Total pages in book: 114
Estimated words: 110757 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 554(@200wpm)___ 443(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 110757 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 554(@200wpm)___ 443(@250wpm)___ 369(@300wpm)
There’s nothing he can say that will restore my trust in him, but I thought he’d at least try. I thought he’d grovel. Instead, he seems to be over it, not even acknowledging what we had. What he destroyed.
I’ve been waiting for him to say he never lied. Willing him to. Technically, he didn’t, but he intentionally let me believe he was always on the right side. The side fighting against injecting unconscious people with a compound that changes who they are. Aromium is dangerous. It heightens women’s sex drives so they’ll get pregnant, and then at Rising Tide, their babies are taken from them and sent to another camp to train as soldiers for Soren Whitman’s militaristic new world order.
“The archery group is waiting for you,” Marcus tells Amira.
She nods, glancing at me. “Thanks for the lesson.”
“Of course. We’ll work more after dinner.”
I meet Marcus’s dark gaze again, wondering what my face is giving away. Can he tell how much I still care? How much I still want him? I won’t give in to the pull, but it’s still there—a taut, invisible cord I’m always aware of.
I miss him. I hate him. I need him.
Breaking our eye contact, I take a deep breath and remove my hair tie, distracting myself by combing through my long dark curls and wrapping my hair into a ponytail.
“Nova, I’m going to the lab,” I call out as I walk away.
Training has become my outlet. The lab is my respite. It’s the only place I can go and shift my focus to something other than Marcus.
Cool air washes over my sweaty skin when I walk into the underground lab. Dr. McClain is hunched over a microscope, his shoulder blades jutting out and creating harsh angles beneath his yellowed lab coat.
His illness is the elephant in the room. Instead of gaining weight and looking healthier since he came back to our camp a couple months ago, he’s declining. He’s bony and doesn’t have much of an appetite. It’s rare for him to leave the lab; he often sleeps here.
“Good morning.”
He gives me a quick glance, unaware that it’s early afternoon. It’s easy to lose track of day and night when you’re underground, and it’s even easier when you’ve become a mad scientist obsessed with your work.
“Morning,” I say back.
The lab was built for a team of scientists to study the people, plants, and animals they’d injected with aromium. It has all the equipment we need, but keeping it sterile is impossible. We do the best we can.
Papers and notebooks filled with our handwriting are scattered on the counters—my writing just barely legible and McClain’s neat and blocky. Glass cylinders and jars with the bright-blue extract we withdrew from the flowers used to make aromium line a shelf, and rats skitter in the small cages on the back wall.
“Every variation is safe for human consumption,” McClain says. “At least a human without aromium.”
I furrow my brow and walk over to him. “You tested them on yourself?”
He doesn’t even look up from the microscope as he grunts a single-note response.
I could push him on it. Tell him that’s not in our plan and it’s not safe. But I know what’s driving him is more important than those things. His guilt weighs him down—understandably.
McClain led the research and development of not only aromium but also the airborne virus that wiped out most of the world’s population in a matter of two months. He put together a team of twenty-six scientists to work with him on the project, including my mother and Marcus.
They were all injected with aromium themselves. McClain wasn’t. He must not have thought the risk to his own life was worth it. So yeah, he’ll never be able to remove the lead suit of guilt he wears.
“I’ll do blood draws on the rats,” I say, going over to the sink to wash my hands again.
We wash up before entering the lab and often when we’re in here. Though we don’t have a perfect working environment, I don’t think we could do this work without running water and electricity. The electricity comes from solar and hydropower, and it’s how we’re able to keep the lab cool.
I don thick gloves that come up to my elbows before handling the rats Niran trapped for us. We’ve injected them with aromium, and we started seeing its effects right away.
Usually, lab rats get increasingly calmer. They realize we aren’t going to hurt them and they stop squealing and biting when removed from their cages. But these rats are getting more aggressive. The first one I take out hisses and struggles, trying to break free. It’s not afraid of me at all.
There are different strains of aromium, and it seems to affect people differently. It would take years to properly research what it does to the people, animals, and plants that have it inside them. Turning the implant off and on, which we can do with a device in our camp, has its own negative side effects.