Not an animal—deliberate movement, a parting of the curtain of foliage at the foot of our stony staircase.
I’m so still, so rigid, I could be a pillar of marble, an intricately carved statue with the likeness of oh, crap on my face. Out of the corner of my eye, I see Lonan. As confident as he sounded, with all his talk of drawing out the enemy, it’s clear he pictured himself having the upper hand whenever they actually arrived—not on top of a cave, with nowhere to go but into the fray. Assuming there will be a fray, of course. Which seems likely.
A head of shiny black hair pops through the green, and the fear that froze us evaporates. “Alexa?” It comes out like a sigh of relief.
Lonan isn’t as relieved. In fact, he looks livid. “I told you not to follow us!”
“You told me I had to be quiet if I did.” She tosses her hair, leans down to look back through the foliage. “And it looks like I succeeded.” I win, her I’m-superior smile says.
A few seconds later, a weary-looking Hope hoists her torso up and onto the stones at the base of the staircase. She’s wearing my yellow cardigan, huge on her tiny frame, its sleeves pulled all the way to her knuckles despite this steamy heat. Alexa hooks in under her arms and helps to pull her the rest of the way up.
“Surprise,” Hope deadpans. In this moment—well, in many moments—she and Alexa are stark opposites. It’s like Alexa has leeched all of Hope’s energy, and Hope had no choice but to trail along behind her in a futile attempt to reclaim it.
“Everyone else in there?” Alexa starts toward the cave.
“Proceed at your own risk,” Lonan says. “We’ll be down in a few minutes.” But of course Alexa proceeds as Alexa typically proceeds: heedlessly. Hope follows her inside.
Lonan shifts beside me. I wonder if he’s feeling as jolted as I am, having to put on armor again so quickly after peeling down to our raw, tender layers. Some of what he said rubbed roughly against me—better a few lives lost—a few, I still can’t get over that—yet I find myself connecting with him, our lives both marred by a common enemy. Our top-of-the-world silence was one of the few true moments I’ve shared with anyone in a long, long time.
I lower my voice, just in case Alexa and Hope are still within earshot. “Are Cass and Finnley going to—you know—”
“Remember?”
“I was going to say switch into lunatic mode again,” I say. “But yeah, that, too.”
He runs a hand through his hair. “As far as I’ve observed, whatever made them this way keeps them sane-seeming almost all of the time,” he says. “They’d be less effective spies if they were constantly attacking people. But certain things trigger the attacks, and I’m not sure if there’s someone actively controlling them or if they’ve been brainwashed to react that way in response to, oh, who the hell knows.”
He folds the dish towel that’s likely still wet with my tears, tucks it in at his hip. “And,” he continues, “the holograms only show up in trigger spots and under black lights. I don’t think they’re aware that something’s wrong with them. Generally speaking, that is—Cass knows, but only because Phoenix told him.”
“And Finnley?” I’d assumed he’d been open about his plans with both Finnley and Cass, but maybe I was wrong. It sounds like he’s been more careful than he let on. “What did you tell her you were looking for out here?”
Lonan grins. “Buried treasure,” he says. “So we can buy our way into the Wolfpack’s good graces.”
I think of all I know about Finnley: not well-off, Before, and then left behind to burn her skin raw in the bullet factory. If anyone has reason to crave good graces, it’s Finnley.
“It isn’t technically a lie,” he says, mistaking my silence as a judgment. “I simply didn’t get specific about exactly what sort of treasure we hope to find.”
“Or that thing about the Wolfpack’s good graces,” I add.
“Right. That thing is also not entirely true.”
“At all.”
“At all,” he agrees. “Anything else? Ask your questions now; we only have a little time left before the sedatives wear off.”
The entire reason I came into the jungle today was to ask questions—but now that I have my chance, I’m not sure where to begin.
Or how.
How do I open up to Lonan about my father—my father, whose ideas set off the chain reaction that left Lonan’s parents dead and bleeding on his kitchen floor? How do I fish for answers about his work on the island without laying everything out in the open?
Just like in barracks, I feel like I’m almost not allowed to grieve. Not allowed to wonder.
I’ve come all this way, though, and what if he knows something? What if the only thing holding me back from the truth is my fear of breaking the fragile connection that’s started to form between us?
Trust is always a risk. I have to ask.
I take a deep breath, pull the field guide out from where I tucked it into my pants. “You sail all the time—any idea how to interpret Morse code?” Of all my questions, I settle on this one because it could be the key to unlocking all I don’t understand about this place. Details, secrets. I flip open to Dad’s island drawing, point out the dots and lines that shade the entire ocean.
“Where did you get this? How?”
I can only imagine what he’s thinking—that I have a drawing of the very island he’s spent so many months trying to find. How much of the truth should I tell him? What if the Morse code says something horrible or incriminating? “It was given to me a long time ago,” I say. True enough, safe enough.
“And this is how you sailed here?” he asks, and I nod. “May I?”
It isn’t easy to let go of the book, but I hand it over. He takes a closer look, scans and studies, eyes darting back and forth. He flips forward a few pages, landing on one of Dad’s blueprint sketches, flips back. There’s something he wants to say, I can tell—but then he snaps the book shut, and my entire lunch threatens to come up.
“What? What does it say? It’s something terrible, isn’t it, it’s—”
“No, no, nothing like that,” he says. “I wish I could tell you what it says, Eden. It’s definitely Morse, and I’m decent at it—but only the standard international version. That message, though, it’s written in American Morse code, which is basically obsolete. Whoever wrote it either wrote it to someone with very specific knowledge, or wrote it only for himself.”
My hopes sink. It does makes sense that Dad might have written the message just for the sake of getting it out, that he might have created a record of some secret, deep part of himself to live on even after his death. He was that way, always a journal-keeper, often private.
It’s just that knowing most of him isn’t enough. I want to know all of him.
“Can I—um.” I gesture to the field guide. “It’s special.”
“Oh! Sorry,” he says, handing it over. “Of course.” He doesn’t press me, doesn’t ask why it’s so special.
Maybe one day I’ll work up the nerve to tell him. Maybe he’d understand.