A steel band seemed to form around my throat and my vision blurred. “She’s been badly injured before. Her body has always been able to fix itself. TorBane will heal her.”
Dr. Beeson met my eyes and shook his head. His own eyes had reddened and there was moisture pooled in them. “That’s the thing. TorBane, it’s a live technology. A normal scan would show it immediately. It’d be brilliant white. You’d see it in her blood, in her organs, in her brain.”
Just like Creed’s scans had looked. But there wasn’t a single trace of that on the scans.
That high pitched sound started in my ears again. I didn’t have a body anymore. I was just a numb consciousness floating in unconnected space.
“Avian,” Dr. Beeson said quietly from very far away. “Eve is dead.”
THE END
PART THREE
There was a broken screen. And then another. Next there was a broken window. And then my skin was sliced open as I climbed through it to pull Eve out of the scanner. I shook her shoulders again, begged her to open her eyes.
But she didn’t.
She didn’t.
She wouldn’t open her eyes.
It didn’t take more than sixty seconds for everyone to pour out of the hospital. People ran into the streets with cheers and whoops and laughter. A few reckless members of the Underground fired off shots into the sky.
Idiots.
I stood just outside the doors, leaning on my crutches. I tried to search through the crowd, to pick out Eve and Vee returning from the Nova building.
Eve would give me a smug smile when she walked through the crowd, even though she’d be incredibly uncomfortable with the fact that she’d just saved the world.
Actually, no, that wasn’t how it would play out.
The second she came down from that building, back toward the hospital, she was going to be mauled to death by the celebrating crowd.
Vee would be scared out of her mind because of the way people were acting right now, but she’d never let that show.
Royce’s chest would puff out and his chin would be held high. He’d start making sarcastic comments and wouldn’t be able to wipe the smile from his face.
So I kept searching the crowd for them. Any moment they’d walk through the masses.
But as ten minutes rolled by, fifteen, twenty, they still hadn’t emerged.
While everyone else celebrated the end of the apocalypse, my blood started turning cold.
It had worked. The Bane were dead, so they’d at least made it up to the Nova unharmed, and set it off.
But where were they?
What was wrong?
I turned back into the hospital and threw the crutches to the side. Limping heavily, I took off without any real direction.
I was just about to push the up button for the elevator when it dinged.
The doors slid open to reveal Vee.
She held Creed tightly in her arms and everything about the sight seemed wrong.
I’d never seen her expression so vacant. And this was a girl born with autism who had then had all her emotions stripped away.
“Eve’s dead,” she said.
THE END
PART FOUR
There was a hard surface behind my back. There was something solid beneath my rear end, but it was so numb it almost felt as if I was floating. Most of my body felt dead, but there were places on my skin that felt afire. My forearms, my lips, the back of my neck. I wasn’t sure what that meant in medical terms, but emotionally, I was pretty sure it meant I was seared dead too.
I stared at Eve. She lay on the table, poking out from the scanner. She rested there perfectly still. Her hair was pushed back from her eyes, now just long enough to be tucked behind her ears. Her skin was pearl white.
She wore her favorite cargo pants and her sturdy boots. A comfortable, flexible jacket covered her arms. Her hands were dirty and calloused from the endless work she would never give up.
Eve looked like she was sleeping.
The door opened but I couldn’t look over to see who it was. They crossed the room slowly, bare feet limping across the tile floor. I could barely process West’s form as he stopped at her side.
He didn’t make any noise, not a sniffle, or a cut off cry, or a scream, or even a whisper. He placed a hand over her heart and stood there for a moment, not moving a muscle.
See you on the other side of the apocalypse, she’d said to him.
Finally, he crossed to the wall and sank onto the floor next to me.
We sat in silence for a long time.
“We’re getting reports back in,” he finally said after an unknown amount of time. His voice sounded dirty in this silent and numb place. “They’re four hundred miles south and there’s bodies everywhere.”
I think I nodded slightly, my gaze still fixed on Eve.
My eyes were dry and tired, but I couldn’t make them close. I wasn’t even sure when the last time I blinked was.
“It worked, Avian,” West said. He held his hand out, like he was going to pat my leg, or give some kind of reassuring gesture. But he withdrew it and let it fall back in his lap. “She did it. She saved everyone.”
I just kept staring at Eve.
“One more day,” I hissed. I locked eyes with Dr. Sun, my jaw set hard. I hadn’t realized I’d gathered the front of her lab coat in my hand and my nose was only three inches from hers. “It might not be too late.”
“Avian, I—”
“I said one more day!” I bellowed. My eyes grew wide when I realized how hard I jerked her. Horrified at my actions and harsh words, I immediately released her.
“Okay,” she said. There was fear in her eyes. “We’ll wait one more day.”
She backed out of the room and practically ran down the hall. I caught a glimpse of Royce and Gabriel behind her.
I turned back to Eve as the door swung shut and walked to her side.
I’d watched her for two days now. Yesterday I asked Dr. Beeson to do another scan.
There were still no signs of live TorBane in Eve’s system.
But I couldn’t…
I couldn’t…
The door opened, whomever it was not bothering to knock.
I looked up when they stopped beside the bed.
Vee looked at me, and I finally threw up. All over the floor.
It was Eve’s face. But it wasn’t Eve.
I stumbled from the room, down the hall, and into the stairwell. I came out on the fifth floor, the floor that housed all the supplies. I collapsed somewhere behind a stack of boxes full of ammunition.
Tears started to freely flow from my eyes, pooling in my ears as I lay on my back. A howling cry leapt from my lips, rattling my entire chest with it. My fist beat against the boxes, knocking one of them over and scattering bullets across the floor.
“Eve!” I cried, my voice gutted and bone-rattling. “Wake up, Eve. You have to wake up!”
But as I lay there, letting all of the things I hadn’t allowed myself to think about up until that point come flooding in. I knew.
I knew.
Eve wasn’t going to wake up.
THE END
PART FIVE
Phoenix. Denver. Dallas.
The Bane were dead in every city we came across. Every one of them.
This should have felt like a triumph. We’d nearly lost the world. Point one two percent. That was what was left of the human population, according to Dr. Beeson’s team. Probably even less. We’d been whittled down to that small of a number and then we’d won.