“They are living, but there is no life.”
Jack looked over the shattered remains of Evangeline’s family clock. Gears, springs, and shards of wood lay strewn around on the floor. A conversation he had shared with Evangeline in the early months of their marriage surfaced in his memory. It had been just after they had moved into the unit together.
They had been arranging furniture and hanging pictures and other decorations on the walls. Jack opened one of Evangeline’s storage crates and found the clock swaddled in bubble-wrap. He pulled it out of the crate and unwrapped the old wood clock. A smile broke out on his face, as if he had opened up a birthday present.
“What’s this?” he called out over his shoulder.
“What’s what?” Evangeline yelled back at him from the bedroom.
“What’s with the clock?” Jack said with a raised voice without taking his eyes off the wooden artifact in his hands. He caressed his fingers against the intricate scrolling on the edges and textured metal faceplate. His smile spread wider. He had heard about ancient timepieces, but had never seen a real one before. So beautiful. The authentic wood was golden, a hue so pure and natural it almost glowed. He held the clock up to his ear, anxious to listen to the whirring of mechanisms, but only silence met his ear. He drew the clock away from his ear, disappointed.
Jack heard soft footfalls and a sniffle behind him. He turned to find Evangeline staring at him from down the hall. Her hands trembled as they covered her mouth, and tears spilled down her cheeks. Jack set the clock back down in the crate with extreme care and walked over to his new wife.
“What’s wrong?” he asked as he rest his hands on her shoulders.
Evangeline’s glistening eyes focused on the clock lying in the crate across the room. For several minutes she stared in silence while Jack waited, uneasy, for an explanation for her emotional demonstration. Feeling embarrassed by his impish excitement he cleared his throat.
“I’m sorry if I wasn’t supposed to unpack that,” he offered. “Should it have stayed in storage?”
Evangeline brushed the tears from her cheeks and turned her shining eyes to her new husband. Her chin quivered as she searched his questioning eyes.
“No,” she stumbled over her words. “It’s okay. It’s an old family heirloom that’s been passed down from mother to daughter since before the Collapse. I haven’t looked at in in years. I put it away because I’ll never have a daughter of my own, so… .” Her voice trailed off as fresh tears flowed down her face.
When Evangeline had fallen in love with Jack, and knew he would be a significant part of the rest of her life, she told him about the hard decision she had made when she enlisted to be a TRTV pilot. Because of her parents’ traitorous background, she would not be permitted her own biological offspring, and she signed away her reproductive rights. She had been afraid her barrenness would be a deal-breaker for the man who had become more important to her than any other person had. But Jack - gentle, steady, dependable Jack - had pulled her into an embrace and said he loved her, all of her, just the way she was. All he wanted out of life was to be able to spend the rest of his years at her side.
Jack went back to the clock and began rewrapping it in the plastic bubble paper. Evangeline’s silent pain was palatable, leaving the new groom uncertain what to do.
Evangeline walked over and put her arms around Jack’s waist from behind. He set the bundled clock down in the crate and squeezed her arms.
“I’m sorry I got this out before asking you about it,” he whispered.
She sniffled behind his back and pressed her head between his shoulder blades.
“No,” she said. “It’s okay. We can hang it up. Just promise me one thing.”
Jack pulled her arms apart and turned in place to face her. He raised his hands to her cheeks and brushed away the moisture with his thumbs. “Anything for you, my love.” His beaming smile illuminated the room.
“I won’t ever have a daughter to pass this down to, so,” she began with a catch in her throat. “If anything ever happens to me, I want you to destroy the clock. Promise?”
Jack knit his eyebrows as he considered the request. A pre-Collapse artifact was rare in Olympus. He did not know how many artifacts even existed in his home community. He could count the ones he knew of on one hand. The thought of destroying something so valuable was a startling concept to him, but his love for Evangeline, and his faith in her, was more important.
He looked down at her with solemn eyes. “I promise.”
Jack bent over, pretended to brace himself up to stand, and stuffed the piece of paper into his pocket next to the neural interface.
FORTY-FIVE
By the time the sedative started wearing off, and Evangeline was coming-to in the back of the vehicle, the entire night had passed. The last thing Evangeline remembered was the unnamed yet familiar voice reassuring her of her safety. Distant, mumbled voices seemed to echo in her mind when the sound of her own name cut through the haze. But, before her heavy mind could recall the face that belonged to the voice, she had slipped again into the dark oblivion of sleep.
The transport hit a hard bump, jarring Evangeline from her slumber. She remained motionless in her seat, and allowed her body to press forward against her harness as her head bobbed against her chest. She wanted to listen and gather as much information about her whereabouts without alerting her captors she was awake.
The sounds from outside the transport were deafening, almost as if they were passing through a parking garage as a hundred other vehicles revved their engines. A few of the people around Evangeline tried talking over the roar, but their conversations dissipated into babble, overwhelmed by the thunder pounding in her ears. She distinguished four different voices in the transport with her, but grew frustrated none of them were clear enough to understand what they were saying.
The vehicle veered to the left, forcing her head to whip backward and slam against the sidewall with a thud. She winced and let out an involuntary yelp, her hand reflexively reaching up to check her head for bumps. It was then she realized the absence of her bonds. She felt a burst of adrenaline rushing through her veins. She was still blindfolded, strapped into the seat, but her arms and legs were free. She toyed with a plan of launching her hands and feet in random directions in hopes she would make contact with her captors. She chose to play it calm, and filled her lungs with a deep breath.
“Garrett,” that soothing, familiar voice raised above the din from outside, reaching her ears from the opposite corner of the transport. “She’s waking up.” The mumbled conversations ended mid-sentence.
Evangeline felt a shiver course up and down her spine. She was in a precarious situation, surrounded by strangers she did not trust. She did not know why they had taken her or where they were going. Her mind explored various scenarios in which they took her into the wastelands for interrogation, torture, and a shallow grave.
“Captain?” Garrett’s voice rose above the noise outside the vehicle. “Would you like us to remove your blindfold? Or would you prefer to continue pretending to be asleep?” A chorus of chuckles sounded about her, and she picked out the voices of two additional individuals. She was outnumbered six to one. She raised her head and flinched as she felt a hand brush against her hair.
“Take it easy!” Garrett’s voice scolded. “I’m just trying to take off the blindfold.”
“Are you sure you’re out of danger? Maybe you should wait until you have more than six men to protect yourselves from me,” Evangeline spat back. “I wouldn’t want you to feel outnumbered!” His hand withdrew from her hair, and through her boots, she could sense his footsteps retreating from her.
“It’s okay, Boyd,” the familiar voice rose above the others. “No one here is going to hurt you.” His voice was calm and assuring, and something within her wanted to trust that voice. She was certain that she knew its owner, yet his face continued to elude her in her mind.
He spoke again. “Garrett, let me d
o it.”
She hesitated for a moment, and then nodded her head. Vibrations from another pair of feet approached her from the opposite direction Garrett had taken. The footsteps fell silent before her, and her ears told her he was crouching down at her knees. She imagined her hearing compensated for the absence of her vision when she thought she heard the pulse in his wrist as it reached past her ear. Large, warm hands loosened the knot behind her head and the blindfold fell into her lap.
The man pulled his hands away and lowered himself onto the bench beside her. The air felt refreshing and cool against her smothered cheekbones and eyelids. Her sticky eyelids peeled themselves open in agonizing slowness. Sitting in a blindfold for the past several hours made even the dim lights in the transport feel like high noon on her pupils. She squinted, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the new brightness. She looked down to avoid the direct glare from above and saw the blindfold resting on her thighs.
She guessed it had been many hours, given how much it hurt to open her eyes. She tried to gaze around the vehicle to get a look at her captors, but their faces were blurred and blotchy shapes hovering about her, as if she were looking at them through translucent glass.
The man next to her rested his hand on her shoulder. She flinched away; even now that she could see his hazy face she was no closer to resolving his identity.
“Easy, Boyd,” he said, withdrawing his hand again. “Remember your training. Let your eyes adjust. It’s just like after the procedure, huh?” The man chuckled. The reference to the neural mapping surgery triggered the connection. She turned to face him, still squinting in the brightness. The longer she stared, more of his features came into focus. There were more wrinkles around his smiling eyes and perhaps his hair was a bit grayer, but he looked just as he had the last time she saw him.
“B.B.?” she whispered, her eyes as large as moons. Her mouth hung open as she stared at him. It must be some kind of trick of the eyes, or her captors were trying to fool her. Maybe she was losing her mind - all the trauma from the past few days cascading down on her all at once. She could not reconcile what she saw with what she knew to be true. The man that sat next to her could not be Kevin Turner.
Kevin “B.B.” Turner was dead.
FORTY-SIX
Evangeline still remembered the day she received a notice during her off-world tour of duty. An old friend from her training class had written to inform her of the death of Kevin “Big Brother” Turner. B.B. had been Evangeline’s TRTV trainer, but their relationship went deeper than that. He had become her surrogate family, and after all her years of loneliness and rejection, his was a friendship she cherished above all others.
Seeing his face, and hearing his voice again, flooded her mind with memories. Remembering the day she received the news, a tear trailed down her cheek. Evangeline wiped it away as she continued to stare at him with a wide-eyed, disbelieving gaze. With no forethought, she swung her arms out and wrapped them around his neck.
“You’re supposed to be dead,” she whispered. She buried her face in his shoulder and shed another quiet tear of shock. B.B. embraced her in return, rubbing her back the way a parent soothes a distraught child.
She held onto him for a few moments before remembering where she was, and pulled away as fast as she embraced him. She brushed another tear from her eyes and gazed around the vehicle to see the faces of the men witnessing their exchange. Some had averted their eyes, while others continued to stare back with hard glares of suspicion. Evangeline’s tenderness turned off like a switch when she remembered she had been stunned, abducted, and sedated by the men in alliance with her former trainer.
The fury welled up inside her heart faster than she could control it, and Kevin was not able to raise his arms fast enough to block the first few punches. She hurled a volley that connected with his nose, producing a sickening crunch.
He howled in pain as she pounded her fists against his forearms raised in front of his face as a shield. The others leapt toward the scuffle and restrained her before she had been able to continue her attack. They had managed to grab her arms and pushed her back into a chair two seats away from Kevin.
“You want to explain to me how you’re not dead and how you’re part of my kidnapping?” she screeched, still kicking in his direction.
With a grimace and a moan, Kevin pressed his fingertips against his nose and popped the dislodged cartilage back in place.
“I taught you how to punch better than that,” he laughed, massaging the bridge of his nose. “You didn’t even draw blood.”
Evangeline had to gulp down several heaving breaths to get herself under control. The muscles in her arms relaxed and the men around her eased their restraint against her.
“Yeah?” she replied. “Well, I didn’t think the dead could bleed!”
She and Kevin engaged in a staring contest for what felt like an hour. Evangeline focused on Kevin like a snake ready to strike. Kevin smiled back at her, as if a child throwing a tantrum on the floor amused him. She never had been successful at staying mad at him for very long. His enduring patience was infuriating but unbreakable. Her fury melted away as she surrendered, a smile creeping onto her face.
She sat back in her seat and folded her arms in a pathetic act of defiance. Kevin scooted closer to her seat as her posture relaxed.
“I’m sorry about what you’ve been through tonight,” he began. “We had to make Olympus believe you were being taken against your will for your protection. This contingency plan has been in place for many years.”
“I was taken against my will,” Evangeline shouted. “I was just looking for answers to how my trainee ended up in a quarantine unit. Know anything about that?”
Kevin stole a glance toward one of the men in the far corner of the transport, watching the exchange with venomous eyes. Evangeline noted the open hostility between the two of them, knowing how even soldiers in the same unit could rub each other the wrong way. Kevin turned his eyes back to Evangeline. “It has something to do with what your parents were working on when they disappeared,” he said with a sigh.
The mention of her parents made Evangeline’s mind recoil, like anticipating a slap across the face. Surrounded by strangers, discussing the tender topic of her parents made her feel more vulnerable. If it had just been she and Kevin jostling around in the back of the transport, she would have been an open book. Unwilling to open herself up in front of strangers, Evangeline buried the anguished memories as best she could. Instead, she let her mind flood with her history with the man sitting next to her.
Evangeline had always felt safe with Kevin. He had been the only TRTV trainer that would take a trainee like her under his wing, what with all her well-publicized past and emotional baggage. Her guilt by association almost kept her out of the program completely, even though her aptitude tests and the results of the neural scan marked her as a shoe-in candidate. Once she was admitted into the program, however, none of the other trainers would associate themselves with the daughter of alleged terrorists.
None except Kevin Turner, that is. At first, he did it out pure pity. She was a young woman, marred by the scandalous reputation of her parents, but had achieved first ranking scores on all the induction tests. He could have claimed there were not enough instructors, passing her over for training by making her wait another year. She won him over with her tenacity and fighting spirit. He consented to be her trainer, and, she had no idea how glad he was that he had made that decision.
“Who are they?” Evangeline asked in a frustrated tone. She was shooting dark glares at all the other men in the back of the vehicle; she looked like a caged animal on display that wanted nothing more than to decapitate her spectators. “What’s going on here, B.B.? I want to know, and I want to know now.” She leaned forward, her eyes focusing on him like lasers. Kevin sat back in his seat, draped one arm across his stomach, and played with his lip with his other hand. His eyes bored into hers as he pondered about how answer her question.
; Garrett interrupted his thought process.
“B.B,” he growled, “it’s not your place to explain anything about our mission.”
Kevin lifted his eyes from Evangeline and looked past her shoulder, letting the full force of his authority burn as he stared at Garrett. Garrett’s confidence dissipated like smoke as Kevin stared him down with an almost imperceptible gesture. Garrett tried rallying back to regain control, but he had already succumbed to Kevin’s strength of will.
Garrett dropped his eyes to the floor and cleared his throat. “Let’s just wait until we get back and let them determine what she will or will not be told, okay?”
“As I recall, Garrett,” Kevin sneered in disdain, “it was your actions that started the domino effect which has brought us to this point.”
Garrett opened his mouth to protest, but Kevin cut him off with a sweep of his hand. He rose from his seat - Evangeline had forgotten how tall B.B. was - and placed a hand against the transport wall on either side of Garret’s head, shoving his swollen nose within an inch of Garrett’s astonished face.
“That surprises you, does it? Yes, I know what you did to that pilot. Felicia contacted me while you were in transit to my station and filled me in. What were you thinking?” Evangeline watched this heated exchange in wonder. She had not recognized Garrett as the man who offered a drink of his flask to Daryl.
Garrett matched Kevin’s disdainful glare. He contorted his face, gritting his teeth and sneering into Kevin’s eyes. Kevin had been right, though; Garrett had only been thinking about his own private agenda when he poisoned that pilot in the LTZ.
Evangeline watched transfixed as the two men stared each other down, bristling and snarling like wolves. She was even more confused now than before they had pulled her into the transport. She stood and put her hands on Kevin’s shoulders, compelling him to put some space between himself and Garrett. Garrett’s posture drooped and he hid a sigh of relief as she pulled Kevin around to face her.
Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) Page 26
