Page 85 of Blue Arrow Island
My pulse pounds as he walks back to me. A storm still rages in his eyes, and I know this isn’t the best time to talk, but I’m done following orders and not getting answers.
“What do you want to know?”
Where do I even begin? I could spend hours asking him all the questions I have.
“Were you elected to be the leader here?”
He grunts. “More like appointed.”
“Who appointed you?”
“The guy who used to be in charge.”
I’m about to ask him to elaborate when something gently drifts onto my cheek. When I touch my fingertip to it, there’s a tiny crunch before it melts into water against my skin.
Weird. I write it off as a fluke, but then another cold flake kisses my arm.
“That’s snow,” I murmur, even though I know it’s impossible.
“Fuck,” Marcus mutters. He puts his hands on his hips and looks up at the sky. “Really?”
He starts walking again, but I keep my feet locked into place on the ground. After about ten feet, he turns around. “What are you doing? Let’s go.”
I cross my arms over my chest and shake my head. “I’m not moving until I get some answers.”
He blows out an exasperated breath and walks back to me. “It’s the middle of the night. Can we do this tomorrow?”
“No, I’m not letting you put me off for another second. Is that snow?”
A pause. “I think so, yeah.”
“How is it snowing on a blazing-hot tropical island? And don’t tell me it’s magic because my tolerance is worn down to nothing at this point. I want a full, honest answer.”
I can barely make out his expression in the faint glow of a nearby light, but I see the corners of his lips quirk almost imperceptibly. “Aromium is being used to experiment on people and animals here. It’s not the only experiment. There are also microclimate experiments. The control panel for those was broken, but Virginia must have an electrician in her camp. With the tools she got from the cache, they must’ve fixed it.”
For a few seconds, I’m too stunned to speak. And not just because of what he just said, but also because it was a real answer instead of a brush-off.
“Microclimates.” I shake my head. “That shouldn’t be possible.”
“It is.”
My scientific mind is reeling, coming up with questions faster than I can process them.
“Won’t snow kill the crops?”
“It shouldn’t. It’ll take time for her to ramp up to produce enough snow for that, and we’ll have time to cover the crops. But even if it killed them” —he shrugs—“we’d just replant. Everything is engineered to grow quickly.”
I fire the next question that comes to mind at him.
“How many people are buried back where...we just were?”
He considers for a second. “Around fifty. And before you ask, no, I didn’t shoot all of them.”
“Did someone else shoot them?”
He exhales heavily through his nose. “Most of them died of natural causes or from being attacked by animals or Tiders. My friend Finn is one of them.”
Finn. The one who was killed by the snake that day by the waterfall.
