THE EPOCH CHRONICLES | ✔

forty-three

ZOEY FELT her heart clench when she saw Luca and that other technician guy approaching; like it was a premonition of what was to come.

She knew Tina had been at the camp — and had vanished into thin air the very next day. It made her worried, how easily Ichabod could make people disappear, but she kept her head down and handed the antibiotics to those who had been bitten by bugs and bandages to those who had shredded their skin on cutting fern leaves. Zoey was a doctor, after all, but it didn't make her feel proud to be treating them.

Them being the people who would kill Amelia without a second thought.

The question was, was Luca one of them?

Zoey knew she certainly wasn't. Even thinking about what was going to happen under Ichabod's control caused mind-numbing anger to flow through her veins. She'd catch herself shaking, gripping onto a tray filled with epi-pens and boosters, her jaws clenched and eyes narrowed. So many people would die if Ichabod's plan was carried out ... And she would fail in her mission.

Well. She was failing already. Any sign of trouble, and she'd take it down. That's what her instructions had been; and look where that had gotten her.

Fearing the people she would've trusted in a heartbeat in her old world, when she still had Amelia and still felt joy in being able to help people.

As Luca approached, she moved outside of her tent and leant against the bracing, feeling the fabric flex like a muscle beneath her. The last time she and Luca had talked had almost been a week before, when he had convinced her to work with Ichabod. A week wasn't a very long tine, but was it long enough for people to shift allegiances?

And was it long enough for Amelia to forget about Zoey's feelings about her?

"Doctor Royson," Luca said, his voice sounding strained. He and his companion were sweating heavily, looking on the verge of an anxiety attack or dehydration or both. Luca pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. "We need your help."

Zoey raised her eyebrows, but stepped back into the dimness of the tent. Luca and his friend followed, their footsteps making the bottom of the tent crackle. Zoey had been lucky enough — Doctor's privileges, she reckoned drily — to get a more spacious one than most. Ichabod's may have had a canopy, but there were enough nooks and crannies in her own to evenly distribute medicines that had arrived in the first container.

The first one.

Because the only thing that had come from the second, secret one (only proving her suspicion that someone high up, maybe even higher than Ichabod's father, was in on his plan for mass destruction), she guessed, had been tools. Tools for construction, and they buzzed day and night as the EEG hovered overhead, co-ordinating marines when Ichabod wasn't there to do it himself.

Though Zoey was anything but a builder, passing by the structure had given her moments of (surprisingly) appraisal. It had only been two days since the container had been dragged into camp, and yet it was beginning to resemble something more intricate than a giant metal box. Bracing points were placed on the four corners, and flaps and edges were cut into the metal like a prodigy first grader slicing up a cardboard box with a scissor for a school project.

It was almost taking on a hexagonal form, unless it was octagonal. 'Oct' is eight. Hexagonal, then. Folding it on itself, it loomed above the camp like the Loch Ness monster rearing up to swallow them.