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Everyone starts standing up, but I stay in my seat, too numb to move. Briar is the closest thing I have to family, and she’s leaving in less than twenty-four hours.

I may never see her again. She could get gunned down by a cartel or caught by New America’s soldiers. If Whitman gets his hands on her, she won’t be going to Blue Arrow Island this time.

Why am I even surprised? My longest relationship is with archery. Everyone and everything else has been brutally ripped from me, and I never seem to learn.

Opening my heart has never ended well, and it never will.

7

“Nightingale is fearless. She’s gathered invaluable intel, but she is impatient. Anyone she’s partnered with must try to rein her in. I say try, because I certainly haven’t been able to do it.” Decoded message from ILF handler Hiro Tanaka to ILF leadership

Briar

I’m worried about Amira.

With her placid expression, I don’t even recognize her. She’s landing every arrow she shoots a few inches off-center of the round wooden target the ILF people asked us to shoot at.

I’ve seen Amira do things with her primitive bow and arrow that I would have thought were impossible if I hadn’t seen them with my own eyes. Wyatt was once racing toward the rest of our group in the jungle, an aromium-enhanced jaguar on his heels.

We couldn’t risk hitting him with a gun, but Amira nocked an arrow and didn’t take even a second to toil about her shot. She somehow fired an arrow that looked like it was going straight for Wyatt, but it went around him and hit the jaguar in the eye.

The bows and arrows here look like they’re made of carbon. They’re technically superior to the ones Amira crafted on the island. She still hasn’t gotten her primitive bow back, and she spent no time studying these bows before choosing one. She just mechanically picked up the one closest to her.

Her amber eyes usually reflect every emotion she’s feeling in real time, and she tends to run through the full spectrum of human emotions every day. It’s one of the things I love about Amira. You never have to wonder how she feels about something.

“Okay, that’s enough archery.”

Bill, dressed in another of his brightly colored Hawaiian shirts, gestures for us to come over. He seems to be high up in the ILF leadership, but he’s the only one observing us who doesn’t seem like a former military member.

Even in plain clothes, I can usually pick out military people just by their stance. I’m almost positive we’re at the former Joint Base San Antonio, where tens of thousands of people from different military branches served before the virus. It makes sense that if the ILF leadership has former military members, they’d want this location as a base.

The fact that they can keep such a massive, coveted base secured speaks to their capabilities. My father was a Marine, and he was the best man I’ve ever known. I hope this organization is led by people who share his definitions of freedom and oppression.

“I know y’all probably feel like lab rats,” Bill says with a grin. “We’re just fascinated by aromium and this is our first chance to see what it can do. If anyone’s willing to show us your speed and stamina on the track, we’d sure appreciate it.”

Everyone has gotten friendlier and more relaxed toward us since we volunteered. I do feel like a lab rat, though. They had us lifting weights earlier, and they tested our vision and hearing in a pitch-black room. When they asked us to give blood, all of us refused, and they didn’t push it.

If my blood could be used to make an aromium stabilizer, I’m sure it could be reverse-engineered to create aromium, and that’s the last thing I want. We don’t know of aromium being used anywhere other than our island, and I’m hoping it’s isolated to that one location. Unstabilized aromium can make people volatile and dangerous.

What’s been nagging at me, though, is that Whitman and two other billionaires funded the aromium experiments. They’re more likely than anyone to still have access to the compound.

Now that we’re off Blue Arrow Island, my connection to the aromium-enhanced plants there has been severed. It was jarring when we first boarded the sub and the steady hum of plant life through my body went silent.

I miss it. When I first discovered I had an aromium connection with the plants in the island’s jungle, I was unsure what it meant or how to use it. I was afraid the plants had access to my mind and would be able to change who I was.

It isn’t like that, though. They’re part of me. I learned how to decipher the humming messages they send through me. The volcano decimated the island’s plants, and I wish I could have done something to help.

I had to leave, though. My sister is my only living family member, and I need to find her.

I start my jog around the large indoor track, Amira falling into step beside me. Marcus is setting a faster pace for himself, Evander on one side of him and Pax on the other. Evander doesn’t have aromium, so he won’t be able to keep up for long.

“You okay?” I ask Amira.

She looks straight ahead and says, “Yep.”

I think she’s upset that I didn’t push back harder over the ILF assigning her with Evander instead of me. Since we came straight here from the conference room, I haven’t had a chance to talk to Marcus about it. Maybe I should have insisted that she stay with us.

Footsteps pound against the track behind us, and I look over my shoulder to see Olin.