Page 45 of The Godhead Complex
Expire. That didn’t sound good. “Could it also mean something else?”
Orange shrugged.
Roxy sighed. “Well, let’s see . . .” She looked to the sky. “A time limit, a length of time until something will go bad, oh, and—” She stopped talking.
“What?” Minho asked. Roxy didn’t say anything, just made that same disapproving expression she pulled whenever Minho talked about the Remnant Nation. Her eyes got a little bigger and her mouth a little tighter. “What else does it mean?”
“Well, sometimes . . . in our language at least, people might use the wordexpirewhen they talk about a person dying.”
Dying. Now that made sense. Not just from the Orphan’s past and all the death he had seen and delivered, but from Isaac’s stories of Kletter arriving on the island. “Those people on Kletter’s crew, who Isaac said were shot in the head when the boat first arrived. . . . Maybe she wrote about them.” He carefully examined the text around the word ‘Caducado’ until his eyes locked on toinfecciónagain.“What if they were infected?”
“Why would she have brought infected people to the island?” Orange asked.
Minho agreed it didn’t make much sense. They must’ve caught the disease en route.
No captain would kill their entire crew for the fun of it.
“Maybe that’s why she murdered them. They got infected on the journey and she had to shoot them.” Minho thought about how many times words likereactionandinfectionshowed up in Kletter’s notes. “Or maybe . . .”
That was it.
It had to be it.
He looked behind him to make sure Dominic, Sadina, Miyoko, and Trish were still at the captain’s wheel. “Maybe the islanders have something to do with it.” Sadina’s blood. Cowan’s rash. “Maybe they’re not immune after all?”
CHAPTERNINETEEN
Haunted Houses
There it was. The house where everything changed and their adventure became an escape mission, then a survival mission, then a rescue mission. There was something about the house even before it all went bad that creeped Isaac out. The windows broken and dusty, the paint peeling, the burnt siding from some long-ago fire. Once he walked past this awful place where he and Sadina had been taken, where Kletter had been viciously murdered, he hoped they could all reset their future and forget Letti and Timon had ever mentioned evolution and extinction.
Isaac wondered about Letti and Timon, if maybe they hadn’t been half-Crank when he met them. Then he wondered if Kletter’s body was still decaying somewhere. He picked up his pace and decided it best not to find out. He twisted the grass-braided bracelet around his wrist. Every day that passed, the bracelet got drier and drier. He hoped Sadina and the rest of the crew were doing okay. “You think they’re getting close to Alaska?” he asked the group.
“Closer every day,” Old Man Frypan replied.
“What do you think, Ms. Cowan? Think Minho threw Dominic overboard yet?” He liked the challenge of trying to make Cowan laugh.
“No, I’m sure Dominic is on his best behavior, but Sadina,” Cowan coughed, “now she can be stubborn. I hope she and Minho don’t have any differences.”
Isaac hadn’t even worried about that. Cowan was right, they were two strong personalities, but he’d count on Trish and Miyoko to keep them in line. He knew the islanders would stick together. “It may be hot out here, but at least we’re not seasick.” Isaac waited for Jackie to chime in, but she didn’t. She’d been awfully quiet the last mile or so. He turned to her. “Right, Jackie?”
Her walk slowed.
“Ithaac . . .”
“Jackie?” He stopped, tried to catch her eyes, but her distant gaze was unfocused. She looked right through him. “What’s wrong, Jackie?” Isaac knew she was prone to nausea, but the path had been smooth and straight. “Do you need to throw up?”
“If you gotta blow chunks, blow them over there.” Old Man Frypan pointed to a bush of clover weed. But Jackie wouldn’t make it that far. Her knees buckled, then her legs folded beneath her like an island hammock cut by a storm. Isaac rushed to her side and caught her weight in his arms, lowering her to the road. Newt fell from her shoulder and scampered off into the weeds.
She reached for Cowan. “Myth Cowan.”
Cowan took Jackie’s hand.
“What’s going on?” Cowan asked. Jackie felt heavy, almost lifeless in Isaac’s arms.
“I can’t feel my lipth, or my thongue, or my legth.”
Jackie’s voice was slow and slurred. Isaac looked at her and then back toward thehouse, as if it held some kind of curse. It was probably haunted by Kletter’s spirit.
