The Eve (The Eden Trilogy)

  Because I had lived my entire life underground up to that point.

  “Let’s get a move on,” I said, turning back to the group. “We don’t have any time to lose.”

  Dr. Evans nodded. “This way.” He crossed the lobby to the long hallway. “There is a room full of generators and solar storage units at the back of the building. We’re going to have to get them back up and running or we won’t be able to see a thing down there in the dark.”

  It was a long walk to get from one end of the building to the other. Finally, Dr. Evans opened a door and brilliant sunlight spilled through. The door let out onto a flat landing, backing up right into the mountain side.

  This was the back door Dr. Evans had shoved me out of after he had Dr. Beeson wipe my memory.

  This was my true birth place.

  On the other side of the landing, there was a door going into a separate section of the building. Dr. Evans broke the door handle and pushed it open.

  It looked like a garden of machines. Rows and rows of them sat inside, filling the middle of the large room in aisles. Along another wall sat tall, black boxes that hummed loudly.

  “Energy storage devices?” Avian asked, indicating the black boxes.

  Dr. Evans nodded. “Solar energy, to be precise,” he said in a raised voice. “Being this far out we tried to be as self-sufficient as possible so as to not draw questions from the local utility companies. The entire roof of the building is covered in solar panels. These devices ran the majority of the power.”

  “And these?” I asked, tapping one of the machines with the barrel of my assault rifle.

  “Backup generators,” he said. He crossed to a large tank that was twelve feet tall and probably six feet across. “This is fuel for them all. Enough to last a few days.”

  “Is the fuel good enough to get them back up and running?” Bill asked. “Fuel only lasts so long.”

  “Yes,” he said with a heavy sigh. “We’re going to have to hope the solar power is just switched off and it can be easily turned back on.”

  With that, he turned to a control panel on one wall and West crossed the room to help him.

  I walked back out onto the landing, kicking at the snow. It exploded in front of me in a big puff.

  “Do you realize you walked about three-hundred fifty miles from here to Eden?” Avian said from behind me. “We’re close if you were driving a vehicle. But walking that distance…?”

  “I wonder how long it took me,” I said as I leaned against the side of the building and crossed my arms over my chest. Disappointment settled into my heart. We weren’t exactly being quiet here. First with the gunshots, and then our talking. If my sister was here, she would have heard us by now.

  I had to assume that since she hadn’t come out, she wasn’t here.

  Of course she wasn’t.

  Avian shook his head. “You have always had impressive stamina, but your hiking was all through desert and mountains. Even if you managed twenty miles a day that would have taken you a couple of weeks. And I doubt you walked in a direct line to us.”

  “Bill walked a lot farther than that, didn’t you?” I said, nodding to where he stood in the doorway. His firearm was held ready in his hands as he scanned the mountains around him.

  Bill simply nodded.

  “You came from somewhere on the east coast, right?” Avian asked.

  Bill nodded once again. “Yeah, but I think I got out of there before it got real bad.”

  “It was real bad from the beginning,” Avian said, though not in a challenging way.

  Bill nodded for a third time and I knew that was the end of that. The past was a place Bill didn’t visit and did not invite others to.

  Whatever had happened in his past, I had a sense that the present was better for him. Even if it was a post-Evolution world.

  The door that had been left propped open leading back into the building suddenly illuminated, the lights flickering on in a line down the hall.

  “Got it!” West shouted from inside. He and Dr. Evans stepped back out onto the landing.

  “This way,” Dr. Evans said as he stepped past us and into the hall.

  We walked past offices and conference rooms and back into the lobby. Dr. Evans crossed to the elevators and pushed the button to go down. It illuminated.

  “No, wait—” West started.

  There was an ear-splitting clatter. Bang—bang—bang.

  The ground and walls shook and we all scrambled back as something behind the closed elevator doors plummeted into the depths of the building.

  The doors dinged open just as the elevator crashed down the shaft. A cloud of dust exploded out the open doors.

  “As I was about to say,” West said, looking at Dr. Evans with stupidity in his eyes. “The elevator is doubtful to work after all these years.”

  Normally, this incident might have made me laugh, but at the moment, all my nerves were on high alert. I’d crouched into fight mode, my finger poised on the trigger. My eyes swept the area.

  Avian and Bill were positioned exactly the same.

  “Shall we take the stairs then?” West said. I glanced back at him to see him shake his head. He started toward the door with the “stairs” sign.

  Slowly relaxing when nothing came rushing out after us, I turned and we all shuffled to the stairs and stepped into the dim light.

  The air was old tasting, smelling all the more pungent since the ventilation system had just kicked back on. The lights above us flickered after such a long time of being dark and cold.

  We only went down one flight of stairs before exiting on the floor marked as 1UGL—first underground level.

  The door opened up into a maze of hallways that had endless doors breaking off of them.

  “This is where the important offices are,” Dr. Evans said, his voice sounding far away as if already living back in his days of glory.

  “This is like freaking déjà vu,” West breathed, breaking off to the right before turning down another hall and disappearing out of sight.

  An approving smile pulled on Dr. Evans’ cybernetic face before he started to follow. “I think he remembers.”

  Bill, Avian, and I lagged a bit behind, weapons ready, even though we all knew there were no more Bane inside.

  “This is the freakiest place I’ve ever been,” Avian said, his eyes inspecting each doorway as we followed West and his scientist grandfather. “Is anyone else feeling incredibly claustrophobic?”

  Bill nodded and I internally agreed. The halls were narrow and lined with door after door. The lights flickered overhead, cold and white. Maybe it was just a play of the lights, but it did feel as if the walls were closing in on us.

  “I assure you the building will not, in fact, collapse on you,” Dr. Evans said impatiently. I looked up to see him standing outside an open door. West was gone; he must have already been inside. “This building was built to withstand earthquakes and attacks. It is as solid as the day it was built.”

  “That’s not what’s freaking me out,” Avian muttered under his breath as we stepped inside the office.

  The place looked ransacked. A large desk sat in the middle of the room and the walls were lined with drawers and cabinets. It looked as if all of them had exploded, papers flying everywhere.

  “This looks like it could be fun,” West said sarcastically as he took it all in.

  Dr. Evans crossed to one of the cabinets along the back wall. He read the labels, bending at the waist as he went down. He pulled the second to bottom one open. Carefully, he thumbed through the few files and pages that were in it.

  “Not in here,” he said with a sigh. “Of course not.”

  “What happened in here?” Bill asked as he looked around the room.

  “When the investigation into NovaTor started, there were some very…aggressive men they sent out,” Dr. Evans said as he knelt and started looking through papers. “Little did they understand the value of all the research in this room.”
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  “Is there any use in us trying to help you look through all this?” I asked. My skin felt itchy, as if waiting for something to happen at any moment. I couldn’t trust that nothing would. “We could get Morgan settled.”

  Dr. Evans looked up at us with dark and annoyed eyes. He had no interest in trying to save that child. But he did need my cooperation. “Go ahead. It probably isn’t the best idea for all of you humans to be in such close quarters to me anyway. The medical labs are on the floor below this one. Get her settled. I’ll come down as soon as I find the code.”

  “Unless you need me, I think I’ll stay and help Grandpa,” West said, glancing up at us as he knelt on the paper covered floor.

  “No,” I said, giving him a small smile. “You stay.”

  He gave an appreciative smile back.

  He’d thought beyond a shadow of a doubt that his entire family was gone, and now he’d found his grandfather. They hadn’t gotten the chance to spend any time together yet.

  I could give West this one small thing.

  The three of us went back up the stairs, out the lobby, and back out to the solar van. Avian opened the doors and leaned over the seat to check on Morgan.

  Even I could hear her labored breathing.

  It felt like losing Sarah all over again. But this time there were two lives about to be lost.

  “She’s not doing very well, is she?” I asked as I leaned against the door.

  Avian looked back at me and shook his head. “Her pulse is very slow and she’s running a temperature. If it gets too high, she’ll basically cook the baby.”

  “How long do you think she has?” I asked.

  “Impossible to say,” he said. “It all depends on if this fever escalates, on how good the medical equipment here is, if any of it still works.”

  “We’ll do our best,” Bill said, stepping forward. He and Avian carefully lifted her while I carried her IV bag and the portable oxygen unit.

  It took us probably thirty minutes, at least, to get her inside the building, down the two narrow flights of stairs, and into the medical unit. It would have helped if we’d thought to clear the way first. There was debris everywhere.

  But finally, with the lights on and a new oxygen tank hooked up, we settled Morgan into a hospital bed. Bill and I stepped back while Avian bustled around, fiddling with her oxygen, hooking up a new IV bag and looking for other equipment we would need.

  “I’m looking for a trach tube,” he said when I asked what I could do to help. “She’s eventually going to give out and I’m hoping we can wait until the last second to pull the baby out. We’re going to need a surgical room when that time comes.”

  Avian suddenly stilled as he fiddled with Morgan’s wires. His eyes slowly rose up to meet mine.

  “It’s okay,” I said, swallowing the cotton ball that formed in my mouth. “I can go look for one. I’ll get things ready.”

  “Eve,” he said, his eyes pained. He needed help, but he couldn’t ask me to go looking for the room that was the cause of endless nightmares for me. The room that would change my very personality forever. “I can do it in a bit.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I insisted. I rubbed my palms against my pants; they were sweating despite the freezing cold temperatures. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  I turned and exited the room. Faintly, I heard Avian ask Bill to come with me. He followed suit a moment later.

  I didn’t mind.

  “So how much of this place is familiar?” Bill asked as we walked down a hall. There were endless rooms in this wing, all identical to the one we had placed Morgan in.

  “All of it seems vaguely familiar,” I said, shaking my head. My insides had started shaking. “If we were to go to the floor I lived on I think I’d know certain places for sure. I started recovering some memories when the Underground was studying my brain.”

  Bill just grunted in acknowledgement, but didn’t push the matter further.

  Sometimes Bill was so easy to get along with.

  We reached the end of a corridor and, here, there were three sterilized rooms.

  I definitely recognized them.

  My head was cold.

  My body was frozen.

  There were voices behind me.

  I blacked out.

  FIFTEEN

  I blinked awake to a dull light overhead. The air was warmer now, but just slightly. There was a heaviness pressing down on me. I sat up to find myself on a hospital bed, a blanket tucked around my arms and legs. My rifle was tipped up against the wall to the side of the door.

  I was just about to climb out of the bed when Avian walked in.

  His face said everything.

  “Avian,” I jumped in before he could even start. “It’s fine. That shouldn’t have happened. I’m rather embarrassed that it did.”

  Avian shook his head, his eyes rising to the ceiling. He didn’t come any closer which didn’t make me feel better. Avian kept his distance when he felt he had something to be ashamed of. “That was stupid of me. And insensitive. I feel like the world’s biggest jerk.”

  “Stop it,” I chided, starting to feel a bit annoyed.

  “Eve, this was exactly like before, when you had your blackouts,” he said, pain in his voice. “You’ve gotten a pretty good hold on your emotions, but no one can expect you to overcome every fear. That’s not an emotion easily blocked out.”

  I had to consider that for a moment. Fear wasn’t something I gave much thought to. If anything, it was the emotion I was least familiar with. Maybe it was logical that it was the one emotion that could still send me into a full blackout.

  “I’m fine,” I said again, crossing the room to him. I pressed a kiss to his cheek, but he just looked at me with doubt in his eyes. “Seriously. What do you need me to help with now? Though it does seem best if I avoid the surgical rooms.”

  “We’re set for now,” he said. We started down the hall, but didn’t go far before we stopped outside a door. I saw Morgan inside. She was now hooked up to a machine that beeped and showed green lines that told us she was still alive. There was a thick band around her belly and another monitor that gave small, quick beats as well.

  The baby’s monitor.

  “How long was I out?” I asked as I watched the green line jump and fall.

  “About forty minutes,” he said, leaning in the doorframe, his arms crossed over his chest.

  “I have to ask that question way too often,” I said, shaking my head. It was ridiculous.

  Avian just gave a small smile. “I’m supposed to send you to the lab when you’re ready.”

  “Did he find it?” I asked, my heart suddenly jumping into my throat.

  “Yeah,” he said with a nod and a suppressed smile.

  Instantly, my heart was sprinting in my chest and my ears suddenly started ringing.

  He’d found it. For real. He’d found the code to unblock my own kill code. We really did have a chance at winning this thing.

  “I hardly believe it,” I said, shaking my head as my brows furrowed. “The world just seems too far gone.”

  “I know,” he said, his eyes turning back to Morgan.

  “Where is the lab?” I asked, pulling back into the present.

  I had to take this one step at a time.

  “Down the hall, a right and then a left. West is with him, so call for him and he’ll lead you there.”

  “Okay,” I said, reaching for Avian’s hand. I gave it a quick squeeze and then turned down the hall.

  The walls reached out to my muscle memory. There was something about this hall, these turns, the doors I passed, that seemed familiar.

  I couldn’t deny that I had been here before.

  I heard Dr. Evans and West talking before I reached the door, alerting me to the lab I was looking for. I stepped into the room and held my hands behind my back.

  “You found it then,” I said.

  West jumped violently, dropping a file on the floor.

  “Yes
,” Dr. Evans said, turning to face me. He grabbed a paper from the counter he had been standing at and held it up. “It is a very lucky thing I was as old fashioned as I am. Most of NovaTor and its workers had switched to an all-digital system of keeping records. I always thought it safest to make a backup hard copy. We wouldn’t be able to save the world if I hadn’t.”

  I crossed the room and took the page he held. It was a sequence of numbers and letters, and for some reason, it seemed like a language I had forgotten how to speak. It was the same feeling I got whenever I observed the crazy sequences that flashed across Dr. Beeson’s monitors for the Wireless Transmission System.

  “Memorize it,” he said. “Should anything happen to our copies, I want at least one person to know what it is.”

  I read through it three times, all fifty-six letters and numbers, and knew it would be branded into my memory. I handed it back to him.

  “Your sister would have had it memorized just by glancing at it,” Dr. Evans said as he took the paper and turned back to the counter.

  I wasn’t sure if I should be offended by that or not. He’d said it offhandedly, like it was a statement, as if the sky was blue, and grass was green. But still.

  “She had an amazing memory,” West muttered as he finished straightening the papers he’d knocked off the counter.

  “She’s not here,” I said quietly. I shifted from one foot to the other. The situation had become uncertain from here on out.

  “Yeah,” was all West said.

  “These are the formulas for your generation of TorBane,” Dr. Evans said, ignoring the situation he didn’t want to deal with. He indicated another file. “There are four doses that you and Eve One received. The first dosage was the weakest, most diluted, and they got increasingly stronger.”

  “How long will it take you to remake it?” I asked, feeling anxious again. This was another uncertainty in our plan. We could try to help the baby, but it was unknown if it would work.

  “I have yet to check the freezers to see if the cybernetic base elements are still any good. And then it will take me a bit to gather all the chemicals and stem cells needed.”