Chapter 21

It had been a long night

One bathroom break, a glass of water, and a couple small loaves of bread that tasted like uncooked flour and sand. They reminded Isaac of when he and Sadina were younger and made sand-pies on the beach. Back then, they'd only pretended to eat them. The young assistant that brought the food and gave Old Man Frypan and Isaac bathroom permissions didn't say a word to either of them and it only furthered the feeling that they were being held as prisoners.

In the morning, as soon as he saw the blonde-haired woman who'd helped take Jackie, Isaac jumped up and frantically pounded on the wall. He didn't care if the glass broke right then and there; in fact, he'd welcome it. "Hey! Hey! What's going on with Jackie?!" The glass in front of his mouth fogged up. The scientist walked over to him, clipboard in hand.

"We're still testing her blood."

"But she's alive?" Relief rushed through Isaac's veins. "You said hours ago that in thirty minutes you'd know if she'd made it—so she did? She made it? She'll be okay?"

"She's in bad shape but is on an aggressive decontamination drip." The woman barely looked at Isaac as she spoke.

He turned back to Frypan to make sure he'd heard Jackie was recovering. He nodded. And Isaac knew what that meant—they had to get out of the pot. "So what happened to her?" Isaac asked the scientist.

"Your friend suffered from a deadly neurotoxin that blocked her sodium channels. This caused her nervous system to shut down." She paused. "You're lucky neither of you had the same thing happen."

The word sodium had really jumped out at him. Was Frypan right about the salt in the stew? "What does all that mean?"

The scientist appeared very bothered with all the questions. "Tetrodotoxin is a common biotoxin in certain species of octopus, puffer fish, worms, toads—"

"The newt." Frypan stood up.

"Really?" Isaac asked him. "The little guy?"

The woman gave them her full attention now. Isaac could see Pr. Morgan stitched above the right pocket of her lab coat and another long set of letters that didn't mean anything to him. "I'm surprised Kletter didn't warn you about all this. . . . Bringing you all the way to California from your safe haven? There are things you need to know, here. It's very common to find birds and other animals dead from newt poisoning. It's part of the evolution that has become an epidemic . . ."

"Epidemic of evolution?" Isaac repeated.

"Yes. When one species becomes more present than others, the entire ecosystem tilts out of balance. Birds, rabbits, even snakes have lost large populations in recent years . . ." Morgan looked over her shoulder to the lab assistants and held up her finger for them to wait a moment.

Isaac tried to make sense of it all, how fragile life could be. "Jackie had touched Newt a hundred times at least and then that bug flew in her mouth and she scraped at her tongue. She put all that toxic crap right into her mouth!" Jackie drank from Isaac's canteen, too. It was a wonder he hadn't gotten sick.

"But she'll be okay?" Frypan asked. "You can get the poison out?"

Morgan nodded, "You're lucky."

But Isaac didn't feel lucky. He felt trapped.

"You got here just in time. Had it been a few more hours, she'd be dead."

Isaac felt a chill, then a rush of heat. He needed to see Jackie. "Take us to her." He hit his palm against the glass. "And Cowan." Morgan just stared back at him. He pounded louder on the glass.

Something wasn't right.

"Cowan is a different case." Morgan slowly unlocked the glass door. Isaac felt a wave of relief. "We'll move you to a lower floor. You'll be able to see them once they're both stable."

Isaac moved to go, anxious to get out of that room. To get the hell out of there for good.

"But first," Morgan said, blocking the exit from the pod. "You need to tell me exactly what you know about Kletter and where she is." She raised her eyebrows and folded her arms. She knows.

Frypan stepped froward. "What did you mean when you said Cowan was a different case?" The professor could cross her arms and raise her eyebrows all she wanted, but she couldn't deny a Glader of old some answers. "Something else from nature's evolution?"

Morgan shook her head. "Not from nature." She let her arms fall to the side. "Look. What Cowan has, we've only seen once before." She looked over her shoulder as she motioned for Isaac and Frypan to step out of the glass pod. Isaac gladly exited that prison but Frypan moved slower; his eyes didn't leave the corner of the lab where the curtained pod had revealed the flash of metal the day before. Could the Griever have been a figment of their imagination? Maybe they did have some slight poisoning from touching Jackie or drinking from the same canteen.

"But that other person recovered, they're alright?" Isaac asked, hopeful. If Jackie was okay, Cowan had to be okay too. He needed Ms. Cowan to be okay for Sadina.

Morgan frowned. "Where I saw it before wasn't in a person." She looked over her shoulder again and pointed, "It was on that shelf over there."

Isaac traced her gaze to a lab shelf filled with glass instruments and surgical equipment.

Huh?

What kind of infection did Cowan have?

War tactics.

Funneling the enemy.

That's exactly how these islands, jutting from the ocean like the shoulders of giants, made the Orphan soldier feel. They left him little choice of direction. Like the ship was being led in by an enemy. A heavy wind blew along the choppy waters and made it all the more difficult to steer.

"We're going to get stuck," he said to Orange, but the truth was they already were. If he could turn the Maze Cutter around and try again, go back out farther west, outside of those little islands—he would have. "It's too shallow." The ship creaked from below. "That's not from water pressure, it's the rocks." He lowered the ship's speed to five knots. The wind howled at the windows.

Orange looked through her binoculars at the maze of islands ahead. "I don't know what happened. Two little landmasses turned into twenty big ones." The rest of the crew were on the deck, braving the gales and gawking at the beauty. The greenest of trees pointed up from the bluest of waters, shapes and colors that probably resembled the Earth before the sun flares and disease. It was breathtaking, but they'd have plenty of time to enjoy the niceness of it all when the boat became grounded. "Oh ship . . ." Orange pointed ahead. A shipwreck. One that looked like it had been there a hundred years.

Minho steered quickly to the right, away from whatever rocks and ship-destroying things were over there, trying to hug the other side of the waters, but Orange was quick to correct him. "There's another wreck over there. A newer one. You've got to stay right in the middle."

His hands shook on the wheel as he steered the boat between a changing center of water through long skinny islands. Dozens of islands. A hundred different paths. The wind pushed the ship back and forth, rougher than the tide at night, reminding them how small and insignificant they were. He'd been prepared for Cranks, and war, but not quite the wrath of nature, herself.

"Get everybody inside!" he shouted. The last thing he needed was someone falling overboard. Orange scrambled to get the islanders and Roxy away from the railings and below deck. Despite Minho's best efforts to steer to the center of the channel, the Maze Cutter hit something beneath. An ominous sound rumbled and groaned and scraped.

Minho looked desperately at Orange and she nodded.

She ran downstairs to check on things and came back within thirty seconds. "Yeah. We're taking on water."

"What do we do?" Dominic trailed right behind her.

Minho took the ship back up to ten knots, no longer caring about damage. Only speed. "Grab your stuff; we're docking farther south than we planned."

"My assistant will take you to the lower level," Morgan said. Old Man Frypan still couldn't take his eyes off the black curtain covering the corner pod, but Isaac was more concerned with the look on the young assistant's face. The fire in her eyes hadn't calmed down a bit from the day before.

"And that's where Cowan is?" The assistant only stared at him as if he were responsible for killing her dog or something. And then she walked away.

Morgan motioned for Isaac to follow the angry girl. "Cowan is in a separate safety pod on the lower level. You'll be able to talk with her through the glass." Isaac pulled Frypan's sleeve to break his stare from what haunted the old man behind the curtain. He snapped out of his trance and they caught up to the assistant. Isaac didn't care what they called the glass rooms, they weren't for safety. They were cells. He and Frypan didn't have a plan beyond telling Cowan what they'd learned about her illness and the folded-up Griever they'd seen—or hadn't.

"We'll see you for the dispensing this afternoon," Morgan shouted after them.

"Dispensing? What's that mean?" The assistant did not respond. She didn't even turn around. He and Frypan could barely keep up with her. For a second Isaac thought he saw a braided grass bracelet sticking out of her back pocket, along with a knife, but it couldn't have been. Couldn't. He rubbed his empty wrist.

The young woman led the two of them down a hallway, down a stairway, then another hallway before reaching a room with several glass pods like the one they had been in. Isaac exchanged glances with Frypan. There were at least a dozen of them, all empty except the one that held a very pale Ms. Cowan. She looked even worse than before. The layout of the bottom floor was almost identical to the lab upstairs; Isaac scanned the corners but there were no pods with black cloths hiding Grievers behind them. Grievers. He had to tell Cowan.

"Why's it gotta be in the basement? Nothing good happens underground," Old Man Frypan muttered as he glared at all the pods within the room. The assistant went to the next pod over to set up cots.

"Isaac, Frypan! Where's Jackie?!" Cowan shouted through the glass as soon as she saw them. Isaac couldn't tell if it was the lighting in the Villa or the stress on Cowan's body, but the skin around her eyes looked almost purple.

Isaac spoke loudly to ensure she could hear him. "Jackie's going to be okay. They've got her detoxing from a deadly bacteria the newt had on its skin." He examined Cowan's setup. They'd given her a bed and several buckets. She was hooked up to an IV.

"Oh. That"s all it was . . . the newt?" Cowan rubbed her face. "I'm glad she'll be okay."

"Us, too." Isaac nodded, but he had bigger things he needed to discuss with Sadina's mom before the grumpy assistant made him and Frypan move to their separate safety pods. "Ms. Cowan," he said through the glass, "we need you to come clean with us. With Old Man Frypan, here." Isaac didn't want to have to tell Frypan about Kletter using the other kids as tests too. But with Cowan's illness and possible exposure to something so rare, they all needed to be on the same page. "It's not just about Sadina's blood . . ."

Cowan's chin dipped and she seemed ready to pass out. "I'm so sorry, Frypan. I never intended for you to get wrapped up in this," she coughed, "but Kletter's request went beyond just our family's bloodline, it was for as many bloodlines as we could escape the island with." The way Cowan said it, escaping the island, confused Isaac. The island was their home, they didn't need to run from anything there. This, now, here is what they needed to escape. He could only dismiss it as the sickness moving through her, confusing her, but she sounded like she'd been brainwashed or something.

"I know," Frypan said nonchalantly. This shocked not just Ms. Cowan but Isaac, too.

"You knew?" Isaac asked.

"What?" he chuckled, "I might be older than mung beans but I knew this wasn't just an off-island adventure for the Cure. As soon as we arrived at the Safe Haven all those decades ago, I knew that one day, someone would come looking for us. It was never going to be over, till it was over."

Cowan piped in, weakly. "It's still about the Cure. There was never anything nefarious other than lying to Congress and omitting some of the intentions. Having the potential use of control subjects within the same family bloodline if we needed them back on the island." Cowan coughed for what seemed like the hundredth time in the last few minutes. "But the Cure is the goal. Hear me? We owe it to the rest of the world to—" She coughed herself right into a fit until she hacked up liquid into a bucket.

Isaac couldn't tell if it had come from her lungs or her stomach, but either way, it wasn't good.

Isaac watched the sullen assistant open up the second pod and prepare it. "Ms. Cowan, did Kletter give you anything? Did she test something on you that you might have had a reaction to?" He looked back at Frypan to gauge how much he should tell her. The way Cowan blinked slower and slower, Isaac wasn't sure they should bother her with the threat of a machine upstairs that may or may not be a Griever.

Cowan seemed to be searching her memory. "I tested the sleeping substance before using it on the crowd at the amphitheater. Do you think . . . I had a reaction to that, it was so long ago though?"

Isaac questioned Frypan but he shook his head. "No. It wouldn't have been that. But, is it possible that she gave you something else while you were asleep?"

Cowan coughed again. "No."

"Maybe testing to see how it would react with a part of Sadina's blood?" Frypan asked as Isaac watched the assistant walk back over to them, dragging heavy feet.

"Kletter?" Cowan's purple-hued eyelids blinked. "You think she gave me something else when I was asleep?" She grabbed her head.

"Annie Kletter was a thief and a liar," the assistant finally spoke. Her eyes widened as if she dared anyone to correct her. "Is that why you killed her?"

"Annie?" Isaac had never known Kletter's first name, but for some reason Annie didn't fit. It was too nice of a name for that woman.

"We didn't kill her," Frypan said.

"No. We didn't kill her." Isaac was more than alarmed that the Villa even knew Kletter was dead. He'd hoped to use it as leverage to get out of there, but instead the walls were closing in on him. He had nothing left but the truth to use as a weapon. "A guy named Timon and a woman named Letti did. . . . I don't know which one actually slit her throat because I had a bag over my head before they kidnapped me, but they killed her." He was rambling, hating the memory.

"Where's the rest of the crew?" The assistant moved her left hand to her back pocket, where her knife was.

"The rest of our group is on their way to Alaska. I swear. We didn't kill her."

"Where's the rest of Kletter's crew?" Her voice had gone from demanding to desperate. "I need to know where they are."

"Kletter's crew from her ship?" Isaac asked, trying to think of something, anything to say about the eight people that arrived on the deck of the Maze Cutter, dead and beginning to rot. "Why?"

"Because my mom was with them."