Page 65 of Blue Arrow Island
We start walking. I’m torn between looking around the camp and focusing on Amira, so I can ask her questions.
“If there’s an order over the camp speaker to take shelter at the base, this is where you come.” She gestures at the tunnel entrance I just came out of. “If they say shelter in place, you take cover in the nearest building.”
“I saw Marcus grab you on the beach,” I say. “I thought they killed you. The Rising Tide people told me they kill everyone.”
She pushes her lips together in a thin line. “No. They brought us all to a shelter in the jungle and gave us water. Then Nova explained aromium to us and they gave us a choice to let them turn it off so we could come here, or leave it on and we could be on our own.”
“And you wanted it off?”
She nods. “I don’t want anyone controlling me. From what they said, people can start losing their minds. Killing each other. Did you see anything like that?”
I look over my shoulder, ensuring Vance is out of hearing range. “Yes. That, and the women all want to have babies they don’t even get to raise. They keep the kids in a separate place where they’re training them to be super soldiers.”
Amira’s lips pull down in a frown. “For Whitman.”
She stops walking and squares her shoulders. “See that perimeter wall? It goes around the entire camp.”
The wall is far away from us, but I can still see it. It’s made of massive logs that stretch more than twenty feet into the air. On top of the logs are long metal spikes that come to a point, jutting out in every direction like a porcupine’s quills.
“Damn,” I say softly. “Guess nothing’s getting in here.”
Amira hums skeptically. “You’d think so, but I’ve seen the security team fighting off animals trying to break the wall down or get over it.”
I give her an incredulous look. “What animals could do that?”
She speaks in a low tone so only I can hear her. “Ones with aromium implants.”
A gust of harsh reality blasts into me like a powerful wind. The wolf that came to me before was much bigger than it should have been. There’s also the jaguar that tore that Tider apart in the jungle. I don’t have a clear picture of what Whitman is doing here—yet—but I have a fuzzy one that gets bleaker every time it becomes more focused.
“When they first brought us here, we were kept in a large cell on the outskirts of camp,” Amira says. She points toward a metal sign on a stake that says “Garden” as we walk past it. “That’s the camp garden. It’s huge and it has lots of vegetables and herbs. I think around twenty people work there.”
She’s trying to give me a tour while we exchange information, so I follow up on what she said before. “How long were you in the cell? Did they treat you okay?”
“More than okay. There were guards there around the clock and they fed us well.” She shakes her head and looks away, then back at me again. “I guess I felt like everyone we came here on the boat with was on the same side as us, but some of them really are cold-blooded murderers and rapists. One guy attacked a woman in the night and they called Marcus. After some of us corroborated her story”—she takes a deep breath—“he shot the guy in the head right in front of us. He said respecting the other people here is a rule we were all told about and that guy had violated it.”
That’s sobering. Amira points to another metal sign on a stake that says, “Farm” and has an arrow. She follows the path.
“We were questioned individually. I was in the cell for two days, and then I got a room assignment and a guard.”
“Not anymore, though?”
We’re approaching the camp’s exterior wall, which has inset double metal doors, both of them wide open.
She shakes her head. “I had a guard for about ten days. Before the virus, I was an archer. I’ve been shooting my entire life; my mom was an Olympic archer and she made me into one, too.”
My jaw drops with surprise. “Seriously?”
“It’s how I stayed alive after the virus. When I told Marcus and Nova, they put me on the security team. That’s why I was in the jungle the day I found you—my partner and I were doing our daily perimeter check.”
We just walked through the open double doors, and I see that the Dust Walkers’ farm has its own security wall. It looks like the other wall, but the spikes on top of this one are made of sharpened wood.
The wind carries the scents of sunbaked earth, musky animals and sweet hay, along with the unmistakable acrid tang of manure. The ground is covered with a mixture of jagged wood chunks, the earthy scent fresh. Wood waste here must be put through a chipper.
“This place is huge,” I murmur.
“Yeah.” She gestures to the left. “Cows over there. Chickens ahead. Boars...somewhere. I don’t know, this is as far as I came when I got a tour.”
“The people in Rising Tide are starving,” I say softly.
