I was pretty much a prisoner at Lochlan’s compound. I never saw children. About once a month, I was allowed out to shop under heavy guard.

We go to a big concrete building with lots of windows next. A beautifully painted sign hangs over the door. It’s made of wood and has the words “The Grub Hub” in neat, blocky black letters. Colorful tropical flowers and vines swirl around the words and over the rest of the sign.

Inside, there are large fans mounted in the corners and along the walls of the large space. All of them are running, making the space considerably cooler than the outside. Round tables, some metal and some wood, are scattered around the space, each one surrounded by about eight chairs.

When I see a painting hanging on one wall, I walk over to it, drawn in. It’s big, maybe twenty inches by thirty inches, and it’s magnificent. It’s a soft watercolor painting of a simple cabin in the woods, the northern lights swirling together in shades of green and purple in the background.

My clothes are soaked through with sweat in several spots, but I can almost feel the flakes of falling snow in this painting. More snow is piled in banks around the cabin and it’s accumulating at the base of the windows in uneven rows.

The room opens upward into the angles of the roof itself, two big ceiling fans hanging down slightly and spinning.

The rest of the walls have more paintings, some showing more skill than others, but all making this place feel comfortable.

Some of the art looks like it was done by children, the colors bright and the lines bold.

One, a painting of a blue dog with a tongue that rolls out like a carpet, makes me smile.

“We eat here, but it’s also where people come to hang out when?—”

Amira is cut off by the wail of an alarm through a speaker in the room, making her spine straighten. A deep voice follows the alarm.

“This is a shelter-in-place notification. Animal at the wall, shelter in place.”

I think it was Marcus’s voice. Vance’s hand goes to the holster at his waist, where he has a sheathed knife.

“You girls stay away from the door,” he says, walking over to it.

I exchange an amused look with Amira, both over being called “girls” and Vance seemingly thinking an animal will be able to turn a doorknob.

Vance opens the door, looks from side to side, then closes it and moves a heavy metal bar into place, securing the door against anyone who might try to come in.

“I wish I had my bow,” Amira says.

“I’ve got this,” Vance says. “I worked in security before the virus.”

I hold back about a dozen dry comments. It’s best to stay quiet around people I don’t trust.

To pass the time, I walk around the room and look at every painting. Some are realistic and others are abstract. One is a portrait of a woman with a lined face, her eyes telling a story of hardship and wisdom. Whoever made it is a talented artist.

There’s a savory scent coming from the area behind a door with a “Kitchen” sign on it. A big metal sheet covers the serving area, which has a smooth wooden counter.

I sit down, fatigue catching up with me. Amira is telling me about archery, but I can hardly keep my eyes open.

Marcus’s voice returns over the speaker. “The shelter-in-place order is lifted. The threat was eliminated.”

Eliminated. It’s a sanitized way of saying some animal that belongs here more than any of us do was just killed. That’s reality, though, both here and back in the continental New America.

Kill or be killed.