Crimson Shore (Blue Arrow Island #2)

Chapter 1

“When my brother put his newborn daughter in my arms for the first time, I loved you from that moment. Anything I do to keep you safe is well worth it. You’re all I have left.” - Excerpt from an unsent letter by Virginia Marsden to her niece

Briar

I don’t feel great about punching my best friend in the face so hard she staggers and drops to the ground, but it had to be done.

“Okay,” Amira huffs, quickly rolling to her stomach and getting into a crouch. “I get it.”

She’s a quick learner, but I’m a ruthless teacher. I spent a week coaching her in hand-to-hand combat—now it’s all execution. And her lessons are like the ones my father gave me and my sister. Unfair, but effective.

Your opponents won’t tell you a hit is coming. You’ll be on your feet one second and on your back the next, and before you take another breath, you’ll be dead.

I carry my parents with me. Dad’s combat lessons were grounded in his love for us. He wanted me and Mae to be able to defend ourselves against any opponent. I want the same for Amira.

She gets to her feet, fists up to protect her battered face. The girl can take a punch, but I don’t want her to have to take them from men who are twice her size and much stronger than either of us.

“First strike usually wins,” I remind her. “Don’t hesitate.”

She goes for my knees with a sharp kick. I evade it, grabbing her foot, twisting it, and shoving her back to the ground. Dirt from the training arena clouds into her face when her palms land.

I’m on her, lightly pressing the toe of my boot into her side. “I’m about to fuck up your insides. Move, Amira!”

She groans and starts crawling away.

Zara, watching us while she fletches arrows, tips her chin at me. “Fighting weaker opponents gets you off, doesn’t it?”

“Eat shit.” I shoot her a disgusted glare. “We’re training.”

“You don’t have to injure people to teach them. I never broke a bone learning.”

She’s never letting me live down Amira’s broken finger from a couple weeks ago, even though it was Amira’s fault.

“That’s probably why I’m a better fighter than you,” I fire back.

“You mispronounced arrogant bitch.”

I turn, closing the distance between us. If it’s an ass kicking she wants, I’ll deliver.

Someone grabs a fistful of the back of my T-shirt and pulls me backward.

“Don’t take the bait, Briar.”

I don’t even have to turn. That smoky, deliberate voice belongs to Nova, who never loses her temper the way I sometimes do. Zara knows how to set me off.

Nova’s right. I shake my head and go back over to Amira, who’s on her feet now.

“Zara. Training drills.”

The clipped command forms a fist around my heart. Even after three weeks of us not speaking to each other, Marcus is never far from my mind. And due to both of us working in camp security, he’s usually physically close, too.

Everything is different now. I used to fight my urges to jump into his arms and beg him to take me back to our room for slow, sweaty sex. Now I have to keep myself from punching him in the balls every time I see him.

The knife still feels freshly buried in my heart. Every day of the past few months on Blue Arrow Island has been a battle to survive. Life on the mainland is a struggle under the regime, too, but at least the rules are clear.

The island is a fresh tropical hell where death awaits in many forms. The cutthroats in the Rising Tide tribe. Genetically modified animals. Controlled climate extremes. The ticking time bomb inside all of us from aromium, the experimental compound Marcus helped create.

It almost killed him. The days he spent unconscious, hanging between life and death, were agonizing. I’ve never felt a betrayal as deeply as his, but I didn’t want him to die. He needs to bear witness to the destruction he helped cause.

“So I should go for the knees, or no?”

Dusty, sunbaked dirt is caked into the sweat on Amira’s face, blood from her nose swirled onto her cheek from her wiping her hand over it while we sparred.

“It’s not a definitive yes or no. If they’re protecting their face, you can’t go for the throat.

Your goal is always to escape. But if you can’t—like if someone is holding your arms on the ground, knee the groin and bite anywhere you can.

If you can get your opponent onto the ground, taking out a knee will keep them from chasing you. ”

“Amira,” Marcus calls.

We both look at him, my eyes locking onto his.

I used to see caged desire there. A leader first and a man second, the needs of the camp usually trumping what he wanted for himself.

There’s still an intensity in his gaze that makes my heart pound wildly, but I don’t know what it means.

Is he angry? Sorry? It’s him not even trying to talk to me that I’m the most incensed over.

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.

We don’t have years, though. McClain and I are in a race against time. We don’t know who will take over at Rising Tide now that Virginia’s dead. We’re safe from Tiders coming into our camp, but that doesn’t mean they can’t hurt us.

A stabilizer is the key. If we can find a way to treat the emotional volatility and urges to breed and kill that come from aromium, we can covertly distribute it to the Tiders through their well water. They won’t even know.

I have a hope in the back of my mind that we can make an antidote to aromium and render it completely ineffective. It’s a pipe dream though, because soon our research team of two is going to be down to just the twenty-five-year-old with one year of college under her belt.

It’s no longer a matter of if, but when. Dr. McClain is dying.