The Revelation of Eden Pruitt, page 20
Beams of light cut through the dark.
Across the highway, Jericho had the remote. He would detonate the EMPs in five … four … three … two …
Ping.
Ping.
Ping.
They came like rapid fire, one after the other. A sound Eden was positive only she could hear; Francesca had no reaction at all. Her catch of breath didn’t come until the headlights went dark and the convoy came to a sluggish stop right inside the dead zone.
Eden gaped, her body flooding with disbelief.
The EMPs had worked.
She closed her eyes and shoved every ounce of attention into her ears, focusing on the convoy and the heartbeats within. There were two in the front seat of the lead vehicle, a military grade SUV. There were two in the front seat of the rear vehicle, another military grade SUV. There were two in the front seat of the middle vehicle, a prison van. Along with several heartbeats in the back.
Her own leapt.
Those heartbeats belonged to the prisoners.
One of whom was Cassian.
He was here.
Not more than twenty yards away.
The drivers attempted to dispatch for help, but they had no signal. They attempted to radio one another, but they couldn’t get through. The driver side door of the lead vehicle opened. A uniformed man behind the wheel was just placing his left boot onto the cement when the sharp hiss of a dart sliced through the air.
It met its mark with a dull thump.
The man toppled from his seat onto the road.
The passenger-side door opened. A second uniformed man slipped out into the night and crouched behind his vehicle with his gun ready. Out of sight to Lark in the tree, but visible to Eden on her belly.
She peered through the scope of her rifle, took aim, and pulled the trigger.
Another sharp hiss.
Another dull thump.
The guard collapsed.
The driver of the middle vehicle must have seen, because he tried dispatching for help once again, this time with a quaver in his voice. He didn’t know what was going on. The men in the rear vehicle couldn’t see anything. The night was a cloak. Their guns, too silent. The rear driver stepped out with his elbow draped over the top of his door. “Is anyone getting a—?”
Hiss.
Thump.
Collapse.
The passenger door flew open.
Eden aimed and pulled.
Hiss.
Thump.
Collapse.
The driver of the middle vehicle tried starting the van while his comrade kept calling for help. Neither worked. Soon, the surveillance drone would return. Which meant they only had a brief window of time before the government knew something had gone awry. Eden willed the door to open. For the uniformed guards to step out of their vehicle so she could shoot them. But neither man budged.
“Cover me,” she whispered as she began army crawling forward.
“What are you doing?” Francesca hissed.
Eden didn’t stop to answer. It was eight against two. And they were running out of time. When she was out from beneath the bush, she pushed to her feet and ran. The doors of the middle vehicle flew open. A series of loud pops chased her heels. A spray of bullets blasted the concrete in her wake as she dove behind the lead vehicle.
Darts sliced through the air from several directions, all of them missing their mark as both guards rolled beneath the van. Belly down, with her elbows on the concrete, Eden aimed her semi-automatic between the tires and fired two decisive rounds.
Hiss.
Thump.
Hiss.
Thump.
The night went silent.
All six guards were down.
“Disable the Atax!” Lark shouted, quickly climbing down from her perch as Jericho sprinted toward the device he’d planted beside the highway.
Moments later, Asher’s voice came to life in Eden’s ear as the others crawled from their hiding spots. “Surveillance drone is four minutes away,” he said, his tone more urgent than Eden had ever heard.
“Move!” Jericho shouted.
She pushed to her feet and ran to the back hatch of the prison van, where several hearts were beating fast and hard. She wanted to force the door open. Bust the lock with her bare hands. Instead, she waited while Francesca and another dragged the unconscious driver around to the back. Francesca lifted his hand and pressed his thumb against the screen pad.
The lock disengaged.
Eden threw the doors open.
And there were the heartbeats. Only six. Bound and gagged and wide-eyed with terror. Dvorak wasn’t among them. Neither was Cassian.
The ground disappeared beneath Eden’s feet. She was falling, falling, falling while some distant part of her brain noted the blinking device planted in the middle of the prisoners. A blinking device that had just been triggered by opening the door. A blinking device that counted down the seconds from nine to eight.
“It’s a bomb!” Francesca shouted.
“Abort!” another screamed.
And suddenly, Eden was running.
She was sprinting as fast and as far away as she could when a fiery blast lifted her off her feet and hurled her into the trees. She landed with breathtaking pain. It pierced through her side, sucking the oxygen from her lungs. Her ears rang—a loud, high-pitched keen that blocked out all other sound as she coughed and blinked and tried making sense of her surroundings. In every direction, fire blazed in scattered piles of debris. She cried out for help, only to cough some more. She rolled onto her side, her hand moving to something large and sharp protruding from her rib cage. She’d been completely impaled by a sword-like piece of metal.
The world spun as she wrapped her hands around one end. Bracing herself, she yanked the metal free. Blood poured from the wound. But then it stopped. The wound closed. The ringing dulled.
Someone nearby screamed.
Eden crawled forward and came upon a man in uniform.
She had no idea how he was conscious. Not just because of the tranquilizer she thought she’d hit him with, but because he was missing half his body. There was nothing at all where his legs should be.
Nausea swelled.
The world kept spinning.
The man kept screaming, his bone-white face smudged with ash. He grabbed onto Eden’s hand, a wild panic thrashing in his eyes, and cried out for his mother. He begged for his life. He told Eden he didn’t want to die. Please. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die! With every terror-soaked plea, Eden held onto him tighter. As though her grip might keep the worst of his fear at bay. With smoke and fire all around, she stayed by his side until his eyes went glassy and blank. Only then did she remove her hand from his, and only then did she notice the ring on his pinkie finger. A ring in the shape of a Monarch butterfly.
Somewhere close, Lark shouted her name.
Eden pried the ring off his pinkie with shaking hands and forced herself to her feet. Jericho and Lark lumbered into view, supporting an unconscious Francesca. The skin on her face had melted. The hair on one side of her head had been singed all the way to her scalp.
They called for the others.
But nobody called back.
Eden tried searching for them.
She found only one, worse off than the guard.
“We need to get out of here,” Jericho rasped. “Now.”
Lark had sustained an injury to her leg.
Eden took her spot to support Francesca. She could have carried the girl on her own. Instead, Jericho supported half of Francesca’s weight as they ran through the trees and over fallen logs. They didn’t stop until they reached the vehicles. They placed Francesca in the back of one. Eden climbed beside her. Lark slid into the passenger seat with a grimace. Jericho jumped behind the wheel, started the engine, and slammed on the gas.
Francesca moaned.
Lark yanked the dead earpiece from her ear and snatched the walkie-talkie from the console. “Asher, do you copy? Asher, can you hear me?”
His voice returned in a chop of static.
Lark pressed the button. “Mission failure. Prisoners dead. Dvorak is MIA.”
So was Cassian. He was MIA right alongside Dvorak.
More static crackled from the radio.
Along with several loud squawks.
Snippets and snatches broke through—Asher’s voice, Nairobi’s voice—as Jericho zoomed over rough terrain, jostling them so aggressively, Eden felt like her brain was being scrambled. Beside her, Francesca released another moan.
“Approaching a bridge.” The clear statement came from Nairobi. She was still tailing the fourth vehicle.
It was followed by Asher’s staticky reply.
Their Faraday Force rocketed onto an access road. The trees cleared. The reception, too. Eden could finally hear what Asher was saying.
Stop the vehicle.
The command was followed by the rev of a moped.
The patter of rain.
The crunching of weeds beneath wheels.
And then, a loud blast.
A second explosion.
Nairobi shouted, “They went over the bridge! I repeat, the fourth vehicle went over the bridge!”
32
Commotion sounded in Eden’s ear as Jericho gunned it—the roar of the engine, the crunch of gravel, the pounding of hearts.
“I need confirmation now,” Asher commanded. “Who was in that van?”
“We’re working on it.”
Dayne’s voice.
Cleo’s voice.
Lark’s voice.
Jericho’s voice.
All of them swirled into a turbulent clamor.
“What happened?”
“They planted a bomb with the prisoners. It triggered as soon as we opened the door.”
Jericho turned the vehicle without braking. Eden braced herself. Francesca flopped and moaned. One side of her face was covered in angry, red blisters.
“We played right into their hands,” Asher said. “They won the match.”
“We didn’t lose pieces, Asher!” Lark yelled. The Faraday Force hit a dip at full speed and went momentarily airborne. “We lost people.”
Six prisoners.
Along with four survivors from Bunker Three.
And that guard.
Eden closed her fingers around the butterfly ring. He’d called for his mother in the end. Not the Monarch. Not his pater. But his mom. That’s who he had wanted in his final moments.
The chatter continued.
People made phone calls.
They shouted out snippets of information.
Eden sat in the back with Francesca, every muscle in her body tightly clenched. The fourth vehicle had gone over a bridge. It had plunged into the Potomac after avoiding the high-tech explosive Nairobi had detonated in an attempt to stop it. But what did it matter? Who cared, really? Nobody was in that van. The van was just a van. Cassian was in Annapolis. He was still in the decommissioned military prison. For whatever reason, they decided not to transfer him.
Asher issued more directives—commanding Jericho where to go, how quickly they needed to get there, what they needed to do once they arrived. Francesca moaned again. Lark shouted at Asher like this was his fault. Like he was the one causing Francesca pain. Like he was the one who’d planted the bomb.
“Fran needs medical attention!”
“We need to carry through with the plan,” Asher shot back. “Harlan’s guy is on standby to get rid of the vehicles.”
Vehicle.
There was only one.
Because there were only four of them.
Not sixteen.
Four.
“The semi-truck is arriving in five minutes.”
“I’m telling you, Asher, she will die in that steel tank!”
“If you don’t go now, all of you will die. They’ll have the entire area on lockdown within the hour. None of you will get out.”
Jericho sped through another turn, the back tires running over a curb. He whipped the Faraday Force into the empty parking lot of a sleeping warehouse and pulled to a skidding stop. Eden helped Jericho get Francesca out of the back seat. They carried her through the dark as she whimpered incoherently. They climbed onto the loading dock and set Francesca down when an incoming message came. One that had been delayed. It was from Amir.
Cleo read it aloud in the background. “Prudence and Gray are not with others. Transfer to Sterling. Route 495, due west.”
The chattering stopped.
Everything went silent as the message plowed into Eden like a freight train at full speed.
No.
No, no, no.
It was a mistake. A fake. A lie.
Cassian wasn’t in that van.
Eden brought her hands to her neck.
Something was choking her.
Strangling her.
She couldn’t breathe.
Nor could she think or feel or function.
Jericho kicked a crate and shouted a great war cry of a shout.
Eden’s knees buckled.
She pictured the vehicle falling. Plummeting into the river. Sinking to the bottom. She imagined the van filling with water. Cassian trapped inside. His lungs screaming for oxygen like hers were screaming for oxygen. She squeezed her eyes tight, but the images kept coming. They pummeled her, one after the other. He was locked in the back of a prison van and that van was at the bottom of the Potomac River. He wasn’t superhuman. He didn’t have microscopic robots running through his veins, enabling his brain to go without oxygen. Nobody did. Except for her. And Barrett. And Violet. And the ninety-four weaponized freaks that completed Oswin Brahm’s army.
Her eyes burned.
A cavern opened inside her chest, and in its center, a horrendous homesickness. A black hole that sucked up every newton of gravity and piled it upon her shoulders.
Somehow, beneath that weight, her breath returned. Oxygen keeping her alive.
But Eden didn’t want to be alive.
She didn’t want to do this anymore.
She didn’t want to fight in this war, this sinking ship with no lifeboats. She didn’t want to be on this loading dock with these strangers. She didn’t want to be in her own body. She wanted to close her eyes and go to sleep and never wake up again. She wanted Cassian alive. She wanted her parents by her side. But she couldn’t go to sleep and she couldn’t wake up. This wasn’t a nightmare.
Cassian was dead. He’d drowned in the Potomac.
Pain tore through her gut—a torment her nanobots could not fix. Agony so overwhelming that for one wild, unhinged moment, she considered removing an explosive from her vest, holding it to her body, and pulling the pin. A self-destruct function she could carry out all on her own. A self-destruct function that would obliterate the ache.
But she couldn’t pull the pin.
Not when Cleo was still alive. Not when Erik and her parents and millions of innocent people, oblivious to the war raging around them, were still alive. She pictured Cassian’s boot flying at her face in a perfectly executed roundhouse kick, refusing to let her shrink. Refusing to let her flee.
Be a weapon, he’d told her. And use it against him.
Moments—memories—flashed through her mind like fleeting vignettes. Cassian, holding up his hands in the back of an alley. Cassian, fighting two grown men in a parking garage. Cassian, in the quiet intimacy of Dr. Beverly Randall-Ransom’s kitchen, inviting her to trace the lines of his tattoo. Cassian, unbearably handsome in his tuxedo as he led her onto the dance floor. Cassian, diving from behind a brick wall to save her mother. Cassian, carrying her father down sixty-six flights of stairs. Cassian, on top of the Damen Silos, the morning sunrise painting his silhouette a rose gold as he told her about his mother.
Voila, tout au mieux.
Training with him at Lou’s.
Kissing him at Lou’s.
Every blissful, intoxicating moment they shared at Elmer and Eloise Miller’s.
Never again would his dark-fringed golden eyes meet hers across a room, simmering with strength and fierceness and steadiness and desire. Never again would she feel his strong arms wrapped around her waist, pulling her into a hug. Never again would she hear the deep rumble of his voice as she lay against his warm, solid chest. Never again would he challenge her. Protect her. Comfort her. Provoke her. This hardened, dangerous stranger who invited her onto the back of his bike and didn’t run away when he found out what she was.
Outwardly, she sat with the rest of them. Francesca, unconscious. Jericho and Lark, numb. Eden didn’t move or blink or speak. Not when Harlan’s guy came and drove away with the Faraday Force. Not when the semi-truck arrived. Not as she climbed into the steel container. A coffin with an oxygen tank.
But inwardly?
She screamed.
She screamed and she screamed and she screamed as she turned off her comm and let darkness enfold her.
33
Rain pounded the roof of the van.
Cassian peered at the two women on the bench across from him—Dvorak, dressed in a jumpsuit similar to his own, and the lady brandishing an assault rifle—as the engine rumbled to life and the van began to move. She was obviously going against protocol. Employees of the United States government didn’t ride in the back of a prison van with supposed terrorists, even if those terrorists were unarmed and bound by steel.
Dvorak side-eyed Lady Justice with a heavy dose of suspicion. She side-eyed Cass, too, like maybe he and this government employee were in on this breach of protocol together. “Where are you taking us?”
“Your location was compromised,” Lady Justice replied. “As your impending execution has become the solace of our nation, all necessary measures are being taken to ensure you remain secure.” Her lip curled slightly when she spoke, as though these necessary measures displeased her.
“Why is it just us?” Dvorak asked. “Where are the other prisoners?”
The curl in her lip grew more pronounced. “They are being taken to a different location.”
The brakes squealed as the van came to a slow stop.
Cass strained to hear through the pattering of raindrops and caught the faintest sound of mechanical gates opening. They were leaving the prison yard. His fingers twitched behind his back. He shifted his feet, the chains around his ankles rattling. Those chains were bolted to the floor. If he had Eden’s strength, he could pull the bolt up like a weed. He could incapacitate the woman in the navy blue rain jacket, pry open the van doors, and jump to his freedom. As it stood, he didn’t have Eden’s strength. Especially not after so many days locked up in a six by nine cell.
