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)
“We will,” Stella says. “But what happens if you don’t come back?”
“I will.”
“Trust me, I want that. But we need to plan for contingencies. So if you don’t?”
Briar turns away. Stella is right—we have to remove the emotion from this situation.
“If I’m not back within a week, Nova’s the new leader here. And I want you two to have her back. Always.”
Briar nods, her back to me.
She’s upset, and I get it. If she was leaving this place and I thought she might be in danger, I’d feel the same way.
“None of this information leaves this room,” I say. “I need to decide what to tell the others about this, and we don’t need people panicking. Promise me.”
Nova nods, and Stella says, “I promise.”
I exhale through my nose and say, “Give us a minute alone.”
Nova and Stella leave the room, closing the door as they go. Briar turns to face me, tears shining in her eyes.
“I have a bad feeling about this,” she says softly.
“I don’t want to go. But I have to.”
“I didn’t need anyone before.” She blinks and tears fall onto her cheeks. “But now—”
It guts me, seeing her so upset. I wrap my arms around her, the mossy scent of the cave still in her hair.
“I know,” I say. “I need you, too. I know how to take care of myself, B. I’ll come back to you.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Be careful.”
“You know I will. Don’t worry about me and forget to keep your guard up. Be careful who you trust.”
She pulls back and looks up at me, a wrinkle between her brows. “Why? Is there someone you’re suspicious of?”
“No, but it’s easy to get complacent and put your life in someone else’s hands without realizing it. Keep a gun on you all the time and watch your back. Watch Nova’s too. I know she can be abrasive, but I trust her with my life.”
She nods, her earthy eyes solemn. “I will.”
I cup her cheeks. “This won’t take long. I’ll probably only be gone a few days.”
She furrows her brow, but says, “Okay.”
I lean down and touch my forehead to hers. “This is our chance. I live with the weight of what I could’ve done but didn’t every day. If there’s a vessel hidden somewhere on this island that I didn’t know about, what else is here? We’re going to have the power to end Rising Tide and save everyone in our camp. I’ll find a way to get us home.”
She sighs softly. “We can find Mae.”
“And then we’ll find that monster who hurt you and I’ll show him what hurt really means. We’re going to burn this shit to the ground. This is our opening.”
“Okay. I love you, Marcus.”
“I love you, too. And we’ll be together again soon.”
17
“Whatever this new Idaho group is, we need to end it quickly. They have members who worked in intelligence, the military, and law enforcement in old America. We need to show them they chose the wrong side.” - Excerpt from a message from New America President Soren Whitman to his top advisers
Six Years Ago
Marcus
The lab is quiet when I walk in, several people gathered around Ellison James’s desk.
When I glance over at the oncology nurse practitioner on our team, she’s holding something against her face.
“I’m fine,” she says, the words muffled by whatever’s in her hand.
Yeva, sitting on the edge of Ellison’s desk, drops her brows in concern and says, “Her face got hit.”
I walk over to them, anger tightening my chest. Ellison is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. “Who hit you?”
“Test Subject Two.” She’s talking like she has cotton in her mouth, and when she pulls the bag of ice away, I see why. She has a badly swollen lip, a black eye, and blood on her face.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” another team member, Mariah Kennedy, says.
Ellison shakes her head and says, “I’m fine, really.”
“Why did he hit you?” I ask.
“No idea. I was checking the test subjects and he grabbed my breast. When I told him to stop, he hit me.”
“What the hell? Were you alone in there?”
She shrugs, saying, “Why wouldn’t I be?” though it comes out, “Wha wooden I be?”
Our experiments have shown so much promise that we’re fast-tracking human trials. Our test subjects are being paid a lot of money, and they all had to sign nondisclosure agreements. None of them has any idea what they got injected with, or what we expect it to do to them.
I wasn’t given that information either, but one of the test subjects told me he’d let us shoot him up with more mysterious substances for another two hundred thousand dollars. I questioned him about it and found out none of our fifteen human test subjects know anything about aromium.
Dr. McClain took a team to a string of islands near the Bahamas to pull extracts from plants, and we got good results with a flower extract from one. The compound we created, aromium, is the same bright blue as the flower.