The Revelation of Eden Pruitt, page 3
“Eden,” she replied, gritting the name between her teeth. She wasn’t girl, and she wasn’t sweetheart either.
“We require your services.”
“They aren’t available,” she said.
“If you care about your friend, you’ll have to make them available.”
She spun around to meet his eye—this boy who had threatened to put a bullet through her head. He looked completely unfazed by her animosity.
“She obviously needs some TLC. We won’t be able to get her any until we have more of our …” He moved his hands as though juggling invisible balls, in search of the right word.
“Devil venom?”
He smirked. “Call it what you like. That devil venom is keeping us alive right now. We can’t leave until we have it.”
“Leave?” Eden asked.
“We have a backup location. One with its very own medical center.”
“They can’t come with us, Ash,” Francesca said. “They probably won’t even let us in. Not with him.” She tipped her chin at the boy on the floor.
“They have to,” Asher replied. “It’s part of the deal. And if she wants to be part of it, we’ll need her cooperation.” He turned to Eden. “The choice is yours. Moral superiority or your friend’s wellbeing.”
Eden ground her teeth. “This place has a medical center?”
“Qualified nurses and antibiotics, too.”
With that, he had his answer.
Eden went.
She traversed the ravaged war zone above, carefully avoiding the drones in the sky. She retrieved an entire box of frozen vials. They clinked in her backpack as she made her quick return. When she arrived, Cleo was still unconscious and the rag-tag group from Bunker Three had joined them—four women and two men covered in grime. Their faces streaked with blood and tears. Each person eyed Eden with varying degrees of suspicion as Asher studied a small magnet in his hand.
When he was finished with the examination, he crouched beside the asset and pressed the magnet against his arm. It attached like the young man’s skin was made of metal.
The mainframe beeped.
Asher strode toward the noise and punched in a command. His brow furrowed.
“What is it?” Francesca asked.
“His system is gone.”
“What do you mean, it’s gone?”
“His network disappeared.” He typed several keys in quick succession and moved strings of code around a screen with his finger. When he finished, he slowly swiveled his chair—looking first at the asset, then at Eden. If he was wary before, he was brimming with suspicion now. He walked toward her and grabbed her by the hair. “Where did you get this magnet?”
“The Bryson’s safe,” Eden blurted.
“The Bryson’s safe,” Francesca repeated, her tone as belligerent as ever.
Before Eden could double down on the lie, something else beeped. This time, the sound came from a small device Asher had placed next to the mainframe. He let go of her and craned his neck to have a look. “We just got the go ahead,” he said, turning to the rag-tag group of six. “I’ll stay here and monitor the drones. Once you’re secure, I’ll catch up on the ATV. Fran will drive the UTV with the asset and her.” He shot a scathing look at Cleo, like her injury was gum on the bottom of his shoe. “Everyone else will have to walk.”
Eden shifted. “Walk where?”
Asher didn’t answer.
Nobody did.
They might take Eden and Cleo with them, but apparently, they would not acknowledge her questions. Wherever they were going, Eden would find out along the way.
5
A girl called Jane walked along a lonely gravel road, past a creaky farmhouse with tinkling chimes and a giant, blow-up monster that flapped in the wind. She wasn’t alone. The missing eighteen-year-old boy named Barrett Barr was with her. According to him, the monster belonged to a mad scientist named Frankenstein. It was a Halloween decoration, a holiday that was only a few days away.
Except for a mud-covered Jeep Wrangler that rumbled past an hour ago, the road was deserted. It was just her and Barrett and the moon and the crickets, which were chirping extra loud in a last-ditch effort to reproduce before winter.
“I can never decide which one is my favorite,” Barrett said. “Pumpkins and haunted houses and a sack full of candy or Santa in his sleigh with a sack full of toys.” He held out his hands like he was weighing the two options against one another. “I used to love trick-or-treating. Mom never let us dress up as anything too scary, but I think she would’ve allowed Frankenstein’s monster. Psychotic serial killers from horror films, on the other hand? Not a chance. Jameson and—”
He looked at his hand where he’d scrawled three names in blue ink. Every few days, a new name would drop out of his head. This last one had unsettled him greatly.
“Graham,” he said with an obvious note of frustration. “Graham, Graham, Graham.” Graham and Jameson were Barrett’s older brothers. Fraternal twins featured in so many of Barrett’s stories, the girl called Jane felt like she knew them personally.
“Anyway,” he continued. “Graham and Jameson always fought her on it. They wanted to be Freddy or Jason or Michael Meyer or It. The gorier, the better. Personally, I never understood the appeal. For me, it was superheroes all the way. I dressed up as a different one every single year until it got really uncool to dress up.”
Barrett listed all the superheroes he had been through the years.
She tried to let his words wash over her, relax her. But every step they took brought her that much closer to the angry red X on the map. She gripped the rolled-up parchment in her hand while the knots in her stomach twisted tighter. They were going to the bad place. They were going there to get answers.
Something about her system was different. She was missing a piece. Jack Forrester called that piece the Queen Bee. The master node. The thing that commanded all the other nodes. Without it, she couldn’t be controlled by the bad guys. But Barrett could. The red-headed girl named Ellery could, too.
“She’s free from that control, which means we can be, too!” Ellery had yelled.
“But I don’t know how!” Jack had yelled back. “And the only person who could give us a clue refuses to talk!”
The clue was Father.
Somehow, he made that piece go away.
Which meant she needed to go back. She needed to be brave. She needed to find out how Father had done it. Then they could replicate it so Barrett and the red-headed girl named Ellery would be safe. Eden, too, if she was alive.
“When I ran for student council in third grade, my dad said to me, ‘Barrett, dress for the position you want.’ On Election Day, I wore a suit and a tie. I didn’t win. It wasn’t even close. But I took those words to heart whenever Halloween came around. I mean, what kid doesn’t aspire to be a real live superhero?” He looked at her sideways, like maybe more of her words might come.
So far, she had said two of them.
Yes. And Okay.
If Barrett expected those words to be some prelude to a flood, he was in for disappointment. On the contrary, her voice felt like a rodent that had lifted its head from its burrow for a quick peek outside before ducking out of sight.
“My brothers were always the brave ones. Whenever Dad was gone and Mom needed a spider killed or a mouse chased out of the house, that’s who she’d call on. Jameson and—” He glanced again at his hand. “Graham. Maybe that’s why they didn’t really care about dressing up as Captain America.”
Barrett kept going.
He was trying to distract her. Maybe he was trying to distract himself, too. From the place they were going. From the place they had left. From the news they couldn’t process. Cassian, arrested. Cleo, confirmed dead. Eden, presumed dead. The memory of those awful, terrible, pain-soaked sobs from Eden’s mother.
The hoot of an owl made her jump.
She laughed nervously—a pathetic squeak of a sound.
Barrett smiled, his eyes twinkling in the moonlight. He had the warmest smile and the kindest eyes.
“You know what’s interesting,” he said. “Some of my favorite superheroes have the saddest backstories. Batman saw his parents getting murdered when he was a kid. Black Widow watched her mom die before she was recruited into the KGB. Bruce Banner had an abusive father. Clark Kent’s entire planet blew up.”
Murder.
Abandonment.
Abuse.
Destruction.
They were all terrible things that somehow made these superheroes special. The disquieting thought had all the knots in her stomach pulling tighter. She didn’t want to be special, not if it required that much pain.
Behind them, headlights sliced through the night.
A red pickup truck approached.
Barrett stuck out his thumb.
He called this hitchhiking.
They’d been walking for hours and still had hours more to go. According to Barrett, they could get to Minneapolis much faster on a set of wheels, and he wasn’t too worried about being recognized. His face hadn’t been on the news much recently. Plus, his hair was considerably longer, and he was wearing a baseball hat. As for her, she was a nobody without an identity.
Brakes squealed as the truck slowed, then came to a stop a few paces ahead of them. Barrett had told her this was how it worked, and yet, the idling truck seemed to catch him completely by surprise. Clearly, Barrett didn’t think anyone would stop. The mud-covered Jeep Wrangler certainly hadn’t.
Barrett gave her a meaningful nod and pulled his hat lower. If the person behind the wheel recognized him as the missing 18-year-old, she was supposed to run. Straight into the woods as fast as possible. He would follow.
The truck’s window rolled down. The scent of grease and cheeseburgers and a minty-sweetness wafted into the air. So did voices from the radio. The driver was an old man who leaned across the passenger seat. He had gray, scraggly hair pulled back into a low ponytail, a haggard face covered in a grizzled, patchy beard, and a fat bottom lip like something was packed inside. “Where you two headed?”
“Minneapolis,” Barrett said.
The man looked from Barrett to her. She was hiding behind her hair and holding onto a backpack bulging bigger than his lip. He spat a stream of black sludge into an empty bottle of Mountain Dew. “That city’s crawling with drones and police officers. You sure you want to go that way?”
Barrett nodded.
“Hop in, then. I can get you as far as the border.”
They climbed inside.
The floor was littered with crumpled McDonald’s wrappers and empty red French fry cartons. A crucifix hung on his rearview mirror and a plastic creature had been stuck to his dashboard—a human with fangs and a white face and a black cape.
“I like your Halloween decoration,” Barrett said.
“It’s for my grandson. He’s gonna be a vampire.” The man sat with one hand on the steering wheel, the other wrapped around that bottle of black sludge cradled in his lap as he pulled onto the highway.
The glass beads of the crucifix tinkled.
The plastic creature’s head bobbled.
The man spit into his bottle and turned up the radio.
“Mark my words,” the host was saying, “this is the beginning of the end for this regime. Interitus will no longer have its tenterhooks in our great nation.”
The man shook his head and spat once more. “Crazy times we’re living in. Crazy times.”
6
In all eighteen years of Eden’s life, she’d never been to an airport. Her parents preferred driving. At least, this was what they’d always said. In truth, they were probably avoiding the security measures required for air travel. They weren’t Ruth and Alexander Pruitt, after all, and Eden wasn’t their biological daughter. The reality took her breath away. She couldn’t dwell on it for long without feelings of sadness and betrayal creeping in, so she chose not to dwell on it at all.
Despite her lack of experience with airports, she’d always been able to picture the setting. According to everything she’d seen in movies and shows, they bustled with life and emotion—goodbyes and reunions, tight hugs and “Welcome Home” signs, characters racing through the crowd to catch a flight or frantically purchasing a ticket so they could declare their love before the final boarding call. Eden had spent plenty of time daydreaming about her first air travel adventure—an international flight to Paris, France.
Not once in all those imaginings had she pictured this—bearing the weight of her injured friend as they made their way through the giant crypt that was once Reagan National Airport. It wasn’t ruined like Union Station. But it was empty, the air unnervingly still, their footsteps echoing through the concourse as they passed baggage carousels long out of use.
They were meeting a man named Jericho. Eden knew this, not because anyone had deigned to fill her in, but because she had used her superhuman hearing to eavesdrop. Jericho was part of the Resistance—a council member like Prudence and Asher and Francesca. But he didn’t live underneath Washington, DC, with the rest of them. He lived in Alexandria—a revelation that had Eden biting her tongue. She knew of Alexandria. So did Cleo.
They first learned about it from a digital map in Mona’s office—a virtual atlas of communities and safe houses for people living off the grid. Alexandria was one such community. She learned about it again from the gentleman who helped care for Elmer and Eloise Miller of Bethesda. A gentleman who was as infamous as Prudence Dvorak—the at-large media mogul named Dayne Johnson. Cleo’s role model. And also, Editor-in-Chief of the largest illegal newspaper in the country, America Underground.
Alexandria was the hub of this illegal newspaper. And apparently, Jericho was the leader of that hub. Dayne didn’t live in Alexandria, but as Editor-in-Chief, he was an integral part of their operation. As such, he had to work closely with Jericho. So, did Dayne know about the Resistance?
Eden rifled through her memories. When she’d asked him if he knew anything about the Monarch, he’d acted oblivious. When she’d shown him the pamphlet from the Bryson’s safe, his face had registered nothing but genuine fascination. She didn’t think he could be that good of an actor. As Eden shuffled forward, taking up the rear of the group, supporting as much of Cleo’s weight as she could without rousing suspicion, she wondered if Dayne Johnson was alive and well. She wondered if he was still with the Millers.
She had her doubts, and those doubts made her stomach hurt. She strongly suspected this was all her doing. Not just shutting down the emergency alert system, but the reason the military showed up in the first place. The Resistance had known Eden was in Bethesda. Amir Kashif was part of the Resistance. He was also an employee of the NSA. They probably knew she was in Bethesda because of the intel Amir had intercepted through his job. And if that was the case, the government had probably known where Eden was staying.
She pictured Eloise Miller, tucked away in her sewing room, watching her scandalous show. She pictured Elmer doing his word search at the kitchen table, smiling kindly if not confusedly any time Eden walked into the room. The elderly couple had taken them in, given them refuge. Fed them hearty meals. Eden couldn’t bear to think of Elmer and Eloise as anything other than perfectly okay.
Asher stopped in front of a set of half-opened sliding glass doors. A sign above read Delta. He unloaded the asset, who flopped onto the conveyor belt like a sack of potatoes. Eden assisted Cleo to the carousel, where she sat with a labored exhale, sweating profusely. Francesca rummaged through the backpack filled with poisonous vials, mumbling in dulcet tones with Asher. The others loitered nearby looking around like they’d never seen an airport either.
Cleo hugged herself and shivered.
Eden sat beside her, lending her body heat. She wrapped her arm around Cleo’s shoulder, trying hard to ignore the unconscious young man behind them when footfalls sounded in the distance. Two sets. Nobody reacted. Nobody could hear. And Eden was struck—not with her own power, but the fragility of everyone else. How vulnerable they were to attack. To injury. To infection. To death.
Finally, two figures stepped through the doors. Eden came to her feet. “Dayne!”
He cut a sharp look in her direction.
“You two know each other?” Asher asked.
Eden ignored him. Dayne was alive. He was here. Hope blossomed in her heart. “Elmer and Eloise. Are they—?” She didn’t finish the question. The look on Dayne’s face stopped her cold.
“They’re dead,” he said, squeezing her blossom of hope into dust. “They shot Eloise as soon as she answered the door. They shot Elmer in his bed.”
She sat down, feeling dazed. Sucker punched. Hopeless. Her worst fears confirmed. This was her fault. The military had come because they’d been tracking her. Now two more deaths had been heaped upon her shoulders. Only this time, those deaths were more than numbers. More than a concept. They involved a kind, elderly couple she’d known. Two individuals she’d grown to care about.
“There wasn’t anything I could do but hide until they left.” Dayne looked old and angry as his attention moved from Asher and Francesca, to the six battle-worn stragglers, to Cleo and Eden sitting on the conveyer belt, to the unconscious asset, to the unarmed gentleman standing beside him—a baldheaded Black man with a salt and pepper goatee. “Now here I am, completely in the dark about some deal.”
“That deal has kept us well fed,” Jericho replied, stepping forward to shake hands, first with Asher, then Francesca. “You’re sure you weren’t followed?”
“Positive,” Asher answered.
“This is everyone?”
“Seven were taken in the raid. The rest are dead.”
Jericho scratched his goatee. “We could hear the airstrike from Alexandria. As far as my people are concerned, you’re members of Interitus. They won’t risk their lives for terrorists.”
“Then we’ll have to tell them the truth,” Asher said.
Francesca shook her head. “We can’t.”
