by Alice Reeds
“I’m not sure I want to know,” I said and turned off the gun thing. My arm went back to normal, to the way I preferred seeing it. I ran my hand over the patch of skin that had been translucent a second ago. It felt completely normal. The entire scene sent a chill down my spine. This was every shade of bizarre.
While I put the gun thing back into the backpack, Miles pulled out a folded piece of paper from under the pile. I watched him as he unfolded it.
“I think I know what that gun is for, and I’m pretty sure you won’t like it,” he said and turned the paper around so I could have a look.
Assignment: Search, destroy, retrieve.
Danger Warning: Before you start your assignment apply safety measures to protect your body.
1) Find female host Wolf and male host Echo.
2) Eliminate hosts Wolf and Echo.
-->Preferred method of elimination: shot at the head, either through the back or forehead.
3) Once the hosts are eliminated, use scanner to find the implant in each host’s neck.
4) Make incision in the appropriate place.
5) Find implant and store it in the vial marked with the respective name. Do not get them mixed up.
6) Seal vial tight.
7) Discard host Wolf and Echo.
8) Before you leave the island, take off safety measures and dispose of them into the appropriate airtight box.
The further I read, the more the blood in my veins began to freeze. Not only was Ji here to kill us, he even had a manual telling him how to do it, like instructions for how to boot up a laptop or set up your smartphone. This was insane, but what was even more insane, and alarming at the same time, was the danger warning and the talk about implants.
“Did you notice the logo at the top?” Miles said.
I shook my head. I was too caught up with the instructions on how to kill us to notice anything else.
“It’s the same logo, the same name, as the company in Berlin that we were supposed to work for—Briola Bio Tech.”
“They put us here,” I said as realization hit me. “Offering the internship was only a way to get fresh meat, wasn’t it? Choosing the two of us based on some fucked-up criteria? To do what, experiment on us?”
“Wait, rewind…implants. What implants?” Miles asked, his voice shaded in by panic.
Instead of answering, I grabbed the gun thing and got up. Quickly I walked around and kneeled behind him, my hand on the back of his head to tip it forward and expose his neck.
“What are you doing?”
“The instructions were talking about an implant in our necks, right? I want to know if it’s true, or if this is just another piece of bullshit they’re trying to sell us like the plane.”
My hands lightly trembled, and I pleaded to any higher power I could think of that it was all just a farce, that maybe, somehow, we were trapped in some psychological experiment, that I wouldn’t find anything. I knew the chances probably weren’t high, but I still hoped. I clicked the gun on and pulled down Miles’s collar, exposing the entire expanse of his neck.
…
It seemed like it was all we did, run and run and run some more. But no matter where we ran or hid, they always found us. I’d been so sure that this was a place they wouldn’t ever think of, especially in a city this big, but I’d been wrong.
Why did I have to be wrong?
…
I sucked in a sharp breath and then cursed as I watched his skin turn translucent the way mine had. And just in the middle of it all I could see this implant the instructions talked about. I didn’t know much about human anatomy and the human skeleton, but I was a hundred percent certain that a pill-sized thing didn’t naturally belong in a human neck.
“What is it?” Miles asked, his voice now clearly alarmed. I couldn’t blame him.
“I found it,” I said, my eyes still glued to what I was seeing. Somehow I willed myself to turn the gun back off, to stop looking. Closing my eyes, I leaned forward until my forehead rested against his shoulder blade and moved my hand that previously held his head onto his neck, his skin warm against my fingers. “You should check mine.”
I didn’t want to know if that implant was really there, the mere idea making my skin crawl with the force of a thousand spiders, but we had to find out. We exchanged places and I held my breath as Miles checked my neck. The way he sucked in a breath, harsh and quick, was enough for me to know that it was there.
“What are we going to do?”
“Cut mine out.” He couldn’t be serious, could he? “Fiona, I’m not kidding. Get it out!”
“Are you insane?” I asked and turned around to look at him. His expression was serious, but he had to be joking, right?
“We have to find out what they are, and that’s the only way to do it.”
“I can’t just cut open your neck,” I argued.
“I can take it.”
“That is so not the point.” I couldn’t believe him. Maybe I was still asleep, was only dreaming that all of this was happening. I hadn’t minded punching Ji, but purposefully hurting Miles, literally cutting his neck open, no way. “I can’t do that.”
“Yes, yes you can,” he said, his voice unwavering. “And you will. It’s the only way, and I’m even volunteering to go first. I trust you.”
“I can’t hurt you.”
“Even if I give you the permission to do it? See it as payback for all the times I hurt you,” he offered, and in that moment, I wanted to punch him. It was a nice gesture of him, offering to be the one being cut, but that didn’t change anything. It was insane, and I had no idea how to do something like that.
“It’s going to hurt, a lot,” I said, my voice so much fainter than his.
“If you could take someone cutting away your skin, I’m sure I can take this.”
“This isn’t some kind of contest to see which of us is more hardcore than the other, Miles.”
At that he reached out and took my hand, squeezed it a little. There was the smallest of smiles on his face; his eyes looking into mine were clear and honest, not backing down. I didn’t see any doubt in them, didn’t see any indication that he was still thinking about this. His mind was made up, I realized. No matter what I said, he wouldn’t change it.
Leaning in, I kissed him. This was the dumbest idea he could’ve had, but the fact that he volunteered to take the pain first, to let me literally cut him open, it said a lot about him, about just how much he trusted me. He kissed me back, deepened the kiss for just a moment, like a man drowning and desperate for air, before he pulled away.
“You’re stalling,” he teased with a small smirk.
“Busted.”
I got up and fetched the med-kit, as well as the hunting knife I’d seen between the other things that had fallen out, and one of the pairs of rubber gloves. With all those things in hand, I moved behind Miles again, kneeled, and then opened the med-kit to see if what I needed was in there. Thankfully I found some bandages—probably too small, but they would have to do—and some antiseptic I could use to disinfect the knife as well as Miles’s skin and then the cut later on to make sure nothing would get infected.
“Are you sure?” I asked after I checked the location of the implant again.
“Yes,” he said without a moment of hesitation.
The blade broke skin, blood pearling around it, and he hissed very audibly. I tried to work as quickly as I could, while still being precise and effective to avoid having to redo it, hurt him only more. The implant was really close to the skin, so once the cut was done it was fairly easy to get it out. With bloody rubber fingers I dumped the implant in the labeled vial and handed it to Miles, trying my best to ignore how much his hand was trembling.
“Almost done,” I said and wiped away the blood before disinfecting the area again and trying my best to put the bandages on.
“Wasn’t so bad,” Miles said and tried to sound like he meant it. I didn’t believe him for a second, but the sight of t
he implant outside of his body was oddly reassuring. We had no idea what those implants did, but if Briola put them there, the same bastards that had placed us on the island to begin with, I was sure it was better to not run around with them. Even more so considering the safety warning that had come with the instructions.
Suddenly, just as I was about to tell Miles that it was my turn now, I heard loud rustling from somewhere in the jungle not too far from us. The bear—it had to be, the sound too harsh to be anything or anyone else. With everything that had happened, I’d completely forgotten about it, though now that I thought about it, we’d been exceptionally lucky that it had taken it so long to realize that we were just sitting there as though on a silver platter.
“The bear,” I said and jumped up onto my feet, more than ready to bolt.
“What?” Miles asked, looking up at me. There was something off about his expression, like he was confused somehow. Was it possible that he simply didn’t hear it? He hadn’t lost any substantial amount of blood, but who knew how it affected him.
“The bear, I can hear it coming,” I said, my voice sounding far more alarmed than I intended. “Come on, we need to go!” Just as I said it, the bear roared in the distance, the sound already too close for my liking. “Miles!”
Finally, he moved, stood up, and we threw the stuff back into the backpack. Taking my implant out would have to wait until we made it back to our cave. Now we had to go, and we had to do it quickly. Like this day hadn’t been awful enough, of course the bear had to show itself as well.
We ran, fast, away, off in the opposite direction from where the roaring had come, the thunderous sound of the bear closing in. My heart raced, my breathing turning labored, my body exhausted from everything that happened, all the emotions it had to process, but still I ran, pushed my body to go farther and farther.
At some point Miles slowed down, and my mind immediately jumped into an even greater state of alert and panic. Was he not feeling well? Had the cut taken more out of him than he let on? What would we do if he couldn’t continue?
“Fiona!” he called out from a few feet behind me. I hadn’t even realized our distance had become this great, the sound of his voice only adding to my worry. It sounded too calm, maybe surprised, shocked somehow. I had no idea. None of it made sense. “Fiona, stop!”
To my surprise, I actually did.
I turned toward him, my heart beating practically in my ears, the need to run like a force within me, pushing, pulling. But I stood there and looked back at him. What was wrong?
“We need to go!” I repeated as the beast roared once more. I flinched, but he didn’t. He didn’t react at all to the sound.
“It’s not real,” he said.
“Have you completely lost your mind?” This was it. Miles had finally lost his mind for good. Maybe the pain had been too much after all, had robbed him of any kind of logical thinking somehow. I didn’t know if it was possible, but something had to be wrong with him. “How can it not be real if I can hear it?”
“Believe me, it’s not real!”
My eyes widened, and I took a step back as I noticed the bear between the trees off in the distance behind Miles, coming closer, racing toward us. “How can it not be real if I can fucking see it?”
“I swear it isn’t real,” he said calmly, and actually smiled. What? How? This couldn’t be, none of this. “I can’t hear or see it. Trust me.”
I took another step backward as I listened to him, tried to understand his words. He asked me to trust him, but how could I when I saw the bear behind him? How could he claim he didn’t see or hear it? But wasn’t this what we’d sworn, our rules, trusting each other and sticking together, that we’d be honest with each other. He’d told me so much about himself, as had I, and he hadn’t given me any sort of reason to doubt him, doubt his words, but this, this just seemed insane in every sort of way.
The fear I had such complete control over before we’d woken up on the island overflowed, an unstoppable wave taking hold my entire body. I wanted to scream, to cry, to run, but my body felt frozen, paralyzed right in that place, my eyes switching between Miles and the bear. I could see it, its giant eyes and flared nose, its brown fur and clawed paws, open mouth and sharp teeth ready to rip me into pieces.
If Miles was wrong, the only thing I could hope for was that death would come quick and painless, as much as possible, at least.
The bear passed Miles, and he didn’t take his eyes off of me, his hair didn’t move, though it should have, considering the size of the bear and its speed. He just continued to look at me, unflinching, a smile on him, trustful and affectionate, the grandest display of belief in my own strength I’d ever seen on another person.
I could do this.
So I looked at the bear, watched as it came closer, grew bigger and bigger, got faster. I refused to flinch, to close my eyes, to make any kind of sound. Instead I just stood there, looked at it challengingly, ready to see what would happen.
The beast jumped, its claws out and teeth bared, but just as I expected its weight to throw me to the ground, for pain to break in on me, neither of those things happened. Instead the bear turned into smoke, swirls of black and gray surrounding me, slowly dissolving. The bear I’d seen a second ago disappeared right in front of my eyes.
This entire time, it hadn’t been real.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The Island
“How?” I asked, perplexed, staring ahead of me where the bear had been just a moment ago before it turned into literal smoke and disappeared. I still couldn’t wrap my head around it. The bear we’d feared this entire time, that had turned every trip into the jungle into literal hell, hadn’t been real the entire time. How was that even possible?
“I think it could have something to do with the implants,” he said, coming toward me. Of course. It was so obvious. “Once you took mine out, poof, the bear was gone. I saw the fear in your eyes, I knew it was approaching but nothing. The bear wasn’t real.”
I only blinked, swallowed the lump in my throat, tried to figure out something to say, but there was nothing. My mind turned blank. My body shook with adrenaline, with the emotional roller-coaster I’d just survived, and no words wanted to come. It had all happened so fast, I couldn’t keep up.
Miles closed the distance between us and pulled me into a hug, his arms around me, his warmth enveloping me. He was real, at least. I could feel and smell him, a reassuring fact. For a moment I’d thought that maybe he would turn out to just be smoke as well, even though I’d touched him many times, so I knew he was real. Slowly I relaxed, the tension easing away. I wrapped my arms around him, pulled him closer, and just breathed.
“You trusted me,” Miles said, quietly. “And you looked fear in the eye, showed how strong you are. I knew you could do it.”
“I thought about you,” I admitted. “What you said.”
“That’s cute.”
“I want that implant out,” I said instead of commenting. I was semi-sure I was calm enough to do something besides hold on to him, that I could face whatever would come next, whatever those damn implants stood for. If they were really what had made the bear happen, I wanted it out, just to be sure it wouldn’t appear again somehow.
We took a moment to look for a small clearing, a patch with a bit more light so Miles could better see what he was doing. While he unpacked the things he’d need, I put my hair up into a bun so he could access my neck and braced myself for what was about to happen. It would suck, a lot, but it would be worth it.
“Ready?” Miles asked and placed a kiss on the junction of my right shoulder and neck. A shiver ran down my spine, and I could practically feel him smiling for just a moment against my skin.
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” I took a deep breath, let my eyes fall shut.
It wasn’t as bad as I anticipated it would be, not much worse than my tattoo had been, most of my ring fights, or most of the dumb stuff I’d done with my friends. It wasn’t p
leasant in any kind of way, but it wasn’t something painful enough that I wouldn’t be able to take it. Instead of thinking about the pain I tried to focus on my breathing, calm in and out, and tried to block out everything else.
“Done,” Miles announced far quicker than I thought. I raised my hand to my neck, felt the bandage that covered the cut, and felt comforted. Realistically, I didn’t feel any different than I had before, but knowing that this foreign object was gone from my body still tricked me into feeling like something had changed somehow. It was almost like a shade of freedom, even though we were still just as trapped on the island as before.
I helped Miles pack away the med-kit and knife in the backpack. Who would’ve thought that something like this would ever be something we’d have to do, take implants out of each other’s bodies, spill our blood because of some company that decided they wanted to have a little fun, put us on an island and see what would happen. I hoped they were fucking entertained enough.
“What do you think these are for?” Miles asked while holding his implant between his thumb and pointer. “Besides inducing the beast, that is.”
“My first guess would be that it’s a tracker,” I said while looking at mine. They weren’t much bigger than those pills with small beads inside of them, but I guessed they were still big enough to have some kind of tech in them. “Maybe the others had those implants, too, and that’s how Briola found the camp in the jungle.”
“Sounds like a possibility, yeah. Trackers come in all sorts of sizes.” The outer layer of the capsule was dark, which made it basically impossible to see if there was anything inside. “I think the best way to go about this would be to simply open one and check.”
While Miles fiddled around with the capsule and tried to figure out how to open it, if there even was a way to do it, I inspected the outside of mine a little further. The surface was completely smooth, and there didn’t appear to be any markings or words. Except—
“Wait!” I suddenly said and raised my hand at him. He immediately stopped, and the capsule almost fell from his hand.