Eden (7 page)

"I really am sorry," I say, leaning forward. 
"I'm sure Lily... I'm sure she—"

Celine's face swings up and her gaze hits me.  Now she's
amused.  Her eyes dart toward the guys, then back to me.  The corner of her
mouth curls up as she leans in.  "You can't be talking like that if you
mean to convince anybody."  Again, her gaze wanders toward Kobee's
huddle.  "There's no her," she murmurs.  "Just you."

My sigh gives away my frustration, but I guess my new policy
is not to hide anything.  "You have no idea," I mutter.  "Some
days it feels like there are ten people in my head."

That earns me a laugh.  She looks like she's about to say
something, but the guys are walking toward us.

"Whatever the deal is between you and Jason," Spec
says, cutting to the point, "it's best to...."  His eyes move off
behind me.

Footsteps are moving toward us from the bottom of the
stairs.  I cringe visibly before I gather the courage to turn and look.

Apollon.  It's just Apollon.  He meets my gaze and comes to
join us, but says nothing.

I suck in a deep breath of air, waiting for the blood rush
to settle.  I swallow and look up at him.  "You did it?"

He glances around at the faces in the group and nods, his
eyes coming back to me.

I want to rip the words from him, demand every detail.  But
there's no privacy.

"How'd he take it?" Kobee prods.  Testing the
truth?  I can't be sure, but his face only gives away wariness and concern.

Apollon frowns at me and then Kobee.  "Sorry," he
says, "but who are you?"

As Kobee opens his mouth to retort, I cut him off. 
"It's OK.  How
did
he take it?"

Apollon looks at me.  He shrugs.  "You know
Jonas."  When I open my mouth, he adds, "He's fine."

...Which tells me almost nothing.  I have a thousand
questions, but I take a deep breath and start in on introductions, instead,
nodding to each person in turn.  I skip Spec, since they've already met. 
"Apollon, Harlan, Kobee, Moses, Celine."  When I get to Celine, I
notice that her hand has been on my leg for a moment.  She's staring at Apollon,
starry eyes, parted lips.  Presumably she's been fixed in that pose since he
appeared.  Now, his eyes turn to her, and Apollon does what he does best.  He
grins mischievously, his blue eyes sparkling.  And oh, the dimples.

A little smile slinks across Celine's lips, and her eyes
move sideways to me.  "I knew you loved me," she murmurs.  She stands
up and takes Apollon by the arm.  I'd say she pulls him away, but there's no
pulling to it.  He goes quite willingly.

The rest of us watch them go in silence.  A moment later,
Moses cracks a grin.  "Well, we won't see him for a while."

Chuckles and mumbles of agreement move through the group,
while I roll my eyes.  I'm not sure that Celine knows what she's in for—not
that I know.  I just know that Apollon is Apollon.  She'd have better luck
putting a leash on a rabid bear.

Whatever my thoughts about Apollon and Celine, I find myself
turning toward the apartment, considering the stairs.  Part of me wants to go
to Jonas.  To confront this thing.  To talk it through.  Evening is falling
over Miami, and I can't very well stay out here all night.  I'm going to have
to face him.

If he's mad at me, if he's—whatever he is, putting it off is
only going to be agony.

The mixture of longing and dread must be plain on my face. 
Spec's hand clamps down on my shoulder.  I glance back at him.

"Putting it off never helps," he says softly, his
words echoing my thoughts.

I nod as he drops his hand.  A sigh shudders out of me.  My
eyes move again toward the stairway.  "Alright," I mutter, and I
leave them behind to face what I haven't been able to face so far.

Chapter 7: Comedy and
Tragedy

A thousand thoughts play through my mind as I climb those
stairs.  I push the door open and step inside.

Jonas is at the table flipping through the book that Lily
left us.  I expected—I don't know what I expected.  A little angst, maybe?  A
small dose of the immeasurable confusion I'm going through?  Maybe some anger
or indignation?  Reading calmly, no.  I didn't expect that.  Maybe he's looking
for some clue about us, but he's not going to find it in there.  He doesn't
even look up when I come in, and that, at least, speaks of tension. 
Something
. 
I edge closer to the table.  He says nothing.

I stand there, at the side, for a long moment.  Then I take
a deep breath.  "So you're mad at me."

He glances up only briefly.  "Why would I be mad at
you?"  There is no anger, no emotion in his voice.  He thumbs through the
pages, focused more on the book than on me.

"...Apollon..."

His hands twitch, and he nearly drops the book as he thumps
it closed, places it on the table, and turns to look at me.  His gaze wanders
over my face, and he fails to completely hide his alarm at first.  An instant
later, it's all safely tucked behind that invisible wall, and he looks as calm
as ever.  "What about Apollon?" he asks.  "Is everything
OK?"

I blink slowly.  My head is starting to hurt, and I have a
feeling it's only the beginning.  "... He just came to talk to
you..." I prod.

Jonas' lips part, his gaze falling to the floor for an
instant before he searches my face again.  "He, uh... you knew about
that?"

I make a noise of frustration, pulling out a chair and
falling into it.  "Of course I knew.  He wanted
me
to tell you.  I
just... there was so much going on."

Jonas kneads his forehead with his fingers, closing his
eyes.  "OK," he finally says.  "Don't be mad at him, Eden.  He's
just—"

"Mad at him?" I laugh.  "I'm not mad at him,
Jonas.  I'm not that petty.  I mean, he was pretty damned insistent, and a bit
impatient, but I get it.  It was my fault for not telling him in the first
place."

His eyes move across my face uncertainly.  "Do you.... 
Did he tell you what he said?"

I frown.  "...I was pretty sure I knew...."

He shakes his head suddenly.  "Never mind," he
says.  "Don't worry about it.  Just...  Just be patient with him for a
while.  All this has been hard on him."

Now my brain is starting to feel like scrambled eggs.  I
have the feeling we're talking at cross-purposes.  "Look," I say
firmly, wanting to be sure I've done my duty in all this, "Apollon was
supposed to tell you that there's nothing going on between us.  That's what he
told you.  Right?"

Jonas' mouth is slightly open as he stares at me, but he
manages a little nod.

"Good," I say.  "And that's the truth of it. 
There never was anything between us.  And there's not going to be."  I nod
curtly.  "So there.  You know.  We're all good and clear, right?"  I
look at him for confirmation, but he's just staring at me, and I can't take any
more of it, so I get up to leave.

Jonas catches my hand before I can move away.  He pulls me
back into the chair, and scoots his chair closer, gathering both my hands in
his.  Our feet overlap each other.  He looks into my eyes, his face so
thoughtful and serious.  My heart rate picks up drastically, waiting for his
words.

"Eden," he says, his voice so soft, so gentle. 
"I know this must all be so confusing for you..."

I'm nodding, swallowing down the lump in my throat.  We're
finally going to talk about this. 
Really
talk about this.  Months'
worth of emotion swells inside me, threatening to spill out.

"I never want to see you hurt," Jonas murmurs. 
"You mean the world to me.  And Apollon, he does, too.  What I don't think
you realize..."  He pauses, like it's hard for him to get the words out. 
"What I don't think you realize is that Apollon really likes you.  I mean,
really.  He's not just playing around with you, like with other girls."

My mouth has dropped open, but the words are far too big to
ever fit through my throat.

"...And you two are good together," Jonas
continues, oblivious to my plight.  "I've seen the way you are together. 
It's perfect.  It's—"

"No," I spit out.  Tears are falling down my
face.  I'm shocked, angry, confused, but more than anything, I feel robbed. 
"Apollon is my friend," I insist.  "
We're friends
."

Jonas just looks wary.  "Don't be upset," he
says.  "It's not a bad th—"

"You have
no
idea."  I jerk my hands away
and climb to my feet, but Jonas is on his feet as well.

"I have a better idea than you do," he says. 
"I know him better.  And I know you, too."

"Bullshit," I say, and I stomp out the door,
slamming it behind me.  But I don't make it all the way down the stairs.  I'm
sure that if I go outside, everyone will still be there.  So I'm trapped in the
stairwell.  I sit on the stairs, near the bottom, letting the tears come.  For
a moment, I wish that Jonas will come after me, but he doesn't.  So I'm alone
with my tears.  In the long emptiness that follows, my thoughts turn to
Apollon.  I want nothing more than to share this sorrow with him, to tell him
everything and have him make fun of me, make me laugh.  But even our best
friends can't always be there to pick us up.  Sometimes, there's just us.  Just
long moments of sorrow, and quiet.  That's OK for now, because it gives me a
chance to let it all out—to feel the pain that I've been shoving away.  Putting
it off hasn't done me any good at all.

***

Jonas and I have not really spoken.  We're pretending that
nothing happened, though—polite but distant.  The morning has brought our first
full meeting with the Council, and it turns out that our terrace is the meeting
place.  I guess these people do everything outside.

The morning is full of sunshine and muggy air.  We sit
around, occupying the lounging chairs, the low walls, or leaning against the
railing.  Everyone present offers us reports on the status of various things in
Wynwood, but mostly, they're focused on filling us in on politics.  We've
already gleaned a lot of this from Lily's book, but it starts to come together.

The big concern is an alliance—the one with the black and
red stars—that is continually pushing Wynwood toward conflict.  Apparently, we
have some kind of awesome weapon at our disposal, but we've made a pact not to
use it.  This bad alliance—Warner's alliance, they call it, aka enemy number
one—seems to be taunting Wynwood, daring us to do something.  They're the ones
behind the bombings and fighting we experienced that first night.  Maybe part
of it is Wynwood's shifting leadership, which makes us look weak.  The Council
believes that we need to reassert our tribe's strength, possibly through an act
of retaliation.  Fighting has been going on for a while now—maybe it never
really stops—but they're talking something big.  A real blow to our enemies.

I'm not sure I like the sound of that.  As a matter of fact,
I'm sick of fighting, and last I heard, we have a war to wage against the
Sentries.  Isn't that enough to handle for now?  But it doesn't look like Miami
is going to sit around and wait for us to do our thing.  For now, I listen to
the Council and try to get a fix on the situation.  I ask a lot of questions,
pulling out Lily's book to get clarification on certain things.  When I do,
there are a lot of exchanged looks flitting around the terrace, but I don't
have any idea what they could mean.

At any rate, things have changed in the year that Lily's
been gone, so I can't go off of her information alone.  And then, there seems
to be a lot that she's forgotten to mention at all.  Maybe they were things
that were so normal for her that she took them for granted.  But for me, the
puzzle is incomplete.

"So these black star guys," I say, pointing at the
map Lily drew, "they're just evil, or what?  I mean, what do they want
from us?  Why are we fighting with them?"

Celine snorts.  She only arrived moments ago, late, looking
a bit tousled but completely satisfied.  "Evil is a good word," she
says, leaning against the railing.  "You're not going to reason with them,
if that's what you're thinking.  We're talking about a bunch of power-hungry
psychopaths with a taste for blood.  They have a lot of reasons to be pissed at
us, too, considering we kind of rained on their warpath."

"How so?" Jonas asks.

Celine glances from him to me.  "It's a really long
story," she says.  "But basically, we formed an alliance strong
enough to stand up to them and placed our sheltering arms over a lot of tribes
they had ambitions on.  We took away their easy kills.  Not that they ever
liked us to begin with."

"And what about this alliance?" I ask, showing
them the map again, pointing at the southern tribes.

Again, some glances fly around, but a lot of the Council
members look at their feet.

"They used to be part of the other alliance," Spec
says.  "They had some differences and broke off."

"And what're they like?" I ask.  "I mean, are
they a bunch of psychopaths, too?"

"Yep," says Kobee.

I frown at him.  "So everybody outside of our alliance
is a psychopath."

"Yep," he says again, but he winks at me.

I roll my eyes and look at Spec.

"We have a lot of bad blood with that alliance,"
Spec says, all business.  "Technically, we've had a ceasefire with them
for a number of years, but our people hate each other.  We keep from fighting
by avoiding each other entirely.  They're never going to be our allies."

"OK," Jonas says.  "But we
do
have a
lot of allies.  Are they any good?  Will they back us up?"

"Mostly," Spec says.  "Some of them aren't
worth much in a fight.  Mainly, we're the ones with the big guns.  Edgewater
isn't bad.  But our alliance isn't as tight as it was a few years ago.  We're
not the only ones who have been targets of this push for a fight.  Some of the
smaller tribes in our alliance have been hit pretty hard.  We try to help them
out, but there's only so much we can do.  And without using the weapon... well,
we need to hit back, hard, in some other way."

Jonas and I exchange looks.  Is he as disturbed by this as I
am?  I am really, really, really tired of fighting.

Before either of us can ask any more questions, Tank pops up
with his own.  "Where do the Sentries fit into all this?  How soon until
we can make a move against them, and where is that going to put us at in terms
of our enemies?  I mean, if we get rid of the Sentries, we get rid of all the
Sentries.  That's good for them, too, right?"

I suppress my groan.  I'm totally not ready for this
conversation.

Celine barely hides her discomfort, but Spec covers easily. 
"Coder's busy working on that.  We don't have enough information yet to do
anything more than speculate—which we've already done plenty of.  So we'll
return to that later.  Probably after everyone has come back from the
towers."

That said, we wrap it all up and take a break.  Only, I'm
still sitting there, perched on the wall.  Of all the dark things to think
about, my thoughts have settled on one of the darkest.

Celine sits down beside me, the dog trailing her.  Spec
stands in front of us, and Jonas moves to his side.

"What now?" Jonas asks.

"We need to talk about the other thing," Spec says
quietly.  It takes me a moment to realize he's talking about the chip in my
head.  I almost forgot about that.  "For now," he continues,
"you two should put in some public appearances.  Look happy. 
Normal...."  His words trail off as he considers me.  My morose thoughts
must be seeping out.

I take a deep breath and bring up the subject I've been
avoiding.  "There were some people at the towers."  We haven't
related the story of our journey here.  But I know they're expecting everyone
to come back.  Well, some of them are never coming back.

Celine gives me a look of concern.  "At what
towers?"  Did they think that Baton Rouge was the first tower we'd come
to?  At least Spec knew better.

I can't really manage an answer.  My chin quivers.

"The cities in the north are all a mess," Jonas
explains for me.  "We were in Minneapolis, and Damoynz.  Whoever you sent
there... they're all dead."

Spec and Celine look at each other, alarm showing in their
eyes.

"There was a boy," I whisper, my thoughts turning
to dying brown eyes.  God, how he reminded me of Oscar.  Is that why I feel it
so strong?

I don't look at Celine and Spec, but somehow I feel their
silence grow more profound, like either of them are afraid to move.  Afraid to
breathe.  When I do manage to look at their faces, they look away.  Celine
shakes her head a touch, but she looks like she might be sick.

"And there was this guy."  I'm not sure why I push
onward with this conversation—why I punish myself like this.  Maybe because I
feel I deserve it.  "He had a scar on his cheek, here."

"Caleb," Spec says softly.  He glances at Jonas
and turns away.  He must have known—at least suspected—that something had gone
wrong.  But now he's sure he's lost a friend.  He'll need some time.

I need some time, too.

I climb to my feet and whap Jonas' arm with the back of my
hand.  "Come on.  We have to go look happy."  It's the last thing I
feel like doing right now, but if I don't do
something
, I'm going to
scream.

"It wasn't your fault," Jonas whispers as we head
down the stairs.

"Shut up."  I clamp my jaw and keep my eyes
straight ahead.

"It wasn't, Eden," he insists.  "Any of us—"

"Shut.  Up."  I stop halfway down the stairs and
turn on him, glaring.  Trying to keep the tears from coming.