“How can you still look at me?” I said quietly, laying my other arm across my eyes. “Seeing the what I really am? I’m not far from being one of them.”
I heard West stand, letting go of my hand, he sat on the edge of the bed. He moved my arm from my eyes, placing his hands on either side of my face. “You are nothing like the Fallen,” he said seriously, his eyes burning into mine. “You keep proving that, over and over again. You’re more human that a lot of the people I’ve known. You give no second thought to doing all these insane, suicidal things to save those around you. Everything you do is out of love. You just don’t realize that.”
“Please don’t say that word,” I said as I closed my eyes, my insides quivering. “I have no idea what it means.”
“You know what it feels like,” he said more coolly as he sat back, releasing my face. “You just don’t know how to recognize it.”
I heard another set of footsteps enter the room and opened my eyes to see Avian enter. His face was hard to read as he took in the sight of West and I, so close together. I felt myself hating everything I was again.
“You’re awake,” he said simply.
“I’ll let him catch you up on everything,” West said quietly to my surprise and left without another word.
As I watched Avian standing there, my eyes stung and my lower lip started to quiver. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
He crossed the room silently and gathered me up into his arms, his face buried in my mass of tangled hair. His entire frame shook as he held me tightly. My lip continued to tremble, my eyes burning. The sob that escaped my chest surprised me.
“How can you look at me?” I barely managed to get the words out. “My leg…”
Avian sat back a bit, taking my face between his hands. His blue eyes looked like there might be flames burning behind them as he stared at me. “You will forever be the most beautiful creature on this planet to me, no matter what happens. I don’t care what you’re skeletal frame is made of. You’re still Eve.”
“Avian, I want…” I dropped off, not even knowing how to finish that sentence. I was tempted to put my head in that gigantic ring on the roof, just to stop all the confusion I felt.
“Don’t,” he said, pressing a finger to my lips. “You can’t make any decisions right now. You just need to finish healing.”
I took a deep breath, finding some sense of my normal self, and nodded. Slowly, I felt the calm start to spread itself through my system again. “How bad was it?”
Avian sat back, close to the foot of the bed. “The skin on your left leg was totally burned away up to your knee,” he started. I saw the terror he had felt then in his eyes. “Traces of metal could be seen in your right leg, most of the skin was gone, and a lot of the muscle had been burned away as well. Your backside had been burned but not too horribly. It healed pretty fast. You lost a few inches of hair. You were bleeding profusely from the bullet wound in your arm and all your other injuries. You needed a blood transfusion. But within hours you were already healing. I would expect your left leg will look totally normal again within three days.”
“Guess you were right about being wary about letting me go to the plant,” I said.
He chuckled. “Like I could have stopped you.”
“You couldn’t have,” I said with a small smile. “Now find me some pants and boots so I don’t scare the town folk away.”
He just chuckled again and shook his head.
It took him a few minutes but Avian found me some clothes and we walked down the hall together.
“They haven’t set the Pulse off yet, have they?” I asked, a strange sense of missed anticipation filling me. My boots were too big without any flesh to fill them and the metal foot slid around inside it. I walked with a slight limp.
“No,” he answered, his always serious eyes forward. “Royce said it takes about two days to build up enough power to set it off. It’s charging now though.”
“Two days,” I breathed. “Do you really think it will work?”
Avian shrugged. “The technology seems right. They have the brains here to do it. It sounds like it is just a matter of building enough power to set it off.”
“I can’t even imagine what life is going to be like if it works. No Fallen. No more running, or scouting to do. Everything I’ve known will be changed.”
“It will be better,” Avian said quietly as we entered the main lobby area. “You’ll see how life should have been, in a post-apocalyptic way.”
I gave him a small smile, already feeling comforted, even after everything that had happened.
By now the lobby was emptying out, everyone preparing for sleep at mid-day. I suddenly missed my days of free scouting, of roaming through the woods, free without any walls barricading me in. Hopefully all that would end in just a few short days.
I followed the others up to the rooms, feeling like everyone could see through my pants to my cybernetic leg as I limped along. No one bothered me though, didn’t ask questions or pull my pant up to see. I made it to my room without being exposed for what I was.
The ceiling greeted me as I lay down, knowing I wasn’t going to be getting any sleep for the next eight hours of silence. Images started to slide across my mind, the blinding light from the explosion that had tried to take my legs, the blue eyes that had tried to call out to me when my brain couldn’t handle it all. Flickers of row after row of Fallen. The flash of light from my firearms.
So much violence.
I turned my head when a crack of light started growing on my wall. The silhouette of a man appeared in the door before he closed it behind him.
“Hi,” I breathed as he hesitated next to the door.
“Hi,” West said through the dark. I could feel the mixture of feelings that were rolling off of him. I knew what it was like to feel like an emotional wreck.
“I won’t bite you,” I said as I scooted to one side of my bed.
“You sure?” he said light-heartedly as he crossed the room and sat on the edge of the mattress.
We sat there in silence for a while, each unsure of what the other had on their mind.
“Are you going to tell me why the sight of me made you sick the last few days?” he asked quietly.
I felt myself tense up, the sick feeling creeping up in me again. I wished he had just left it alone. I would have rather forgot all those feelings I had been fighting with. “No. You don’t want to know why. Just know that it’s over.” This was one secret I would carry with me to the grave. I vowed that West would never have to go through what I had gone through.
“You sure?”
I gave a nod.
West trailed his fingers softly across my forehead, brushing stray hairs off my face. He didn’t look in my face as he did so, his eyes lingering on my ears, my shoulder, my neck, as he struggled with how to form the words he had in his head. Hesitantly, he picked up the wings Avian had carved and held them lightly in his hand. I wondered if he knew Avian had made it for me, and the sacrifice he had given for me to have it.
“I thought you were going to die,” he said quietly. “When they brought you in after the explosion you looked so broken, I wasn’t sure they could put you back together. You heart barely kept going. For a while I think I’d fooled myself into believing that you couldn’t die. I knew I was wrong then. I didn’t know what I would have done if you’d died.”
“Good thing I’m not dead then,” I said as I placed my hand over his as he stilled it on my cheek. The coals started to burn as we touched. A sense of anticipation started to ignite in my belly.
“I wanted to give you something,” he said quietly as he finally met my eyes. “One last thing before I stop this. It won’t happen again until you make your decision.”