Chapter 11
“It’s extraordinary. Humanity will never be the same, and every scientist on our team is awestruck. History will remember us for this.” – Excerpt from the journal of Ingrid Voss, leader of Island Three
Briar
When she’s well enough, Ellison has some celebrating to do.
After all these years, we finally have a dentist in camp. As the only healthcare provider, Ellison has done her best to handle toothaches and other dental issues that arise, but she has no dental training.
“How many years were you a dentist?” Nova asks Wendell Dade, one of the prisoners who came on the last boat.
“Let’s see.” Wendell pushes up his glasses, which are missing a lens. “Before the virus, seventeen years. And since the virus, I’ve done what I can for people.”
“And what was your crime against New America?” I ask.
He stiffens. “Their soldiers captured two of my friends. I helped rescue them.”
“Tell us more about the two friends.”
“Shayla and Brynn. They joined our group, I don’t know, like a year before they got captured.
We were just passing through and we were going around Atlanta, but they got us anyway.
” His gaze lands on the black X inked onto the back of one of my hands.
“Brynn was marked. We knew they’d kill her if we couldn’t get her out. ”
A prickling sensation creeps up my spine. “Is that what they do now? Kill those women right away?”
His expression darkens. “Usually. They do public executions to deter women from using birth control.”
My stomach hollows out. “Public executions?”
“Fertility rates have dropped in the past couple of years. No one knows why.”
I glance at Nova, whose expression is stoic, as usual.
“If we set you up in a space, are you able to check the wounds of the other prisoners and give basic medical care?” she asks Wendell.
“You mean the incision sites where your nurse practitioner took out the devices that were implanted in us on the boat?”
“Yes, and whatever else comes up. Our usual provider is unavailable.”
“What happened? We heard someone was kidnapped.”
“This is a one-sided Q and A,” Nova says. “You’re on the A side, so yes or no?”
“Yes. I mean, I’ll do my best, but I’m just a dentist.”
I give him a reassuring smile. “We work with what we have, and we just ask that you do what you can.”
He pushes his broken glasses up again. “I will. Also ... there’s a woman in the cell with us who is experiencing very heavy vaginal bleeding. I’m concerned for her.”
“For how long?” I stand up.
“The past two days. I told one of the guards, but he said it’s probably just her period. It’s worse than that.”
Annoyance flares in my chest. I’ll be finding out which guard that was.
“Take me to her,” I say. “We’ll do whatever we can to help.”
Wendell leads Nova and me back to the large holding cell we keep new arrivals in before we question them to determine if they’re safe to be in our camp. Marcus and Nova usually do the questioning, but because of what happened with Ellison, they’re behind.
And now Marcus is gone, which only makes things worse. He didn’t discuss it with anyone, even Nova. Now I’m helping her with questioning people, even though I’m supposed to be working in the lab with McClain.
The holding cell was carved out of a small cliff, so the crashing of ocean waves is a loud backdrop as we go into the cell. In one darkened corner, a slight woman is curled up in a ball, blood soaked into the dirt beneath her.
I go to her, getting to my knees. Wendell already told us her name.
“Cheyenne, I’m Briar. I’m sorry it took us so long to come. What’s going on?”
She focuses her eyes on me. “I don’t know. I just can’t stop bleeding. Nothing hurts.”
“Has anyone done anything to hurt you?”
“No. It’s like I’m having three periods all at the same time or something.”
Her clothes and her palms are smeared with dirt and blood. There’s even some clumped and dried in her blond hair. Three other prisoners, all men, are standing on the other side of the space.
I look up at Nova, who’s keeping an eye on the men.
“We need to get her cleaned up and into a bed. I’ll talk to McClain about treatment. And I think we should pair a security team member with each of the last three. They’ve been in here long enough.”
Cells don’t build loyalty. With Marcus gone, we have to divide our time as efficiently as we can.
“They’re getting food and water,” Nova says, the clip in her tone telling me she disagrees.
I stand my ground. “We could use them in the farm and the garden.”
“I’ll do whatever you need,” one of the men says. “Anything to get out of here.”
I should wait for Nova to make the final call, but when she doesn’t say anything else, I consider the decision made. She picks Cheyenne up from the ground and we all leave as a group.
Carissa, one of the kitchen workers, is exceptionally warm and gentle, so I ask Vadim if I can borrow her for a few hours. She gladly agrees to help Cheyenne get showered, dressed in clean clothes, and into a bed.
“I need to get to the lab,” I tell Nova once we’re alone.
“If those prisoners hurt anyone, it’s on you.”
I knit my brows together, surprised by her attitude. “Fine. I’m just trying to make the best use of our time.”
“I’ll decide how to manage my time.”
“I know you’re pissed at Marcus, but what did I do?”
“It’s what you did to Marcus.”
I hold her fiery gaze. “And what did I do to him?”
“You broke him. He’s not the monster you seem to think he is.”
I sigh inwardly. “I don’t think he’s a monster. But he’s not innocent, either.”
“No one’s hands are clean here. Not even yours, so get off your pedestal. He’d burn the world down for you.”
I open my mouth to respond, but she puts her palm up, cutting me off. “If you don’t even want to understand him, you don’t deserve him.”
Her words slice through me, tears flooding my eyes as she turns her back and walks away. I take a deep breath to steady myself.
I hear Nova loud and clear. But I can’t understand a man who doesn’t want to explain himself to me. Marcus hasn’t even tried to make things right. He owes me that.
An hour later, McClain practically collapses into his lab chair after our visit to Cheyenne’s room. It wasn’t even that far—Carissa brought her to her own room in the Sub, which is a short walk from the lab, but it exhausted McClain.
He said it’s impossible to diagnose her definitively with the limited resources here, but he thinks she likely has uterine fibroids, polyps, or adenomyosis.
None of the conditions is life-threatening, but the heavy bleeding could leave her anemic, so Carissa is making sure she gets plenty of food and rest.
When I go over to the rat cages, I find my latest test subject, a scrappy little rat I named Poe, alive and well. Which doesn’t mean our newest strain of stabilizer works, but does prove it’s not deadly.
“You’ll be working alone soon,” McClain says, his tone matter of fact.
I turn to face him, sadness welling inside me. His silence about what’s happening to him has been weird, but hearing him say it out loud is almost worse. I ask the question that’s been eating at me.
“If you weren’t here, with the shield active ... would you still be dying?”
He doesn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
My shoulders sink. “I thought maybe turning on your aromium could help heal you.”
“It may have slowed the process, but I never got an implant.”
Of course not. Why experiment on himself when he had other people to inject with his untested chemical compound? I’m reminded that McClain was a string puller in all of this, not an innocent bystander.
“Didn’t you care about them?” My question comes out bitterly. “The twenty-five, or however many people it was, who were all injected with it, but you spared yourself. Didn’t that feel ... selfish?”
A sad smile deepens the crinkles around his eyes. “It was twenty-six. I wanted to inject myself, but I didn’t make the cut.”
“How is that possible? It was your project.”
“I led the experiment and virus teams, and I required everyone on those teams to pass extensive genetic testing. My genetic predisposition to cancer disqualified me.”
I’m too taken aback to answer for a few seconds. “Cancer?”
“Pancreatic, most likely. It’s progressing quickly. I wanted to complete a stabilizer before the end, but I’m almost out of time.”
My anger dissipates. He’s frail, full of regret, and likely working while in a lot of pain to try to clean up the mess he created.
“So my mom, Marcus, Ellison, Virginia, Pax ... they all passed the genetic testing?”
“Well, not Pax, but his father. They were all chosen for their expertise, but passing the testing was required.”
“What was Marcus an expert in?”
McClain’s eyes light with warmness. “He scored almost perfectly on his medical school entrance exams. He also had a lot of qualities that can’t be quantified.”
I’m so curious about what he was like before, so I can’t help prodding for more details.
“Such as?”
He takes off his glasses, sets them on the counter, and turns his stool so he’s facing me.
“Our genes don’t just determine physical traits and predispositions to diseases and disorders.
They also influence personality traits and behavioral tendencies.
I chose Marcus for my PHP team because he’s intelligent, analytical, strong, and he has the qualities needed for good leadership. ”
“PHP?”
“Partnership for Human Progress. That was the name of the organization seeded by billionaires that I was recruited for.”
“Whitman.”
McClain uses the bottom of his T-shirt to wipe the lenses of his glasses clean, then puts them back on. “And others. Aldous Thatcher and Emily Monrovia were very involved. They bought their way into the original twenty-six, but they still had to pass the genetic tests.”
“So it was about power.”
He shakes his head. “Not at all. You may not believe this, Briar, but our work was intended to help humanity. We wanted to reverse climate change, eradicate diseases, eliminate famine.”
“I do believe it. My mom wouldn’t have been part of something that was going to hurt people.”
“You’re right. None of us set out to do that, including Marcus.”
That hits me hard. I’ve been waiting for Marcus to explain himself to me, but maybe I should initiate the conversation. I hate the distance between us. I’m confused, though, because Marcus resents McClain for being part of something both of them did.
“Why are you both so remorseful, then, if you didn’t do anything wrong?”
“I didn’t say we did nothing wrong. I said we didn’t set out to hurt anyone.” He folds his toothpick-like arms over his chest. “I never had children. Marcus ...” He sighs and looks away. “If I could do it over again, I’d make different choices.”
My throat constricts as I work up the nerve to ask him the next question. “How well did you know my mom?”
McClain looks away. “We had a close professional relationship. She was a force in the scientific community. Nothing lit her up like talking about her family, though.”
Hearing that makes me warm and cold at the same time. I’ve accepted that my parents are gone, but their loss is still an ache I think will always be part of me.
“Do you know how she died?” I hold my breath, wanting to know and not wanting to in equal measure.
“I know it was quick and painless.” When he looks at me, I’m taken aback by the sadness and regret etched into his lean, lined face.
“Did you do it?”
“No. Absolutely not. I tried to save her. It just wasn’t enough.”
There’s a small sliver of peace in knowing she didn’t suffer. “So it wasn’t the virus, then? She was deliberately killed?”
Shame floods his expression. “Yes. And it’s too little, too late, but I am deeply sorry for your loss. She was endlessly proud of you and your sister and she loved your father with everything in her.” He clears his throat. “I need to get back to work.”
He turns away, and I swallow back my tears. I knew it wasn’t the virus that killed my parents, but McClain’s confirmation that they were murdered stokes the fire of anger inside me.
I keep my fury simmering, doing what I have to do to survive and find a way off the island—and I will find a way. Once I’m back in striking distance of Soren Whitman and the men who follow him, I’ll let the flames flare and spread until they consume every one of them.