“Mother requested her personally,” the woman says, her voice notably cooler. Then she laughs and her blue eyes sparkle with fake happiness. My parents don’t join her. They’re too busy having one of their silent conversations. “Her genomes have proven superb.” She forces her face into a serious expression, one that makes me even more scared of her. “Of course,” she says, “you will be fully compensated for your contribution.”
As if summoned, a young woman slips out of the shadows, startling my parents and terrifying me. I cling to my mom’s neck as the shadow woman walks directly to me.
“She is in my charge now,” the new woman says. Her emotionless voice causes my little body to shudder and I cower even more into my mom’s chest.
“Now?” my mom asks. “But—”
“She must begin immediately. There is no time to waste.” The monster takes my hand and rips me from my mom’s lap.
“Mommy,” I yell, tears rolling down my cheeks. But she doesn’t get up, and the monster doesn’t even pause as she removes me from the room.
When I come out of it, I’m staring at a woman’s body and the small pool of red forming around her. I feel like I’m going to be sick.
Everyone is still gaping and Eli looks shell-shocked. After a second he yanks me down the hall in a full out run. Gavin is pushing me from behind as if he’s terrified I’m still not moving fast enough. Finally we reach what Eli calls—and a little voice tells me is—the Residential Sector without further incident.
I can tell Gavin thinks this has been too easy, despite the scene we just witnessed. He’s watching Eli warily as if he thinks we’re being led into a trap, but I hope he can shove down his paranoia enough to let Eli help me. If it is a trap, then we’ll just have to deal with that when the time comes. I don’t have to tell Gavin to be prepared. He’s got his fingers wrapped tightly around the gun.
We take a set of stairs and by the time we make it up the half dozen or so flights, I think my heart’s going to explode the way it’s banging against my ribs. Finally we reach the right floor and go through a door and down a hallway. We stop at a door at the very end and Eli knocks loud enough to startle everyone.
“What’s he trying to do?” Gavin whispers to me. “Wake the dead?”
I wince. Not exactly the right wording there.
A few seconds later, the door opens slowly and blue eyes peer out from the crack. Then it jerks open slightly more as those eyes catch slight of Eli.
“Father?!” The woman bows her head, the only part of her body I can see, but her hair covers most of her face besides her eyes. “To what do I owe the pleasure of seeing you so late this evening?”
“Evangeline.” His tone—one I’ve heard Gavin use when talking to me—has everyone glancing at him, before Eli shakes himself. Suddenly he’s all business. “Evelyn has returned. These Surface Dwellers have brought her back to us, but her memories are wiped clean. The nanobots have done their job. Too well, it would seem.”
The woman’s eyes widen; then she follows Eli’s gaze over to me, and the door flies open, banging against the wall. It makes me jump, but the woman ignores it.
She leans against the door and I’m surprised to see how familiar she looks to me. As if I’ve seen her before, but I can’t remember where.
“Come, come. Get in here before someone sees you,” she demands.
We step inside, and she immediately shuts and locks the door behind us. She starts toward me, but Eli brushes her off. “No time for that now. We need to get her memories back or she’ll never be able to help us. Where’s the best place?”
She gives him a bland look. “The Medical Sector,” Evangeline says.
“You know we can’t risk that,” Eli says.
She gives him another look, but sighs. “Follow me.” She pushes past him, leading the way down a hallway painted a pretty lavender with wood wainscoting on the bottom. It reminds me a little of Asher’s house in Rushlake. Pictures of a little girl are framed on the wall and I tip my head to the side to study them closer. I think I recognize her from somewhere.
Eli clears his throat. “Come on, Evelyn. We should get started as quickly as we can.”
I follow him, though I keep glancing back at the photos until I get into the room. It too is purple with the wood wainscoting. The pictures in this room are all of flowers. Disappointment pricks at me. The answer to where I’ve seen that girl before had been just at the edge of my memory.
“Lay here.” Eli gestures to the bed. “I’ll be right back. I need to get some things. I hadn’t been expecting to do this.”
He starts to walk past me, but I place a hand on his arm as the question I should have asked first finally comes to mind. “How did you know we were here?”
“The nanite substrate.”
“Excuse me?”
“The nanite substrate. The green substance? It moves. I’m sure you noticed.” He lifts his eyebrows. “Mother has me studying it. I told you. And we’ve been trying to figure out what it is. We’ve figured out it has something to do with the nanites of the deceased bodies, but we’re not sure exactly how they went from”—he glances at me—“human bodies to that substance. We’ll figure it out eventually. Anyway, it sets off the alarms in the Sector. As you can imagine, Mother hated that the alarms were going off every time the stuff migrated.” He shrugs when Gavin scoffs. “So I rerouted them to send an alert to my slate. That included all the alarms for the Sector. Including when the sub docked, and the alarms for the Tube station. I knew the minute you came back.” He glances at Gavin. “You weren’t as secretive as you thought you were.”
“I wasn’t trying to be secretive. Just stay alive,” Gavin mutters.
“Anyway, as soon as I realized you were back and got over the initial shock of that,” he smiles at me, “I made sure I’d be able to get you into Sector Two and up here without setting off the other alarms. Then I went to find you and ensure you made it to safety without causing the uproar you caused before.”
“And the Enforcers? What about them?” Gavin asks. His arms are crossed over his chest.
“That, young man, is the exact reason we can’t be sitting here talking.” He focuses back on me. “Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
Before we can ask any more questions, he rushes out the door and the four of us—Asher, Gavin, Evangeline, and I—sit there in an uncomfortable silence. Gavin is studying her. She’s studying me.
I nudge Gavin—hard—with my elbow and give him my “stop staring” look. He gives me a “what?” look in return. Evangeline grins at me.
I shift my gaze to my hands while Gavin sits next to me, still watching Evangeline while trying to look like he’s not. Asher walks around the room, picking up picture frames and putting them back down before moving on to the next one.
After a few minutes, he says, “So? Evangeline? How are you involved in all this?”
Before she can answer, Eli bursts through the door. “I’ve got everything here to help you.” He swallows and I see how nervous he is. “But there’s a problem.”
“What? What’s the problem? I thought you said you could fix this,” Gavin demands, his voice and movements panicky as he jumps from the bed.
“I can,” Eli says. “But she…” He focuses back on me. “You’ll have to be awake for the procedure. I’m sorry, but I don’t have the equipment I need to put you to sleep. I’m sorry,” he finishes weakly.
“Mother,” Mom says, and presses her hands to her mouth. “There’s nothing you can do?”
“I’m going to give her a sedative, but there’s no guarantee she’ll stay asleep during … everything.” He looks over at Gavin. “You need to keep her still. Can you do that? If not, I’ll have to tie her down. It’s bad enough that I have to gag her; I don’t want to do that, too.”
Gavin blanches. “Why does she need to be held down? What exactly are you going to do to her?” His voice has a hint of panic in it, which makes me feel a little panicky.
Eli
sighs as if he really doesn’t want to spare the time telling us, but he says, “I’m re-injecting her with working nanites, or nanobots. They’ll go in and they’ll repair the bots that aren’t working and hopefully restore the parts of her neuro-network that have been destroyed to access those memories again—”
“Hopefully?” Gavin interrupts, disbelief tainting his voice. “You’ve said repeatedly you could fix her and we’re actually working with a hopefully?”
Eli glares at him. “I’ve never promised anything. I’ve promised to do the best I can, and I’m fairly confident this will work, but there’s never any guarantee. We’re working with human biology here, not machines.”
“Well, actually we are,” Asher says. “Aren’t nanobots tiny robots?”
“Yes.” Eli sounds exasperated. “But the main part we’re actually restoring is her neuronetwork inside her brain. So yes, we’re working with machines, but the machines are working on the biology. Now are we going to sit here discussing what we’re going to do or are we going to do it before Evie has another hallucination that could kill her?”
I finally pipe up. Ultimately I don’t really care what’s going to happen as long as I get my memories back. “Let’s get moving.”
Eli gives me a grim smile, then turns his attention to Gavin. “Can you hold her down? Or not?”
“I can.”
“Are you sure? I can’t—”
“I said I could do it,” Gavin says between clenched teeth.
“Me, too,” Asher says, swallowing hard.
Eli nods and turns back to me. “I’m going to give you a shot. Okay? It’s going to sting, but it should make you sleepy after that. It should … help.”
I’m about to nod when Asher says, “Uh … maybe we should hold her down for this? She kind of took out like six full-grown men at the hospital back home when they tried taking her blood.”
“What?” Gavin demands. “Really?”
Eli’s eyes grow wide, but there’s something in them that makes me think he’s happy to hear this. “There’s no need. It’s not a real needle. Just a pressure syringe. She won’t feel it.”
I look away anyway. I really don’t want to hurt the people in this room. But Eli was right. I don’t feel it. I don’t even know he’s done it, until he says, “Done.”
Eli disappears and comes back again with an armful of supplies. He lays them all out on the dresser next to the bed. It’s a handful of syringes that make my mouth dry. I recognize those syringes for some reason and they terrify me, but the shot he gave me already is masking it and I watch with an increasing amount of numbness as he lays out different machines, vials with a silvery liquid in them, and other things that I don’t recognize. Then he removes his jacket and rolls his sleeves up past his elbows, before turning to me with a piece of cloth all twisted together. “I’m sorry, Evelyn, but this has to go in your mouth. If anyone hears … anything, we’ll be in trouble. Okay?”
I know I should feel something. Panic. Fear. Anxiety. Something. But all I feel is an odd floating sensation, and so I do as he asks and open my mouth without even so much as a question.
He places the cloth in my mouth and ties it behind my head, then disappears from view again while the pungent smell of rubbing alcohol scents the air. When he returns, he peers down at me. “Scream all you want. Okay?” he says, and looks away.
My eyes widen. Something in his tone makes panic tingle in my veins for the first time.
I shake my head rapidly back and forth. But they all ignore it and it’s only moments before a sharp pain tears through me. My chest, lungs, shoulder, leg. They’re all on fire. I jerk, trying to scream, but the gag prevents it. There are voices in the background, but it’s hard to understand over the screaming inside my head.
I struggle harder, but they’re pinning me down. I open my eyes to see Gavin with a determined look on his face. Asher stands at my side, leaning over my chest, holding my arms down. More pain rips through my body and it jerks. My head spins opposite of my stomach and I think I’m going to be sick, but neither Gavin nor Asher will let me up.
Without warning, I feel bugs crawling over my feet, burrowing into my skin, slithering across my muscles and nerve endings. I try pulling away, but it only gets worse and worse. Those nasty little bugs crawling up over my feet, past my ankles, my shins, knees, until more than half my body feels like it’s infested with the horrible burrowing insects. I scream, wiggling and struggling to get away. But the firebugs continue to ravage my body, over my chest, up my neck, until I’m gagging on them, fighting to breathe.
Voices crowd around me. Shouting, whispering, rising and falling around me like waves.
Then, just when I think I can’t take any more, it stops and I feel nothing. No pain. No burrowing insects. Nothing but the strange floatiness I felt before. My eyes drift closed.
* * *
My eyes fly open. Every bone in my body aches. Sweat clings to my skin and blood bubbles on my mouth where my teeth tore into my lips. My whole body feels like it’s encased in ice.
I’m lying naked in a room of all white, strapped down to the bed, Technicians floating around me, murmuring.
“Excellent candidate,” one says. “Procedure went perfectly. Tell Mother. She’ll want to watch this one.”
One of the female Technicians helps me sit up, wrapping a robe around my shoulders. She smiles at me. “Congratulations, Evelyn. You’re officially an Enforcer.”
* * *
I kneel, careful not to get too close. He’s quite obviously a Surface Dweller and therefore unpredictable.
“Hello,” I say softly. “I won’t hurt you.”
He shrinks away from me and narrows his eyes, but adjusts his body, bracing his legs. It’s obvious he’s positioning himself to run again.
“Yeah, right.” His voice is scratchy, as if he’s swallowed too much saltwater.
I try again, using a smile this time—a woman’s best weapon is her smile, unless there’s a loaded Beretta 9mm nearby. I frown. What an odd thought. “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. You don’t know me, but I assure you, I mean you no harm. My name is Evelyn Winters. I’m the Daughter of the People.”
“Gavin Hunter,” he answers warily.
I smile again, a real one this time, and he blinks, as if surprised.
“Gavin. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
* * *
“Faster,” the woman says, mashing a button on the box in her hand.
Suddenly my blood’s on fire and I scream, collapsing onto the ground. Almost instantly the pain stops, but I’m still gasping for breath, even as I lurch to my feet and jump onto the rope swinging from the ceiling, pulling myself up hand over hand. Even as I push the button to ring the bell at the top, I know it’s my fastest time yet. I let myself drop, bending my knees as I was taught to absorb the force of my weight.
“Good.” The instructor smiles. “Faster.” She presses the button again.
* * *
“Aren’t you coming?”
“Of course not. Why would I leave? This is my home. I’m just going to make sure you get back to the door that leads to the Surface. You’re all healed, so you should have no problems getting out okay after that.”
“But what about the Enforcers? Won’t they kill you for helping me?”
“A chill tickles my spine and I suppress a shudder, but I say, “I’m the Daughter of the People. Mother will never believe it was me who helped you.”
He doesn’t look convinced. “I’d feel better if you came with me,” he says.
“If you’re really concerned about me, you won’t argue with me. The clock is running and the sooner you get out, the less chance they’ll figure it out.”
“But the guards saw you.”
“Who will Mother believe? The Guards? Or her own daughter? Now come on!”
“Fine, but this conversation isn’t over,” he says, and I fight the urge to roll my eyes. “So, we’re on the run now, right?”
/> “Yes.”
“Great.” He grabs my arm and spins me around, and then pushes me back with his body so I bump into the wall. Before I can say anything he leans down so his mouth captures mine.
At first I freeze, afraid of the punishment that’s surely coming. I start to struggle to get away from him, but then, as my mind fogs from his scent and taste, I melt in his arms. If not for his hands holding me steady at my hips, I would be a puddle on the ground. His lips are sweet and soft, but insistent. The kiss makes my head spin. As far as first kisses go, I can’t imagine a better one.
* * *
A girl lies at my feet, her face covered in blood, her arm twisted by her side at an awkward angle. She’s older than me and almost a complete Enforcer. Sweat covers every inch of skin and my body is bruised and battered, but I held my own. I stand there as straight as I can, wanting to pant as my body craves oxygen, but I will maintain control over myself. No one will know how I almost lost. How winded and exhausted I am. Especially not Mother.
She watched the entire thing, and now she strolls over to us both, flicking a gaze down at the girl who’s trying to push herself up on her good arm before turning her attention to me.
My lips want to pull up in a smile as she inspects me. Instead, I pull myself straighter, ignoring the excruciating pain in my ribs from where the girl kicked me. Mother’s gaze travels from my head to my feet and back again, before she turns away without saying a word.
I close my eyes against the dismissal and let my shoulders droop.
* * *
I struggle to remain standing. I’ll kill him before I go down. Again, I raise the gun, aiming for his head. I won’t miss this time. I won’t fail again.
He closes his eyes and steps forward, pressing the gun to his own head.
“What are you doing?” I ask. Panic is tearing through me and I don’t know why. I should be grateful he’s doing my job for me.
“Making it easier for you. With that arm, you wouldn’t be able to hit the broad side of a barn.”
“Are you crazy?”
Revelations (The Elysium Chronicles) Page 24
