Chapter 25

It should not have surprised her that the woman who killed her mom also resurrected the Grievers of old, but impossibly, she was even more disgusted with Annie after the terrifying scene with Cowan. When the moment was right, Ximena sneaked down the basement stairs without Morgan or Carlos seeing her.

Ximena was done with the Villa and everything to do with it. She pulled out Annie's knife and sheath, onto which her mom had sewn an eagle, and traced the threads. Ximena had promised to sew the truth through the land and she would still do that in her own way. She walked to a small room in the basement, far in the back that held the electrical components. Wires. Cables. Cords. The room smelled of heat and dust and disease. She stood inside for a long time, her knife in hand.

There was no going back.

She cut each and every cord in front of her. Solar wires to pods. Cable cords to safety viewers. Fluid funnels to hydraulic machines. She cut them all, figuring she'd have about eight minutes before Morgan realized what was going on. A minute for each of the dead crew members Annie had slaughtered—and Ximena would make each of them count. She stepped out of the utility room and moved quickly to the islanders' pods.

"Where's Ms. Cowan, is she going to be okay?" Isaac asked frantically as Ximena unlocked his pod. Cowan would be okay as far as the power and machinery she'd been hooked into—she had her own breaker unit on the west side of the property. But Ximena didn't know that she'd ever be okay again.

"She's in a medically induced coma," Ximena told Isaac before she moved over to Frypan's pod. She paused momentarily and shivered at the splintered glass along the front where the Griever had attacked. It had been a close run, Morgan finally shutting the creature down at the last minute. Ximena opened his pod and set him free.

"Thank you," the old man whispered.

"We don't have much time, they'll be down here in about five minutes." She rushed to Jackie's pod.

She wondered if Morgan and the team would miss the islanders more than they missed her. Carlos might not, but that was all. The others would miss having her blood to study and having her on standby if they needed anything—but they'd never truly cared about her.

As soon as Jackie was freed, she ran to hug Isaac. "What's going on? I feel like I'm hallucinating again."

Isaac was teary by the time he let go of Jackie. Then he addressed Ximena. "Thanks for letting us out, but we can't leave without Ms. Cowan."

"Look, I don't care what you do or where you go. Just get out of here before they run some other test, okay?" Ximena threw the pod keys into the corner, remembering how it felt when the Villa once studied her. She was setting herself free. She turned toward the black metal door that led to the outside.

Isaac reached for her. "We can't leave without Cowan. Her daughter, Sadina, supposedly has—"

"Cowan's not going to get better," she snapped at him, forgetting how weak the islanders could be. Even after seeing what they had seen—they still had hope?

"I think we're overdue for getting out of this, Isaac," Frypan said.

Jackie fiddled with her grass bracelet, avoiding the terrible choice.

Isaac didn't stop, as if staying at the Villa were really an option. "I know, I know, but Sadina . . . they were going to come and . . . what about the Cure?"

Ximena opened the door and welcome sunlight poured inside. She debated for a second and a half telling the islanders the truth about things. She held the heavy door open and looked the three of them up and down. Her Abuela would've asked what good was freedom without the truth?

"The Cure is just another lie of Annie Kletter's." Ximena couldn't help but think of the silver ring on her dead skeletal hand. The snake eating its own tail. A perfect symbol for the world when humankind continued to destroy itself. She'd said enough; they could figure the rest out. She stepped outside and let go of the door.

"Wait!" Isaac and the other two followed her, after all. Of course they did. "I get not trusting Kletter, but what if there really is a Cure?"

She looked back at them. If she was going to sew truth in the land to honor her mom, she might as well start here. But they needed to get the hell out of there. "Come on, let's get to the woods, we'll talk and walk. Annie Kletter came to our Village twenty-nine years ago to give us the Cure."

The three immunes were right on her heels.

"So you do have the Cure? But . . ." Isaac took a moment, probably to gather his thoughts. "Why would Kletter tell us that we had to leave the island to help find a Cure if she already had one and took it to your village?"

"Is it a real Cure for the Flare?" Jackie asked. "I mean, it really works?"

Ximena nodded as she quickened the pace. "No one in the village has gotten the Flare in twenty-nine years."

"Then what's the problem? That's almost three decades, two generations, without disease and Cranks and—"

"No generations," Ximena said. "There are no more generations." She let that settle in as they reached the cover of the wooded hills. Ximena pictured her mom and Mariana. They would have wanted to tell the islanders the truth from the beginning. Maybe that was their ultimate downfall and the reason Annie killed them. The truth was a weapon that Annie took away from every single one of those eight crew members, but it would be the weapon that Ximena carried with her for the rest of her life. "Kletter went to your island for a cure from the Cure."

"Oh, man," Jackie said under her breath, obviously understanding.

"The Cure needs a cure?" Isaac asked.

"It created its own type of disease." Ximena looked behind her again to make sure no one on staff was nearby. She was surprised at how well the old man could keep up. "In my village, I'm the only child born in the last twenty-nine years."

"I'll be . . ." Frypan rubbed his eyes. "And you guys wonder why I never trusted any of this."

Ximena continued, ducking under a low-hanging branch. "They studied me here from the time I was born until I was six years old. Then my mom agreed to work for the Villa, trying to help them decode the Cure."

Isaac and Jackie looked at each other. "That's . . . ," but neither of them could finish their thought. Just as the Cure had wiped Ximena's village of children, it wiped the words right out of their brains.

Ximena could only imagine the shock of learning such a thing all at once. "The Cure might rid the population of the Flare, but it also rids the population. They obviously didn't mean to do it, but something about the sequencing that blocks the Flare also blocks reproduction." A part of her wished she hadn't burst their hopes and dreams. "Carlos and his wife volunteered to help Annie's studies because they wanted children. My mom volunteered because she somehow was able to have me. They studied us in those same pods."

"The Cure," Frypan scoffed. "More like the Curse. The truth ain't always the truth." He couldn't stop shaking his head back and forth, as if chastising himself for some reason.

Ximena wanted to hug the old man.

"It's a curse, alright," she said. "The Evolution will cause our extinction."

As they trampled their way through the hilly, dry forest, he tried to process what Ximena had told them about the Cure. How it can save the population while ensuring it ceases to exist. How could both realities be true? It had to be one of the worst things he'd ever heard.

And of course he couldn't let it go. "Okay, so maybe if Sadina's blood really is the cure for the Cure then everything will be okay? Kletter had to have some basis for coming all the way to our island." Ximena wasn't having it, her face saying that nothing would ever be okay again and Old Man Frypan hadn't looked the same since the Griever of old practically stabbed him through the glass.

Ximena walked even faster, as if she wanted to leave the topic behind forever. "Or maybe it'll just create a new disease. Maybe everything we thought was wrong was right, and everything we thought was right was actually wrong."

Isaac was already sick of Ximena's riddles. He was thankful to be free of the glass cell, but he had no idea what came next and he hated, absolutely hated that they'd left Ms. Cowan behind. "So what's your plan? What did you do back there?" She had something in her eyes that reminded him of Sadina when she got a big idea in her head that wouldn't go away. A plan was brewing, here.

"I destroyed the electrical room in the basement of the Villa and I'll do the same thing at the next one."

"Next one?" He didn't know where they'd end up. Mostly he wanted to run up the coast as quickly as possible and wait at the spot that Minho had designated for their return. What killed Isaac more than anything was that Sadina had been right. Letti and Timon had been right. The Villa was a bad, bad place.

"So yeah, what do you mean by next one?" Jackie asked.

Ximena had something move across her lips that half-resembled a smile. She then delivered a cutting jab, "You all really did live on a desolate island, didn't you?" She was breathing hard from the ups and downs of the hike. "This isn't the only Villa, and we aren't the only people Kletter worked with. There's quite a few of them, all the way from the southern desert to the site of the Maze in Alaska."

Old Man Frypan bristled at that but didn't say anything.

"Alaska?" Jackie repeated. "That's where the Godhead is."

Isaac felt like he was practically running to keep up with Ximena and the others. He liked her. She knew a lot and they'd still be trapped in a glass prison if not for her. He had a feeling they needed her and maybe she needed them.

He had an idea. "Ximena, come to Alaska with us to find our friends. And to see the Godhead." He didn't know what he expected her to say, but her sharp laugh surprised him.

"The Godhead." She eviscerated the word as she spoke it. "The Godhead is just another disease."