Eden (21 page)

“
Why did you tell Gabriel
to send the raid without me?”  And just like that, I had
broken the peace I had found.

He didn’t say anything for
a minute.  He pressed his lips to the top of my head before he
spoke.  “Because I didn’t think I’d survive the few days of
not knowing what was happening to you.”

I didn’t say anything in
response.  My insides were pulling me everywhere.  Part
of me wanted to yell at Avian and tell him he should know I could
take care of myself.  Another part of me felt all soft and
mushy.  That part felt weird.  I buried my face in
Avian’s chest, breathing his scent in.

“
We won’t ever give up,
Eve,” he said quietly in my ear.  “I’ll never give up. 
As long as you’re still here, I’ll keep fighting ‘til they destroy
my system.”

I pressed my cheek harder
to his chest, listening to his heart thump.  “I won’t
either.  Until they blow me up or something.”

He gave a chuckle, sending
crazy vibrations through his chest.

“
I need to go talk to
West,” I said, taking a step away, breaking the bubble of
comfort.  “I have to look through that notebook.  There
were all kinds of notes in it.  Maybe there will be something
that will help us figure out a way to win this.”

Avian’s face fell at the
mention of West, but he made a good effort to give a small
smile.  “It couldn’t hurt.”

My eyes met his again and
not thinking about what I was doing, I placed my hand on his cheek,
feeling stubble forming there already.  My eyes searched his,
wanting to give him promises, not even knowing what they
meant.  Wanting to give promises I knew I would never be able
to keep.

And so I didn’t say
anything.  I simply stepped outside of the tent into the
blinding light of mid-summer.

Summer had a way of
bringing everyone in Eden to life.  Everyone bustled around,
going about their duties with a smile on their face.  In the
summer people seemed to feel safer, knowing there was plenty of
food and that we wouldn’t freeze to death.  The excitement and
contentment in the air was almost electric.

I understood then why
people kept secrets so often.  What if I were to suddenly
announce to everyone that we could no longer go on raids? 
That we could expect at any time to have the Fallen come down on
us?  It was better sometimes not to know.

I’d
still rather know though.

Was this the conflict of
right and wrong I had heard so much about?

I found West by the
lake.  He stood in only a pair of pants, washing out the few
clothes he possessed.  He looked up at me, his shaggy hair
flopping across his forehead as he did.

“
I want to look at that
notebook again,” I said, coming to a stop ten feet away from him,
stuffing my hands in my pockets.

“
Well, hi, Eve.  I’m
doing great this beautiful afternoon.  How are you?” he said
with a chuckle.

“
Great,” I said
shortly.  “I’d like to look at the notebook again.”

His expression stiffened
as he looked back at me.  I tried to decipher what was going
through his head.  He looked uncomfortable, but I couldn’t be
sure.  “Why?”

“
Does it
matter?”

“
Kinda’.”

“
I think I have a right to
look at it as much as I like, considering most of it is about me,”
I said, feeling an itch of annoyance build in my chest.

“
Only about a third of
it,” he said sarcastically as he stepped out of the water, wringing
a shirt out. 

“
Why does everything have
to turn into a joke with you?” I asked, my tone sharp.

“
Geesh, Eve,” he said as
he narrowed his eyes at me.  “Wake up on the wrong side of the
bed today?”

I clenched my teeth
together.  I fought back the urge to clamp my hands around his
neck.  My eyes dropped from his eyes, to the pile of his stuff
at the base of a tree.  I saw it there, lying next to his
pack.  Without hesitating, I walked over to it and grabbed
it.  I started heading back in the direction of my
tent.

“
Hey!  Eve!” he
yelled as he started after me.  “What do you think you are
doing?”

He grabbed my arm, pulling
me around to face him.

Before I even realized
what I was doing, I found my left hand wrapped around his
throat.  For half a second, everything flashed
black.

“
Eve!  Stop it! 
What are you doing?” I heard Sarah’s screams from behind me. 
I had dropped my hand before she even got to us.  West started
coughing violently and dropped to his hands and knees.

My eyes grew wide as I
took two steps away from him.  My mouth opened and closed a
few times before I found any words to form.  “I’m… I’m
sorry.  I…”  I couldn’t seem to find anything else to say
as I turned and jogged toward my tent, notebook in hand.

I sank onto my cot,
breathing hard.  What had I just done?  I didn’t even
remember making the decision to do what I did.  I didn’t think
I was even that worked up over his reluctance.

I pressed my hands over my
eyes, trying to calm myself.  My chest was hammering
again.

Three minutes later the
flap of my tent was pushed aside.

“
You attacked West?” Avian
asked, his voice stiff.

“
I’m sorry, Avian!  I
don’t know what happened.  It’s almost like I blacked out or
something.”  I couldn’t even look up into his face.

He didn’t say anything,
just stood in front of me.  That’s when I actually felt scared
about what had happened.  Why wouldn’t he say
anything?

“
Let’s take a look at that
notebook,” he said quietly as he sat beside me.  I closed my
eyes again and leaned into him.  He wrapped an arm around my
shoulders and gave me a tight squeeze.  I took several deep,
long breaths.  Why, when I was with Avian, did everything seem
like it might be okay?

I sat back up, feeling
slightly better, and opened the notebook.

“
All this is about you?”
Avian asked as we started flipping through tattered
pages.

“
Just these ones,” I said
as I pinched a bunch of pages together.

“
That’s so weird,” he
mused.  “I can’t even imagine how it was for you to read it
all.”

“
Weird,” I breathed. 
Avian chuckled.

We turned to the pages
that came after all the entries about me.  I didn’t understand
what most of it meant, just that it was the notes about the
evolution of the technology that was a part of me and how it
changed into the infection.

My eyes were glued to the
page as we came upon one entry.

Something has gone
wrong.  It is spreading.  Lab assistant Kelly Strong, who
received a hearing implant, has been complaining about
uncontrollable movement in her left leg.  Other reports have
been coming in from other patients as well.

Eve’s technology wasn’t
the only to evolve.

We’ve made a terrible
mistake.

“
They should have stopped
it right then,” I said as we turned the page.

“
They thought they could
control it,” Avian said quietly.

We continued to flip
through pages, reading about the horrors that took place in the
facility used to do the procedures.  The doctors started
Falling, one by one.

“
Hang on a second,” Avian
said, turning a page back.

“
What?”

He didn’t say anything as
he brought the notebook up closer to his face.  There was a
drawing on the page, an octagonal shaped thing, with other crazy
drawings inside of it.  Hurried notes were scribbled all
around it.  None of it made sense to me.

Avian flipped to another
page.  This one had more drawings.  These looked more
detailed, like maybe they were the things inside the octagon. 
Tiny writing was inside of the drawings, so small I had to look
very closely to read it.

“
What is it?” I asked,
looking at Avian.

His nose was only about an
inch away from the pages, his eyes squinting.  “I don’t even
know what half of this stuff is.  They’re materials. 
Reactive elements.  I think this is it.”

“
What we need to destroy
it?”

“
I’d guess,” he said as he
shook his head.  “I didn’t think it was this
complicated.  I had always assumed it was just some kind of
electrical pulse but this is far more complex.  I never
studied engineering or that kind of thing much so I don’t really
understand it all.  But this is more involved than I had
thought it would be.”

“
The infection must be
harder to kill off then we realized,” I said quietly.  I had
to take deep breaths again. 

Avian turned the page,
finding the next one to be full of notes.  I didn’t even
bother reading it.  I wasn’t going to understand what it was
talking about.  He read through four more pages of
notes.  He flipped back and forth between a few of the last
ones.

“
It’s not finished,” he
said as he looked up at me.  “It’s here, I think.  But
it’s not complete.  The notes on how to create the core, the
thing that makes the whole thing work, they’re not
here.”

“
He got infected before he
could complete it,” I said quietly.  West had told me how his
grandfather and his father had Fallen fairly early on.  How
could they not, being so involved in everything?

Avian turned back to the
first of the pages that detailed the device.  “Why didn’t he
tell us he had this?” I asked as I narrowed my eyes on the
pages.  “We could figure it out.  West had the
instructions on how to save everything hidden away in his jacket
the whole time.  Why has he been hiding it?”

“
Hang on, Eve,” Avian said
with a little sigh.  “I’m not even positive that is what this
even is.  We don’t know the scale of this thing.  For all
we know it’s for nothing more than our very own CDU.”

“
Still,” I said, the pitch
of my voice rising.  “Why didn’t he tell us?  Why has he
been hiding it?”

Avian didn’t have anything
to say to that.

It started building up
inside of me.  An unfamiliar sensation.  It took me a
while to recognize it.

It was
distrust.

Every moment I had spent
too close to West flashed through my head.  All the times I
had let him kiss me, touch me in any excessive way, filled me with
regret.  I had been so stupid.  I hadn’t trusted him in
the beginning.  I had let my guard down too quickly.  He
was human, he knew the peril we were all in.  So why would he
hide something like this?

“
He’s not getting this
back,” I said as I stood and started pacing around my tent. 
“How can he even call it his?  This kind of information
belongs to us all.”

“
It doesn’t do us a lot of
good,” Avian said as he stood.  “If we can’t understand what
any of it means.  How to use it.”

“
We’ll figure it out,” I
said through clenched teeth.

“
You know where an
electrophysics engineer
is?”  I was surprised at the tone Avian used.  It
wasn’t harsh, but it was still unexpected.  It felt like he
was taking West’s side. 

“
No, but I’ll find one,” I
said as I glared at him.

“
Good luck,” he said as he
stepped toward the door.  “I’ll see you at dinner.”

I headed to the gardens
after that.  I needed something to distract myself.  I
was afraid what I might do with all this angry energy built up
inside of me.  Ripping weeds out of the ground seemed to help
a little.

West wasn’t at dinner that
night.  I had mixed feelings.  I felt like I should feel
guilty or something.  I wanted to throttle him
though.

Avian kept ahold of the
notebook, which was fine with me.  None of it made sense to me
and I had no desire to look over the parts about me again.  I
remembered every word like they had been branded into my partially
cybernetic brain.

Alone on the watch tower
that night, I paced from one end to the other.  The night was
passing slowly, as they had been for the past few.  I kept
thinking about the notes, wondering how we could use them,
if
we could even use
them.  My brain hurt from thinking about all the things it
felt like I could do nothing about. 

My eyes scanned the
trees. 

Something felt off. 
I couldn’t explain it, but I could feel something.

I shifted the rifle in my
hand, too on edge to sling it back over my shoulder.  My pack
was cinched tight to my back.  In my agitation, I had sorted
through it all twice.  Food, water, ammunition. 
Everything I needed to survive on my own out in the wild.  For
as long as it would take me to reach a city and take what I
needed. 

I then remembered how Bill
and Graye claimed it wasn’t safe to go into the cities
anymore.  I didn’t think I could fully believe that though
until I’d witnessed it myself.  Maybe it wasn’t safe for them,
but it might be for me.  I was at least not in danger of
getting infected.