Eve of Man

  ‘Now you might actually complete one,’ I tease.

  ‘I’ve done it before, remember?’ she says, the pitch of her voice raising an octave in protest.

  ‘Only because you painstakingly removed all the stickers and cheated.’ I laugh, feeling my body tilt towards hers.

  ‘I got what I wanted, though, didn’t I? Sometimes a little cheating is good for the soul.’

  ‘It made you feel good?’ I ask, finding his response surprising.

  ‘It did until you sussed it out and made me confess to being a cheat. You even told the Mothers on me,’ she adds, pretending to be wounded.

  ‘You’d roughed up the edges of the stickers. I could see exactly what you’d done so of course I knew.’ I recall the look on her innocent face when I called her out on it all those years ago, then watched Mother Tabia give her a stern talking-to. ‘Imagine how good you’d feel if you did it properly.’

  ‘Are you forgetting it’s just a toy?’ she asks, her eyebrow raised.

  ‘You’ll get a real sense of achievement.’

  ‘Let’s test your theory,’ she says, holding the colourful object in front of us.

  ‘Fine.’ I smile, my eyes absorbing the pattern of colours while my brain works out the best way to start. ‘Put your right hand on the top section and rotate it just once to the left …’

  Holly misunderstands my instruction and turns the top two thirds of the Cube rather than just the upper layer.

  ‘No!’ I shriek, stifling a laugh at how my insides churned with anxiety at her mistake – perhaps she’s right and I do need to remember that it’s just a toy. ‘Go back to where we started.’

  She does as I ask.

  ‘Right,’ I say, looping my arm through hers so that my right hand hovers above hers. I curl my fingers as though the Cube is in my own hands and repeat the instruction, showing her what to do. ‘Now turn the Cube around so that the yellow of this side is at the bottom and …’ I demonstrate.

  She understands and turns. ‘That’s three yellows in a row!’ she yelps, delighted with herself.

  ‘You really did cheat if you think that’s an achievement.’ I giggle, sweeping my hair away from my face and over the opposite shoulder from where Holly is sitting.

  Her eyes snatch a glimpse of my newly exposed neck and I notice her lips give the smallest pout in response before she focuses back on the Cube.

  My body tingles at this new level of intimacy and craves more.

  I tentatively feed my arm through hers again so that we can continue as before, but this time I don’t say a word. I just instruct with my hands.

  She mirrors them perfectly, taking note of exactly how my hands rotate, turn and manipulate before doing the same with her own.

  A silence might’ve fallen between us, but something entirely new is being communicated.

  I feel her.

  I know that’s absurd, but I do. With our arms interlinked and our bodies sitting closer than usual, we’re sharing a new energy.

  I’m aware of her every breath working its way in and out of her body, each and every muscle as she mimics my movements, and that she is just as aware of the change as I am. It’s not in my imagination. It’s real. I know she feels it too. It’s titillating, tantalizing, and stirs an inexplicable hunger inside me.

  I want her.

  I don’t need words to define the thoughts being shared, not when my insides are flipping with excitement at the tingling sensation of her body next to mine.

  ‘We’ve done it,’ she says quietly, holding the completed puzzle in her hands, neither of us engaged in the game any longer.

  We remain in silence.

  My thoughts are focused on the heat passing down the right side of my body. It’s real. The feelings that are being stirred are here and alive, and I won’t have anyone tell me different.

  Time passes. It could be seconds, or it could be hours, I’ve no idea.

  ‘I should go.’ She taps the top of the Cube, then gets to her feet. She starts to say something else, but stops herself. Instead she turns on the heels of her jelly wedges and heads indoors.

  ‘I’ve made a decision,’ I call, looking at the clouds beyond my feet. ‘I’ll go for science.’

  I don’t need to turn to know that she’s gone.

  20

  Eve

  I stay sitting on the Drop for some time, trying to calm down and make sure my cheeks aren’t still pink from our encounter.

  Encounter …

  An unusual giddiness has risen within me – a warm fuzzy excitement. I’ve needed time to digest it, to enjoy it, but also to quash it until I can dwell on its inevitable disappointing outcome. Which I’m hoping to delay for as long as possible. I have to choose science, because I couldn’t handle meeting Potential Number Three and not feeling that. Whatever that was.

  While sitting here I focus on the perfection in front of me. It’s a sight I try never to take for granted. Living here, seeing the earth in all its beauty, spurs me on. The greens of the land I occasionally glimpse in the distance, the blues of the sky. It’s all so inviting. It fills me with love for Mother Nature, even though she’s revealed her flaws – or perhaps she’s exercising her strength to warn us of the magnitude of her power. She’s in charge, that’s for sure. Try as we may, we cannot bend her laws. Not if she doesn’t want us to. Is it wrong that I’m starting to take solace from that?

  A bell tells me it’s time for the afternoon’s session to start. Gardening. Holly doesn’t join me for this: sometimes reality and illusion just aren’t compatible. A lesson that’s all about respecting the earth, nurturing life and seeing it thrive at the touch of your fingertips could be ironic with Holly in attendance. I don’t mind her absence, as it’s a class I get lost in anyway. I always find any manual task highly therapeutic. I need that today, right now. And the last thing I need is one of the other Hollys.

  Mother Kimberley is waiting for me when I arrive at my allotment across the Dome. Elsewhere the Mothers grow all the fruit and vegetables we eat at each meal, but this patch is just for me. It’s filled with flowers: roses, daffodils, lavender, clematis, delphiniums and poppies – to name just a few. I pick up my secateurs and snip off dead blooms and yellowing leaves.

  ‘Are you well?’ asks Mother Kimberley, her rounded frame pulling out two brown folding chairs from my shed and taking a seat. She looks as she normally does in her navy gardening trousers, cream cotton blouse and trainers, with her short red hair curling around her ears, but there’s a weariness behind her glistening blue eyes, which usually sparkle with happiness. And there’s tightness in her lips, which are usually smiling. She looks shattered. I’ve forgotten the toll recent events must be taking on the Mothers too. It’ll be a long time before things feel normal again. If they ever do.

  I let out an exaggerated sigh.

  She nods in response, sympathy on her rosy face as she purses her lips in a straight line. ‘I heard.’

  ‘I don’t want to even look at another Potential, so how could I let one touch me?’ I ask, removing the rosebuds that have failed to bloom and shrivelled on the bush, thereby directing more energy into those that show more promise. I’m learning to grow life.

  ‘You don’t know how you’ll feel about this one until you’re in his company,’ Mother Kimberley advises, her tone all-knowing. I usually enjoy it when the Mothers share some knowledge from their experiences before the current structure was formed, although I’m not sure they always understand what it’s like to be me.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to be in his company,’ I say bluntly.

  ‘Oh.’

  I watch her face drop as she understands what I’ve said and feel a pang of guilt.

  ‘That’s a shame.’

  ‘You think so?’ I ask, picking up an empty bucket and disposing of the bits I’ve been hacking off.

  ‘Any children you deliver will be partly made of him,’ Mother Kimberley says firmly, her neck straightening a little as she tries to
remain diplomatic. I doubt she’ll tell me I’m wrong, it’s not in her nature, but I’m expecting her to share her thoughts on the subject.

  ‘Does that matter?’ I ask.

  ‘Does it matter to you that half of you came from your father? That you only exist because of him?’ she asks slowly, her head tilting to one side. ‘Do you ever find yourself wondering if you’re like him in any way?’

  I’m rarely asked such a direct question about him. He features in my thoughts, but they focus mostly on my mother.

  I don’t reply because not only is there truth in what she’s said, but also she knows the answers to each of her loaded questions.

  ‘Wouldn’t your child feel the same?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I mumble.

  My life has been so geared towards meeting the Potentials and finding my perfect match that I’ve hardly thought beyond the act of procreation at the Revival. Until very recently I hadn’t really thought about life with a child. A baby. My baby. Surely the most significant part in all this is bringing life into the world. It was for my mother. She had plans for me, for us. She’d thought through our lives together.

  I wonder what kind of mother I’ll be and whether I’ll even be allowed to raise my children, if I’m lucky enough to have any. They may be taken from me, raised by another group of Mothers and given their own Holly to grow up with. The thought of them going through that fills me with dread.

  What would happen if I bore a boy? Would we just keep going until another girl is born? That’s why they’re starting me so young, surely – to get the most out of me while they can.

  ‘I’m old enough to remember a time before you.’ Mother Kimberley sniffs. She leans forward in her chair, rubbing her hands together while she rests her elbows on her knees. ‘The tests. The hormone treatments. The poking and prodding. All of it to no avail. They were sure the fault lay somewhere with us women and needed to find out what it was. Eventually we were considered worthless. That was until your mother and father.’

  I stop pruning and look up at her, letting her know she’s got my full attention now.

  ‘Your mother was a very special woman.’

  ‘Did you know her?’ I ask, my interest piqued. Now I’m starting to understand the woman who carried me for nine months I want to hear everything there is to know about her.

  ‘Not personally,’ she admits, with a touch of sadness.

  My heart drops with disappointment.

  She glances around us to ensure no one is in earshot, then continues, her voice low and gravelly, quite different from the delicate sound I’m used to hearing from her. ‘But one of the things that made her special to us women wasn’t that she fell pregnant with a girl but that she had done so away from a laboratory. Whatever your mother and father shared was more efficient than a bunch of men and women in white coats telling us our bodies were useless.’

  ‘She was tested, the same as everyone else.’ I’ve read about it in her own letters, her thoughts of failings echoing Mother Kimberley’s. ‘She was one of you.’

  ‘Yes, she was told she was of no use and was sent home to your father … so the story goes,’ she adds, with a non-committal shrug that suggests I’m not the only one to have my suspicions about what we’re told. I realize it’s not just me being kept in the dark.

  ‘That’s true.’ I nod. ‘My mother wrote about it.’

  ‘Yes.’ A smile appears on her face but doesn’t quite reach her eyes. I wonder if it’s for my benefit or theirs. ‘I just wonder if the power of attraction and emotion should be so quickly overlooked, Eve. Science has failed us before.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s advanced since then. What else have they been doing all this time?’ I ask.

  Mother Kimberley shakes her head. She thinks I’ve not listened, that her words have gone in one ear and straight out the other, but she’s wrong. I’ve heard them and they’ve made me stand even firmer in my decision.

  Science has failed before.

  Maybe it’ll fail now.

  Secretly, that’s what I’m hoping for, because being responsible for bringing another human, my child or not, into this world doesn’t feel like the right thing to do. And maybe, just maybe, their experimental meddling was Mother Nature’s reason for attempting to kill us off in the first place.

  21

  Bram

  I can’t sleep.

  No surprises there, I guess, although tonight is different. Usually it’s my brain that keeps me awake, thinking about the missions, the future and Eve (of course). During the day a river of thoughts is held at bay behind a dam inside my head but each night it bursts and the river drowns any chance I had of sleep.

  But tonight it’s not my mind that’s keeping me awake. It’s a feeling, a physical feeling, that somewhere in the core of my body something is leaping around. I suppose they call this ‘butterflies’, although that seems to paint a far gentler mental image than what I’m experiencing. Mine are trapped hummingbirds, flapping tirelessly to and fro, their wings relentlessly strumming the strings of my emotions as I lie in my bunk.

  A small pop breaks the silence and I roll over to see Hartman sitting in the glow of his reading light at his desk in the far corner of the dorm.

  ‘It’s called bubblegum,’ he says, sensing my eyes on him.

  ‘Huh?’ I reply. He purses his lips and a blue bubble starts to appear. It grows and pops, splattering over his nose.

  ‘It’s vintage!’ he says, throwing a small, shiny, rectangular piece of paper to me. ‘Try it.’

  ‘Jeez, it’s smells sweet,’ I say, folding back the silver foil and sniffing the blue strip of gum inside.

  ‘Don’t waste it. That stuff ain’t cheap!’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, avoiding having to try it by subtly slipping it into the chest pocket of my jumpsuit.

  ‘You’ve not stopped rubbing your fingers together for the past thirty minutes,’ he says, and I’m suddenly aware that I’ve been massaging the spot where Eve was touching me earlier, remembering the sensation that my kinetic gloves were creating on my fingers, that she was creating, as she guided my hands around that Cube.

  ‘You know you pushed it to the line again today, dude,’ Hartman says, and I can’t help but feel he’s finding this subject difficult to approach. ‘You do realize that I could tell what was going on, both of you playing along that you were intent on completing the Rubik’s Cube, which, by the way, was obviously a totally romantic gesture on your part.’

  Okay, maybe it’s not so difficult for him to approach it.

  ‘We both know she can solve that thing in no more than twenty moves. I know you can too. I’ve sat here watching you twiddle it around, slept through the constant clicking when you were figuring it out years ago. But today she repeatedly made mistakes. Purposely directing you to make wrong turns, allowing your time on the Drop to last that little bit longer.’

  I don’t say anything. What can I say? He’s totally right.

  ‘Look, if I can see it, then you can bet your next set of stitches that your dad can too, and if by some freaky miracle he can’t, then Miss Silva certainly can.’ He waits for me to fill the silence, but I’ve got nothing to say.

  ‘You’ve got to be careful. Sometimes I wish they didn’t heal you up so good. Then you’d have the scars to remind you of what happens when you break the rules here. Your dad may not punish you publicly, but he sure as hell makes you pay for it, dude.’ He sighs.

  ‘Today was the longest Eve and I’ve had physical contact,’ I say, staring up at the underside of Hartman’s bunk. ‘I know it’s forbidden.’

  ‘Exactly! Think how many pilots have lost their jobs, or worse, for that exact reason. Lucas, Kook, that other guy with the weird nose.’

  ‘Saunders?’

  ‘Yeah, all of them slowly falling in love with her, then pushing the boundaries of their missions. It’s a criminal offence, Bram! Anything that could potentially put her at risk, that’s a prison sentence, dude,’ Hartman warns me. ‘Don??
?t think I can’t see what’s going on with you two.’

  He knows me too well. He knows her too. Plus he’s right. It’s beyond stupid. I used to laugh at those pilots who came here, swore their oath to the EPO and then, wham , fell in love with Eve within the first few months on the job. Saunders, Lucas, Kook … Idiots. I’d grown up with her and managed to remain professional. Always kept my intentions, my motivations clear. Why this change? Why now? Where have these feelings come from? Am I jealous of the Potentials? Maybe. Has this love been born out of the fear of losing Eve now that she’s being called upon to fulfil her destiny?

  Did I just use the word love?

  Maybe I’ve always loved her.

  ‘Hello?’ her innocent voice calls. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I’m Holly,’ I reply, staring at Eve’s incredible face through the prototype visor my father has just finished. Her big blue eyes are trying to figure me out, as though they’re staring into my mind even though we aren’t even in the same room.

  ‘Who are you really?’ she says. So smart.

  I feel the nervous energy from the grown-ups surrounding me, even though I can’t see them beyond the visor on my face.

  ‘Cut it off,’ I hear Vivian whisper to my father, followed by a rustle of his shirt as he moves to end this session.

  ‘I’m a kid,’ I tell Eve quickly. My father pauses. ‘Just like you.’

  Eve looks at me. My insides flutter. ‘I’m Eve,’ she says, trying to suppress a smile.

  I sense the glances around the room.

  ‘Can we be friends?’ I say the line as I was instructed to before the session began.

  ‘Maybe,’ she teases.

  I sigh.

  ‘What?’ Hartman asks.

  ‘Do you think …’ I stop myself asking the question.

  ‘What?’

  I look at him. I can trust him. More than anyone.

  ‘… that she feels it too?’

  He rolls his eyes, then lets his head hit the table. ‘Oh, my God, Bram. I can’t believe you said that. I mean, I know you two have been getting closer, I can see that, anyone can see that, but seriously, dude, this is Eve. The person you’re talking about, the girl you’re asking me if I think she’s feeling things for you, is Eve . The. Saviour. Of. Humanity. E. V. E.’