The Human (The Eden Trilogy) (24 page)

Avian met my eyes and for a moment there was pain and panic there.  I could only nod and try to assure him that somehow, everything was going to be okay.

There was a loud, large crowd just inside the hospital doors.  Guards, including Tristan, stood armed and ready with the masses behind them.

“Move!” Royce bellowed as we made our way through the crowd toward the stairs.  The tension inside of me built as we ascended. 

How much time did we have before we were all dead?

As soon as Royce closed the door to his office he turned and shoved Margaret back into a chair.  Her eyes grew wide with fear as she fell back.

Good.

“What have you done?” he growled.  He placed his hands on each of the arm rests, his face again coming within an inch of hers.

“If you weren’t going to use that Pulse on your own, we thought we’d force you to see reason,” she started explaining in a shaky breath.  “It was all too easy to plant false information and stage a supposed escape.  We knew you’d listen to one of your own soldiers.  You would never suspect she was in fact the beacon.”

Royce slapped Margaret across the face.  The sound was sharp and startling.  Margaret jerked to the side, her hair whipping across her face.

“How far is that beacon going to reach?” he demanded.

Margaret faced forward again, her mouth slightly agape, her eyes not quite meeting Royce’s.  Her hand rose to her cheek gingerly.  “We had no certain way to test it.  But we estimated it would reach at least five-hundred-miles.”

Royce was silent for a moment.  I had little doubt he was calculating the size of the cities within that five-hundred-mile radius.

“There is about to be over a million Bane flooding into this city.  We were in the middle of an evacuation but there is no way we will get everyone out in time.  And we have no way to defend ourselves,” Royce said.  “What do you have to say about that?”

We heard a shot fired, followed by another.

Royce swore and we both sprinted for the stairwell.

“Do you have any idea how much time we have before they start arriving?” Royce asked as we ran.

I shook my head, tightening my grip on my handgun, wishing I had more firepower.  “We were clear for at least seventy five miles.  Three hours?”

Royce swore again as we sprinted through the lobby and back out the front doors.  There was the faint sound of glass shattering.

The crowd had disbanded again and the fighting resumed.

Elijah lay on the ground, pressing fingers into a bleeding wound in his chest.

Avian had another man pinned beneath him and his fist connected with the man’s face.  Even West was in the brawl at this point, scuffling in the dirt, his hands wrapped around a soldier’s throat.

Down the street another shot was fired.

A woman from the Underground tried rushing the entrance to the hospital.  I threw myself at her, knocking her to the ground.  We rolled to the ground and she hitched the barrel of her gun up into my stomach.

My breath caught in my throat and I froze on top of her.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said, my voice breathy.  “We are about to be invaded.  We don’t have time for all this fighting.”

“You’re one to talk,” she spat.  “After you just murdered Margaret?”

“What?”

The woman shoved me off of her and pointed somewhere just behind me.

There was broken glass everywhere.  And in the middle of it was Margaret.

She was dead.  There was no question about it.  Her right arm was bent back underneath her at an impossible angle.  Her neck was cocked sharply to the left, broken.  There were huge chunks of glass embedded into her skin and blood poured from her lifeless body.

“She jumped,” I said, my voice horrified and disgusted.  I’d heard glass shatter just before Royce and I had gotten back outside.

Royce told her how she’d killed everyone, and she jumped to her death.

“Don’t lie to me,” the woman said, her voice harsh and emotional.  She wedged the barrel of her gun back between my ribs.

“No,” I insisted, meeting her brown eyes again.  “I promise you, that wasn’t us.”

The woman’s features hardened and she shook her head as she cocked the trigger.

I spun quickly, grabbing her wrist as I did.  With a quick flip of my own hand, I pulled the gun from her grasp and completed the spin to turn and point both my own firearm and hers at her chest.

“I will not fire unless I have to,” I said quietly.  “But right now I am not your enemy.  There are about to be hundreds of thousands of Bane flooding this city and I am your only shot at staying alive and human.”

And then I knew exactly what I had to do.

Throwing the gun out of her reach, I turned east.

There was a wide open desert out there where no people would get hurt.  A wide open desert big enough to hold the enemy that would soon be arriving.

I scanned the fighting crowd for Avian but he was nowhere in sight.

There would be no time for a goodbye.

I dashed around the side of the hospital and dropped down into the garage.  I hopped on an oversized ATV.  It would get me through the mountains, over the rough terrain, and it would do it quickly.

The engine growled to life and I shot out of the garage.

The crowd parted as I ripped down the street.  Members of New Eden shouted after me as I moved.  But Royce, Gabriel, and Avian were nowhere in sight.

Spotting Bill, I slowed momentarily.  He caught sight of me and I waved him over.  He rushed the ATV and hopped on, grabbing onto the cargo rack.

“You’re going to head them off, aren’t you?” he asked, his eyes serious and dark.

“There’s no other way,” I said.  “We’re all dead if I don’t do something.”

Bill nodded, glancing back at the fighting crowd.  They had barely paused when I barreled through them.  “Hopefully there are still some of us left to save.”

And then West shot through the crowd, stumbling over debris.  He stopped next to the ATV, his hands braced on his knees for a moment as he caught his breath.

“I’m sorry I lied, again, Eve,” he said, looking up at me with regret on his face.  He straightened and pulled something from the cargo pocket of his pants and extended it towards me.

His grandfather’s notebook.

“The truth is in there,” he said.  “You’re going to hate me for hiding it, but it’s there.”

In that moment, there wasn’t anything to say.  I took the notebook and looked back at the fighting masses, my heart hurting. 

“Tell Royce to figure something out,” I said.  “And tell Addie to be ready with the wireless transmission system.  I’ll keep them away for as long as I can.  But in case I can’t keep them all out of the city, continue with the evacuation plan.  Head into the water.  You’ll be safe there.  At least for a while.”

Bill held my eyes for a long while before he nodded.  He placed a hand on the back of my neck and pressed a kiss to my forehead.  “Good luck,” he said.

“Do me a favor,” I said, glancing briefly at West before meeting Bill’s eyes again.  “Tell Avian that I love him.  And that I’m sorry.”

“He knows that,” Bill said.  “But I’ll tell him.”

I nodded and Bill saluted me.

“I’m sorry,” West muttered again as he backed away.

Gripping the handlebars tighter, I revved the engine and took off down the street.

TWENTY-SIX

Even though I could no longer feel that connection to the Bane, I pushed my thoughts out to them.  I pictured the desert I had never actually seen.  I commanded them to go there and to wait for me.

I was just over an hour outside of New Eden, and had just left a canyon when my ATV sputtered and died.  I looked down to see the gas gauge dropping below the red line.  Leaving it on the side of the road, I walked.

The land opened up before me, revealing dry desert.  There were a few towns hugging the mountains, but after that, nothing but dry open desert. 

I know you’re out there.  Come and find me.

The towns fell behind me and soon my boots crunched over rough, cracked ground.  The light breeze that brushed past me tasted stale and dry.  When I could no longer see buildings and the landscape was nothing but sage brush, I stopped.

A wind picked up, cool and arid, empty and lonely.  I turned my eyes to the horizon, blocking out the blinding afternoon sunlight with my hand.

A figure stepped into view and slowly approached.  Another was behind him.  Followed by another.

They gathered, one by one, ten by ten.  They walked slowly and even, in no hurry and perfectly controlled.

Come.

I shifted uncomfortably as they closed in around me from all sides.  Their metal parts gleamed in the sun, their eyes reflecting crazy colors in a prism of light.

The first dozen of them stopped just ten feet from where I was.  They stood perfectly still and stared at me.

I was queen of the Bane and these were my subjects.

Night fell and the Bane continued to flock around me.  They stretched as far as I could see, filling this desert.  There were thousands of them.  More than ten thousand.  And they all just stood there, facing me.

I sat on the ground eventually when my legs started shaking from standing for endless hours.  I commanded the Bane to sit as well, uncomfortable having them stand over me when the last five years I had been trained to fire or run whenever one of these things came in sight.

My eyes were heavy, but I didn’t dare fall asleep.  What if I did and my connection to them was lost and they headed into New Eden?  What about those who were still answering the call of the beacon and heading this way but had not arrived at our gathering place?

My eyelids tried to close, but I held them open until they burned, all through the night.

The sun seemed to rise all at once.  It was brilliant and beautiful and so cold all at the same time.

I stood, stretching my stiff limbs and looked out over the crowd again.

There had to now be a few hundred thousand Bane surrounding me.  All I could see around me was gleaming bodies that shone in the sun.

Something fell out of my pocket and I looked down to see the notebook.

Loose pages had fallen out of it and it lay open, facing the ground.

The truth is in there,
West had said. 
You’re going to hate me for hiding it, but it’s there.

Bending, I carefully picked up the loose pages and the tattered notebook.

It was open to a page I’d read before.

An unexpected side effect of the chip implantation has occurred.  I have been aware of the fact that everything project Eve is able to do should be impossible.  The strength, speed, increased eyesight and hearing capacities.  This has evolved beyond the capability of the military’s chip and TorBane.

The two technologies have intertwined with each other I believe.  The chip has given the TorBane technology the ability to spread and evolve.  After sedation and a full body scan, hints of cybernetic enhancements have been detected throughout Eve’s body.  It is not just the brain, lungs, and heart that have been altered now.  It is the entire body.

Test’s I and II yield duplicate results.

I and II.

It had really been there all along.

My eyes jumped to another entry.

As Eve’s brain has continued to develop and evolve, adjustments have been required in II.

Another:

They don’t want just one test subject.  But how can I in good conscious give them more than that?

The Eve project…

She’d been there too, the entire time.

My sister.

My identical twin sister.

I looked at the loose pages I held in my hand.  They were frayed and worn.  Like they’d been ripped from the notebook in a hurry.

West had wanted to hide something from me.

I unfolded one, tucking the rest of the pages into the notebook.

It’s been a month since my last entry.  Eve I has already shown improvements.  She’s been learning a few more words every week.  She is interacting a bit more.  Just yesterday we introduced her to my 3 year old grandson, West.  We took her to his playroom.  He tried to engage her in activities, but she seemed hesitant.  Though she did watch him for an hour.  She observed the things he did, the way he talked to his toys.

I cannot wait to see Eve I’s progress.  If she is able to fully recover, this opens up a whole new aspect to this technology.  I had never even considered the mental side of TorBane before.

And on the back of the page…

Eve I plays with West three days a week now.  She is taken to the playroom and she stays there with him as well as his nanny and her nurse for two hours.  She is allowing him to talk to her, though she still will not respond with more than a word or two.  But she does try to play with the toys.

It’s been eight months since Eve I was given the technology.  I don’t know if it is because it was given for a neurological condition, but it still seems to work more slowly than I would have hoped.  We may try to speed things up with the next generation of testing.  We should have it ready in about a year’s time.

My hands shook as I read about my sister.

I pulled out another page, dated more than two years prior, and read.

While I has started to stabilize, II continues to languish.  The department is fighting against it, saying that the technology is not ready to be tested on a human subject, I feel that I cannot simply let this infant die without trying.  It could, and I believe will, save her.

We had been given TorBane for completely different reasons.  Mine were physical.  Hers were mental.

The truth had been so close to the surface for so long.

I thought about the past, how West had always worded things so carefully when we first met.  And the brief look between West and Dr. Beeson when we had first gotten to the hospital.  A secret had passed between them then.  This secret.

Dr. Beeson.

He wasn’t innocent in this either.  He knew about my sister as well.  He had taken care of us for years!  And he never said a word either.

West must have talked him into keeping things quiet.

…let the past stay dead…

Movement across the masses drew my attention from the pages. 

One of the Bane was moving closer, working its way through the crowd.  As if it had a purpose in reaching me.  The others surrounding parted to let it through, but their attention never wavered from me.

I took a step back, stuffing the notebook and pages into my pocket, suddenly unsure of my abilities, but there was nowhere to turn.  I was completely surrounded.  And there was no one here to save me.

The masses continued to part and I saw a gleaming figure coming through the crowd.

Everything inside of me froze when the Evolved figure finally stepped through the bodies.

“Hello, Eve.”

My voice caught in my throat.  The Bane no longer spoke and this figure before me was nothing but machinery from the neck down.

But his head was covered in some kind of helmet and the skin of his face was mostly intact.  His eyes were human white and West-like brown.

“Dr. Evans?”

He nodded, his eyes bright.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. 

“And so are you,” he replied.

I shook my head, questioning everything I was seeing and hearing.  Maybe I was really lying unconscious on the desert floor from dehydration or something.  “I don’t know what is real any more.  I don’t even know who I am.  My entire life has been a lie.”

“I can tell you exactly who you are,” he said, his eyes softening.  “I can tell you exactly who your sister was.”

A lump formed in the back of my throat.  I tried to clear it, but it refused to move.  “It’s true.  I really did have a sister.”

Dr. Evans nodded.  “An identical twin sister.  The only way we could tell you apart was your personalities and the tattoos on the backs of your heads.”

I lifted a hand to my scalp, running my fingers over the place where I knew my II was.

“Then how can you tell which one I am?” I asked, my eyes narrowing at him.

“Because your sister never would have been able to do this,” he said, a hint of a smile pulling on the corner of his lips as he turned and waved a hand over the masses around us.  He faced me once more.  “You are capable of so much more than you know, Eve Two.”

I searched inside of me for the sound of my heart beating.  For my erratic breath going in and out my lungs.

I was conscious and this was real.

“Can you answer this,” I said, holding his unbelievably human gaze.  “Why did everyone think Eve Two was dead?”

He hesitated, regret on his face.  “Because you did something that wasn’t your fault.  Something that in the eyes of most everyone at NovaTor, in the eyes of my son, was unforgivable.”

“What?” I asked.  “What did I do?”

He shook his head, the fire building in his eyes again.  “It doesn’t really matter.  What does matter is that the reason you were able to do it, is the reason you are going to be able to save the world.”

I couldn’t answer him for a long moment.  His words were impossible, unspeakable.  Our world was too far gone.  There was no saving it when there was only half a percent left to save.  There was no saving it when I was surrounded by possibly millions of Bane.

“That’s impossible,” I practically whispered, shaking my head.  “I can’t save the world.”

“Oh, that is where you are wrong,” Dr. Evans said, a full, plotting smile curling on his lips.  “Like I said, you are capable of so much more than you realize.  And I had already started plans for the device that will clear our planet.”

And the pieces of a puzzle I hadn’t even realized where there suddenly fell into place.

“The notebook,” the words slipped over my lips.  My hand shifted to my pocket.

Dr. Evans nodded his head.  “So you’ve seen the plans.”