Keary Taylor: The Eve

Royce scoffed and shook his head. “You have some grand master plan to save us all?”

“Royce,” I cut in. “You should listen to him.”

He looked over at me and held my eyes for a long moment, as if reevaluating if he could trust me. I didn’t blame him for doubting me. I’d made a nuclear mess of things the last few days. I’d nearly gotten one of his original crew killed. Avian had joked and said Royce was protective enough of me to be called my father. Was that still true? I wasn’t so sure I deserved that anymore.

“What do you have in mind, world-ender?” Royce finally said, turning back to Dr. Evans.

He held his hand out toward me and I hesitated for a moment. He was asking for the notebook. Suddenly I felt protective of it. The information within its pages could be our last chance.

But what could I do with it on my own?

I handed it over.

“First you all need to know the truth about Eve here,” Dr. Evans said as he set the notebook down on the table he sat at.

“What does Eve have anything to do with this?” Avian asked, his brow furrowing.

“Everything,” Dr. Evans said ominously. He turned to Dr. Beeson. “I’m afraid I pulled the wool over your eyes all those years ago, Erik.”

Dr. Beeson’s expression grew serious and he shook his head. “I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Eve,” Dr. Evans said. “Show him.”

My stomach dropped into my knees. I was so sick of the lies and the secrets and the revelations and the hard feelings and apologies.

But it had to be done.

“What’s going on?” Avian whispered.

Without answering, I turned my back to everyone in the room, revealing the tattooed II on the back of my skull.

“Two,” Dr. Beeson whispered. I turned back around. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “No, Eve Two is dead. You killed her after what she did to him!” Dr. Beeson shouted, pointing at West.

“No, my good man,” Dr. Evans said. “I’m afraid I didn’t dispose of her as my son demanded. And she remembered, Eve Two. It wasn’t she that attacked my grandson. It was her sister.”

“What?” West questioned. He looked at me, our eyes locking. A million nerve endings of hurt and betrayal were as fresh as ever between us. “You…you remember?”

I shook my head. “Not a lot of details. But I remember being brought back to NovaTor after whoever it was took me. I remember her melting down. The kill code made her go crazy. It was she that attacked you West. You’d tried to comfort me, thinking I was her. I don’t know if she was jealous or what, but it was her West, not me.”

His eyes glazed over, as if replaying the scene in his head.

“Okay,” Avian said, shaking his head and pressing his thumb and forefinger into his eyelids. “I’m totally lost. Eve has a sister?” He looked back up at me, his eyes wide and confused.

“An identical twin sister,” I said, my voice quiet. Suddenly all the exhaustion I’d been staving off for the last four days hit me and my entire body sagged.

“And you knew?” Avian said, turning cold eyes on West and taking a step forward.

“Cool it,” Royce growled, pointing the barrel of his shotgun at Avian’s chest. “Let’s not have a replay of the other day. I can’t afford to have any other soldiers laid up.”

“Nick?” I suddenly asked.

“He’ll live,” Royce growled. Avian had accidentally shot Nick when he’d tried to break up a deadly fight between Avian and West.

“The point is,” Dr. Evans interrupted as tensions grew thick. “That because we have Eve Two, and not Eve One, we may be able to end this catastrophe I created.”

“Those are big claims,” Royce said, shaking his head as he relaxed his weapon. “And while we’ve all been very impressed with Eve and especially her newfound abilities, I don’t see how that’s possible.”

“Eve Two was taken from NovaTor just as TorBane was released to the public. She was tampered with. She was given the ability to transmit signals. When she was taken from NovaTor Biotics, they programmed her with a kill switch—if you will. When they returned her to the facility, she killed off over fifty people who had just gotten TorBane. She did this wirelessly . I disabled the kill switch, but she obviously maintained the ability to send signals. You saw what she did in the desert.”

Every eye turned to me and the air grew thick and heavy and desperate.

“Where did you send them?” West asked.

My eyes darted to his before sweeping everyone else. “I told them to search out and destroy other Bane.”

“Nice,” Tristan complimented.

But I could tell everyone else barely heard what I’d just said. They were still mulling over what Dr. Evans had revealed.

There had been a shift in each of their eyes. It was small, but it was there. I was no longer Eve, protector, in their eyes. Unwillingly, I had just taken one step up.

“How do we end this?” Avian finally said. I hated that he, too, was looking at me slightly different.

“What means of communication did we all use before the world came to a quick halt?” Dr. Evans asked, breaking the silence. “What is still floating up in the sky above us?”

“Satellites,” Bill said from his corner.

“Exactly.”

“Holy shit,” Dr. Beeson breathed, his eyes growing wide as the wheels started instantly turning in his head. “He may be right. This could work.”

“You turn her kill switch back on and somehow transmit it to the satellites in orbit,” Royce said. His voice didn’t betray excitement. He was a smart man, but he was also a man who knew to keep his hope in check after living in a post-apocalyptic world for the last six years. “The Bane can obviously receive signals since Eve can control them.”

“It will only take an instant. Once they receive the kill code, they’ll be gone,” Dr. Evans said with a nod and a smile.

“The notebook,” Avian said, his eyes suddenly jumping to it. “The plans. That’s what they were for, a transmission device for Eve.”

Dr. Evans nodded again. “She is the key to saving the planet.”

“Told you,” Tristan said quietly from the back.

That brought a twitch of a smile to my face.

“This is almost too much to process,” Dr. Beeson said, shaking his head, squeezing his eyes closed. “She is not supposed to be alive, and there is not supposed to be hope for this scale of reclamation of our world.”

“What I want to know is why we can’t just create a signal with the same kill code and beam it up to the satellites?” Royce said, placing his hands on his hips. His curiosity was stronger than his distrust of yet another Bane-human hybrid. “Why does this all hinge on Eve?”

Dr. Evans shook his head. “They would not be compatible. Eve has TorBane, so a signal from her would be receivable. Anything else wouldn’t be read. And she is the only TorBane receptacle capable of transmitting.”

“So it’s Eve or nothing,” West said.

“She’s our last hope,” Avian said, slipping his hand into mine.

“I do believe so,” Dr. Evans replied.

Everyone was quiet for a long while, processing everything that had been revealed. I looked around at each of them. There was a mix of emotions spread throughout: hope, disbelief, unbelief, uncertainty.

“I thought those satellites had to be maintained?” West broke the heavy air. “Without someone controlling their orbit, some of them will just be crashing out into space. How do we know all of them aren’t completely useless now?”

I didn’t really understand what West was talking about, but everyone else must have because their eyes darted instantly to Dr. Evans.

“There is a chance that this won’t work,” Dr. Evans said, his eyes dropping from everyone else’s. For the first time since I reunited with him, he didn’t seem confident in his plan. “It has been nearly six years since the world fell apart, this is quite some time. But, I do believe that since there were thousands of satellites orbiting us at one point, that there will be enough that will be functional to reflect the code back to Earth.”