In the next bed over, Galian stirred and opened one eye. "Morning."
"Morning," I said, curling under the covers.
"Do you think there's anything to eat in this place?" he asked with a huge yawn.
I smiled. At least he was starting to prioritize the right things. "Doubtful. If they left anything behind, I'm sure it's expired by now. I'd rather not die of food poisoning."
He grimaced and rolled over. "So we have still to go hunt for breakfast still?"
I laughed and kicked off the covers, sitting up and stretching. "You'd think you'd be used to it by now."
"Hope springs eternal, Theo..."
This side of the island was teeming with rabbits. Once I had fashioned a trap, we caught four of them in one fell swoop. I'd almost forgotten what it was like to be full.
After our meal, we set to exploring the radar station now that we had light inside. When the Kylaens abandoned this place, they'd taken everything with them, save the supply closet. We found more operating rooms and jail cells, and I looked through every cabinet in the mess hall, unearthing exactly three cans of vegetables that had expired forty years before.
"Theo, look in here," Galian called from down the hall. I followed the sound of his voice into a room filled with screens and old computers. Galian stood in the center, a nearly maniacal smile on his face.
"What's this?" I asked.
"Looks like it's the control center," he said, turning to press the buttons on the machines. To my surprise, they hummed to life.
"Interesting."
"Theo, these might still be hooked into Kylae," Galian said, a little breathlessly.
I stopped for a moment, my face falling along with my hopes.
"If we can get these to work, maybe we can get a message out to someone," Galian said. "These things are older than dirt, but maybe there's a way you can tap into the Kylaen airwaves and—"
He stopped when he saw the look on my face. I knew I could probably fashion a half-assed signaling system, if Galian could tell me what frequency Kylae operated on.
But I wasn't sure I wanted to.
"What?" he asked.
"If we do call for help, let me be far away from here," I said, knowing I was resigning myself to one fate if I were left there. But if I went, I'd be resigning myself to another. In the optimism and company of Galian, I'd let myself forget that I was going to die soon.
"Theo..." He stood up. "Don't say that."
I cocked my head at him. "Galian, I'm serious. There is no way going to Kylae ends well for me."
He grabbed my hands and held them together. "You can't be serious. To stay here?"
"I'm dead either way," I whispered. At least if I remained on the island, I'd have a chance of staying alive a few extra...weeks.
"You remember what I promised you?" He tightened his grip. "When we first landed on this island, I told you I wasn't going to let you die, remember?"
"Galian—"
"No," he insisted. "I am a lot of things, but when I say something, I mean it. You're coming with me off this island."
A fresh wave of heat rose in my face from the way he held my hands and the intense look on his face.
"First, let me see if I can get it to work," I said, freeing my hands. "Then we'll talk about what happens next."
Galian
I tried not to hover over Theo as she tinkered with the electrical wires, now splayed around her. But it was damned hard not to.
If this place was Kylaen, at one point it had been connected to our military networks. If we could just get one computer working again, it might be enough to alert someone. The thought was so exciting I could barely sit still.
I didn't care what Theo said, I wasn't going to leave her there. It was suicide, and she knew it. I wouldn't be able to live with myself knowing she was back there starving while I was back in my bed.
Then again—I tossed her another look—I wondered if she'd ever consider sharing that bed with me.
She caught me staring at her so I stood to leave her be. If I pissed her off, she wouldn't help me. A small part of me wondered if she was just pretending to fix the computers, but that wasn't the Theo I knew.
I strolled down the halls to burn off my nervous energy. This place was still a mystery to me, but I no longer cared. I could go back to not caring about things like this. I could go back to filling my head with obscure diseases and intubation techniques. I wasn't sure what I'd do with Theo when I got there, but I'd figure it out. Maybe she could dye her hair blonde and just say she was really, really tanned.
I blanched, thinking of Theo as a blonde.
I stopped in front of an office we'd opened but not explored earlier in the day. It was small, with a built-in desk, and shelves and cabinets lining the walls. I sat in the small chair and thumbed through some of the paperwork, wondering if Theo had gotten the computer to work yet.
"Don't piss her off," I whispered to myself.
I forced myself to read the binder in front of me, which turned out to be a medical file.
"So those were operating rooms," I said, still puzzling over why my great-grandfather would see fit to place a medical facility on a deserted island, and disguise it as a radar station. None of this made sense to me at all.
I put on my Doctor Helmuth hat—since I was going back to the hospital and all, I supposed it would be good to practice again—and read through the patient file. Except, the more I looked at it, the less it seemed like a patient file. It was about a person, sure, but it seemed unnervingly clinical. The patient name was a number, the notes were specific to test results, not a word on how the patient felt.
I flipped back to the front of the binder, looking for more information. Buried deep within the paragraphs of introductory tests, my eyes couldn't believe what they read.
"During the process of smelting Kylaen weapons from raw barethium, a small amount of airborne barethium is released. Barethium is a known toxin to the human body. In large quantities, it causes aggressive malignant tumors, renal and liver failure, and, if ingested, is almost always fatal.
I sat back, mouth open. Not even a year before, the Kylaen scientists had shown my mother research proving the exact opposite.
What remains to be seen is how much inhaled barethium will cause the severe reactions seen in ingested amounts. Initial tests on rabbits and mice indicate that a human could withstand two hundred times the level of inhaled barethium before side effects begin to occur. This facility has begun a trial of inhaled barethium on Raven slaves—"
I slammed the binder shut, my heart and stomach in my mouth.
Theo
Silence was golden as I worked on the computers. Even though it was sixty years old, the circuitry was scarily similar to what we had in Rave. I twisted two wires together while considering how our technological advancement was stymied, whereas Kylae continued to move forward.
"Bastards," I muttered to myself.
I sat up and pressed a button on the computer and cursed when the machine did nothing. Lying back down, I unhooked the two wires and tried a different set. My fingers singed as the active currents touched each other and the computer hummed to life. Our lifeline back to civilization was working.
Galian was going to go home, back to his family, his castle, his full meals. For him, I was happy that I could save his life for once and relieved to clear the ledger between us. I was surprised at how sad I became knowing he'd soon be out of my life. We had only spent a short time together, but I had grown more attached to him than I'd thought.
I heard his footfalls down the hall and I crawled out from under the circuitry.
"Well, it's working. Do you happen to know the frequency for—" I stopped when I saw his ashen face and knew something was very wrong. "What is it?"
He gripped a binder like it held some closely guarded secret. "I found something you need to see."
"What is it?"
He hesitated for a second, looking down at the binder. "Please don't...don'
t think any less of me."
I furrowed my brow. "Why would anything of yours be in here?"
"Not me, but..." He sighed heavily and thrust the binder at me. "Just...please remember that..."
I almost didn't want to look inside. With trembling hands, I opened the binder. The first page was refreshingly devoid of anything horrifying; it was simply a cover page. A report of a test that had been conducted in the radar station. I flipped the pages, seeing text and numbers and lots of things that didn't make sense.
Then I saw the first photo.
"Oh my God..."
It was a person—a Raven, to be exact. But I could only tell because of the label on the photo. Strapped to one of those operating tables, the body was so disfigured and discolored that I couldn't even tell it was human anymore. The mouth was open at an odd angle, as if the person had screamed themselves to death. Purple splotches covered the arms, evidence that the patient had tried to free himself from the restraints. Giant tumors stuck out from the shoulder, the knee, the stomach.
"W-what is this?" I whispered to Galian, who looked about as sick as I felt.
"I think...I think this was a secret testing laboratory," he replied. "There are other binders of experiments with animals. That's where all the rabbits came from."
"What were they testing?" I asked. "What could they possibly have been testing that would have warranted this kind of...horrifying..."
"They wanted to test the effects of barethium on humans," he whispered.
"Barethium?" The name sounded familiar, but I couldn't place it.
"It's the...it's..." He couldn't look at me, and that made me even sicker. "Mael."
"Mael?" I said, looking down at the binder again.
"Barethium is the ore that they're mining out of the mountains, the same ore that's found in Rave," he said quietly. "This lab was to test how much a human could take before it was fatal."
"Ravens. They were testing on Ravens," I whispered, covering my mouth.
He plopped down in a chair across from me. "When my mother went to the Kylaen royal scientists to try and prove Mael was well, killing people, they told her they'd done tests and showed her proof that it was safe."
I glanced up at him. "You can't be serious. All of the people who die there every year?"
"Pre-existing conditions," he replied hollowly. "That's what they say. But this proves that they know. They've known! They knew before they built the first plant in Rave. They knew before... they knew before they even tested on humans. And they did it anyway."
I closed my eyes. "The wolves? Did they test on them, too?"
He shook his head. "I think...they were guard dogs. There are photos and..."
I couldn't think of it anymore; I couldn't stand to be in this place. The knowledge of the atrocities committed there was suffocating. The ghosts of my ancestors pressed in on me, as if the very mention of their suffering had drawn them.
"Theo, where are you going?" Galian called after me.
"Back to the camp. I'm not spending another minute in this place." I knew it would take me all day to get there, but I didn't care. I barreled through the kitchen, ignoring the visions of Kylaen doctors and guards eating their leisurely lunches while torturing and killing human beings in rooms down the hall.
"Stop." Galian grabbed my arm and spun me around. "I know this is shocking and sickening. Trust me, I'm just as disgusted as you are."
"But what?"
"This all happened years ago," Galian said and my anger flared.
"So we should just let it go?" I growled.
"Not let it go, but we need to—"
"What about the fact that your people are still exploiting mine!"
"Theo, now's not the time to get into all that—"
"And when is a good time, Your Highness," I spat the phrase at him. "When all the Ravens are dead? When you've got your hundred square miles of country back?"
"How about after we call for help?" he barked at me. "Let's get off this island and then we'll deal with all of the shit that happened here. We'll raze this entire place to the ground!"
"Look around you!" I screamed. "I'm Raven! This place is how your people see me—nothing but an animal to experiment on! Do you think they'll let me live a second in your country? Are you that stupid to think that just because you snap your fingers, everyone will forget what I am?"
Galian watched me helplessly. Even though I was nauseated, furious, disgusted, and all manner of other feelings I couldn't name, I still felt pity for him. He was different than the rest of his family, the rest of his country, even. But in this case, his blinding optimism was to his detriment.
"I'm sorry, Theo," he said. "I truly... I wish..."
"The radio is on," I said. "If you can find the Kylaen frequency, you can call for help. I'll be long gone."
He didn't argue with me. Prince Galian Helmuth of Kylae had finally realized just how depraved his country really was. And that was victory enough for me.
Galian
I didn't go after her. I should have, but I didn't. What was there for me to say to her to make this place right? What could I have done to erase all this horror sanctioned by my own ancestor?
There was no universe in which these atrocities would ever be forgiven. I could save a thousand lives, and it wouldn't make up for the ones taken there. Even more, we continued to subject prisoners to the deadly fumes at Mael, knowing the consequences—and lied about it to our own people.
I glanced at the door, again wishing I could follow Theo. But I didn't feel worthy of her presence.
There was something wrong with getting to leave this island after what I'd just discovered. I deserved to suffer for the sins of my forefathers. Theo should've been the one who went home.
I wasn't sure how long I sat in front of the radio, tapping my fingers on the dashboard, thinking, before I tried to use it. Rhys was a radio operator in the Kylaen military, but I'd never spent any time learning, so I had no idea what to do.
There were two buttons in front of me, green and black, and a dial that adjusted the frequency. I pressed the black one and heard static echo through the speakers on the dashboard. Pressing the green one stopped the static, but alighted a small red light on the microphone.
"Hello?"
No answer.
I spun the frequency dial slowly, listening for chatter. I did two passes through all the frequencies and heard none.
"Shit."
Trying again, I pressed the green button and spoke into the microphone, waiting a half second before moving to the next one. When that didn't work, I sat back and lazily moved the dial, now considering if I should go after Theo and tell her that it wasn't working. At that point, I'd probably grovel on my hands and knees, and beg her to return and help me.
I was halfway out the door when I thought I heard a scratchy voice over the radio.
"I...iden...you....or..."
My heart flew into my throat and I rushed back over to the microphone.
"Hello? Can you hear me?"
I heard more static, and then the word Herin. I was almost dizzy with relief. Herin was a neutral country, friendly to both Kylae and Rave and—
My mouth moved before I could stop it, "I'm here with another Raven soldier. We...we're both Raven. We crashed here on this island..."
I blinked, realizing I knew nothing of where we were on a map. If only Theo were there. She'd know what to do.
I listened for the Herin response, and realized other than the first few scraps, there was nothing.
"Hello?" I called into the microphone. "Hello?"
I ducked under the console. Maybe I could rewire the cords and make the signal stronger? I unconnected the wires, then twisted them with other ones Theo had left dangling. I tried several combinations, pulling down other wires and connecting those. None of them worked—and I'd lost track of which ones connected the radio in the first place.
"Fuck!"
I pulled myself out and raced around the command
room. Completely out of my element, I banged on every button and typed on every keyboard, knowing that it wasn't going to do much good, but hoping that I could figure something out.
I leaned against the console and sighed loudly out of frustration when my gaze landed on a small metal door on the wall. Crossing the room quickly, I opened it to reveal another circuit board with switches and my eyes lit up. To my untrained, hopeful eyes, it was just what I was looking for. I pushed all the switches to the right at the same time. The room was bathed in black for a moment, then red, then back to light. A siren wailed somewhere in the building, before it was joined by the one in the center command. I covered my ears to the loud noise.
"Self-destruct mode engaged."
"Shit."
Theo
My weeks-old leg injuries still handicapped me as I walked, but I was moving on pure fury alone. I hoped I was headed in the right direction that would lead me to camp. The place I would now call home. It was nothing but a clearing, the wreckage of my plane a reminder of how I'd arrived on the island. But I ached for it now. I wanted to be as far away from the graves of my people as possible.
Had they even buried them? Or just burned their bodies like garbage?
I fell to my knees, disgusted and needing to empty my stomach. But I swallowed the sickness. Wasting nutrients was idiotic.
Instead, I watched thick droplets—tears—fall to the ground.
Galian's reaction shouldn't have been surprising. It was easy to see him not as the prince of Kylae, but as the princeling. His ignorance of basic survival skills, his lame jokes. The way he ministered to me when I was hurt (and even when I was not). But this place was a stark reminder of the vast ocean that lay between us, filled with blood shed on both sides.
Though significantly more Raven blood than Kylaen.
It gave me some solace that Galian would be able to go home. He would return to his life of princeling bliss. Perhaps find a wife who would bring his ego down a few pegs.
The Complete Madion War Trilogy Page 10