“Thanks for trying,” I say. I tuck my disappointment away with the book, try to clear my head of it and focus on this present moment.
“We should probably get moving,” he says.
“Yeah. You’re right.” I take a deep breath, steel myself for whatever we’ll face when the sedative wears off. “What’s next?” No one ever really knows what will happen next, but still, it’s a comforting thing to ask. A hopeful thing that assumes the day will proceed predictably.
“We continue our treasure hunt”—he shifts to the edge of the roof and curls his fingers into the crevices of the rock wall like he was born climbing—“unless we are found first.”
FORTY-TWO
THE FIRST TIME I cracked open Dad’s field guide, after it became my inheritance, I scoured every page for traces of him: fallen eyelashes, pencil marks on paper scraps–turned-makeshift-bookmarks, mustard stains from when he actually used the guide on recreational camping trips.
Funny, I couldn’t help but think, how the little yellow book that helped him survive in the wilderness ended up being the one thing that outlived him.
I read the pages for comfort, memorized them, especially on days when I should have been eating turkey and cranberry sauce; on peppermint mocha days when I should have been tossing crumpled wrapping paper into piles at my feet; on so very many days when candles should have been plucked from cakes, dripping with wax and freshly wished-upon.
On all the other days, too.
Some pages were harder to memorize than others, like the ones about protocells and biosynthetics, with all their formulas and multisyllabic science words that basically boiled down to this is the future of the world, how we stopped Venice from sinking—our country should embrace the self-healing organisms that protect so much of the rest of the planet. Those were the entries I read purely for Dad’s markings, for the comfort in their familiarity. He wrote most of his notes with blue ink, but also had a thing for colored pencils. Neon’s like poison for my eyes, he always said. Anywhere a normal person would’ve used a highlighter, he used the pencils, tracing light outlines around the letters until they practically glowed.
I also coveted his sketches—like the one that pointed us toward this very island—and the notes he’d made that were completely at odds with the survival subjects printed on the page. Like with that biosynthetics entry, for example, he’d written his notes on top of a section about respiratory physiology, along with a detailed account of one of his early dates with Mom, before they were married: she’d had the worst week. Her cat had just had two toes amputated, and spent the afternoon bumping into everything because he couldn’t see around his giant cone. Mom called to cancel their date—she felt bad for the cat, who was terrified—but then Dad showed up on her doorstep an hour later with grocery bags full of top-notch steaks, Mom’s favorite cabernet, and a bouquet of peonies. Nothing at all to do with respiratory physiology, this entry, except maybe for the way he always said she took his breath away whenever he saw her.
You shouldn’t have, she said.
Why do people so often say the exact opposite of what they mean?
I’d do anything for you, he told her.
Dad was good at pretty much everything he tried. And of all the things he was good at, he was best at keeping promises.
I’m not sure why the field guide—Dad preserved in the field guide, rather, and bits of Mom, too—brings me such comfort. For a long time, I thought I found comfort in it because it was proof that this world was capable of producing great people, when so little evidence of greatness existed. So little evidence of goodness.
But how can that be comforting when this world is what it is?
Maybe it’s because I know, deeply, that they may have taken everything from Dad—his home, his freedom, his me—his life—but that his goodness was the one thing they couldn’t take.
Maybe that’s it.
Maybe it’s knowing they can’t take everything that has always given me comfort.
But if what Lonan says is true—that the Wolfpack alters people into spies, into weapons; that they can take control of a person’s will—there is no comfort in that. There is only horror, and the cold hope that Dad died before they’d perfected the process.
FORTY-THREE
“WHY ARE THEY asleep?” Alexa asks as soon as Lonan and I are back inside the cave. Finnley, Phoenix, and Cass are still exactly where we left them, slumped and unconscious on the cold cave floor.
“I think the real question,” Lonan says, “is why aren’t you taking advantage of the rest time, too?” He passes Alexa without so much as a glance, goes straight over to the far wall where Hope is sitting, on the darker side of the room. “How’s the leg?”
“Clean,” she says. “Thanks. But sorry, I . . . um. I forgot to bring your flask?”
“I’d drink it all today, and that’d be problematic, so it’s for the best. Unless we have any more injuries, of course.” Lonan gives me a look, as if we have secrets. Which I guess we do.
“Sorry,” she says in a small voice. “I’ll try not to hurt myself again.”
I’m certain it isn’t Hope that Lonan’s concerned about—she isn’t the one who turned on us, who attacked us. But Lonan doesn’t correct her. I guess we are holding our secrets in locked cages, for now.
“Aren’t you hot in my sweater?” I say this purely because the silence had started to gape, because it is something to say. My mind is still running circles around everything I talked about with Lonan. “Why would you wear that on a day like today?”
Alexa snorts. “That’s what I’ve been saying for hours now.”
Hope’s pupils are wide and dark, crazy dilated in these shadows. “I—I don’t know? I am a little hot, actually. It was cooler back on the beach.” She pushes the sleeves up to her elbows.
The slick sheen of sweat covers her neck, her chest. Dirt is caked to it where the back sides of her legs have touched the ground. “Maybe you should take it off?”
She shrugs. “I don’t know. After the moss yesterday, the leaves and everything kind of freak me out. I think I’d rather keep my arms covered.”
“At least have some water; you must be dying!” I say. “Alexa? Could you grab her a bottle? And maybe some grapes, too? They’re right there, next to Phoenix’s backpack.”
“Eden?” Lonan’s voice echoes from around the corner. It is so dark that way that I can’t even see his silhouette. “Can you come look at this?”
If he honestly thinks Alexa won’t follow me—Hope, too—he isn’t thinking at all. But he strikes me as the type who overthinks, two, three, even four moves ahead. So what is he up to?
I roll my eyes for Hope and Alexa, like Lonan is this enormous hassle. “Be right back,” I say, then call out, “Coming!”