Page 17 of Blue Arrow Island
Despite the headache that never fully goes away, and the pain I feel from my scalp to my toes from training, my lips quirk with a smile.
“Thanks, Olin.”
We walk in silence to the kitchen, stopping at the well next to it to fill our canteens. I drink two canteens full before filling it a third time and putting the strap over my shoulder so it rests on my hip.
I shouldn’t be drinking so much water, because I know I’m feeling the effects of sodium deficiency. Water makes it worse. But I’m also usually dehydrated here. It’s an ugly irony.
“Briar and Rona, you’re on meat prep, get going.” Billy wastes no time putting us to work.
Meat prep is a double-edged sword. It’s hard to peel and slice juicy, ripe papayas when your own stomach is knotted painfully with hunger and you aren’t allowed to eat any of it. Meat prep is gross, but not tempting, so at least there’s that.
The term “meat” is all-encompassing at Rising Tide. It includes fish and kills brought in by the hunting team. Hunting kills are field dressed and sometimes come to us in pieces, and I’m only able to identify some of the animals because of my knowledge of biology.
We get a lot of boars, birds and reptiles. Snakes are the easiest to identify. Some days we get a lot of fish, and other days,hardly any. I don’t think too hard about what some of the meat is, but Rona seems to enjoy pointing out the things she knows will make me cringe.
“Mmm, rat.” She holds it up and waggles her brows.
The carcass still has its tail attached, wiry hairs sprouting between the scaly rings. Eating rats is bad enough, but what’s worse is that Rona won’t discard the tail. Everything gets eaten here—even fish skin and eggs. And still, it’s not enough.
I hated training at first, but it’s become my favorite part of life at Rising Tide. When I’m running, rolling massive logs, swimming or sparring, it takes everything I’ve got just to get it done. I’m always exhausted, sore and hungry, but I can’t think about that during training.
Instead, I pretend my dad is beside me. I imagine what he would tell me to do and how he’d encourage me.
You don’t have to be the fastest or the strongest, Briar. If you want to be the best, it only takes one thing—never, ever quit.
He didn’t talk a lot about what he did in his Special Operations Marine Corps unit, but he did say he survived things he shouldn’t have many times.
Maven and I complained about him forcing us to read Jack London books in our early teen years, but when the virus came, I clung to those stories of survival and the human spirit. I still do.
“What we really need is some canned fish,” I say as I chop unidentified meat into small pieces.
Rona snort laughs. “Canned fish? If I could make any food appear before me, it would be a giant, juicy burger and fries.”
“I wouldn’t turn that down.”
She slices the tail from the rat carcass and deftly chops it. “Why canned fish? Aren’t fresh fish healthier?”
“Yes, but we need the sodium canned fish have.”
“I thought sodium was bad.”
I scoop up the pile of chopped meat in front of me and dump it into the big stainless pot. “Too much is bad, but humans need some sodium to survive.”
Billy makes it clear that if he catches the kitchen workers complaining about the food or our work, he’ll have us reassigned to laundry. I’ve seen the hands of the people who do laundry—they’re so raw from scrubbing that they bleed.
Telling Rona the diet here is nutrient deficient might be seen as complaining, so I don’t say anything else. And really, there’s no point mentioning it. I figured out a few days in that there’s not enough food to feed everyone here.
It’s a cruel paradox, being around food for eight hours a day, but preparing it for others. When Rona and I get a five-minute break to eat our first meal of the day, it’s two bite-sized chunks of smoked meat and a small sliver of hard, unripe papaya. At least it quells the dull ache in my stomach.
My limbs are heavy as we return to work, fatigue blanketing every inch of me. I don’t know how everyone else makes it look so easy to get by on maybe five hundred calories a day.
There are no walls in the food prep area we’re working in behind the kitchen, and I get a quick glimpse of a training group racing past us on the dirt path that runs through camp. It’s a group of fours, and I swear they’re running at a four-minute mile pace.
Not only are the fours surviving on very little food and not enough of a single nutrient, they’rethriving.
I finish my meal in about a minute, and instead of sitting with Rona, I take my bowl back into the kitchen and find Billy.
“What?” He glares at me, his brow furrowed with annoyance.
