Since the Change, Zion is armed to a tee and guarded by the world’s best contractors. I am nineteen, raised and trained by a military father, but Archer Crone probably thinks I am a pretty, feisty girl who is pissing in her pants with the excitement of being selected to come to the island. Granted, he approves the final applicants himself.
Yeah. Archer Crone is a ten, but he knows my dirty laundry. My records don’t shine so brightly, yet I won the golden ticket.
Sleeping with the enemy, my future boss…
I entertain the idea until my stomach tightens. I smile like a dummy. My nerves are on edge. The adrenalin makes my skin tingle.
I study Archer Crone’s photo in the file on my lap as I sit in the backseat of the pickup truck as my dad and uncle drive me to the Transfer Center. From there, I am off with the several selected to be taken to Zion Island.
Zion is a mystery. A hundred elite students from Deene University went there on Spring Break the week when the world’s most powerful nations snapped and pressed the red buttons, turning half the globe into a battlefield. Over a hundred nukes didn’t destroy the world, despite what most people had thought. To be fair, over a hundred above-ground nukes were tested in Nevada in the last century. It didn’t kill us. Didn’t harm Las Vegas either.
But an actual war is different.
The nukes hit the major infrastructure points, data centers, and military bases. The US was affected the most. Ironic, considering once we were the world police and now the world’s pity.
Martial law, internment camps, nationwide hunger, humanitarian crisis, gun violence that escalated with the lack of policing, a banking system crash, medical and sanitary disasters, and—too fresh to still remember the previous one—world lockdown that’s been in place for over two years now.
You name it, we have it.
A new nuclear pact was signed recently, like it would do any good, because there was already one such pact before the Change.
“You’ve been staring at the picture for a while, kiddo. What’s up?”
I lift my eyes to see my uncle’s narrowed eyes on me from his front seat.
How long has he been studying me?
How long have I been staring at Zion’s own Tony Stark?
Was I smiling the entire time?
Ugh. I’ve been burning holes in Archer Crone’s picture for some time. Yeah, I can’t help it. The idea of meeting him is making me anxious and… excited.
My uncle’s gaze is prying as I snap the file closed and put it aside.
“Nothing reckless, Kat, got it?” he says, not turning away. “Don’t get involved with him in… You know what I mean.”
I know.
I run my hand over my dark thick hair, half-braided at the scalp and the rest of it loose and cascading down my back, then bring a strand over my shoulder and curl it around my finger.
Uncle’s eyes follow my hand, and I drop it, annoyed.
I roll my eyes. We’ve discussed this for two months while waiting for the results of the application to go to Zion Island. Only seven are selected every three or four months. Chances are one in a thousand. Most of the selected are skilled and talented, but all of them young.
I was lucky. Anyone selected is.
Zion is a fortress. No outsiders are allowed except for the businessmen and the powerful family members of the Ayana residents, who fly there on private jets and helicopters while the mainland is under martial law and the world is in lockdown. There are no rules for the rich—that part didn’t change since the war.
Zion is also a home base to Gen-Alpha Project run by Archer Crone himself—a pharmaceutical company that develops the formula and manufactures the drug to stop genetic mutation caused by fallout. A drug only affordable to the richest one percent. Shocker.
There are rumors and stories about Zion. But none of the spring-breakers who returned from there—a handful is all—talk about it.
And here I am, twenty minutes from the Transfer Center that will take me and the lucky others to paradise.
“This is a job, Kat. Not a game,” Uncle says for the hundredth time, his eyes never leaving mine.
We’ve discussed the plan of me getting to Zion and finding the mobster princess for weeks. I know the map of the island, the logistics, its organization, and even some of the spring-breakers and their family history.