“We’ll find out soon,” Bill said. “The next big city after this is San Francisco. Population eight hundred thousand.”
“There’s no way I can hold off that many of them,” I said, shaking my head.
“But hopefully they’re not going to all come at us at once,” Gabriel said. “We made it through fine in the night when we came up here. We’ll make it through again.”
How could they be so confident in me? They didn’t know what I was capable of anymore. I didn’t even know what I was capable of.
But those Bane before we were still standing there, just looking at us. Waiting for orders.
“March west,” I shouted. “Don’t stop when you get to the water.”
And as one, the growing crowd turned to their left and started marching, their strides perfectly in unison.
“Not possible,” Gabriel whispered as his eyes followed them.
“Welcome to the new age,” Avian said. His hand rose to my shoulder and gave a squeeze.
There were Sleepers inside the buildings, just staring out at the world. But not a single Bane moved as we rolled through the town.
It was an exact replay when we reached the next three small towns. But each town got a little bigger. And I sent more and more Bane marching toward the Pacific Ocean.
At noon day, the Golden Gate Bridge was looming before us.
“Maybe we should go around the city,” Gabriel said, as we approached. He, Bill, Avian, and I were perched atop the tank while Tuck continued to drive.
Bill shook his head. “That could take us another full day. Probably more. We can’t afford to lose any time.”
We were all quiet for a moment. I was trying to ignore my self-doubt. Trying to ignore the urgency to get back to New Eden as soon as possible.
“I’ve got an idea,” I suddenly said. “The Bane, they really don’t like water. The more Evolved they get, the more so. I saw it while I was in Seattle. It would rain and they were a lot more hesitant to come out. A lot of them would die just stepping out in the rain.
“If I can call as many of them out as I can onto that bridge, I can make them jump off. The water will kill most of them.”
“And you’re sure they won’t rip you apart?” Gabriel asked doubtfully.
I swallowed hard. No, I wasn’t sure at all. “I don’t see any other option.”
Avian’s eyes met mine, and to my surprise, pride shone in them. He draped an arm across my shoulders. “Sounds like a plan.” Hopefully gone were his days of overprotectiveness.
Avian’s confidence bolstered mine.
Old habits dying hard, we all turned to Gabriel for approval.
He didn’t respond at first. He eyed me carefully, his eyes unable to keep from drifting up to the scar that wrapped around my head. When his eyes met mine again, they were resolved. “Let’s do it.”
I nodded. “I want you guys to wait a ways back. Keep the hatch locked until I give the go ahead. If this doesn’t work, I’m not risking any of you getting infected.”
Avian hesitated, and finally nodded. “You’re never going to change, are you?” he said, cracking a smile. “Always putting yourself in danger to save the rest of us.”
“Never,” I said, a smile tugging at my own lips.
We rolled the tank closer and Tuck parked. They wouldn’t be able to see much from this far away but I came up with a signal to let them know when it was safe to come to the bridge.
As soon as they had the tank parked and I walked away from it, Bane started stepping out from their hiding places.
“You’ll follow me,” I said loudly. There were more and more of them emerging every second. My heart started hammering as there came to be twenty, fifty, seventy of them.
“You will not look away, you will go nowhere else,” I said loudly again as I started walking toward the bridge. “You will follow me to the bridge.”
The crowd that had started forming between me and the bridge parted as I moved forward. I glanced over my shoulder and saw that they were indeed following me.
Looking forward once more, I concentrated my thoughts. I imagined every Bane that must be in this city, in the entire bay area. I imagined them collecting on the bridge. I called to each of them in my head, screamed for them to come to me.
At first the movement was hard to make out. I squinted through the cold, pale light, trying to see all the way to the other side of the bridge. The land was shifting, or so it looked. Like a dark avalanche. An avalanche that started funneling itself to the massive rust colored bridge.
With my first step onto the bridge, I questioned our decision to cross it. The road was cracked and some of the gigantic steel cables that held the bridge up had rusted away and snapped. And I was about to flood it with thousands and thousands of bodies.
Sensing that my time was going to quickly disappear, I broke into a sprint across the bridge. A thundering of feet followed me. And a horde rushed at me from the other side.
The bridge rattled and shook. The cables groaned and a sharp snap sounded as one broke and fell over the side. The bridge jerked sharply as the cable dangled toward the water.
I froze when I finally reached the middle of the bridge. I looked back the way I’d come to see thousands of bodies filling the road behind me. I turned again to observe those that were coming.
There were men and women and, always the most disturbing, children. There were old men who had no teeth but gleaming bones that cut through their saggy skin. A child that couldn’t be more than eighteen-months-old crawled down the road. Its human flesh had worn away to expose cybernetic bones. I couldn’t look at it. It was too disturbing to imagine the horrifying looking thing as a human that had once been someone’s darling baby.
I faced the crowd that had followed me onto the bridge. They all looked at me, their faces blank and waiting for orders.
There now had to be well over a hundred thousand Bane on the bridge. And they all waited for my command.
“Jump,” I said, too quiet to be heard very far.
But every body turned to one side of the bridge or the other. They climbed the rail, balancing there for just a half a moment.
And then they jumped.
The water hissed as the cybernetics inside of them shorted out and died. Sparks of light flashed under the water and the bodies sank to the bottom of the ocean.
Come, I thought. Meet a real end. Reclaim your humanity through death. Be released from this manmade hell. Go on to the afterlife you should have been allowed to earn.
Bodies continued to flood onto the bridge. They crossed to the middle. Then they climbed the rail, and took the leap.
This went on for an hour.
I had no way of calculating how many of them jumped to their death, or whatever you call the end of a machine. But there had to have been nearly three hundred thousand of them. Maybe more.
I had reached them all.
They had all heard me.
And they had all obeyed.
There was something terrible and fearful about that kind of power. Something that made my hands shake and my stomach weak.
I was just Eve. I was just a girl who didn’t understand people most of the time. I was just a girl who never said the right things.
I wasn’t a girl who could control hundreds of thousands.
I wasn’t this god of TorBane.
Finally, the last dozen bodies dropped into the water.
I turned to wave my arms in the air, to signal to the others that it was safe to cross. Then there was a pulsing, piercing pain behind my eyes. My head felt like it was splitting in two.
A scream ripped from my throat as I collapsed onto my knees. My hands came up to either side of my head and I pressed in, trying to keep my head from falling apart.
I opened my eyes but everything looked vividly green and numbers flashed across my vision. There were degree symbols and feet and inches. Something that looked like longitude and latitude.
Slowly it formed into a t
hree-hundred eighty-one. The number flashed five times.
“Eve!” I faintly heard Avian scream.
And everything went black.
TWENTY
“You’ve got to wake her up, now!” a voice shouted. A gun fired.
I gasped for air as my eyes slid open. All four of the men were at the hatch. Another round of shots was fired. Something hit the side of the tank just as I jerked into a sitting position.
“Move!” I bellowed, grabbing the shotgun that was at my side. Bill and Tuck ducked back into the tank, providing a hole big enough at the hatch for me to pop out of.
There were probably twenty Bane rushing the tank.
I fired as I concentrated my thoughts.
The Bane turned on each other. One ripped another’s arm clean off. Another broke his brother’s neck. Another simply started beating another Bane to a crushed pile of metal and skin.
Avian, Gabriel, and I picked off the rest of them. Then the afternoon was still.
“What happened?” I asked as I took in our surroundings. We were on a narrow highway, the ocean directly to the west, a steep hillside with little more than shrubs covering it to the other side.
“We’re just outside Santa Cruz,” Bill said as we all dropped back inside and closed the hatch. “We were waiting for you to wake up before we went into the city, but there was a pack of Hunters.”
“What about earlier?” I asked, trying to remember what had happened after the Bane had started jumping in the water.
There was nothing.
“We were about to come across the bridge when you collapsed,” Avian said, concern in his eyes. “You screamed and then crumpled to the ground. You were unresponsive for over an hour.”
“We didn’t dare wait,” Gabriel said. “We had no way to be sure you’d cleared all the Hunters out of the city, we had to get out of there. We’re already behind schedule.”
I nodded, closing my eyes. There was a dull throb behind them.
“What did they do to you?” Avian said quietly, pressing a kiss to my forehead.
“I think we need to hurry up,” I said, swallowing hard. “I need to see Dr. Beeson.”
We didn’t stop.
We didn’t take time to come up with elaborate plans to wipe out the Bane as we moved. I simply sat atop the tank and managed to keep the Bane back as we drove through city after city. I ignored my drooping eyelids when night came. If I slept, that meant we would have to stop and hide somewhere, and that meant we wouldn’t reach New Eden in time to warn them about the beacon.
My companions took turns driving and we continued through the night.
The night was easier. There were still some of the Bane that held to their old rules of inactivity during the night.
Avian never left my side except to take his shift driving. I could feel the anticipation inside of him. He wanted to take me home, to go back our abnormal normal schedule. To return to our rooms in the hospital or our tent on the beach. But he remembered how I’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown before I’d been taken. Going back to the city was going to bring me right back to that point.
“I love you, you know that, right?” I said in the dark. Avian’s strong fingers linked through mine. His hand was getting cold in the dark winter night.
He looked over at me, and even though I didn’t turn to look at him, I knew his eyes would be serious. “I know,” he said.
“No matter what happens to me, just don’t forget that.”
“Eve,” he said, his voice rising in uncertainty. “Dr. Beeson is going to fix this. We’ll get you back. Whatever they did to you, we’ll find a way to repair it. And he can reverse your last adjustment.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t necessarily believe it was true.
“We’ll wait in the mountains where we hid everyone a few months ago,” Avian said, squeezing my hand tighter. “Next to the lake?” I remembered. I’d only spent a few hours there, but I remembered. “I’ll stay with you. The others will go get Dr. Beeson, he’ll come back and we’ll figure this thing out.”
I nodded emptily once again.
“Hey,” Avian said. “Don’t give up on me. I have faith in you, in this. In mankind. Don’t give up on yourself.”
I finally met his eyes. I couldn’t find any words to say, so instead I just looked back out into the dark.
Because it wasn’t just the worry that the people from the Underground had done irreparable damage to me that was eating me away. It was that I could feel that dark, ugly feeling creeping back up inside of me as we rolled back toward the city. The depression was settling in again. The emotions that had started pushing me towards my break were coating my insides with blackness.
There was something wrong with me and I wasn’t sure an adjustment from Dr. Beeson could fix it.
I needed away from the city, but the city was where I was needed.
Like Avian had said, I was never going to change. I would always do what was needed of me. I would protect my family. I would keep being Eve until being Eve killed me.
“We’ll be back as soon as we can,” Gabriel assured me. He stood in the hatch, about to duck back inside.
“Okay,” I said, nodding.
We watched the tank drive away.
“Let’s find some dinner,” I said, not giving a moment for speeches that made me feel no better. I dropped Avian’s hand and headed into the trees.
He knew there was something wrong. Avian knew how to read me better than I knew how to read myself most of the time. But he also knew when I didn’t want to talk. When I just needed to go back to my old instincts and do what I was good at.
After being in the Redwoods, this forest seemed dehydrated and starved. These trees were small, more shrub like. They felt like sad impersonations.
A movement to the left caught my attention. There was a flash of orange and white. I crept behind a tree, peering around it.
A fox was eating something. Feathers. A bird.
Knowing my shotgun was going to riddle the body with buck shot, I opted for my knife instead. Well, Tristan’s knife. Tristan’s shotgun too.
I flicked my wrist and embedded the blade in the side of its neck. It gave a choked off howl before it collapsed to the ground.
Avian skinned it while I built a fire. My stomach actually started growling. It seemed like it had been ages since I’d had fresh meat.
I dared a glance at Avian while we ate. I wasn’t really in the mood to talk but Avian almost always was. So his silence was out of place.
He stared into the fire, his expression distant. His shoulders were shrugged up towards his ears. He picked at his meat absentmindedly.
I knew he was trying to think of a way to fix the problem that was me. He was turning the situation over and over in his head, trying to find a way to keep me from going crazy. But we were both needed in the city.
Avian spent too much time worrying about me.
“I haven’t forgotten about what you said the night of Victoria and Wix’s wedding, you know,” I said. I leaned over and bumped his shoulder with mine. “About wearing a white dress for you someday.”
He looked over at me, the spark instantly back in his eyes. “Oh yeah?”
“Don’t know how a girl could forget something like that.” It was incredible how the air instantly lightened around us, the pressure lifting off my chest. “Sarah told me about marriage proposals once. I don’t think you did it quite right.”
Avian smiled, one that lit up his whole face. “I never said that was a proposal. I can be a little more grand than that. I was just asking you a question that night.”
“You said, as we were looking at Victoria’s wedding dress, ‘would you wear one for me someday?’ Did that not count?” I was smiling now, too.
“No it does not,” Avian said as he leaned in closer, his nose only inches from mine. “Like I said, I can be a little more grand than that.”
“You’re going to build up expectations in my head, staying
stuff like that,” I said as I breathed in his nearness. “Are you sure you’ll be able to live up to them?”
“Are you doubting me?” He brushed his lips against mine.
I met his eyes, that familiar hunger rising in my blood. His hand was hot on my cheek despite the cool around us. I was aware of every place his body touched mine. The way he breathed in and out touched a place in me that felt similar to the way my heart beat in my chest.
Then suddenly it felt like an arrow pierced me between the eyes.
I screamed out, crumpling into Avian’s lap.
“Eve!” he yelled, pulling me close into him.
I opened my eyes, a vivid green wash and numbers flashing across my vision. I pressed my hands in on either side of my head.
“Ahh!” I screamed, feeling like my brain was going to explode.
“Stay with me, Eve!” Avian called to me from somewhere outside the pain.
A sixty-two point one pulsed across my vision and then everything was dark.
TWENTY-ONE
A blinding light suddenly filled my vision and I reacted on instinct.
My fist connected with a jaw.
Someone swore and I was momentarily blind as I climbed to my feet.
“That’s probably the first time someone has ever punched you, isn’t it Addie?”
I blinked furiously, trying to clear the white lights blocking my vision. “Royce?” I asked.
“Yeah, I’m here,” he said.
Finally the white started to fade from my vision, leaving only the dull pain behind my eyes. Addie, Dr. Beeson’s assistant, was pulling herself into a sitting position, cradling her reddened jaw. She gave me a disbelieving look. Royce laughed, shaking his head.
“That would indeed be the first time someone has ever punched me,” Addie said as she picked herself up off the ground, brushing dirt from her clothes.
“I’m sorry,” I said, shaking my head once more. “Instinct, I guess. Where’s Dr. Beeson?”
“He’s been really sick,” Addie said. “Pneumonia. There’s been a bad case of the flu at the hospital.”
“Is he going to be okay?” I asked.