“Geeze, West,” I griped at him, slipping my gun back into its holster. I reached for an orange from the fridge. “Were you trying to get your head shot off?”
“If someone is going to do it, it might as well be you,” he said, hopping down from the counter.
“What are you doing up right now?” I asked, digging my fingers into the rind of the orange. Its strong odor flooded my nose.
“Couldn’t sleep,” he said, leaning back against the upper cabinets. “Nightmares.”
I nodded. I knew what that was like. But lately my nightmares usually involved West.
He stood there for a long minute, staring at me as I ate the orange. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes. I fought the urge to turn and leave, to not have to answer the million questions and accusations I knew were running through his head.
“You’re different,” West finally said. My eyes rose to meet his as I wiped my hands on my pants. My heart was beating just a little too fast. He slid off the counter.
West took a step closer to me. I could see the conflict in his face. Before, he would have reached for me, touched my face, tried to take my hand. But I had made my choice. And it wasn’t him. “You seem…older? More beaten.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked, trying to keep my voice hard. I wasn’t going to show how uncomfortable I was. I wasn’t going to let him get to me.
“Was it easy?” he asked. “Just flipping it off like that?”
“West, don’t do this,” I said, shaking my head.
“This kind of seems like something we should talk about,” he said. There was obvious pain in his eyes. There was anger right alongside it. “Don’t you think?”
“We have talked about it,” I replied softly, my eyes dropping.
West faltered at that.
We had talked, the first time he had woken up. He’d been in disbelief, over his infection, over my choice, over what he was to do with his future.
“This hasn’t been easy for you, has it?” he asked, taking another half step forward. “What happened to me?”
“Doesn’t that sound a bit presumptuous to you?” Something stung under the surface of my skin and my eyes dropped to the blue glow of West’s inhibitor.
“I know you, Eve,” West said, his voice growing quiet. He reached up and pushed a loose strand of hair behind my ear, bringing him even closer. It felt like all my bones were seizing up, my blood hissing to life. “Better than even Avian knows you. You might have picked him, but I know what happened to me had an effect on you.”
“Not like you’re thinking though,” I managed to say. My jaw clenched, pain prickling along my bones. “I couldn’t live with the guilt, knowing you didn’t know what I had done, that I’d finally made my choice.”
“Are you sure that’s it?” West asked, his finger tracing along my cheek.
My breath caught in my throat. My lungs felt like they were being pulled out through my rib cage. “Unlike you West, I don’t keep everything hidden, masking the truth at all times. I picked Avian, end of story.”
A painful half smile formed on West’s face. He gave the smallest of nods. “Then why doesn’t it feel that way?”
My bones were starting to splinter as the device embedded into West pulled at all the cybernetic and mechanical parts inside of me.
“West,” I breathed, my voice coming out as a whisper.
“Yes?” he replied hopefully. He came closer, so close our clothes were touching.
“You’re hurting me,” I forced out, barely able to breathe anymore.
“Trust me,” he said, his expression hardening. “It’s nothing like how I’ve been hurting since that night on the transformer.”
“No—” I hissed, my eyes squeezing closed.
“She means you’re physically ripping her apart,” a voice from behind us suddenly said. “You should really step away before you kill her.”
I couldn’t even turn my head but I knew Royce’s voice. West’s eyes widened, panic flashing across his face. He scrambled away from me, backing up against the stainless steel counter.
I collapsed to the ground on my hands and knees, my breath coming in and out in painful gulps.
Royce’s boots came into view and I felt his calloused hands around my arms, helping me to my feet again.
“I’m sorry,” West stammered. “I didn’t realize this thing would affect her like that.”
“You’re an idiot then,” Royce said, his voice hard. Sure I would be okay, he turned toward West, his fist balled. “That thing controls what her entire body is made of. You never stopped to consider that?”
My eyes rose to West. He looked tortured, pain at his unknown actions plain on his face. A part of me wanted to feel sorry for him, to tell him it was okay. But forgiving West was something I was getting tired of doing.
“I don’t particularly like the fact that the last remaining infected person within one hundred miles is walking around my base, but because of Eve’s insistence I’ve allowed you to stay. Don’t give me a reason to get rid of you,” Royce’s voice dripped with ice. “She’s our most valuable asset here in New Eden next to the Pulse. And you…are not.”
Royce’s hardness was startling and I saw the fear in West’s eyes.
“Eve?” another voice said from the entrance to the kitchen. I turned to see Avian looking at us, uncertainty on his face. “What’s going on?”
I glanced back toward West, guilt and shame racing through my blood.
Avian looked from West to me and I saw his eyes harden. “Did he hurt you?”
“No, Avian, I’m—” I started to say, but Avian was suddenly across the kitchen, right up in West’s face.
“Keep your distance with that thing,” Avian said. “Or I swear—”
“Avian!” I yelled, pulling on the back of his shirt. He stumbled back four steps but his gaze remained locked on West. West glowered back.
“Take Eve back to her room,” Royce growled, pushing Avian gently back with a hand on his chest. “Make her get some rest.”
After a long while, Avian nodded, tearing his eyes from West to look at me. His expression softened only slightly.
I couldn’t meet his eyes and I hated that.
The radio crackled later that afternoon. Royce was calling for the weekly meeting.
As people gathered around me in the conference room, I wondered if this was how society worked before—leaders meeting to discuss how things should run and planning how to keep everyone alive.
But before the Evolution they didn’t have to rebuild from scratch. They didn’t have to talk about where to find food, to scavenge new homes, to have to haul away decomposing bodies.
I sat at the long table, between Avian and Gabriel—Eden’s former leadership—joined by half a dozen others, Royce and Elijah included.
“Welcome, everybody,” Royce started out as he walked into the room. He pulled his chair back and took a seat. He folded his arms on the table, his grey eyes turning to meet ours. “Bet ten years ago you never thought you’d be on the board of what’s left of humanity.”
A few people chuckled, but most just gave a tight-lipped smile, not always appreciative of Royce’s harsh and blunt humor.
“Let’s go over the weekly report,” Royce said, pulling out a notepad and a pen. The sight was strange, too relaxed and too organized for our chaotic world. “Tuck, why don’t you start us out?”
Tuck cleared his throat as he stood. His eyes shifted just a little too fast from his own notebook to the faces around the table. Tuck had gone from simple watchman in Eden to leader of the Bane Removal Crew, or the BRC, in New Eden.
“We cleared block sixteen this week, and got half of block seventeen cleared,” he said as he walked to the map that hung on one of the walls, marking block sixteen with a big red X. “No issues reported.” We had created this map with the hospital as ground zero, sectioning off each block spreading out around us. The bodies may have been dead, TorBane destroyed, but no one wanted to see the hundreds of thousands of bodies lying everywhere. And the remaining decomposing human flesh was a health hazard.