Chapter 3
“The woman who betrayed you will only be remembered as a traitor. Your new wife is a credit to you. I send my heartfelt congratulations on the birth of your son. Given your wife’s beauty, I’m sure you’ll be expecting another one soon.”
—Excerpt from a message from New America President Soren Whitman to New America Supreme Commander Lochlan Murphy
Briar
The next morning, Amira and I are the last ones to arrive at the meeting room for a briefing of Command Team One. It’s deliberate—I didn’t want to make small talk with Marcus nearby.
He’s sitting on a stool, his feet flat on the ground since he’s so tall. As always, he looks good. He’s wearing one of his trademark gray T-shirts, the sleeves hugging his biceps. His hair is getting longish, a few dark strands hanging close to his eyes.
The rest of Command Team One’s members—Nova, Adele, Chase, and Wyatt—are sitting in chairs around the small table in the center of the room. Amira and I take two empty chairs.
Marcus only glances at me for a second before saying, “Let’s get started.”
“We need to check on Niran,” Nova says.
Marcus crosses his thick arms over his chest, shaking his head. “It’s risky enough having one person there. We can’t send more.”
Niran has been surveilling Rising Tide for two weeks now. He checks in over the radio daily when he can. I didn’t realize there was an issue.
“Has he not checked in?” I ask.
“Not for the past two days.”
It’s the closest Marcus has come to speaking to me since Pax told me the truth about him. His complete indifference makes me rage inwardly. How fucking dare he not be as upset about what happened between us as I am?
“Why are we sitting on our asses, then?” I say sharply. “If he didn’t check in, they might’ve found him.”
He could be at the bottom of the hole Virginia imprisoned me in when I was at Rising Tide, getting pissed on and denied water. This is the kind of information that should have been shared with all of us the first day he didn’t check in.
“Niran knew the risks.” Marcus’s deep voice is taut with aggravation.
Everyone in the room seems to hold their breath. The rest of them won’t risk pissing Marcus off. But I’ve never been great at blindly following anyone’s lead.
Marcus didn’t want him to go. He told Niran he was sending Nova to spy on the Tiders, and that made Niran so angry that he stormed out of camp with nothing but a canteen, a radio, and a promise to check in daily if he could.
The two of them are more alike than Marcus realizes.
Not only in looks and age—Niran is almost as tall as Marcus and a little lankier, with a panty-melting smile—but in the way they both want to call the shots.
“So what?” I pinch my brows together. “We’re not just leaving him. He wouldn’t leave us.”
He narrows his eyes, rubbing a hand over his jaw. “I’m not—” An alarm blares from the main area of the Sub, silencing him.
“Fucking great,” he mutters.
It’s the camp-wide alarm that means a boat of prisoners has been spotted approaching the island. This is the first one since Virginia’s death upset the balance of power at Rising Tide.
“This is perfect timing,” I say. “We can go get Niran while they’re all on the beach. A prisoner boat helped me escape their camp.”
“No.” His tone is decisive, of course. It always is. “We’re going to the beach.”
“So more of our people can be slaughtered and we can get a dozen new people to take care of?”
Someone—I think it’s Adele—gasps softly. None of them challenge Marcus. I used to only do it behind closed doors, but he and I won’t be alone behind closed doors again, so out in the open it is.
“It’s my call, and we need to get going.”
“Okay. I’ll go look for Niran myself.”
He gets to his feet, his legs eating up the distance between us.
“The fuck you will, Briar. I’ve never said every decision I make is the right one, but I’m in charge.
Don’t insinuate that I don’t care about the lives of my people.
Niran left against my orders. Play dumbass games, win dumbass prizes. ”
I press my lips together, then say, “Let’s vote on it.”
The smallest hint of a smile quirks on his lips. “All in favor of doing what I said?”
Arms shoot up around the table. Everyone but me and Amira, and honestly, even she doesn’t look fully committed to her choice, her palm halfway up in the air. I widen my eyes at her, annoyed.
“They might have captured him.” I look at the faces around the table. “That could be any of us.”
Amira lowers her hand all the way, but she’s clearly my only ally here.
“We have to go,” Nova says, standing up. “Just because we aren’t going after Niran right now, it doesn’t mean never.”
“Are you with us?” Marcus asks.
I glare at him. “Yes. For now.”
The tension between us is heavier than the thick, humid island air outside the Sub. He holds my gaze for a couple seconds before getting up and reaching for the handgun in his shoulder holster. He takes it out and points it at the ground, then checks the safety and drops the magazine.
Amira tugs on the back of my shirt.
“Come on, we have to get strapped.”
I get up and follow her from the room. It’ll be hard to clear my head for the fight ahead over the new prisoners, but I have to focus and do it.
I can’t be thinking about Marcus when arrows are flying and the stronger, faster Tiders are gunning for me.
Since I killed their leader, I know I’m their top target.
Half an hour later, I’m crouched behind some shrubs, a vine coiled on the ground beside me.
The Dust Walkers who don’t know me well are careful to keep their distance, even though I’m one of them. I get why. The vine is poised to defend me against danger, and the concept of sentient plants is kind of hard to swallow.
My bond with plants on the island comes from aromium.
My aromium isn’t on now, but like Marcus’s connections to wolves and endoliths—small living organisms present in rocks—my connection to plants is there even when my aromium device is switched off.
I’d be worried about it if I had time to stop and think, but I keep myself in motion, training and working on the stabilizer. Worrying accomplishes nothing.
“Stay in formation.” Marcus’s eyes rebuke me when he gives the command, like I defy his every order.
Asshole. My hand is hanging at my side so he can’t see me flipping him off, but I still get satisfaction from doing it.
Wyatt and Chance are always paired in combat, and Amira is usually with Niran. Since he’s not here, she’s paired with Nova.
Marcus and I are together in this one and only way. We’ll be the first team to engage, standing back to back to protect each other as we try to rescue prisoners from the boat while fending off Tiders.
Good thing we have guns and stun sticks. The electric current at the end of the long poles several of us are carrying knocks people on their asses. It’s like a super Taser.
The Tiders have archers, though, and spears. The aromium coursing through all of them gives them a physical advantage, but we have better weapons.
“Tell me if you see incoming arrows,” Marcus says as we run toward the beach.
He has a round wood shield on one arm, and we can shelter under it to avoid arrows. I refuse to carry one. Because I trained for so many years without one, it would throw me off balance in every way.
I can feel the vines following behind us.
As our connection has grown stronger, I’ve learned to communicate with them.
It’s not full conversations or anything, but I can read incoming feelings from them the same way they can read them from me.
They get cranky when it rains several days in a row and there’s no sunshine, but most of the time they’re content.
They’re not so much a them, actually. There aren’t different plants I communicate with. It’s more like a collective communication that all of them are part of. It’s scientifically impossible, but also true.
“Watch yourself.” Marcus’s command is more of a growl, his gaze leveled on Pax.
The lighthearted man I once thought was my friend has one goal burning in his eyes—murder—and a singular target—me.
“Watch yourself,” I clap back at Marcus.
I’m not proud of how childish I sound, especially considering the gravity of our situation.
Marcus intercepts Pax before he can get to me, using the shield to force him to the ground.
“Run while you can, Briar,” Pax yells. “I’m coming for you.”
I can’t watch them. The only thing I know for sure about Marcus anymore is that I can trust my back to him in a fight. I turn to see a woman nearby looking around with wild eyes.
She’s a prisoner, and she doesn’t know she was injected with an aromium device on the boat that brought her here.
The guards do it to every prisoner. If she ends up at Rising Tide, like I did when I jumped from a prisoner boat, she’ll become a breeding and fighting machine with very little say in what happens to her.
“That way.” I point toward the Dust Walkers hidden behind dense brush, waiting for prisoners to take back to our camp.
She’s just started running in the direction I pointed when a thrown spear pierces the back of her shoulder. She cries out and falls forward into the ivory sand.
I find the Tider who threw it and race toward him, reaching him before he can get to the defenseless woman he just attacked from behind. I feint a high hit with my stun stick, then switch to a low one at the last second, shoving the electrified end into his stomach.
He drops to his knees, stunned silent for a couple of seconds. Then he screams like he’s dying, because a good hit with a stun stick makes you sure you are.
I’m on my way back into position behind Marcus when I get a glimpse of tightly coiled, pale-blond curls.