I clenched my teeth together. I fought back the urge to clamp my hands around his neck. My eyes dropped from his eyes, to the pile of his stuff at the base of a tree. I saw it there, lying next to his pack. Without hesitating, I walked over to it and grabbed it. I started heading back in the direction of my tent.
“Hey! Eve!” he yelled as he started after me. “What do you think you are doing?”
He grabbed my arm, pulling me around to face him.
Before I even realized what I was doing, I found my left hand wrapped around his throat. For half a second, everything flashed black.
“Eve! Stop it! What are you doing?” I heard Sarah’s screams from behind me. I had dropped my hand before she even got to us. West started coughing violently and dropped to his hands and knees.
My eyes grew wide as I took two steps away from him. My mouth opened and closed a few times before I found any words to form. “I’m… I’m sorry. I…” I couldn’t seem to find anything else to say as I turned and jogged toward my tent, notebook in hand.
I sank onto my cot, breathing hard. What had I just done? I didn’t even remember making the decision to do what I did. I didn’t think I was even that worked up over his reluctance.
I pressed my hands over my eyes, trying to calm myself. My chest was hammering again.
Three minutes later the flap of my tent was pushed aside.
“You attacked West?” Avian asked, his voice stiff.
“I’m sorry, Avian! I don’t know what happened. It’s almost like I blacked out or something.” I couldn’t even look up into his face.
He didn’t say anything, just stood in front of me. That’s when I actually felt scared about what had happened. Why wouldn’t he say anything?
“Let’s take a look at that notebook,” he said quietly as he sat beside me. I closed my eyes again and leaned into him. He wrapped an arm around my shoulders and gave me a tight squeeze. I took several deep, long breaths. Why, when I was with Avian, did everything seem like it might be okay?
I sat back up, feeling slightly better, and opened the notebook.
“All this is about you?” Avian asked as we started flipping through tattered pages.
“Just these ones,” I said as I pinched a bunch of pages together.
“That’s so weird,” he mused. “I can’t even imagine how it was for you to read it all.”
“Weird,” I breathed. Avian chuckled.
We turned to the pages that came after all the entries about me. I didn’t understand what most of it meant, just that it was the notes about the evolution of the technology that was a part of me and how it changed into the infection.
My eyes were glued to the page as we came upon one entry.
Something has gone wrong. It is spreading. Lab assistant Kelly Strong, who received a hearing implant, has been complaining about uncontrollable movement in her left leg. Other reports have been coming in from other patients as well.
Eve’s technology wasn’t the only to evolve.
We’ve made a terrible mistake.
“They should have stopped it right then,” I said as we turned the page.
“They thought they could control it,” Avian said quietly.
We continued to flip through pages, reading about the horrors that took place in the facility used to do the procedures. The doctors started Falling, one by one.
“Hang on a second,” Avian said, turning a page back.
“What?”
He didn’t say anything as he brought the notebook up closer to his face. There was a drawing on the page, an octagonal shaped thing, with other crazy drawings inside of it. Hurried notes were scribbled all around it. None of it made sense to me.
Avian flipped to another page. This one had more drawings. These looked more detailed, like maybe they were the things inside the octagon. Tiny writing was inside of the drawings, so small I had to look very closely to read it.
“What is it?” I asked, looking at Avian.
His nose was only about an inch away from the pages, his eyes squinting. “I don’t even know what half of this stuff is. They’re materials. Reactive elements. I think this is it.”
“What we need to destroy it?”
“I’d guess,” he said as he shook his head. “I didn’t think it was this complicated. I had always assumed it was just some kind of electrical pulse but this is far more complex. I never studied engineering or that kind of thing much so I don’t really understand it all. But this is more involved than I had thought it would be.”
“The infection must be harder to kill off then we realized,” I said quietly. I had to take deep breaths again.
Avian turned the page, finding the next one to be full of notes. I didn’t even bother reading it. I wasn’t going to understand what it was talking about. He read through four more pages of notes. He flipped back and forth between a few of the last ones.
“It’s not finished,” he said as he looked up at me. “It’s here, I think. But it’s not complete. The notes on how to create the core, the thing that makes the whole thing work, they’re not here.”
“He got infected before he could complete it,” I said quietly. West had told me how his grandfather and his father had Fallen fairly early on. How could they not, being so involved in everything?
Avian turned back to the first of the pages that detailed the device. “Why didn’t he tell us he had this?” I asked as I narrowed my eyes on the pages. “We could figure it out. West had the instructions on how to save everything hidden away in his jacket the whole time. Why has he been hiding it?”
“Hang on, Eve,” Avian said with a little sigh. “I’m not even positive that is what this even is. We don’t know the scale of this thing. For all we know it’s for nothing more than our very own CDU.”
“Still,” I said, the pitch of my voice rising. “Why didn’t he tell us? Why has he been hiding it?”
Avian didn’t have anything to say to that.
It started building up inside of me. An unfamiliar sensation. It took me a while to recognize it.
It was distrust.
Every moment I had spent too close to West flashed through my head. All the times I had let him kiss me, touch me in any excessive way, filled me with regret. I had been so stupid. I hadn’t trusted him in the beginning. I had let my guard down too quickly. He was human, he knew the peril we were all in. So why would he hide something like this?
“He’s not getting this back,” I said as I stood and started pacing around my tent. “How can he even call it his? This kind of information belongs to us all.”
“It doesn’t do us a lot of good,” Avian said as he stood. “If we can’t understand what any of it means. How to use it.”
“We’ll figure it out,” I said through clenched teeth.
“You know where an electrophysics engineer is?” I was surprised at the tone Avian used. It wasn’t harsh, but it was still unexpected. It felt like he was taking West’s side.
“No, but I’ll find one,” I said as I glared at him.
“Good luck,” he said as he stepped toward the door. “I’ll see you at dinner.”
I headed to the gardens after that. I needed something to distract myself. I was afraid what I might do with all this angry energy built up inside of me. Ripping weeds out of the ground seemed to help a little.
West wasn’t at dinner that night. I had mixed feelings. I felt like I should feel guilty or something. I wanted to throttle him though.
Avian kept ahold of the notebook, which was fine with me. None of it made sense to me and I had no desire to look over the parts about me again. I remembered every word like they had been branded into my partially cybernetic brain.