It almost killed him. The days he spent unconscious, hanging between life and death, were agonizing. I’ve never felt a betrayal as deeply as his, but I didn’t want him to die. He needs to bear witness to the destruction he helped cause.
“So I should go for the knees, or no?”
Dusty, sunbaked dirt is caked into the sweat on Amira’s face, blood from her nose swirled onto her cheek from her wiping her hand over it while we sparred.
“It’s not a definitive yes or no. If they’re protecting their face, you can’t go for the throat. Your goal is always to escape. But ifyou can’t—like if someone is holding your arms on the ground, knee the groin and bite anywhere you can. If you can get your opponent onto the ground, taking out a knee will keep them from chasing you.”
“Amira,” Marcus calls.
We both look at him, my eyes locking onto his. I used to see caged desire there. A leader first and a man second, the needs of the camp usually trumping what he wanted for himself. There’s still an intensity in his gaze that makes my heart pound wildly, but I don’t know what it means. Is he angry? Sorry? It’s him not even trying to talk to me that I’m the most incensed over.
There’s nothing he can say that will restore my trust in him, but I thought he’d at least try. I thought he’d grovel. Instead, he seems to be over it, not even acknowledging what we had. What he destroyed.
I’ve been waiting for him to say he never lied. Willing him to. Technically, he didn’t, but he intentionally let me believe he was always on the right side. The side fighting against injecting unconscious people with a compound that changes who they are. Aromium is dangerous. It heightens women’s sex drives so they’ll get pregnant, and then at Rising Tide, their babies are taken from them and sent to another camp to train as soldiers for Soren Whitman’s militaristic new world order.
“The archery group is waiting for you,” Marcus tells Amira.
She nods, glancing at me. “Thanks for the lesson.”
“Of course. We’ll work more after dinner.”
I meet Marcus’s dark gaze again, wondering what my face is giving away. Can he tell how much I still care? How much I still want him? I won’t give in to the pull, but it’s still there—a taut, invisible cord I’m always aware of.
I miss him. I hate him. I need him.
Breaking our eye contact, I take a deep breath and remove my hair tie, distracting myself by combing through my long dark curls and wrapping my hair into a ponytail.
“Nova, I’m going to the lab,” I call out as I walk away.
Training has become my outlet. The lab is my respite. It’s the only place I can go and shift my focus to something other than Marcus.
Cool air washes over my sweaty skin when I walk into the underground lab. Dr. McClain is hunched over a microscope, his shoulder blades jutting out and creating harsh angles beneath his yellowed lab coat.
His illness is the elephant in the room. Instead of gaining weight and looking healthier since he came back to our camp a couple months ago, he’s declining. He’s bony and doesn’t have much of an appetite. It’s rare for him to leave the lab; he often sleeps here.
“Good morning.”
He gives me a quick glance, unaware that it’s early afternoon. It’s easy to lose track of day and night when you’re underground, and it’s even easier when you’ve become a mad scientist obsessed with your work.
“Morning,” I say back.
The lab was built for a team of scientists to study the people, plants, and animals they’d injected with aromium. It has all the equipment we need, but keeping it sterile is impossible. We do the best we can.
Papers and notebooks filled with our handwriting are scattered on the counters—my writing just barely legible and McClain’s neat and blocky. Glass cylinders and jars with thebright-blue extract we withdrew from the flowers used to make aromium line a shelf, and rats skitter in the small cages on the back wall.
“Every variation is safe for human consumption,” McClain says. “At least a human without aromium.”
I furrow my brow and walk over to him. “You tested them on yourself?”
He doesn’t even look up from the microscope as he grunts a single-note response.
I could push him on it. Tell him that’s not in our plan and it’s not safe. But I know what’s driving him is more important than those things. His guilt weighs him down—understandably.
McClain led the research and development of not only aromium but also the airborne virus that wiped out most of the world’s population in a matter of two months. He put together a team of twenty-six scientists to work with him on the project, including my mother and Marcus.
They were all injected with aromium themselves. McClain wasn’t. He must not have thought the risk to his own life was worth it. So yeah, he’ll never be able to remove the lead suit of guilt he wears.
“I’ll do blood draws on the rats,” I say, going over to the sink to wash my hands again.
