“We know it is. Cass was pulled out of his sector last week, not by the Resistance, and he’s definitely been compromised,” Lonan says.
Last week, last week: the timing is too perfect. Cass is the prisoner who went missing from New Port Isabel, the reason so many rumors went flying. And people say he escaped on his own—Alexa thinks he ran without her on purpose. No wonder she was so desperate to leave her entire life behind. There wasn’t much left to save.
“Fortunately,” he goes on, “two nights ago, we intercepted the Wolves’ ship before they could plant him back on the mainland. Finnley was with him on that ship.”
Two nights ago—Finnley disappeared from our camp three nights ago, if my count is correct. An entire day seems like enough time for someone to perform a procedure and put her on a ship. The unsettling implication of Lonan’s words, of what he hasn’t explicitly said yet, slams into me all at once. “But that would mean the other ship came from . . . here.”
He nods. “Finnley’s holo-ink was fresh when we found her—we’ve installed a black light to test for the tattoos, back on the ship. The fact that she was here on the island with you, just before, proves this is the place where we’ll find answers.”
“But no one’s here. Everything’s so deserted—we haven’t even seen a single animal since we arrived.” I almost bring up the temple, but decide against it. If someone had performed a procedure on Finnley the day before, surely we would’ve found a lot more than death traps and ruins.
Or they would’ve found us.
“It seems to be an unusual island,” he says, in the understatement of the century. “We’ve sailed past it for months, but it never showed up on the radar, and it was invisible to the naked eye. I suspect some brilliant someone made it that way on purpose.”
“How did you find it, then?”
He averts his eyes. “Knives at throats have an uncanny knack for producing information.”
The crew of the other ship. Nothing comes without the price of blood these days, it seems. How many other ships’ crews have they bled for island intel?
But for all they’ve learned, they still have questions. “You said you came here to find answers,” I say. I want answers, too. The words hologram tattoo are carved into my mind: according to my father’s notes, they were the marks of peace. According to the syringes Finnley and Cass nearly plunged into our necks, peace lives on an entirely different planet. “So. What’s your plan?”
“We’ve intercepted and recovered a good number of the HoloWolves”—I make note of the term, assume it’s used to describe those who’ve been compromised—“but it’s gotten to the point where we have to do more than just detain them in makeshift holding cells on the Resistance island.” He exhales, deeply. “According to this last ship’s crew, there’s a lab, somewhere on this island—and we’ve been told there’s a cure. The beach totem’s map was marked with various symbols, but we’re not sure we’re translating them correctly, so it’s possible we’ll have to backtrack before finding the lab.”
The churning in my stomach says he’s right, despite the fact that this place is completely uninhabitable and void of all the usual signs of life. That there are answers here, even if they aren’t obvious. Precisely because they aren’t obvious.
Whoever is here doesn’t seem to want to be found. Yet they have no problem finding us.
I’m getting a bad, bad feeling about all this. “How do you know they were telling the truth? About the cure, I mean.”
His eyes see something I can’t. The memory of blood as it drips down the throats of his informants, perhaps. “So far, every bit of intel the Wolves’ crew gave us has checked out. We hadn’t been able to find the island, but with their information, we were finally able to. We already knew how the sedative syringes worked on the HoloWolves, but what the crew said matched up with that, too. And the totem map has yet to check out, but there was a map there, like they told us, and we were able to access it with the instructions they gave us.” He shrugs. “Their intel hasn’t failed us yet.”
“Assuming the map does lead you to the lab—what then? You just plan to walk in there and ask for the cure?”
He smiles, but it’s not a bright one. “Yes,” he says. “That’s exactly what I plan to do.”
I smile back, sure he must not be serious. But he just leaves it at that, and the bottom drops out of my stomach. “That sounds like a suicide mission, Lonan. Seriously? That’s your plan?”
“They’ll want me alive.” His words are confident, final. Unnerving. “Or, at the very least, they’ll drag out my death. Which means maybe I’ll at least have a shot at finding the cure, or I can be a diversion while Phoenix goes in to find it.”
It should be comforting that he’s so certain they’ll want to keep him alive—or, at least, not kill him immediately—but, no. Alive means he has information they need, or he’s useful to them somehow. Slow death means he’s done something terrible.
Nothing about any of this is comforting.
“Why would you do that?” The words, the panic: it all spills out of me. “Risk everything, when your plan is so terrible?”
Again, his eyes go somewhere far, far away. “My parents died for the Resistance,” he says. Shakes his head. “They were much better people than me. Also, I believe in what they were hoping to accomplish.”
It hits so very, very close to my heart, a razor-tipped bullet flying on wasp-poison wings. My father lost his life to this war, too. I thought he’d lost it to establish peace on this island. Not anymore.
Lonan isn’t the only one who wants answers. Lonan isn’t the only one who wants to carry out the mission that cost his family their blood.
“The other reason is,” he goes on, “we have cause to believe they’re using the HoloWolves as more than just spies.” He runs both hands through his hair, keeps his forehead buried in his palms. “The Resistance is pretty sure the Wolves are building an army. The sooner we find the cure, the better chance we have at taking down the entire war.”
Of course the Wolves wouldn’t want to fight their own war, now that it’s escalated to the world stage, not when they finally seized the lives of luxury they’d always wanted. It’s terrifying, really, that anyone, anywhere, could be listening in on private conversations on behalf of the Wolves—that the Wolves did this to innocent people without their consent. That the Wolves who turned them into spies—into weapons!—are here, on the island with us. Somewhere.
And then something else occurs to me: “You’ve been totally open with your plans around Cass and Finnley, right? What, did you think you’d just sneak up on the Wolves and find the cure for this without being found out—with spies in your midst?”
He cracks a smile, and it sends a chill straight down to my bones. “Best way to find what you’re looking for is to draw out the enemy and force them to lead you straight to it.”
FORTY-ONE
THERE’S A RUSTLE in the leaves below us.