I jump, I zip, I fly. The temple, the ferns, the stones, the secrets: they are nothing more than a blur of wind and wonder, for just a little while. And then my feet find solid ground again on a second temple—the lodge—hidden among more ferns, more stones, more secrets.
“Ready?” Pellegrin says. We are on top of the lodge, where Ava and the man—Stark, she’d called him—were talking while I hid below, by the canal. There’s the rope ladder, I note, crumpled in a heap at the base of the barrier wall. Pellegrin’s lab must be close. “You’re going to have to trust me on a few things once we get inside holding.”
How far will Pellegrin and Dad go to convince people of their loyalty? Not so far as killing Alexa, I hope. Surely not.
The night air is fresh but thick. I take a deep inhale and follow him inside.
SEVENTY-FOUR
PELLEGRIN WEARS AN earpiece just like Gray’s. He touches it as soon as we’re inside the lab, holds up the other hand in a universal wait for a second sign. Guess we’re not going to holding just yet.
“Good on our end,” he says, not to me. “You?”
We are inside his lab, which is a crisp contrast to where my father works. I always imagine labs as being perfectly white, but this one is softly lit and the color of a spring sky. There are three more dental chairs, also mint green, and three silver tables with identical sets of tools. The far wall is lined with a counter full of microscopes, test tubes, beakers full of colorful liquid, and various office supplies like masking tape and Sharpies. A corkboard covers almost the entire wall, with innumerable samples of fern and vine and palm and moss—amid who knows what else—pinned to it.
Sorry, Pellegrin mouths to me. “How long has she been out?”
My ears perk at this. I continue pacing the lab, try my best not to look like I’m hanging on his every word.
“I should go ahead and give it to Seventy-Three, then?”
It could be anything. I’m not sure I want any it Pellegrin might offer, especially if it comes from this lab.
Two of the walls are mostly windows, ones that overlook the canal. It’s probably a beautiful view during daytime—how very nice for Pellegrin that he gets to operate on unsuspecting innocents while surrounded by such a peaceful atmosphere.
Pellegrin rummages around in a drawer near the microscopes, so I occupy myself by checking out the fourth wall. This one is full of screens—a grid of nine—but they don’t look like they’re for surveillance. A small silver keyboard sits, lonely, on the countertop below. The meticulous spotlessness of this lab is the most striking difference from the Aries office.
“I’ll let her know,” Pellegrin says. He pushes the drawer shut until it clicks. “Anything else?”
There’s a three-dimensional rendering of the entire island on one of the screens, surrounded by ocean. A cluster of red dots glows from one area close to the far northeast shore: Perhaps each dot represents a person? Is this where we are? If so, we’re much closer to the coast than I realized.
“That’s the barrier projection.” Pellegrin’s voice is so startlingly close I practically jump out of my freshly hologrammed skin. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.” He points to a gray line that circles most of the way around the island. “This is how we deflect unwanted visitors,” he says. “We’ve anchored the line at eight hundred points so it stays in place, and the line projects filaments of light that stretch as tall as the Freedom Tower. If you look at it from the outside, it looks like the ocean goes on forever.”
“That . . . is kind of amazing.” It feels like so long ago that we were on our boat, when Hope and Finnley first spotted the island and Alexa couldn’t see it. “What about this?” I point to a swath of blue at the bottom of the screen. “Most islands are attached to the bottom of the ocean, aren’t they?” It looks as if the entire island has been scooped from a larger hunk of land and set adrift. Sky above, water below. If Alexa had ventured much farther out to sea that night when the guys arrived, she might very well have fallen off.
“Your dad ever talk about protocells when you were a kid?” he asks. “Artificial reefs, like they crafted to keep Venice from going under?”
I nod. “I remember a little bit. That’s what this is?”
“This island was one of a few prototypes we built for Envirotech when we first started researching biosynthetics, materials that can heal themselves. We grew the foundation to be like limestone, but porous, so it makes a sturdy base without being in danger of sinking. And this layer”—he swipes a finger across the screen—“we built with ancient reed technology out of Peru. Everything on top of it, we cultivated on our own.”
His finger moves to a thin green line underneath the island. “This is the tether—it holds us in place and automatically lets out length so our island can rise with the sea if needed. We’re basically a living raft that never moves.”
I’m speechless. My father is brilliant, but this man is an off-the-charts genius.
“Sorry for so many questions—but—this? What is it?” I say finally, pointing to an enormous blue triangle. It spans much of the Gulf and stretches all the way out into the Caribbean.
“That’s the magnetic barrier,” he says, not fazed by my barrage of questions in the slightest. I guess it isn’t often he gets the chance to talk about the things he’s so passionately created. “Just one more way to maintain maritime control. Our ships are equipped with charts so they’ll know when and how to adjust their compasses.”
“And Lonan’s people?” If they make their living out of intercepting Wolf ships full of spies, they’re sailing the exact same water. “How do they know how to deal with it?”
But I already know the answer, as soon as I ask for it. Knives at throats have an uncanny knack for producing information, Lonan told me, when we were on top of the world.
“They . . . have their ways,” he says.
It turns my stomach to think of Violent Lonan, so I stare harder at the map on Pellegrin’s screen. “And you invented all of this?” No wonder the Wolves snatched him up for their cause. I don’t want to know what they’re holding over his head, what he gave up in order to help them.
He nods. “You sailed in through here.” He points to a narrow opening on the west coast side. “And this is where you’ll sail out. You’ll need this,” he says, placing a small silver case in my hand. It’s like trying to hold ice, metal straight out of the borderline-too-cold refrigerator. “Open it.”
Three syringes line one side, held in place by snug elastic. Two are full of amber liquid. “Sedatives?” I ask. “And where exactly am I sailing?”
“We’ll get to that,” he says. “And, yes, those two are the sedatives. Just in case Ava wakes up and overtakes the control board, you might have to fight off the others.” I open my mouth to ask, and he adds, “Your friends.”
For all his words, he’s not the clearest communicator. I hold on to my logistical questions for now. “What happened to Ava?”