The Eve (The Eden Trilogy) (23 page)

“That’s fine,” I said, nodding and taking a step back.  “You don’t have to come with me.”

She looked back in the direction of the kitchen, and then back at me.  “I suppose it could wait one more day.”

I shouldn’t have felt like smiling.  Security detail was an important job.  Maybe the last important job ever.  But I was lonely, even if I’d never admit it.  I wouldn’t mind having her company.

She followed me down the hall and very quietly, we pushed open the door to Creed’s room.

The baby was nearly naked, except for a diaper.  She lay under a light.  I’d been told it was to somehow help her liver fight off something premature babies often had a hard time with.  She had a tiny mask over her eyes.

Vee and I had just stopped at the side of her tiny bed when someone stepped into the room.  We both turned to find Dr. Sun enter.

“Oh,” she said, looking up at us from a chart.  “I’m sorry.  I didn’t realize anyone was here.”

“It’s okay,” I said, smiling at her.  “How is she?”

Dr. Sun made a sound that was like a mix between a laugh and a sigh as she approached the bed.  “Incredible, actually,” she said.  She quickly changed the bag that led into Creed’s feeding tube and threw the empty one in the trash can.  “Her lungs are ninety-two percent functional.  We can take her off of her oxygen in a few days.  Her heart is pumping blood efficiently.  Heart rate is stable.  The jaundice is nearly gone.  She’s more like a three week premature baby, not a twelve week one.”

“How long until she no longer needs to be in the hospital wing?” I asked.

Dr. Sun hesitated in the door, all ready to leave.  “I would say in about ten days.”

Her face paled slightly as she realized what else was to happen in ten days.  We might all be dead within ten days.  Not knowing what to say, she turned to leave.

“Dr. Sun,” I called out to her.  “What happened to the boy we found?  The one from the warehouse?  I don’t see any other rooms occupied in the hospital wing.”

She turned sad eyes on me and instantly I didn’t want to hear her answer.

“He was doing better for a while.  He was conscious.  We thought he would recover.  But then he passed away suddenly one night.  We think it might have been an infection in his blood.”

“Oh,” was all I could manage.

Her eyes falling to the floor, she turned and left without another word.

I kept staring at that door, long after Dr. Sun left, feeling hollowed out.  Vee, however, turned back to Creed and looked at her.  I finally turned and saw as Vee lifted a hand and ran a finger over the back of Creed’s tightly gripped fist.

“She’s so soft,” Vee mused.  “I know she’s like us, but she seems so different.”

“She is different,” I said, pushing away emotions I didn’t want to deal with right then.  “She’ll be able to feel things easier than we did.  If she gets the chance, life won’t be so confusing for her.”

Vee made a sound of acknowledgement and gave a nod of her head.  She continued to stare at the baby.  “What did it feel like, when you were close with West?  When you are with Avian?”

She didn’t look over at me when she asked and her out-of-the-blue question took me off guard.  But the way she had asked it, she hadn’t meant it to be uncomfortable for me.

“Um,” I struggled.  “I mean, at first I guess I just felt alive.  Confused, but awake in a way I didn’t really understand.  I hadn’t really felt much of anything before that.  It was…complex.”

Vee nodded and crossed the room.  She sank into a chair and sat there.  More ridged than anyone else would have sat.

“While West was helping Lin with my hair, his hand brushed the side of my neck,” she said.  She didn’t quite meet my eyes, as if she was uncomfortable sharing this information with me.  “It felt…nice.  And at dinner yesterday, I kind of wanted him to do it again.  But I don’t know why.”

A smile started to curl in the corner of my mouth, but it wasn’t an amused one, or one like other girls might have smiled.  It was almost sad, sad because there were two females in this world that had to have these kinds of reactions explained to them.

“Emotions develop,” I said, sinking into a chair across the room from her.  “Very slowly for us, even more slowly for you I suppose, because of the way you were born.  Sometimes they’re shallow feelings, like sadness, or anger.  But sometimes they develop in your belly and try to eat you from the inside out.”

“Is that what happened with you and him, in the beginning, when West found you?” she asked.  She fixed me with this expression that wasn’t quite blank, but wasn’t quite filled with the right amount of curiosity or jealousy.

It took me a moment to nod.  “Yeah,” I said.  “But it wasn’t just…regular romantic feelings that woke me up.  I didn’t trust West in the beginning.”

“Understandable,” Vee said.  She almost smiled.

I almost smiled too.  “But there was something about him that drew me in.  The only way I can explain what I felt towards him is fire and ice.  He woke emotion back up inside of me, both good and bad.  But it was Avian too, not just West.  What I felt for Avian was deeper, slower.  It took me longer to recognize that emotion was love.”

Vee nodded and her eyes glazed over slightly, as if thinking about how that applied to her.

“Do you have those kinds of feelings for West?” I asked. 

She took her time in answering, but I was willing to wait.  I felt bad for even asking the question.  I hated how everyone had demanded it out of me before I made my decision.  But she was asking for advice and I was pleased it was me she came to.

“I feel as if there is something under my skin,” she finally said.  She looked up at me.  “Like it’s buried deep inside of me.  Sometimes it floats to the surface a bit and lets me almost touch it.  But most of the time it is so far down there that I can’t even consider that it exists.”

“Do you want to feel more of it?” I asked simply, locking my eyes on hers.  I had asked her this question before, but something felt different now.  Something had changed with Vee in the last few days.

“I don’t know,” she said.  “How can I know that when I don’t have anything to compare it to?  Which I think is my answer there,” she added after a moment of thoughtful hesitation.

“I think you owe it to yourself to at least try it,” I said, lacing my fingers together and leaning forward to rest my forearms on my thighs.  “If you don’t like it, or can’t handle it, Dr. Beeson can always revert the programming.  He had to do that with me once.”

“Really?” she asked, her eyes jumping to mine once more. 

I nodded.  “I couldn’t handle it.  I was on the verge of a breakdown.  I would have hurt someone.  I
did
hurt someone.  You and I, we will never be normal.  That was stripped away the moment we were born too early.  But we can be somewhat closer to normal.”

Vee kept my gaze for a long time.  I knew there were thoughts swirling in her head.  She was weighing her options and searching inside for what her gut was telling her.  But none of that showed in her eyes.  I just knew.  Because I had been like that once too.

“I think I’d like to give it a try, if you save the world,” she finally answered.  “But if you can’t, I think maybe it might be nice to not feel the weight of it so heavily.”

TWENTY-SEVEN

FIVE DAYS UNTIL SET OFF

Day nine, day eight, day seven, and six rolled by excruciatingly slow.  I could feel the darkness trying to creep back in on me.  The darkness that had pushed me to my breaking point before the Underground had taken me.  The constant urgency in the air meant adrenaline was trying to burn nonstop in my blood, but there was nothing I could do to use it up.

I had to stay protected and safe inside.  And it was pissing me off.

Finally, on day five, I demanded to see the Nova.  I didn’t need to demand, but I was too on edge to say it with a please or thank you.

Avian was out with security detail, along with West and Vee.  So Graye had returned to take me to the building where they were constructing the transmitter.

“How is the perimeter holding up?” I asked.  The vehicle we rode in was electric, which meant it felt too quiet inside.

“We’ve been getting a few Bane coming inside the borders,” he said, not looking away from the road in front of him.  “Nothing extreme, but there’s getting to be more.”

“How long until they start coming in larger numbers?” I formed it as a question, but knew there was no way Graye could answer it.

“This is it,” he said instead, bringing the vehicle to a stop.  I looked out and up.  We’d driven five blocks and stopped at a towering building. 

“Thanks for the ride,” I said.  I climbed out and Graye drove away.

This was the highest building for a long ways around.  The very center of the city had the tallest buildings, but this was the tallest within five miles.  I opened the doors and walked across to the elevator.  I glanced over at the door to the stairs and debated on which option to take.  Deciding I had nervous energy to burn off, I opted for the stairs.

All thirty floors of them.

I was annoyed that I wasn’t even breathing hard or sweating when I reached the roof.  Even more annoyed when I got there and it started drizzling.  There was a massive cone-shaped object sitting to the side of a tent.  There were a dozen other cone-shaped objects spaced evenly all across the roof.  I crossed the space to the hulking tent that sat in the middle of everything.

Throwing the flap aside, I stepped in.  No one noticed I was there for a while.  Dr. Beeson, Addie, Royce, and half a dozen others worked in murmured voices.  Dr. Evans stood off to one side, standing in a glass box.

There were three panels standing in a circle.  They were shiny silver on the inside and flat black on the outside.  Several boxes were stationed on the outside of the panels—controls and monitors.

Thin bands connected the three panels, except for one side, and I could only assume that was where I walked into it.  Atop each of the three panels was a rod, and the three of them connected into a point.  That had to be where the big dish attached.

On a table to one side of the tent, lay Dr. Evans notebook.  But now it had been torn from its spiral binding.  The pages were smudged with grease and pencil dust.  They were well used.

Dr. Evans looked over at me then and I saw thin metallic veins fractionally growing in his left eye.

As soon as he saw me, the others turned their attention to me as well.  They shifted to the side, giving a clearer view of the device.

 “So this is it?” I asked, looking once again at the Nova.  “This is the thing that’s going to save the world?”

“Technically
you’re
going to save the world,” Dr. Beeson said, looking at me intently.  That was when I noticed the reverent looks on each of their faces.  Like I really was their savior.  “But yes, this is the amplifier and transmitter.”

“Will you show me how it works?” I asked.  My voice came out quieter than I wanted.

“Of course,” Dr. Beeson said.  The other scientists shuffled back from it and watched with nervous attention.  Royce stood to one side, his arms crossed over his chest.

Dr. Beeson held his hand out, inviting me to step inside.  I did.

“It’s quite simple, really,” he began.  “You stand inside here.  When we take the block off your kill code, these panels both absorb and amplify the signal.  They’ll be sent up here,” he said, pointing to the rods that connected at the top.  “And in a day or two we’ll connect the transmitter.  Each of those other transmitters outside is connected to the Nova.  They will all then send the signal up to the receiving satellite above us.  From there it bounces off to every other satellite still floating above this planet.  They reflect the code back to Earth ten times stronger than we sent it up.  And then…”

“And then they’ll be dead,” I finished for him.

Dr. Beeson nodded.

My eyes flickered to Dr. Evans.  He’d be dead too.

“And there is no chance that Vee and Creed will be affected by it?” I said.

Addie stepped forward, a clipboard in hand.  “We’ve never said they wouldn’t be affected in any way.  This has happened before, after all.  It did cause major damage to Eve One the first time, but it did not kill her.”

“We’ve built a lead box,” Royce spoke up.  “You probably didn’t notice it when you came up, but it’s here on the roof as well.  Nothing can penetrate its walls.  It’s effectively a dead zone.  They’ll be perfectly safe inside.”

“And the outside of these panels,” Addie said as she indicated the black coating on the outside of them.  “They will stop the signal from coming back at you.”

“It didn’t affect me at all the first time,” I pointed out.  “Is it even necessary?”

“It’s just a precaution,” Royce said.  There was complexity behind his eyes that told me he was the one who had insisted on this.

“Okay,” I said, nodding as I scanned everything once more.  “It looks like you have everything under control, right?”

Dr. Beeson, Addie, and Royce nodded.

But I looked at Dr. Evans. 

There was no way he could guarantee that the satellites in orbit would still work.  And if they didn’t work, all of this was pointless.  It would be the end.

“Everything has come together exactly as I planned it all those years ago,” he responded.  Everyone but me probably missed the way the veins in his eye grew fractionally, even as he spoke.  “There are just a few more minor details to attend to and check.  We are on schedule to set it off in four days.”

“Four days,” I breathed.  That should have felt like no time at all.  We’d survived over two-thousand of them since the Evolution happened.  But that was four entire days we had to hold our breath.   We just had to hope a Bane sweep didn’t fall upon us before those four days were over with.

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWO DAYS UNTIL SET OFF

“I think we’ve missed one important detail.”

Royce jerked awake, his arms twitching where they had lain over his eyes.  He rolled over onto his stomach and glared at me with groggy eyes.