Page 3 of The Godhead Complex
Roxy took all the bowls from Isaac and stacked them together. “I’ll forage first thing in the morning, go out a little farther east and see what I can find up there.”
“I’ll go with you and maybe find some squirrels to hunt.” Orange tugged at the annoying burs that had gotten stuck in her hair from hunting earlier. “Ow! These things really hurt for how small they are.” The weeds, vines, and brush had weapons of their own in this part of the world. The harshest things back on the island were rocks, water, jellyfish, and the weather, but out here there were too many dangers to count. Every day it seemed like Isaac learned something new to watch out for. Besides Cranks and giant killing machines.
“How’s your insect bite?” Isaac asked Dominic.
“I don’t think it bit me. I think it was a stinger.” Dominic looked at his bicep. “Kinda looked like a bee but that sucker was way bigger. Do you think Grievers can shrink down and fly?” Everyone but Old Man Frypan laughed.
“Grievers are nothing to snark at,” the grizzled veteran said, and the group hushed out of respect.
“Maybe the bees bite out here?” Miyoko asked.
“I don’t see any teeth marks.” Dominic examined his arm even closer.
Roxy went over to check on the poor guy. “Hmmm. . . . It’s not ants or you’d have more of them with the same marks. Sounds like it could have been a murder hornet. That’s not good.”
“A murder hornet? Is my arm going to fall off?” Dominic looked at Roxy, concerned, and Isaac couldn’t tell if he actually believed it. “Am I going to die?”
“I bet that sucked the gas right out of you!” Trish laughed until Sadina elbowed her.
Roxy held in her own laugh. “I’m just messing with you. It’ll probably be sore for a few days, but you’ll be fine.” She looked closely at Dominic’s arm, then patted it lovingly. “Lucky he didn’t get you more than once.”
Miyoko and Trish combed their fingers through Orange’s ginger locks and removed the spiky balls of nature that had attached themselves, tossing her hair into a bird’s nest. Despite Minho and Orange being more intimidating than Ms. Cowan at times, Isaac was glad to have their leadership within the group. Without Orange they’d all be dead.
He sat back down by the fire, taking everything in. The wind kicked up and the sparks of the fire reminded him of the sparks in the forge. He’d give anything to go back to being a blacksmith apprentice at home, but he had a feeling that even life on the island wasn’t exactly“life on the island”anymore. The fire made Isaac feel safe, and the smoke had a way of cleansing the group enough that they all didn’t smell like the hammers of hell in between stream baths. The wind pushed again, longer and harder. “Anyone else notice it’s getting colder at night?” Isaac had only felt it in the last few days, but right before dusk the temperature dropped further and eachwhooshof the wind lasted longer than the day before.
“Yeah, it sure is,” Dominic answered.
Ms. Cowan inched closer to the fire. “Never had this kind of chill back home.”
The flames flickered and highlighted the shadows of stress on Cowan’s face. Along with the drop in temperature, she had been uncomfortably quiet the last few nights. Isaac imagined that the weight of her decision to leave the island and to go against the government must have continued to weigh on her, especially after losing Wilhelm and Alvarez. But there was no way she could’ve known the trip would result in so many deaths.
“You think everyone back home is doing okay?” Isaac asked her, but Cowan didn't blink. Slowly, one by one, heads looked up in her direction.
“. . . Ms. Cowan?” Isaac asked again.
Even Orange, Minho, and Roxy, who had never been to the island, waited on Cowan’s response but she just stared at the fire.
“Mom?” Sadina shouted over the fire.
Ms. Cowan finally blinked, “What’s that, dear?”
“Do you think everyone back home is doing okay?” Isaac asked again.
Cowan looked at him as if it were a trick question. “Yes, of course.They’re all fine,I'm sure.” But the way her voice lowered slightly at‘they’re all fine’gave Isaac a pang in his gut. A pang that said it was them, the elevensoulssitting around the fire just then,whoweren’tfine.
“How many Bergs are on your island?” Minho asked while adding wood to the fire, and everyone from back home looked at each other.
Trish replied. “None of us knew what that . . . thing you call a Berg was until we flew on it.”
“No, we didn’t have Bergs on the island. The islanders weren’t meant to leave . . .” Cowan’s last words seemed coated with regret. Isaac felt the mood shift along with the cold air but Cowan finally snapped out of her trance. “Look, if we hadn’t left the island, Lacey, Carson, Wilhelm, and Alverez would still be alive. I know that.” She took a slow deliberate breath. “But we owed it to humanity to work for a Cure, and if we’d succeeded . . . we could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Maybe millions. Who knows.”
“. . . if there’s that many people left,” Roxy responded in the grimmest voice possible.
“We can still do that,” Miyoko said while she finished the braid in Orange’s hair. “The Villa Kletter talked about wasn’t far from where we were when we arrived on land. Maybe a few miles?” She paused before adding, “I think she said it was a two-day hike before she . . .” and Isaac knew why she stopped talking when she did: because there’s no polite way to saybefore Kletter got her throat slit open.
Sadina chimed in at that. “Yeah, we were supposedly really close to the Villa. And that’s why Letti kidnapped us and kept saying the same thing: not to trust the people there or Kletter.”
“You trust a word that came out of Letti’s or Timon’s mouth?” Isaac didn’t think he had to remind his best friend that the two crazy people who forcibly took them probably weren’t the best ones to take advice from. Sure, there were moments when Isaac thought that maybe Letti and Timon were helping to protect them from something, the way they allowed them to leave clues for the rest of the group to stay on their trail, but they’d never fully explained what the so-called Evolution was or how people could die.
