The Extinction Trials(32)

Maya was tired and scared.

And for the first time since she had awoken in this strange place, she was hopeful. For the first time, they had a way off this island. And a destination. What waited there, she didn’t know, but it had to be better than here.

The team worked urgently then, and in sync, worked together as never before.

Owen, Maya, and Cara suited up and carried the packaged meals and their supplies to the ship. Alister and Will studied the power plant, then trekked out to the boat to inspect the broken engine again.

When they returned, the rest of the group was eating in the observation room.

“How sure are you that you can fix it?” Owen asked Alister.

“Pretty sure,” the middle-aged man replied. Maya could see that he was dead tired.

“I just need to rest a bit,” Alister said. “I’ll get one shot at it. If I break the parts to fix the boat, then we’re stuck here.”

“Once we take the power plant offline,” Will said, “we’ll need to stay in our suits. We may as well journey to the ship together and—”

“Make our stand there,” Owen said. “That’s what it is.”

Silently, the others nodded. With those words, the course was set.

Alister and Will ate dinner together, quietly reviewing their plan until both were so weary, they could barely keep their eyes open.

Cara lay on a bed of blankets, holding the small item she had found in the envelope with her name on it. She stared at it, marveling. It was something she had seen hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times in pictures. But she never thought she would ever hold it. A single thought ran through her mind: I’m free now.

In the corner, Owen was reading the book he had found in the envelope with his name on it: The Birthright. His face was a mask of concentration that made him look younger, like a schoolboy struggling with a new subject. Maya found it endearing.

Blair placed a hand on Maya’s shoulder, and she turned to find the young girl holding the tablet. “Will you read to me?”

“Of course,” Maya said, smiling.

She didn’t know if Blair could read herself—the child looked like she might be at the age where she was learning—or if she simply liked the comfort of Maya reading to her. Either way, Maya was more than willing to do so. They sat in the corner, reading until Blair’s eyelids closed for good. Maya wasn’t far behind her.





The next morning, they suited up and waited by the airlock as Alister and Will removed the parts they needed from the power plant.

The pulsing red emergency lights winked out, plunging the space into darkness. One by one, their helmet lights snapped on, six sets of beams cutting into the darkness.

“We’re ready,” Alister said over the radio.

They marched single file out of the cave and into the forest. The storm was gone, leaving only the morning fog. Still, no one risked removing their helmet.

On the uneven ground, Blair held hands with Maya and Owen, who were both prepared to catch the girl if she stumbled. A fall—and a tear in her suit—could be deadly.

At the boat, they climbed the ladder and walked along the narrow path to the open-air portion of the deck.

At the station, they had decided they would stay here, in the open portion of the deck while they had the suits on. Cara had reasoned that if whatever deadly agent was on the island could cling to the suits, it was best not to track it deeper into the ship.

With Will’s help, she had also extracted the decontamination liquid from the station’s chamber. The plan was to leave the suits on the lower deck, then wipe down the ship. They didn’t want to take any chances.

Alister and Will descended the short stairway to the lower deck, where they began their work in earnest.

Maya had learned that Alister was a hard worker, but he wasn’t a particularly happy worker. He cursed and muttered complaints in a near-constant stream as he fitted the parts from the power plant into the engine. Chief among his complaints was having to work with the suit on. But he didn’t dare take it off, or so much as mention the idea of trying to take it off.

The first time Maya glanced at the oxygen reading on her suit, it read 62%.

When she looked at it again, the sun was high in the sky, and the oxygen was down to 43%. Time was running out.

All eyes focused on Alister and Will when they trudged up from the lower deck. “We’re ready,” Will said.

In the cockpit, Alister tapped the control panel with his grease-covered fingers, unbothered by getting the shiny boat dirty. “Here goes nothing,” he mumbled as he tried starting the engine.

It only clicked.

Alister threw his hands up. “This hunk of junk is too complicated for its own good! Probably designed to fail so they could sell some rich idiot another one.”

With Will in tow, he returned to the lower deck and toiled some more.

Maya made eye contact with Owen, and she could instantly tell what he was thinking: this isn’t going according to plan. But there was not much they could do except place their faith in Alister and Will—and wait.

Blair, despite her youth, was clearly aware of the danger they were in. Her face displayed the fear they all felt but were trying hard to hide.

Maya felt as if they were standing in a pool watching the waterline rise, knowing soon there would be nothing they could do—except remove their suit helmets. And even if they survived that, they would still be stuck on the island.