“You didn’t use your gift because you can’t use it against these vines,” the woman’s warm voice says to me. She turns to face Alexander and I, and for a moment we just look into her dark shaded face. Then, she takes her hand and brushes back her hood.
Her blonde hair blows back and her frail face comes into view. Her hazel eyes shine in the sunlight. “Mother?” Alexander asks, his voice cracking. Tears are in the woman’s eyes and Alexander leaps off the ground and throws his arms around the woman’s neck. “Is that really you?” he says between sobs.
“It’s me. It’s really me,” the woman says into his shoulder.
Chapter 29
I can feel my own tears starting to fill my eyes because I can only imagine how happy he must feel to have her back in his life. Alexander’s mother breaks away from him and says, “It’s good to see some familiar faces.” She glances between Cooper and Alexander.
When she gets to me she pauses and says, “Adaline, it is so good to see you.” She embraces me in a tight hug, and even though I truly don’t know who she is I feel as though I have known her my whole life. She just seems to be one of those people who are so welcoming to others. I can already tell she is so selfless and caring of not just her own family, but also everyone she comes in contact with.
“Marin, we need some answers,” I say to her as I pull away.
“I know,” she says and then continues, “I need some answers myself. I can start by telling you all that I know, but first I want to know what you guys are doing out here.”
“The eels attacked our boat on the way to Libertas,” Cooper explains and Marin nods, seeming to understand. “Adaline got us out of the destruction and brought us here. We’ve been here almost two days now.”
“Did you all make it?” Marin asks her question innocently.
“We lost seven. Four you didn’t know, we picked them up in Sard,” Cooper says. “Cassandra, Sarah, and Andy didn’t make it either.”
“I’m sorry, we knew this trip would be dangerous,” Marin begins to say, but Cooper cuts her off.
“Marin, it’s all right. Everyone knew the stakes when we signed up,” Cooper says.
“We’ve been looking for freshwater. We are running dangerously low,” Zavy says after a moment of silence, and then adds, “You must know where some is, right?”
“I do,” Marin says in her strong voice, pulling her mind away from the deaths of the kids she left behind, and then explains, “I built my camp near a creek that runs through the island. I’ll take you there.” She places her sword back in her cloak and starts taking large strides back toward the woods. We all run and fall into step with her and then she starts telling us her story.
“I’m sure that Cooper has told you all that he knows about the night that we brought everyone out into the woods, so I’ll just pick up from when we left the camp,” Marin says. “After we left you with Mio and Cinder, your father, Derith,” she says, looking between Cooper and myself, pausing for a second, “and I headed deeper into the woods for Sard.
We got there without any trouble, and Leo had us on a boat in no time. Derith seemed oddly off the next day and I couldn’t figure out why he was like that, but when we were just a couple of hours or so from the shore of Libertas the creatures in the sea attacked our boat. Part of me thinks that Derith knew they were coming, and that’s why he was so on edge the entire time.” I nod, not completely surprised. According to Cooper, he was a Future Holder and probably did know they were coming.
Marin continues explaining, “For awhile we managed to stay on the boat and keep everything in one piece, but that didn’t last long. The moment the creatures snapped our boat in half I was knocked unconscious and I can’t remember a thing. When I woke up I was on this island.”
“We heard about the crash,” Cooper says and I watch him pull out my father’s compass that he had shown me. “We found this washed up with the debris from your boat.”
Marin takes the old compass and her face sets in a soft smile before she hands it back to Cooper. “He wouldn’t go anywhere without that thing,” Marin says. “There was no one else here on the island with me, trust me I’ve walked every inch of this place. I had no way out of here so I’ve just been trapped here for seven years. Now it’s starting to make sense why Derith was so on edge and wouldn’t tell me why. He probably saw that you all would end up here on your journey to Libertas and he needed someone to be here when you arrived. I wish he just would’ve told me he needed me to stay here, but to be honest if he’d asked I would have said no. This island isn’t exactly the number one place for a vacation,” Marin says as she begins to make the pieces fit on her end.
“What is this place?” I ask Marin, curious about what exactly those vines really are.
“This used to be Libertas,” Marin starts explaining. “Those people who are buried back there are the very first generation of people who had fled from the Kings of Dather to save themselves. The problem was, when they died and were buried, their body decomposed and the atomic matter that was in their bloodstreams, what
