Revelations (The Elysium Chronicles) (29 page)

Eli catches the look Asher sends me and raises his brow at Gavin, who only stares back at him, distrust clear on his face. Then Eli turns his attention to me. And this time, I can make out the emotions running over his face. Relief, happiness, and, finally, sadness. Gavin slides his hand into mine and squeezes. I squeeze back to let him know I’m fine.

It’s not exactly true. My head feels like it could explode at any moment from all the stress, but he doesn’t need to know it.

Eli reaches out toward me and both Asher and Gavin shout and block his advance. Gavin draws his gun and Eli puts his hands up, palms out.

“I just wanted to touch the necklace.” He keeps his eyes steady on mine. “I meant no harm. I can’t believe you still have it. I meant no harm.”

Gavin jerks his head around to face me and there’s understanding in his eyes. He lowers the gun and steps back. “You’re the one who gave it to her?” he asks.

Eli hesitates for a moment, lowering his hands to let them hang at his sides before saying, “No, not I. Her mother … her
real
mother. But I gave … I’m pleased to see she kept it.”

He’s not telling us everything. I don’t know how I know, but I know. From the expression on Gavin’s face, I can see he’s thinking the same thing.

“But the scents? You’re the one who gave her the perfume bottles, right? You’re the one who helped her every time she got her memories erased?”

Asher jerks his head around and narrows his eyes at Gavin, even as I watch Eli and Gavin wide-eyed. I had my memories erased before? This isn’t the first time? Why didn’t Gavin tell me? If it happened before and there was a cure, why didn’t we come to Elysium earlier?

Eli nods. “Yes. I did what I could at the time. Even if it wasn’t nearly enough.”

“But now you’re here to actually help us?” Asher asks, his face scrunched up in confusion.

Eli looks around. “Yes, but not here. There’s a place in the Residential Sector that I can take you to. I assure you, it’s safe. Then you can tell me what you need help with.” He turns to me with a smile. “There’s someone there who really misses you and wants to see you again.”

“Oh no,” Gavin says, and all of us turn to him. He crosses his arms across his chest. “We’re not going anywhere. We came to find you and you’re here, so you need to help us now, so we can back to the Surface.”

Asher nods, agreeing with Gavin for once, but I ignore it and ask, “Who’s waiting for me?”

Both boys turn to me. “Evie…,” they warn, but I ignore them.

“Who?” I demand.

Eli takes a deep breath. “Your mother. Your
real
mother,” he says, quietly.

My heart trips in my chest and I raise a hand to my necklace again, trying to remember something about the woman who birthed me, but nothing comes. Not even the tiniest of memories.

But … I do feel
something
. And I want nothing more than to meet this woman.

I open my mouth to tell him we’ll go, but Gavin interrupts. “Nice try, but no. We came to get her memories back. That’s it, and then we’re gone.”

Eli turns toward me, his eyes really focusing on me again. “You lost your memories?” I nod. “What happened?

I don’t think Gavin will tell him anything—after all, he was dead set that coming to this place was the wrong idea—but he surprises me. “I don’t know. She was having issues when we left. Small things. Like how to work the Slate, and where things were. But it wasn’t until we got to the Surface that I realized she’d forgotten everything.” He looks at the ground. “Including me.”

“It’s the nanos,” Asher shoves in. “Grandma said that you and she developed the nanos, but they’ve changed. She couldn’t help Evie, but she was sure you could.”

Eli’s face darkens. “They’ve changed all right. After all, we couldn’t have our little prize giving anything away, could we?” he mutters.

Gavin and Asher exchange a look. “Huh?” Asher asks.

Eli shakes his head. “Nothing. Never mind. I can help her, but not here. She needs to come with me.”

Gavin raises the gun and aims it at Eli. “I’m not sure if you’re hard of hearing or just dumb, but she’s. Not. Going. With you. Whatever you need to do, you can do it here.”

Eli shakes his head. “You don’t understand. What needs to be done is … quite complicated. I
can’t
do it here. Believe me, if I could, I would. It’s going to be hard enough as it is.” He looks at me. “I promise you I won’t let anything happen to you. I
can
help you, but you have to come with me.”

Gavin is about to say something, but I know it’s another argument, so I start talking before he can. “The nanos? Are they what’s making me forget everything?”

Eli hesitates, then nods. “Yes.”

Gavin and Asher look between Eli and me as I say, “And will I get my memories back if you fix them?”

Eli at first doesn’t respond, but then he starts firing questions at me. “Have you been able to recall anything at all?”

“I-I don’t know. I’m not sure.”

“How about any dreams that seem more real than usual?”

I share a glance with Gavin and nod. “Y-Yes.”

Eli makes a hmm-ing noise. “How about hallucinations? Sleepwalking? Sleeptalking? Fugue states?”

I nod quickly, getting more excited with every question. “Yes! Yes, I have. All of those.”

“That’s the major reason we’re here, actually. She’s almost killed herself a couple of times with sleepwalking and the fugue states,” Gavin interjects.

Eli’s eyes widen. “Please explain.”

Gavin tells him the story of me walking into his weapons room and then of me almost drowning myself, while Asher explains about my hallucination in the Outlands.

Eli tilts his head back and forth, obviously considering all of the information. “Yes,” he finally says. “The memories are still there, they’re just blocked. It’s part of their programming for Enforcers. We’ve never tried to get memories back, but I think I can.”

He doesn’t seem confident, but I’ve heard all I need to hear. He can help. Probably. Before I can respond, Gavin asks, “How are you going to get her memories back if you’ve never done it before?”

“Well, we’re going to have to reset the nanites.”

“And how are you going to do that?”

Eli shakes his head. “We don’t have time for explanations right now. It’s not safe here. I’ll explain everything when we get somewhere secure.”

“Then let’s go.” I push past Gavin and Asher.

They grab at my arms, each saying something to try to make me change my mind, but they speak over each other and I can’t understand.

Besides, I don’t want to hear it. Eli says he thinks he can fix my memories. That’s good enough for me. I pull away and step closer to Eli before looking over my shoulder. “I’m going. You can come along if that will make you feel better, or you can wait here with the goo.”

Then I turn back around and start walking toward the Tube station again.

Eli laughs as they run to catch up after a long pause. “Still the same Evelyn, I see. Good. We’ll need that spunk.” Then he steps in front of me, leading the way.

Gavin

I don’t know what to do. I can’t say I’m surprised Evie made us follow Eli, but nothing good is going to come of this. I’m certain of that. I can sense Asher’s unease as he walks behind me, and serves him right. He’s the one who brought us down here. My only comfort is that even if Evie doesn’t remember Father, I remember the way she’d talked about him and how he’d helped her stand up to Mother in the past. If anyone can help her now, it’s probably him.

Of course, that doesn’t mean I completely trust him.

“The train itself is out of service,” Eli explains as we quickly walk through the Tube. “Due in part to a mysterious malfunction that ended up causing the entire tunnel to flood, killing six people.” He gives me a knowing look.

I clear my throat. “And the other part?”

His look doesn’t change, but it darkens. “I’m sure I don’t have to say, but it has something to do with some … failed experiments, and that marvelous substance you were trapped with.”

Asher dances in front of Eli, walking backward to face him. “What was that stuff, anyway?”

Eli shrugs and shakes his head. “We don’t know yet. We’re still studying it. It’s been a bit of a challenge. It resists all our attempts to gather it by somehow mutating anything that touches it into its matrix.”

“And that doesn’t bother you?” I ask, shuddering as I think how close
Asher
came to “being mutated into its matrix.”

“Of course it does. We’ve had to quarantine Sector Three.” He passes by Asher, shutting down any further questions, while the three of us exchange a look behind his back. Just another reason on the long list of them: murderous experiments, entire floors flooded with seawater, green mutating goo—to get the hell out of here as soon as possible.

When we enter the Tube tunnel, dread hunches my shoulders. I expect the sound of rushing water and the icy chill of the ocean to pour over my head. Mother’d tried to drown Evie and me—not to mention the family that had been unlucky enough to have been in the train with us—the last time. There’s no evidence of any of that now. It doesn’t surprise me that the train—and bodies—are gone. Mother strikes me as nothing if not efficient. Even so, I’m glad Evie doesn’t remember any of it. She doesn’t need any more anguish right now. It’s funny to see her gaping around at the water that surrounds us and the lava flows below us that turn the water orange. She’s the one who grew up here.

Asher is doing the same and I have to wonder if that’s what I looked like when I first came. I hope I didn’t look as stupid as he does, with his mouth hanging wide open. I can’t imagine I did. Evie wouldn’t have tolerated it.

Then again … I chuckle to myself as Eli barks at Asher to stop gawking and keep up.
That
sounds exactly like what Evie had said to me.

The tunnel slopes upward and for the first hundred or so feet, everything seems to be okay. But then Evie stumbles.

I rush to help her up, but she says, “I’m fine. Just a bit tired.” Her voice is all breathy and her tone confused. She had another hallucination. I know it. I can see it in the way her eyes aren’t completely focused.

Eli looks over her head at me with worried eyes. He turns his attention back to her. “We can rest if you need to, but we really need to get you somewhere safe as soon as possible. You’ll probably experience more and more of your … hallucinations the further we go. Especially back in Sector Two. The more familiar surroundings are likely to act as triggers, and we can’t risk you doing something to endanger yourself.”

I know what he didn’t say, “and us.” Then something he said clicks in my head.

“Wait. If she’ll get her memories back just by being here, why do you even need to do anything?”

“I didn’t say she’d get her memories back by being here. I said here might
trigger
more
hallucinations
. And the hallucinations, as you well know, are dangerous. She’s been lucky—mostly because of you—up until now, but there’s no guarantee that she’ll stay lucky. Without my intervention, she could end up injured or worse.” He gives me a steady look until he’s satisfied I understand what he means, then he turns back to Evie. “Again, we can stop if you need to rest, just let me know.”

She must see how worried he is, because she shakes her head. “I’m fine. Let’s just keep going.”

We do, but after another couple hundred feet, she stumbles again. When I reach for her this time, she just leans against me. Her body is shaking, and even through that I can feel her chest heaving with each breath she takes. Whatever she’s seeing, it terrifies her.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

She nods. “Yeah. Perfect.”

Asher shoots me an uneasy glance. He knows as well as I do how far from perfect we are right now.

“Do you want me to carry you?” I ask. I don’t know if it’ll help, but at least we’d be able to keep going.

She looks up at me with the look of “Are you insane?” She shakes her head. “No. I’ve got it.”

For the next several minutes we continue up the constantly sloping floor until even I’m winded. The last week of running all over the Outlands has taken its toll. At least for the trip from Rushlake, I had a horse. Even if I did have to steal it. My whole body aches and I just want to collapse right here and sleep for a month. But I don’t trust Eli enough to close my eyes even for a second. Looks like sleep is off the menu until we leave.

And then we come to the open doorway that leads into the main part of Elysium. Up ahead, I can see the pools of light in the center of the Square, though the shops and businesses around it appear dark. Closed up for the night. It looks peaceful, like my own village after dark, but I know it’s nothing like that. Everything in this place is manufactured. False peace. Fake plants, a fake moon overhead, and a weird smell like baked goods. But even that isn’t quite right. It’s more candy-like—a sickly sweet—instead of real spices and sugar.

I have to fight not to turn and run in the other direction as every cell in my body warns me of the danger. Eli gestures for us to get into the shadows made by the lights just outside of the tunnel, so we slip around the corner and press ourselves against the walls as he goes on ahead. My mind screams that we can’t trust him, that he works for
her
. He’s not bringing us to help, he’s bringing us to Mother.

With a small shudder, I push the thoughts away. I don’t have a choice. Evie is determined Eli can help and Asher’s the classic case of curiosity killing the cat. Even as I think it, he steps into the light to look closer at
something
. I bark at him to get back into the shadows. Which he does with an “oops” expression, but doesn’t look all that concerned. I have to remind myself, he doesn’t know what could be watching him. Literally. And he doesn’t realize that his silver tongue isn’t going to be able to talk him out of any trouble he’s gotten into.

We wait and I look around, trying to find the turrets, but I can’t see any from my angle. I take slow, deep breaths to calm my own unease. What if Eli’s going to get an Enforcer? Or Mother? What if he doesn’t come back at all?