The Revelation of Eden Pruitt, page 6
Dayne leaned forward and set his elbows on the table. “Are you Gollum?”
Asher paused from his work just long enough to give his eyebrows a saucy lift.
Eden gaped.
Dayne, too.
The door swung open, and Jericho entered. He set an opened container, a white carafe, and a stack of styrofoam cups on the table. Francesca poured herself some coffee and took a long drink. Asher removed a chess piece from his pocket—a queen—and set it on the table with a sharp tap. Then he helped himself to some coffee, too. He crossed one long leg over the other and peered at the queen over his cup. Two sips later, her head flashed.
Eden pointed. “What was that?”
“Our cue,” Jericho said, pulling a domino from his pocket. It was flashing the same as Asher’s. So was the locket around Francesca’s neck. She wrapped her hand around it, then reached inside the container Jericho brought with him and removed a pair of handcuffs, her good eye pinned on Eden. “Give me your hands.”
“No way,” Eden said.
“You’re not coming to our meeting, and we can’t have you leaving either.”
Eden pressed back in her chair.
“Cooperate,” Asher said, setting his cup on the table, “and maybe we’ll start to trust you as much as he trusts you.” He tipped his head toward Dayne.
She had been cooperating. So far, all it had gotten her was Asher’s animosity, Francesca’s accusatory stare, and now, handcuffs. But this wasn’t a hill to die on. If an emergency arose, the cuffs couldn’t hold her anymore than a plastic zip-tie. With her lips pursed, she held out her hands.
Francesca cuffed her wrists to the chair, then returned to the container. She pulled out three headsets, tossed one to Asher, one to Jericho, and took the last for herself. Dayne came forward in his seat like he might take one, too. She yanked the container away.
He glared.
“Let us talk to the rest of the council,” Jericho said in his deep baritone. “As long as they’re okay with it, you can join us.”
Dayne muttered angry words under his breath. So did Francesca as she sat next to Eden. With a nod, the three of them slipped their headsets over their eyes and ears.
They went completely still.
It was more than creepy. She sat in a boardroom with four people, but three of them weren’t really there. For all intents and purposes, it was just her and Dayne Johnson, his fists clenched on the table. In all their time at the Millers, she’d never seen him so visibly angry.
He belonged to the same demographic as Dr. Norton—white, older male. And yet, the two gave off very different vibes. Dr. Norton radiated pleasant grandfather with his silver mustache and his woolen flat cap and his kind eyes. Dayne Johnson made a person forget he was old enough to be a grandfather. Twenty-one years in hiding and he still radiated charisma. TV ready, superhero chin, dazzling smile with a physique made for expensive suits. Instead, he wore a white cotton shirt beneath a nubby, double-breasted cardigan. The same clothes he was probably wearing when he had to flee the Millers.
“I’m really sorry,” Eden said.
He looked at her across the table, his fists unclenching. His jaw, too. He didn’t have to ask what she was sorry for. “This isn’t your fault.”
Au contraire. She had a strong feeling it most definitely was.
Dayne ran his palm down the length of his face. “Elmer and Eloise knew the risks they were taking when they decided to house fugitives.”
Eden wasn’t Catholic. She’d never been inside a confessional. But she imagined this was what it felt like. Guilty. Self-conscious. Alone, but not really. She looked at Jericho sitting beside Dayne, as still and unresponsive as a statue. “I don’t know how aware Elmer was of anything.” Let alone the risk she’d put him in when she knocked on his door.
“He was aware in the beginning,” Dayne said. “It was his idea to take me in. Eloise agreed and they’ve been treating me like their son ever since.” His eyes went dewy. Probably at his use of present tense, which no longer applied.
“I thought about moving here several times over the years. It would have been easier. But Elmer and Eloise enjoyed having me with them. Eloise specially, when Elmer’s memory started to go. I suppose Jericho liked the arrangement, too. It was easier to keep his secret, anyway.”
His jaw clenched again. His fists, too. “I think some of this might have been avoided if he hadn’t kept me in the dark.” Dayne shook his head. “It doesn’t even make sense. Why wouldn’t the Resistance use America Underground to advance their cause?”
“They must have been happy with the numbers they had.” Maybe they didn’t need any more people to carry out their aim. Maybe they saw themselves less like an army in need of numbers and more like special ops. “And it sounds like they’ve been burned before.”
According to Francesca, Prudence Dvorak tried to grow the Resistance once upon a time. The rumors that circulated nearly squashed them before they could get started. Eden suspected those same rumors led to the scrambling device implanted in her ear.
“A few years later, your father started hearing rumors,” Dr. Norton had told her.
He’d been making tea at the time. She’d been sitting at the small table in his basement kitchenette, in shock after learning the truth. Because of those rumors, her parents had taken her to Dr. Norton when she was four. They told her she was getting tubes in her ears. In actuality, the doctor had implanted a scrambling device. He’d done the same to Ellery Forrester. And because of those scrambling devices, Eden and Ellery weren’t taken like Violet and Barrett. On the contrary, Eden had helped rescue Violet and Barrett.
In all likelihood, those rumors had prevented four more weapons from passing into enemy hands. But she could hardly share this without letting a giant cat out of the bag. She was one of the superhuman soldiers the Resistance wanted to destroy.
Dayne cracked a knuckle. “So, Cassian was apprehended?”
She nodded, a strong ache burning in the back of her throat. She felt like she was sinking into quicksand with nothing to grab onto. Where was Cassian now? What had they done with him? And how could she get the Resistance to care about his wellbeing as much as they cared about Dvorak’s?
Dayne cracked another knuckle. “Cleo will be back to herself in no time. They have a good medical team here.”
Eden tried to respond, but her throat was too tight. She cleared it and tried again. “Once she realizes where she is, I’m sure she’ll be thrilled.”
The girl who’d run an illegal newspaper from her dorm room was quite obviously a big fan of America Underground. Now here she was, in its epicenter.
Dayne smiled.
Asher moved. With no warning at all, he removed his headset. “The council just voted,” he said. “Amir hasn’t arrived yet, but at this point, his vote doesn’t matter. Majority will still be majority, and majority’s in favor of debriefing Alexandria. It’s also in favor of letting you join us.” With his attention on Dayne, he nodded at the container of headsets and scooted closer to his makeshift work station. He made several adjustments on the three-dimensional interface, then stood from his seat and unlocked Eden’s cuffs.
She rubbed her wrists.
“Lark has questions,” Asher said, gesturing for her to take a headset, too.
Eden looked up at him, shocked.
“She wants you to answer them.”
11
The moment Eden put on the headset, she was no longer in the boardroom. The floor-to-ceiling windows disappeared, replaced by a dimly lit octagonal room. Curtains covered six of the walls. Two were alight with intel.
One featured the enemy—a dossier on the Monarch. The other was a bit more jarring. It featured her and Cassian. Eden’s mug shot—taken after her arrest in California—stared back at her. Next to it, a promotional picture from Cassian’s fighting career. Beneath each, information the Resistance must have acquired about them. Thankfully, her information was sparse. His was much longer. It included his former occupation as a fighter. His more recent occupation as a tracker. His connection to Mordecai, a high-stakes gambler in the world of Underground Fighting and a known member of Swarm. Along with information Eden felt certain Cassian wouldn’t want so visibly displayed. Like the photograph of his mother. And another of a man who had to be his father.
He had Cassian’s strong jawline, Cassian’s straight nose, Cassian’s caramel eyes and full lips. Their likeness was uncanny, and yet, she knew they were nothing alike. This man was a monster. An abuser who hunted down a mother and her child, beat that mother to death, and nearly did the same to his son, forever altering that smiling, gap-toothed six-year-old boy so safely tucked between his mother and Mona.
Longing burned in her chest. It throbbed in her arms. She wanted to hug him. Hold him. Be with him. She felt it so intensely, Cassian might as well be a limb that had been torn from her body. The phantom pain was almost unbearable. She bit down on her lip—wanting to break skin, wanting to taste blood, wanting to feel anything other than this terrible ache in her heart—and turned away from the photographs.
The oblong conference table had been replaced by one much more intimate—a circle with eight chairs.
One was occupied by Jericho, another by Asher, another by Francesca, who looked like she’d been forced to chew on a mouthful of rocks. Three more were occupied by strangers. Two of them, old men. One had an elfin face with caterpillar eyebrows and large ears sprouting with hair. He looked rough around the edges, like life hadn’t been particularly kind or easy. The other wore a tweed suit. He had a bulbous nose, a thick head of silver hair, and a matching beard. Beside him sat a woman who was younger, but not young. Of east Asian descent, slim with choppy, shoulder-length hair and a familiar face.
“Lark,” Eden exclaimed. Shangguan. An actress and martial artist known for doing her own stunts. “You were at the Prosperity Ball.”
“So were you,” Lark replied, her voice as deadpan as her expression.
There were two empty chairs at the table, and a ninth not at the table at all, but placed several feet in front. Stark and alone, swathed in light from the bulb overhead. Asher snapped. He pointed at this seat and told Eden to sit.
She did so stiffly. She didn’t like being snapped at any more than she liked being called sweetheart.
Jericho invited Dayne to the table. Eden watched him sit hesitantly, looking so much like himself, she wondered how Asher had done it so quickly. How had he created an avatar from scratch with all the nuances of an actual person? Everything was so realistic that had she not been sitting inside a boardroom in Alexandria mere seconds ago, she would absolutely believe she was sitting here, in a physical space.
The two old men stood from their chairs and offered Dayne their hands. The hairy-eared fellow was named Emmett. He spoke with an Irish brogue. Dayne shook his hand first and when they let go, he looked down at his palm in wonder, as though he’d felt the interaction. Eden had been in the metaverse before. Plenty of times, in fact. Usually, if a participant wanted the fully immersive experience—one which involved all the senses—they needed more than a headset.
The man in the tweed suit introduced himself as Harlan Wallace.
Eden’s attention caught on the surname. Wallace. That was familiar, too. “Any relation to Renata?” she asked.
Harlan’s face paled, which was answer enough.
“How do you know that name?” Lark asked.
“I read it on the back of a pamphlet I took from the Bryson’s safe.”
Harlan cleared his throat. “Renata was my granddaughter.”
Which meant Harlan’s granddaughter was dead. Along with every other woman on the back of that pamphlet. Not from grueling labor, but from poison forced upon them after giving birth to Oswin Brahm’s special soldiers, of which Harlan’s great grandchild was one. Was he aware that his counterparts were torturing one of those soldiers right now? Did he know they’d tossed him into a refrigerator like a piece of meat? Did he care? Or was he as cutthroat as Asher and Francesca?
Eden glanced at the other wall of intel which contained a plethora of pictures, all of them of Renata Wallace’s murderer. One in particular caught her attention. It had been taken when he was young. A fresh-faced student in his teens. She’d never seen it before, not even in his biography, which had been one of her dad’s favorites. Eden had never read it, but she had flipped through the pictures a time or two.
Her eyes traced the shape of his young face—this man who had kidnapped her from an IVF clinic when she was nothing more than a frozen embryo. This man who had altered that embryo using nano-science. Then grew her and five others in a laboratory. It was his first successful test group. Until CIA agent, Alaric Taylor, found and dismantled the operation when those test subjects were eighteen months of age. He was ordered to extract the nanobots. Upon carrying out that order, Alaric discovered the babies could not survive the extraction process. Two of them died before he came upon Subject 006. A little girl who somehow had his eyes.
“Where did you get that photograph?” Eden asked.
“From my yearbook,” Lark answered.
“You were classmates?”
“We went to the same boarding school.”
Eden’s mouth fell open. The urge to know everything there was to know inflated inside her. Who was Oswin Brahm, really? On the outside, he was a rich and upstanding philanthropist. But in secret, he played God. At least, his own twisted version—a deity who pulled puppet strings and manipulated truth and altered human life and blew up entire cities. He called himself the Monarch, a butterfly. But to her, he was a venomous spider spinning a web he wouldn’t stop spinning until the entire world was trapped and at his mercy. “Did you know him well?”
“Unfortunately,” Lark said, in the same deadpan way she’d said everything up until this point.
“What was he like?” Eden asked.
“Brilliant and dangerously charismatic. He had the entire staff and half the student body hopelessly charmed two weeks into our first semester.”
“Were you part of that half?”
Lark’s dark eyes went flat, but not before she shot a fleeting glance toward Harlan. Despite its brevity, Eden was able to catch the blip of emotion inside that glance. Shame. Terrible, all-consuming shame.
“I was one of his first followers,” Lark said. “I helped recruit people to his cause. It took many years before I saw his true colors. And it will take many more to undo the damage I inflicted.”
Eden shot a curious look at Harlan. Something told her Renata Wallace was one of the people Lark had recruited.
Lark blinked, as if coming out of whatever stupor she’d gotten stuck inside. She folded her hands on top of the table. “Cassian Gray is affiliated with Nicholas Marks, a known member of Swarm. Which led us to assume, as one could understand, that you were both members of Swarm. But you’re telling a different story.”
Eden nodded.
“I’d like to hear it,” Lark said.
Eden obliged. She gave Lark the version Cassian had given Dvorak before the raid. They were hunting the Monarch because the Monarch was after Eden’s father, a former CIA agent who helped bring down Karik Volkova. She kept her voice even, her breathing steady. Her heart rate, however, was harder to control. Thankfully, nobody here had the superhuman hearing required to register it.
When she was finished, Lark narrowed her eyes. “If this is true, how did Cassian Gray come to be involved?”
“When he found out Mordecai was trying to kill my father, he sent us a warning.”
Lark tilted her head. “This father of yours. Where is he now?”
Eden didn’t want to give them his location, so she held her tongue.
“Why are you doing his dirty work?”
“He was badly injured. I decided to eliminate the threat. And Cassian decided to come with me. It’s how we ended up in the Bryson’s basement, where we got the pamphlet.”
“And the magnet,” Asher said, his stare so intense she felt like it was boring holes into the side of her face.
She nodded. “We never killed anyone. We were falsely accused, just like Dvorak was falsely accused.”
“Just like I was falsely accused,” Dayne said. “There seems to be a pattern. Innocent people. False accusations.”
Before Lark could respond any further, a current of electricity ran through the room. Someone else had joined them. Eden knew his face. She’d been staring at it through the front window of a diner for the past week. Amir Kashif, with his dark hair and his long nose and his Harry Potter glasses, looking wild in the eyes—like he’d swum through alligator-infested waters to get here.
When his attention fell on her, sitting alone in a chair in front of two computerized walls, his wild eyes went wilder. “You!”
She pressed back in her seat.
“What are you doing here?” Amir whirled to face the others. “She’s the reason Pru was taken. She’s the reason the air raid happened in the first place. They were following her and her two friends.”
Eden closed her eyes. This wasn’t news, really. She’d suspected it all along. But to hear it confirmed so angrily made her heart sink into the soles of her feet.
“What did you call Pru’s hamster when you were a teenager?” Francesca demanded.
Eden’s eyes flew open.
It was the strangest question. And yet, Amir answered it like it wasn’t strange at all.
“Cujo,” he said.
Francesca seemed to relax.
“Avatar theft is a real problem,” Jericho said, addressing Eden’s confusion. “The simplest way to check someone’s identity is by asking a question nobody but the real person would know the answer to.”
Eden imagined eighteen-year-old Prudence Dvorak, forced into pregnancy by her extremist father, owning something as normal as a pet hamster. She imagined seventeen-year-old Amir, dealing with the fact that his widowed mother was also pregnant, lounging with Prudence in her bedroom. Maybe Amir tried to hold the hamster. Maybe the hamster bit him. And thus, the nickname was born. Cujo, a rabid dog from a Stephen King novel. She pictured Prudence tossing a pillow at Amir in defense of her pet, then casually setting her hand over her baby bump. All of it was so normal. Which made it even more bizarre.
