The Island Experiment

by Erica Rue

“You’re sweating,” Bel said.

  A worried voice called through the tent canvas. “Lithia? Bel? Are you both okay?”

  “Jai?” Lithia asked.

  “Yes.” She could see the outline of his shadow on the canvas.

  “We’re fine,” she said. It was nice of him to check, though she wondered how many she had woken with her apparent scream.

  “What happened?”

  “Nightmare,” she said again, feeling even more foolish now.

  “Oh, I’ll tell the others. We thought maybe it was the Vens or the Green Cloaks.”

  In a way, it was, she thought. “Okay. Sorry if I woke people.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” His shadow moved and disappeared, leaving her alone with Bel.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Bel asked.

  Lithia settled back down and pulled the blanket over her arms. “Not really. Just your classic Vens-killing-everyone nightmare.”

  “I’ve had my share of those,” Bel replied quietly. “It helps to talk about it. At least, it did for me.”

  Lithia was silent for a long time.

  “Bel? You still awake?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “You were dead. Dione, Zane, Oberon, too. Cora and Evy. Not peaceful dead, either, like at a funeral. The Vens had killed everyone and left you, bloody and broken, where you fell. I was too late.”

  “I’ve had that dream before,” Bel said, “where I’m too late to save my family.”

  Lithia shook her head. “No, it wasn’t like I was too late to save you. I was…” She hesitated. In her dream, it had been so clear. “I was too late to die with you.”

  They were silent a moment before Bel spoke softly. “I’ve had that one, too. It was just a dream, though.”

  “But it wasn’t a dream. The bodies were ones I saw during the battle, but they had your faces.” Lithia shivered as she vividly remembered the fatal injuries she had seen.

  Lithia felt Bel’s small hand wrap around hers and squeeze. She was trying to comfort her, but she wasn’t very good at it. Lithia missed Dione. She put her free hand into her pocket and wrapped her fingers around the stone that Dione had given her, rubbing its polished surface with her thumb so hard that she was sure by morning she wouldn’t have a fingerprint anymore. She heard Dione’s voice echo in her head. The flow of the river is like the flow of time. It smooths the rough edges of your pain.

  When she heard Bel’s breathing slow and her hand grew limp around her own, she slipped out of the tent.

  One of Theo’s men was keeping watch. She thought his name was Felix. She saw him take a drink out of a bottle and went to join him.

  “Should you be drinking while on watch?” Lithia asked. He was a good twenty years older than her, with rough hands and broad shoulders. He smiled, which emphasized the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes.

  “Ever had vigo?”

  “No, what’s that?” she asked.

  “It’s a stimulant. Keeps away the drowsiness on a watch like this.”

  “Can I try it?”

  “Not if you plan on going back to sleep. There’s a few hours left before dawn.”

  “I’m definitely not going back to sleep.” She shuddered at the thought of returning to the battlefield in her dreams. The man misinterpreted it as a shiver and handed her his blanket. She accepted it, along with the bottle. She tilted her head back and drank deeply.

  “Go easy on it, if you’ve never tried it before.”

  She righted the bottle and heard the liquid slosh around inside. It tasted bitter but not unpleasant, and after a few minutes, she felt it working. Her mind lit up like Alliance Day fireworks.

  She started composing a message to Dione. A long one. There were even paragraphs. She just needed to tell Dione. At the end, she read through it all one last time. Her vision blurred as she stared at it, and on impulse, she deleted the entire thing. Dione had enough to worry about. She was on her own island of nightmares and didn’t have time for Lithia’s whining. It was just a bad dream.

  Lithia typed out and sent a new message: Alive?

  “Lithia?” She recognized Jai’s voice.

  “What are you doing awake?” she asked.

  “I couldn’t get to back sleep. You either, huh?”

  She shook her head. Everything she had tried to write to Dione was still on her mind, and she couldn’t bear it. She just needed to talk to someone. “How am I the only one having nightmares? How can anyone sleep?”

  “You’re not the only one, trust me,” he replied.

  “Are you?”

  Jai nodded. “They chase me, but I can’t run properly, so they catch me. Luckily, that’s where I wake up. I imagine that as things calm down and people begin to process everything that’s happened, there will be more fallout.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “What are yours like?” he asked.

  She repeated what she had told Bel, and he just listened. Somehow, repeating it now that she was awake and had some time to process it, made her feel better. Just a little bit. She shivered. Jai hesitated, but then put an arm around her, drawing her in close.

  Their closeness reminded her that he was technically engaged to her cousin. “Do you want to marry Cora?” Lithia asked.

  “I would be lucky to marry Cora,” he replied.

  She read between the lines. “I’m not trying to trap you into saying something bad about her. I’m just curious.”

  Jai relaxed a little, but didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know. I don’t have someone else in mind, and she seems nice enough, but it’s strange. My sister gets along with her husband, but their match is functional, not loving. My brother hasn’t been matched yet, and it’s hard on him. You should see him with our nieces. He loves them to pieces and just wants a family of his own.”

  “So refusing Cora would mean you couldn’t have a family?”

  “Yes, but refusing isn’t an option. It is our duty as Aratians to accept the results of the Matching. What’s going on now, with the Match confirmations getting delayed, is completely unprecedented.” He released Lithia from his embrace, and all the warmth from his touch dissipated into the cool night air.

  Lithia bit her lip. She probably shouldn’t say anything, but she couldn’t help it. “Cora wants to end the Matching.”

  A crease formed between Jai’s brows. “Really?” He looked a little hurt.

  “I don’t think it’s personal,” she said, realizing where his mind had gone. “She loved Will, and seeing the Matching up close shook her. Now with all of the new information she has, she doesn’t think the Matching is necessary.”

  “There’s a fine line for her to walk between tradition and pride, and this new information,” he said. “I don’t know where popular opinion will land on this one. My sister may not love her husband, but she’s proud of her commitment to our traditions. My brother, on the other hand, would gladly give up the Matching if it meant he could find a wife on his own terms instead of waiting for his name to be picked out of a hat.”

  “I don’t know if she can pull it off,” Lithia offered.

  “Neither do I,” he said. “It would mean a new kind of freedom for a lot of us, one we never expected.”

  They sat in silence for a while longer until the dark blue of the night sky began to fade. Soon Bel would wake up.

  “I’d better get back to my tent before Bel wonders where I am.”

  “In that case, good morning,” he said.

  Lithia took one more drink from the watchman’s bottle and returned to her tent. She lay down and closed her eyes, but her mind raced. She didn’t need to fear the nightmares if she didn’t fall asleep.

  20. DIONE

  There had been a message from Lithia waiting for her when she woke up that morning. Dione replied with the expected response.

  Lithia: Alive?

  Dione: Yep. You?

  Lithia: I think so.

  The words were only somewhat reassuring. She
decided to press for more information.

  Dione: What’s on fire?

  It was their way of asking what was wrong.

  Lithia: Small dumpster at most. Nothing compared to the past few days.

  Dione: Be careful.

  There were no more responses. Lithia was laughing it off, but Dione wasn’t so sure. She had a bad feeling about her friend. She was more convinced than ever that they had to get off this planet before something finally happened to one of them.

  Despite the unsettling messages from Lithia, Dione felt strangely at peace as she ate her breakfast. She’d opted to leave the tree house and sit on a nearby rock. Everything was green and vibrant, with splashes of color here and there. The air had that cool, dewy quality, untouched by the heat of the day, that only early mornings could offer. She felt like she was on an immersive vacation, the kind that rich people took where they stayed completely in nature. Except for the running water and electricity in their bungalows, of course.

  She threw the pit of whatever fruit she’d been eating into the woods and licked the juice off her fingers, wiping the rest on her borrowed clothes. Her own were dry, and she slipped behind a large tree to change back into them.

  Up in the tree house, Brian and his dad were chatting away. Upon seeing her, Brian gave her a smile that made her stomach do somersaults. She returned the smile and sat down next to him.

  “Brian’s filled me in on the communicators. We’re about to call Victoria,” Oliver said. Brian’s smile evaporated at the sound of her name.

  “Let’s get this over with, then,” Dione said.

  The first two calls went unanswered. The third Brian placed to Melanie, who sounded like she’d been asleep. His news woke her up fast.

  “Oliver? Is that really you?” Melanie asked.

  “Yes, it’s really me,” he said.

  “I have so many questions! How are you?”

  “Ready to come home,” he replied.

  “Melanie,” Brian cut in. “Can you find Victoria? She’s ignoring my calls.”

  “Shocking.” Melanie did not sound shocked.

  “I know. But now that we’ve found my dad, she might be willing to come get us.”

  “I’ll see if I can find her.” They could hear Melanie walking, opening doors, and greeting people as she asked Oliver a few more questions about what he’d been up to on the island. After several minutes, she interrupted their conversation. “Found her,” she finally said.

  “What do you want now?” Victoria’s voice sounded distant, but already annoyed. “If you’re here to ask about borrowing a Flyer for the thousandth time, the answer is still no.”

  “Brian found Oliver. He’s alive.”

  “I guess that explains the calls.” Dione could imagine her scowl.

  “They called me, too. They want to talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk to them. They both made a choice. I’m not going to waste resources on headstrong fools who get into messes they can’t get out of.”

  “What if he’s found useful information?” Melanie asked.

  “Like what?” Victoria was speaking to Melanie, but Oliver was the one who answered.

  “The fabricator,” he said. “It’s here. There’s a whole ship full of Artifacts.”

  “A whole ship, huh? I’ll send someone to check that out when I’m ready, and they’ll have orders not to pick you up. That’s enough, Melanie. I’ve got to meet with the others.” They heard a door slam.

  “Sorry, guys, she’s gone. That’s the best I can do. Is there really a fabricator, Brian?”

  “I think so.”

  “Stay safe. We haven’t forgotten you, but it might take some time. So glad you’re okay, Oliver! Dione, keep an eye on Brian. Someone has to stop him from being an idiot.”

  “You have no idea,” Dione replied.

  The call had barely ended before Oliver spoke. “We should wait. There are others working on a way to come get us. One that doesn’t involve heading to the ship.”

  Brian opened his mouth to speak, but Dione cut him off. “It’s the logical plan. At least wait few more days, just to see if Lithia or Zane can pull something off.”

  Brian nodded. She thought he was coming around.

  “Do you think it still runs?” he asked.

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” Dione said. “See, normally, all parts of a colonizer are broken down and used to create and fortify the settlement. Jameson didn’t do that. He parked it over here on this dangerous island, so that even if someone did use a Flyer to get here, the local wildlife would probably kill them. We can guess why he hid the fabricator here. He wanted to preserve that power of ‘creation’ for himself. But why leave all of these materials unused? Why keep the ship intact, unless he planned to fly it again? I think it still flies, or at least, it did when Jameson used to come here.”

  “Then we take it home, along with the fabricator.”

  “In a few days—”

  Brian cut her off this time. “What if it can get you home, too?” He was looking directly into her eyes, but it was his words that gave her goose bumps.

  The ache that she had been ignoring flared up, like fire exposed to a new source of oxygen. She had resigned herself to living on Kepos, at least for a while. She thought that maybe in time they could finagle something, either from the Calypso or the Ven Marauder, or even go back up to the space station and look for something they missed. Something Jameson had hidden.

  Was this how Brian felt, hope expanding like dust kicked up from a shockwave? Was this why he was so set on going to the colonizer now? She was beginning to understand. She knew it was stupid, that they should still wait, that her risk-taking adolescent brain was clouding her judgment, but biology didn’t care about logic.

  Oliver looked concerned. “Those dragons are vicious. We won’t be able to get anywhere close to that ship. They’ve staked out that area as their territory. I live here because it’s the area where I have the most control over the threats against me. Once we leave hyena territory, my knowledge is limited. I have no way to protect us against the dragons.”

  Something in those words set the gears of Dione’s mind into motion. She closed her eyes to remove all distractions while she thought, trying to gather the wisps of information in her mind and fashion them into a cohesive idea.

  Her eyes opened wide. “There’s a dragon song!”

  Brian looked confused. “What are you talking about?”

  Oliver, on the other hand, understood her immediately. “How do you know that?”

  She answered Brian first. “There has to be a dragon song. Think about it. The hyenas respond to musical commands just like the maximutes and machi. Jameson bred a song into the hyenas. It only makes sense he did the same for the dragons. He liked being in control, and he never would have left the colonizer here unless he was sure he could return to it unharmed.”

  Brian was beaming at her, but Oliver was skeptical.

  “And what about when the song doesn’t work? What if it’s got a high failure rate? I’ve been killing off the unaffected hyenas for years. I encounter immune ones less and less often because of that.”

  “How did you even learn about the hyena song?” Brian asked. Oliver repeated the story he had told Dione about the parrots and his near-death experience.

  “Oliver, why don’t we try? If things get too dangerous, we can come back and wait.” Dione tried to sound as calm and reasonable as possible. It felt strange to act as a bridge between father and son, between their cautious experience and reckless hope.

  “All right. We’ll go out tomorrow morning to visit nearby sitac trees and look for the song, but before we go anywhere near the dragons, we have to test it. Assuming it even exists.” Oliver, despite his objections, looked eager. He was an explorer, Dione reminded herself. He had risked everything to come to this island and search for the truth that had been denied him. Nevertheless, he was still hesitant, which she again assumed was the result of his
journey here. He had learned firsthand that risks had consequences, and expeditions didn’t always turn out the way one planned.

  Oliver left the two of them in the tree house to start making preparations. Brian was quiet, but moved toward her, hugging her.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me. I still think this is a bad idea, but I’m just as desperate as you now.”

  Home. Dione had tried not to think about it too much. An avalanche of what-ifs cascaded through her thoughts. What if the colonizer was beyond repair? What if Jameson had booby-trapped it? What if the dragons had damaged it? Despite her doubts, she couldn’t pass up the chance to return home.

  Before going to help Oliver with his pre-departure checklist, she sent a quick message to Lithia.

  Dione: Heading out to find dragon song and see the colonizer. Cross your fingers.

  Lithia: Crossed x2. And let Brian do the singing. He’s better at it.

  21. DIONE

  Brian had convinced his father to prepare for a longer trip than originally discussed. Just in case. The trio would trek toward the center of the island where the ship and dragons were, stopping at all of the sitac trees that the parrots loved so much.

  Dione noticed something different about Brian as they left the treehouse. Even though they were headed toward danger, he seemed more relaxed than she’d seen him before. His father’s absence had weighed heavily on him, she realized. Or maybe now that he had been reunited with his father, the burden of care for his mother and colony could finally be shared.

  Dione liked Oliver. As they made their way toward the dragon-infested heart of the island, he asked her questions, not only about the worlds outside Kepos, but about her own education and research. She couldn’t imagine how it felt to be as curious as she was about the world around her, but find herself faced with disapproval and false information at every turn. Even among the Ficarans, this island had been considered cursed, forbidden by the Farmer and the Architect alike.

  In the middle of their conversation, Oliver held up a hand. “Can you hear that?”