The Eve (The Eden Trilogy) (27 page)

Seeing there was no use arguing with him anymore, I shut up.  I looked up at Vee, and her expression told me she was as unsure about this working as I was.

I sat back and watched the others around us as West and Vee ate.  Almost everyone in the dining room had been on security detail last night.  Tristan, Graye, Raj.  They all looked exhausted.  But there was a frantic determination in their eyes.

Less than five months.  That was how long the Pulse’s clearing had lasted.  And even those five months of ease had been marred.

Suddenly I was exhausted too.

I looked back at West, only to find his eyes locked on my left hand.  I glanced down and realized he was staring at my freshly placed ring.

“He proposed,” West stated simply.  He didn’t look up at me.

“In a way,” I said, feeling my insides grate and slither at the same time.  “But I said yes.”

West raised one eyebrow and then returned to his meal.

“The metal of the ring seems odd,” Vee observed. 

“Avian had the ring forged from the bullets I pulled out of him,” I explained, straightening my fingers and looking down at the ring.  “That night you both went to the transformer.  The night you got infected.  He kept them.  He made the ring and then had them covered in white gold.”

“How romantic,” West said flatly.

“Knock it off,” I said, fixing him with a steely glare.

“Sorry,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.  “Habit I guess.  I am happy for you.”

“Hmm,” I said, still glaring at him.

Vee shifted uncomfortably.  And then I felt horrible.

Finished with their breakfast, Vee and West returned their trays.

“We’re going to be on night duty again tonight,” Vee said, standing next to West, her shoulder brushing against his.  I saw his fingers twitch slightly, as if he debated taking her hand in his.

“I think we’d better go get some sleep while we’ve got the chance,” he said.  He looked at me with genuine concern in his eyes.  “Try to relax, Eve.  There’s nothing you can do right now.  Avian can take care of himself.  He’s one of the best marksmen I’ve known.”

I nodded, my stomach turning sour as I did.  West placed what he meant to be a comforting hand on my arm for a moment before he turned and walked back down the hall.  Vee followed after him, looking back over her shoulder once.

Standing there with my shoulders slumped, it felt as if I were both hollow and filled with a million sharp rocks at the same time.  The world was too loud inside the hospital and too quiet from the outside.  Except for the occasional shot fired.

“You look like someone should put you out of your misery.”

I turned to see Tristan walking toward me, brushing crumbs off his hands.

“This is wrong,” I said, shaking my head.  “It doesn’t feel right.”

Tristan took a breath as if to speak, and then seemed to think better of it.  He fiddled there for a moment and then finally started walking forward.  “Come on.”

Eager for something to do, I didn’t question him.

He led us straight for the armory.  Opening a locked storage container, he brought out a wicked looking weapon.

It had three balancing legs, so this was not a weapon to be walking around with.  A deadly accurate scope was attached to the top of it.  Jutting out the front was a thin barrel.

I’d heard of one of these before, but never dreamed I’d get to handle one.  A DSR 50 sniper rifle.

Tristan handed it over to me before picking up a bag of ammunition.

“Let’s go,” he said with a grin.

He carried the bag of ammo and I followed him silently to the elevator.  We stepped out on the blue floor.  Walking to the end of the hall, Tristan punched in the code to the door that led to the roof.

Tristan had really gained Royce’s trust if he knew this code.

“Not much need for a guard here,” Tristan said as we stepped out into the bright sunlight of mid-morning.  We walked past the broken Pulse to the edge of the roof.  “Everyone else is too busy on duty down there.”  He nodded with his chin off the side of the building.  Looking down, I could see one of the tanks.  The firing turret swept from the east side of the building to the west.

“Royce doesn’t have time to babysit you and make sure you don’t get outside,” Tristan said, smiling.  “He’s right in not letting you out there.  But maybe you can still do some good.”

“It’s times like this that I remember why we got along so well from the first moment we met,” I said, smiling back as I grabbed a magazine from the bag.  I snapped it into place.

“Hey,” he said, giving a shrug and a crooked smile.  “The feeling’s mutual.  Even then I knew you’d save my rear end sometime.”

I glanced over at him before looking back down the thin barrel of the sniper rifle.  I could see over a mile out with the high powered scope.  What surprised me was that the red targeting dot in the middle flashed.

“The scope is different,” Tristan said.  “One of Royce’s creations.  It’s designed to scan for cybernetics.  If a Bane comes within your sights the flashing will stop.”

“Fantastic,” I said through a smile.  I didn’t think I’d ever used that word before in my life.

Tristan lingered, shifting from one foot to the other.

“Are you supposed to be my babysitter today?” I asked.  “Avian’s out on duty right now and West’s a dead man walking with how tired he is.  Does that leave you?”

Tristan laughed out loud, a sharp barking sound.  “Technically yes, but I’m feeling a bit delirious myself.  I’m going to get some shut eye and hope you can behave yourself.”

Lowering the DSR 50, I turned to Tristan.  “Actually, I think I’m good now.  Thanks for this.  I don’t feel quite so useless anymore.”

He gave another smile before turning and going back down the door into the hospital.

Facing the edge of the building once more, I brought the rifle back up to eye level and looked down the scope.

I crossed to each side of the building, checking every road.  We had a guard positioned in the middle of every street that led into the hospital, exactly five blocks out, just as Graye had ordered.  Each of those guards paced.  They held their assault rifles at the ready, fingers hovering.  There were eighteen ways to get access to the hospital directly.  Men, women, and even two teenagers from the Underground, stood guard.

That was a quick way to get over the tension that had built between the two colonies.  When your existence as a human being is about to be wiped out, you tend to get over your differences and work together.

This surge of Bane once again had been good for something.

Seeing that we had all the entrances covered, I searched out Avian.  Gabriel was positioned on the northeast side of the building.  Even Wix was out there with a gun.  It looked bigger than him.  He helped watch the west side.  I smiled at that.  That was the least likely direction an attack would come from.

I finally found Avian at the south side of the building.  The direction the Bane
were
most likely to come at us from.

He stood tall and sure.  He held an assault rifle in his hands, but unlike some of the others, his was leveled at his eyes, ready to fire at any half-second.  His knees were bent slightly and where the others paced between buildings, across the roads, Avian held perfectly still, pivoting at the waist slightly to scan the roads.

I smiled as I scrutinized him.  I’d never gotten the chance to watch him work from afar, when he didn’t know I was observing him.  Avian was an impeccable soldier.  When he wasn’t worrying about my safety.

I was glad he couldn’t see me up here on the roof of this building.

The sun crept to its highest position in the sky and started sliding toward the west.  From my perch, I watched as Bane came in on foot or again attempted to barrel their way through by truck.  My breath would still in my chest and my finger would hover at the trigger. 

I created a set of rules for myself:

I had to let the soldiers around me take care of the Bane that were within seven blocks of the hospital.

But the second I spotted any further out that that, I took them out.

The first shot I fired drew eyes.  Avian met mine, and a slow smile curled on his lips.

I wasn’t leaving the hospital, I was perfectly safe up here.  But at least I was useful.

This continued all day long.

I could feel each and every one of the seconds passing like another stitch in my skin.  Time sewed me tighter and tighter, until I felt as if my insides were squeezed too hard, my hair even felt too tight, my eyes too compressed.

How many hours were left until we knew if this would work or not?

So my finger nearly pulled the trigger by accident when my radio crackled to life.

“Eve, it’s Dr. Evans.”

“Go ahead,” I said into it.

“Everyone else up here has gone home to the hospital.  Can you come over and talk for a bit?”

“Give me ten minutes.”

I stashed the sniper rifle in a corner where it wouldn’t be seen and slipped quietly downstairs.  Since the building we had built the Nova on was barely within our five block perimeter, it wasn’t too difficult to sneak behind the guards.  Their attention was turned the opposite direction.

I took the elevator this time, climbing all thirty floors.  I stepped out onto the roof and took everything in.

Dr. Evans stood facing the Nova, his cybernetic hands clasped behind his back.  As soon as he heard the door, he turned.

I stilled instantly, though, when I saw the look on his face, or what was left of it.  His left eye no longer showed any traces of ever looking human.  But his right was still mostly white and brown and expressed enough emotion to compensate for the rest of his mechanical body.  His shoulders were held high, as was his chin.

“It’s done,” he said.

It took me a moment to nod.

It’s done.

“The energy storage devices will require about eighteen hours to charge,” he said.  His voice didn’t sound right.  Almost like he was talking into a tin can.  It was rough, very not-human sounding.  “Like your Pulse, this device requires an enormous amount of energy to be set off.  Power must be built up for a few hours.  And then we can set it off.”

I calculated the time in my head.  We would set the Nova off at noon tomorrow.

It stood behind him, beautiful and shiny and brilliant.  The dish was mounted to the top, pointing up and slightly east.

“I wish we could do a test first,” he said, his eyes turning up to the sky. 

“To see if the satellites in orbit respond?”

He nodded.

Everything in me said this wasn’t going to work.  It had been six years since anyone cared about those chunks of metal and technology floating up in space.  How could we ever expect them to work?

“But we will only get one shot at this, before we drain our power source.”

I swallowed hard.

“Are you ready?” he asked.  His eyes fell to me again.  His words were heavy and full of meaning.

It took me a moment to reply, because I wasn’t sure how to answer.  I hadn’t really allowed myself to picture what life would be like if this did work.  I had become depressed months before, when I had felt like I had no purpose because we had no Bane to fight off in this city.

Soon, that’s how the entire planet would be.

This would be different though.  If it worked.

“Let’s hope so,” I replied.

THIRTY-ONE

SIXTEEN HOURS UNTIL SET OFF

There were less than twenty-four hours until we knew if we were going to live or die.

Some people celebrated.  They laughed and spoke loudly and dared to discuss how they would live their lives tomorrow and the next day and the next.

Some people sat in the background, staring blankly ahead, too overwhelmed to think about the future when there might not be one.

Others went to bed to stare restlessly at the ceiling above them, afraid of the too hopeful dreams or the too near future nightmares that were sure to haunt them.

Twenty-two men, women, and teenagers went back outside for the night guard.  Royce was among them, now finished with the device.  So were West and Vee.

I sat in a chair in the middle of the lobby, facing the front doors that were blocked off with reinforced steel.  I could hear voices just outside them, speaking harshly and loud.  Every once in a while I would hear a gun fire.

Avian paced the space before me, gently bouncing Creed, who lay wrapped up in a blanket against his chest. 

Lin sat next to me, a stack of magazines sitting in her lap.

“I think this style would look really flattering on you,” she rambled, holding a magazine in front of me.  I didn’t bother to look down at the bridal pictures she was trying to distract me with.  “But then again, you might be too tall to pull off that look.”

She shuffled a few more pages and then I heard her drop that magazine to the floor and pick up another.  “Ooo,” she said.  I could tell her eyes had widened without even looking at her.  “Look at this cake!  Doesn’t that look amazing?”

But I couldn’t make myself look at the amazing cake.  I could only look at the steel doors and imagine what must be going on out there.

So far, in the last three hours since security detail had switched, I’d heard no fewer than eighteen gun shots and one blast from the southern tank.

And it was barely midnight.

Another shot was fired and Creed burst into hysterical cries.  Avian adjusted his hold on her, placing her against his chest and increasing the depth of his bounce.  He did manage to drag my eyes away from the door for a moment.

But they snapped back when three more shots were fired.  Two people shouted and then I heard the tank fire.

Creed wailed harder.

Lin put her hands over her ears and twitched into a ball for a moment as another blast went off.

“It sounds awful out there,” she said.  She looked up, slowly relaxing back into a sitting position.  Her expression showed her fear openly.  Tristan was out there.

The shooting ceased, but Creed didn’t stop crying.  Avian patted her back and spoke soothing words to her.  She continued to scream.