The Eve (The Eden Trilogy) (9 page)

We were just walking past Lin’s room when she stepped out.  Her hair was sticking in every which direction and she was wearing bright pink pajama pants.  She looked very Lin.

“You weren’t going to sneak out without saying goodbye, were you?” she said, giving me the look of death.

I chuckled and crossed to give her a hug.  “Of course not,” I said, giving her a tight squeeze.  “I know the penalty for such would be a public stoning.”

“That’s right,” she said, patting my back before releasing me.  “You be careful out there.  You’re not immortal, you know.”

“I know,” I said, smiling back at her.  “Take care of Tristan for me, will you?”

She wiggled her eyebrows at me.  “You know I will.”

She quickly said goodbye to the crew and we made our way downstairs.

There was a small crowd waiting for us when we got to the kitchens.  Royce, Gabriel, Dr. Beeson, Graye, and Tristan were all there, finishing up breakfast.

“There they are,” Tristan said with a wide grin when we stepped into view.  “The reclamation team.”

I just shook my head and smiled.

The kitchen had already made us breakfast sandwiches with eggs and ham on them.  We each grabbed one and headed for the back entrance.  The others talked softly, going over details and plans and things I should probably be listening to.  But my mind was on the back seat of the van.

My hands started sweating as we stepped outside the doors.  My eyes darted to Avian’s.  He looked as nervous as I felt.

I spotted a soldier across the street, escorting Dr. Evans to the solar tank.  No one said a word as he climbed into the glass box in the front.  Closing the door, he rolled down the window.

“This feels like watching you leave Eden all over again,” Gabriel said as he observed the van.  “Not knowing if I’ll ever see you all again.”

“You saw what she did on the way back from the Redwoods,” Bill said, clapping a hand on my shoulder.  “We’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Gabriel said, but his eyes said he didn’t.

“Get that kill code and get back as soon as you can,” Royce said.  He shifted from one foot to the other.  It was hard for him to let go of control over something so important.  “Dr. Evans knows the stuff he needs for the transmitter at NovaTor.  Get ‘em back as quick as you can so we can end all this madness.”

“Yes, sir,” I said.  I was and wasn’t surprised when he wrapped his arms around me in a tight embrace.  He pressed a quick kiss to my temple before letting me go.  I considered briefly making some speech about how I didn’t need to know who my real father was or if he was still alive.  Royce was all I could ask for, even if I was all grown up now.

But all I did was say a quiet “see you later.”

“You have no idea how bad I wish I could go on this mission,” Tristan said as I turned to him.  He had a crooked smile on his face.  “To see this freaky place where you were cooked up.”

“I wasn’t ‘cooked up’,” I said in mock offense.  He just shook his head and pulled me into a quick hug.  “Besides, you’ve got Lin here.”

“True,” he said, backing away and shaking Avian’s hand.  “Fair trade I guess.”

“Bring them all back in one piece,” Royce said to Avian, shaking his hand next.  “And you two,” he said, pointing at Bill and West.  “I expect you to take the bullets for her, got it?”

The two of them both laughed, but I knew that they would, in fact, do it.  I hated that I was so important that I would have to let them do it if it came down to that.

And that was all the goodbyes we could say.

Avian turned and opened the side doors and strategically placed himself in the third row of seats to block everyone’s view of Morgan.  Bill climbed into the driver’s seat.  I sat behind him and West sat at my side.

No one looked in that fourth row.

I turned and watched everyone else wave goodbye as we rolled out of the parking lot and into the street.

“You all ready for this kamikaze mission?” West bellowed, pounding against the glass that surrounded his grandfather.

Bill nodded, Dr. Evans didn’t respond at all.

“Yep,” I said, looking back at Avian.  Both our eyes darted to Morgan’s still form.

I was ready for not just one impossible, crazy mission, but two.

NINE

“So, how much do you think will go wrong on this trip?” West said as he looked away from the side window.

“Given the last three months, I’m assuming
everything
is going to go wrong,” I said as I shook my head.  We were headed northeast and were just outside our one hundred mile cleared circle.  But there were no Bane around in these smaller towns, none of them rushing at us from the off ramps or chasing after us with helicopters. 

Maybe the ones we’d seen just a few days prior were an isolated case.

Somehow I doubted that.  Their absence out here made me uneasy.

“Yeah,” West said, looking out his window.  “I think that’s probably a pretty safe assumption.”

“Things will go a lot smoother if you two would give up the ridiculous idea that we might find Eve One,” Dr. Evans said.  He didn’t bother to turn and look at us.  He simply stared out that front window.

“I have to try,” I said, my throat turning dry.  I knew our odds of finding my sister.  They were close friends with the number zero.  But we had no idea if she would be shorted out the instant the transmitter went off.  If we could, in fact, build the thing and set it off.  I didn’t want to risk it.  “She’s my sister.”

“Look inside yourself, Eve,” he said, still not turning around.  “When you think of your sister, do you feel anything?  Do you feel a bond, a pull?”

My eyes darted away from him back to the window. 

“There isn’t anything there, is there?” he said, finally looking back over his shoulder at me.  Not that I was going to look at him.  “We kept you apart for a reason.  It was not beneficial to have the two of you bond.  Admit it; this is just another rescue mission for you.”

“You can still be the world’s biggest dick, can’t you?” West said, annoyance in his voice.

“It is not logical to attempt to find one person on this huge continent,” Dr. Evans explained smoothly.  “One person who took off almost six years ago.”

“That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” West said, his voice not so defensive.

I took a deep breath and sat up straighter.  I shoved aside the grating nerves Dr. Evans’ doubt caused.  He wasn’t in charge of this mission.  At least not in the way that mattered.

“I need you to tell me everything that happened,” I said, my voice under control, “after I was brought back to NovaTor’s doors.  What happened with my sister, how you were supposed to dispose of me.  How you released us.  All of it.”

“We’ve already discussed this,” he said, though I could hear the resolve in his voice wavering.

“Not everyone has heard it,” I said, my voice hard but measured.  “Don’t underestimate the competence of my team.”

I saw a twitch of a smile on Bill’s face.

“Details bring clarity,” Avian said.

“Fine,” Dr. Evans said.  “Where would you like me to start?”

The tension in the solar tank started to ease back and everyone relaxed into their seats.  None of them would admit it, but they were all at least a little afraid of Dr. Evans and the freakish hybrid he was.  What if he decided to turn on them?  What if he lost the miraculous grip on his humanity?  He could infect them all before I could immobilize him.

“After I was taken from NovaTor and tampered with,” I said.  “They dropped me off and I started killing off those who had just been implanted.  You said it affected my sister differently.  Why?”

He took a deep breath, looking out the side window.  He rubbed his cybernetic hands together, as if contemplating all that had happened in the past. 

“Your generation of TorBane and the generation we released to the public were different.  You could say they receive on a slightly different frequency.  While it immediately killed all the others off, it basically just scrambled Eve One’s brain.  It should have killed her, but your healing capabilities are unprecedented.  She was in bad shape, but she recovered.”

“I remember seeing her,” I said, looking over at West and then back at Avian.  “Sort of.  Like a muddy memory.  But her eyes were blood shot.  She went crazy.”

“And that’s when she attacked me,” West said, his hand rising to the scar on his neck.

Dr. Evans nodded without looking back at us.  “Her brain was basically being melted.  She’d never experienced pain, at least as far as she could remember.  Anyone would have reacted the way she did.  Coupled with the fact that my grandson thought she was you, Eve Two.  He tried to help you.  Eve One, I believe, was jealous.”

This brought a small smile to my face.  I looked over at West, who met my glance.  When the smile on my face grew fractionally bigger, he rolled his eyes and shook his head.

“My son, Lance, he got the two of you mixed up,” Dr. Evans continued.  “He had worked with Eve One extensively, knew how emotionless she was.  So when she did what she did, he couldn’t imagine it was her.  You, on the other hand, frequently had to be adjusted emotionally; you evolved.  It had to be you.”

“She was a very expensive, very valuable project by then,” Avian said.  I turned slightly in my seat to see his brow furrow.  “And he wanted her disposed of?  Why not just lock her up and fix her?”

“Do not underestimate the love a parent has for their child,” Dr. Evans said, looking back at us.  His eyes grew dark and severe.  “Or the lengths one will go to protect their offspring.  West nearly bled to death after Eve One accidentally attacked him.  My son wanted his attacker destroyed.”

“Okay,” I said, shaking my head.  That part didn’t really matter at this point.  I understood what desperation did to people.  “So you pretended to dispose of me.  You locked me up for a few weeks.”

“More than a few weeks.  I hid you for fifteen weeks,” Dr. Evans said, his voice heavy with the difficulty of his task.  “You were hidden for the entire time that TorBane supposedly saved the world.”

“And then the world started to fall apart,” Bill said quietly.  His eyes were fixed on the road ahead of us, but his knuckles turned white where they gripped the steering wheel.

Dr. Evans nodded.  “Twelve weeks after the first fifteen hundred implants were given, we started getting calls that people weren’t feeling right.  That they weren’t quite themselves.  We told them it was just going to take some time to adjust to the technology.  It was, after all, a blend of machine and man that had never been attempted before.

“But then another week later we were getting some much more serious reports,” he said, his voice growing quiet.  “I took a look at the research again.  I had never considered until that point that the Eve projects’ spreading TorBane was just because of the technology.  We had always thought it was because of the chip.  We had ignored what was standing right before us for thirteen years.”

There was nothing but the sound of the tires rolling over the pavement for a few moments as we heard an account of the end of the world from the lips of the man who created it.

“Anyway,” he said with a heavy sigh.  “At that point, we were preparing the second round of TorBane recipients.  I realized what was happening and created this,” he said, tapping a finger on the helmet that covered his head.  “It’s nothing short of a miracle that the timing of it all worked out.  I’d been exposed many, many times, but it had yet to overtake me.  At that point, TorBane was still spreading slowly.

“NovaTor was invaded by the US government.  They came to take over our research, to destroy all the components that we used to make TorBane.  Things turned violent.  Once they realized what the Eve’s really were, they would have killed them without hesitation,” he said, his voice suddenly rough sounding.

“I had to do something about Eve Two.  So I took her, you, from the holding room, told you not to say a word to Dr. Beeson or anyone else about who you really were.  You were obedient.  You never said a word.  You know what he did.  He did it not having the faintest clue about who you really were.  He thought you’d been dead for months.  Everyone did.  So he wiped your memory and then I set you free.”

“But not before your son tried to kill me, again,” I said.

“What?” West choked on the word.  “Dad—”

“Your father was angry that I’d lied, he reacted on impulse,” Dr. Evans said, shaking his head.  “Eve Two defended herself.”

“That’s probably why you were covered in blood when you arrived in Eden,” Avian mused.  “You’d been attacked.”

I’d nearly forgotten that, one of my very first memories.  When I first walked into Eden, I was mostly naked and covered in blood.  But didn’t have a scratch on me.  Considering the distance between NovaTor and Eden’s location, my blood would have dried in the journey.  But it wouldn’t take much rain or sweat to make it look fresh again.  And my body would have healed in just a few hours.

“In all of the chaos that was happening that day, I did not plan as carefully as I should have,” Dr. Evans continued.  Regret echoed in his voice.  He folded his hands and placed them in his lap.  “I should have watched, I should have paid attention to what Dr. Beeson did to take away your memories.  But there was no fixing that.  The soldiers that took over the building were tearing things apart.  So I took your sister to the back entrance and told her to go.”

“And did she run?” I asked. 

He shook his head.  “At this point, my son knew what I had done.  There was a confrontation.  And I had to worry about getting West out of that building.  But I told her to run and I have no reason to believe she wouldn’t have.”

“We’ll look,” I said, glancing out the window.  City areas started to fall behind us, dropping us into desert terrain.  “I understand we might not be able to find her.  We won’t lose focus on the bigger picture.”

West shifted in his seat and his change in demeanor grabbed my attention.

“What?” I said, turning my eyes on him.

“I understand that saving the world is more important,” West said, his voice unsure and uncomfortable.  “But I searched for her for five years.  I thought I’d found her, only to find out I’d found my nemesis.  How could I possibly stop trying to find her?”