Sensing that my time was going to quickly disappear, I broke into a sprint across the bridge. A thundering of feet followed me. And a horde rushed at me from the other side.
The bridge rattled and shook. The cables groaned and a sharp snap sounded as one broke and fell over the side. The bridge jerked sharply as the cable dangled toward the water.
I froze when I finally reached the middle of the bridge. I looked back the way I’d come to see thousands of bodies filling the road behind me. I turned again to observe those that were coming.
There were men and women and, always the most disturbing, children. There were old men who had no teeth but gleaming bones that cut through their saggy skin. A child that couldn’t be more than eighteen-months-old crawled down the road. Its human flesh had worn away to expose cybernetic bones. I couldn’t look at it. It was too disturbing to imagine the horrifying looking thing as a human that had once been someone’s darling baby.
I faced the crowd that had followed me onto the bridge. They all looked at me, their faces blank and waiting for orders.
There now had to be well over a hundred thousand Bane on the bridge. And they all waited for my command.
“Jump,” I said, too quiet to be heard very far.
But every body turned to one side of the bridge or the other. They climbed the rail, balancing there for just a half a moment.
And then they jumped.
The water hissed as the cybernetics inside of them shorted out and died. Sparks of light flashed under the water and the bodies sank to the bottom of the ocean.
Come, I thought. Meet a real end. Reclaim your humanity through death. Be released from this manmade hell. Go on to the afterlife you should have been allowed to earn.
Bodies continued to flood onto the bridge. They crossed to the middle. Then they climbed the rail, and took the leap.
This went on for an hour.
I had no way of calculating how many of them jumped to their death, or whatever you call the end of a machine. But there had to have been nearly three hundred thousand of them. Maybe more.
I had reached them all.
They had all heard me.
And they had all obeyed.
There was something terrible and fearful about that kind of power. Something that made my hands shake and my stomach weak.
I was just Eve. I was just a girl who didn’t understand people most of the time. I was just a girl who never said the right things.
I wasn’t a girl who could control hundreds of thousands.
I wasn’t this god of TorBane.
Finally, the last dozen bodies dropped into the water.
I turned to wave my arms in the air, to signal to the others that it was safe to cross. Then there was a pulsing, piercing pain behind my eyes. My head felt like it was splitting in two.
A scream ripped from my throat as I collapsed onto my knees. My hands came up to either side of my head and I pressed in, trying to keep my head from falling apart.
I opened my eyes but everything looked vividly green and numbers flashed across my vision. There were degree symbols and feet and inches. Something that looked like longitude and latitude.
Slowly it formed into a three-hundred eighty-one. The number flashed five times.
“Eve!” I faintly heard Avian scream.
And everything went black.
TWENTY
“You’ve got to wake her up, now!” a voice shouted. A gun fired.
I gasped for air as my eyes slid open. All four of the men were at the hatch. Another round of shots was fired. Something hit the side of the tank just as I jerked into a sitting position.
“Move!” I bellowed, grabbing the shotgun that was at my side. Bill and Tuck ducked back into the tank, providing a hole big enough at the hatch for me to pop out of.
There were probably twenty Bane rushing the tank.
I fired as I concentrated my thoughts.
The Bane turned on each other. One ripped another’s arm clean off. Another broke his brother’s neck. Another simply started beating another Bane to a crushed pile of metal and skin.
Avian, Gabriel, and I picked off the rest of them. Then the afternoon was still.
“What happened?” I asked as I took in our surroundings. We were on a narrow highway, the ocean directly to the west, a steep hillside with little more than shrubs covering it to the other side.
“We’re just outside Santa Cruz,” Bill said as we all dropped back inside and closed the hatch. “We were waiting for you to wake up before we went into the city, but there was a pack of Hunters.”
“What about earlier?” I asked, trying to remember what had happened after the Bane had started jumping in the water.
There was nothing.
“We were about to come across the bridge when you collapsed,” Avian said, concern in his eyes. “You screamed and then crumpled to the ground. You were unresponsive for over an hour.”
“We didn’t dare wait,” Gabriel said. “We had no way to be sure you’d cleared all the Hunters out of the city, we had to get out of there. We’re already behind schedule.”
I nodded, closing my eyes. There was a dull throb behind them.
“What did they do to you?” Avian said quietly, pressing a kiss to my forehead.
“I think we need to hurry up,” I said, swallowing hard. “I need to see Dr. Beeson.”
We didn’t stop.
We didn’t take time to come up with elaborate plans to wipe out the Bane as we moved. I simply sat atop the tank and managed to keep the Bane back as we drove through city after city. I ignored my drooping eyelids when night came. If I slept, that meant we would have to stop and hide somewhere, and that meant we wouldn’t reach New Eden in time to warn them about the beacon.
My companions took turns driving and we continued through the night.
The night was easier. There were still some of the Bane that held to their old rules of inactivity during the night.
Avian never left my side except to take his shift driving. I could feel the anticipation inside of him. He wanted to take me home, to go back our abnormal normal schedule. To return to our rooms in the hospital or our tent on the beach. But he remembered how I’d been on the edge of a nervous breakdown before I’d been taken. Going back to the city was going to bring me right back to that point.
“I love you, you know that, right?” I said in the dark. Avian’s strong fingers linked through mine. His hand was getting cold in the dark winter night.
He looked over at me, and even though I didn’t turn to look at him, I knew his eyes would be serious. “I know,” he said.
“No matter what happens to me, just don’t forget that.”
“Eve,” he said, his voice rising in uncertainty. “Dr. Beeson is going to fix this. We’ll get you back. Whatever they did to you, we’ll find a way to repair it. And he can reverse your last adjustment.”
I nodded, even though I didn’t necessarily believe it was true.
“We’ll wait in the mountains where we hid everyone a few months ago,” Avian said, squeezing my hand tighter. “Next to the lake?” I remembered. I’d only spent a few hours there, but I remembered. “I’ll stay with you. The others will go get Dr. Beeson, he’ll come back and we’ll figure this thing out.”
I nodded emptily once again.
“Hey,” Avian said. “Don’t give up on me. I have faith in you, in this. In mankind. Don’t give up on yourself.”
I finally met his eyes. I couldn’t find any words to say, so instead I just looked back out into the dark.
Because it wasn’t just the worry that the people from the Underground had done irreparable damage to me that was eating me away. It was that I could feel that dark, ugly feeling creeping back up inside of me as we rolled back toward the city. The depression was settling in again. The emotions that had started pushing me towards my break were coating my insides with blackness.