The Revelation of Eden Pruitt, page 9
She was so focused on the disturbing footage, on the tumult of questions spinning through her mind, she didn’t notice Dayne staring at her until he asked a question. “Do you know him?”
She blinked.
Dayne nodded at the screen. “Are you acquainted with Barrett Barr?”
Eden swallowed nervously. She’d spoken his name with too much familiarity. Dayne had noticed. What would he make of her connection to Violet and Barrett? What would Asher and Francesca and the other council members? Three eighteen-year-olds, three months older than the Electus. And Eden’s father, a CIA agent who supposedly destroyed a test group that would have been three months older than the Electus.
Asher and Francesca weren’t dumb. They would put the pieces together. And then what?
The news anchor was talking about Violet again. But Dayne wasn’t paying attention. He was too busy studying Eden.
“She was in your paper,” she finally said.
Dayne looked at the television.
“Her name is Violet Winter. She was reported as a missing person.” By her father. Who lived in Minneapolis. Barrett and Violet were supposed to be in Milwaukee with her parents and Dr. Norton and Jack Forrester. They were supposed to figure out how to disable the Queen Bee so Eden wouldn’t be forced to shoot someone ever again. So they couldn’t be controlled. Not by the Monarch. Not by a member of Swarm. Not by the Resistance, either. So what were they doing in Minneapolis, so close to Violet’s father? Were Eden’s parents okay?
“Dayne,” Eden said. “If Violet’s father reported her missing, would you have a way to contact him?”
“If Violet is listed as a missing person in America Underground, then yes, we should have a way to contact him.”
Which meant Eden might be able to get in touch with them. She at least needed to try. As soon as possible. But how could she without asking Dayne for help? Her breath went shallow.
He slid his hands into his pockets and cocked his head. “So you do know them?”
Eden bit her lip.
Dayne was watching her, waiting for an answer. Waiting for the truth. This man who had vouched for her without really knowing who he was vouching for. She was keeping a massive secret from him, no different than Jericho. If she didn’t share the truth with him now, she risked alienating the one person here besides Cleo who trusted her.
“Yes,” she finally said. “I know them.”
She could see the cogs turn in his mind. A missing 18-year-old boy and an off-the-grid girl. “How do you know them?”
Eden grappled for a lie. An innocent explanation. But then, what would stop Dayne from mentioning that connection in casual conversation? Whatever she told him now would have to be done so in confidence.
The tilt of his head deepened. She expected to see annoyance in his eyes. She was obviously holding something, and he was obviously sick of secrets. But he only looked curious, and sympathetic.
He wasn’t loyal to the Resistance. Other than Jericho, he’d known Eden longer than any of the other council members. Could she trust him to keep her secret? She didn’t see any other option. If she wanted his help, she would have to tell him. And hope with everything inside her he would keep that truth to himself.
16
“Asher is Gollum?”
“Apparently,” Eden said.
Cleo gaped, her spoon paused halfway between her mouth and the tray in front of her. She was resting on an inclined bed in her own room in the Kaiser Medical Center. She wore a hospital gown. The gash above her right eyebrow had been glued. Her scratches and scrapes covered in antiseptic. She wasn’t exactly the picture of health, but she did look significantly improved. Her complexion, at least, no longer had that alarming grayish tint that it did yesterday.
Last night, when Eden and Dayne finally arrived to check on her, the patient had been sound asleep. The nurse on duty wasn’t happy about their visit. He’d taken one look at Eden, still dressed in the clothes she’d been wearing when the government dropped bombs from the sky, and began shaking his head and wagging his finger as he ushered both her and Dayne to the nearest exit. If he recognized her as the fugitive responsible for those bombs, he didn’t let on. He was too busy shooing her away. She could come back in the morning when she didn’t look like a walking health hazard.
Now it was morning. Eden had showered. Slept. She wore a cheap but clean pair of light gray sweatpants and a matching crewneck sweatshirt, provided by the abandoned concierge desk of The Landing. Dayne had retrieved the clothes, a roll of toilet paper, a small stack of folded towels, and a key. He’d escorted Eden to her new living quarters on the fifth floor—a two bedroom, two bathroom suite with a kitchenette and a living room and a balcony that faced the Potomac River and the decimated capitol beyond. Dayne had let her in, then bid her goodnight, leaving her alone for the first time in a long time.
Eden didn’t like it.
There’d been entirely too much space. To feel Cassian’s absence. To worry about her parents. To theorize as to why Barrett and Violet had left Dr. Norton’s cabin in Milwaukee, each possibility more dire than the last. There was too much space to think about the bombs, and death, and Xavier’s stiff body, and the asset’s agonizing screams, and Eloise and Elmer Miller killed in their own home.
The soft, king-sized bed in her new room had felt obscene. Even more so knowing Cassian was locked in a cold cell, probably with no bed at all. She’d distracted herself with Oswin Brahm’s biography, which had been riveting. But that only lasted an hour. Sixty minutes. It had taken a mere sixty minutes for Eden to not only finish the thick tome, but commit everything inside to memory, making her wish she could switch off her superhuman powers. She would have liked more than an hour’s reprieve.
By the time she fell into a fitful sleep, her bedside clock read three am. She awoke a few hours later with sunlight streaming through her windows. Her kitchenette had no food, so she made her way to Alexandria’s commissary, feeling very much like a bug under a magnifying glass. The residence hall was no longer empty, and while the occupants had been briefed last night at the assembly, none of them seemed particularly welcoming. She’d grabbed a banana and a protein bar and headed to Kaiser, eager to tell Cleo all the things she hadn’t been able to tell her last night.
“The jerk who did the hack job on this.” Cleo motioned to her leg, which had been cleaned and bandaged, and was now hanging from a sling. “It was so bad, the nurse had to remove my stitches and put in new ones. That guy is Gollum?”
Of all the things Eden had told her—about Lark and Harlan and his granddaughter Renata, about the asset in the refrigerator, about their plan to leak the prisoner’s location in order to force a transfer, about the deep fake that had made Barrett Barr look like a cold-blooded killer—this was what elicited the strongest reaction.
Asher as Gollum.
“He didn’t come right out and say it, but yes. I’m ninety-nine percent sure he is Gollum.”
Cleo gave her head a rattle, as though trying to shake this bit of news into place.
“Dayne should be here soon,” Eden said, shifting in her chair.
He was coming with a device that would enable them to contact Violet’s father. Or someone who would know how to contact Violet’s father. According to Dayne, every missing person’s report was assigned a reference number, and every reference number was connected to a digital code. That digital code was used within the confines of the Amber Highway to communicate information regarding the missing person, should any information arise. Dayne was meeting them here with that code and the device.
Cleo glanced at the door. “You really told him everything?”
“I didn’t know how else to get the contact information.” Eden ran her hands down her pant legs and resisted the urge to pick at her fingernails. Last night, when she told Dayne the truth, he’d reacted in the best possible way. He could have panicked. Sounded an alarm. Gone directly to Jericho. Instead, his trust in her only seemed to solidify. Even so, she’d spent a significant chunk of her fitful sleeping hours second-guessing. What if sleep changed his mind? What if he woke up with a new take on the whole ordeal? She was dangerous, and everyone ought to know.
Cleo scooped out the last of her yogurt with her lips pursed. She took the bite, then set the container on the tray. “I think it’s fine,” she said confidently. “Dayne Johnson isn’t going to rat you out. Especially if you told him off the record.”
“It was definitely off the record.”
“Then you can trust him.” Cleo licked her spoon.
Eden’s leg bounced. Her instincts said the same, but her instincts had been incorrect before. In pretty egregious ways. Like following a tunnel to see what was on the other side. For all she knew, Dayne was in the boardroom with Francesca and Asher right now, telling them everything while they readied one of their poisonous vials.
Cleo set her spoon beside the empty yogurt container. “Tell me more about this biography.”
“It was fascinating,” Eden conceded. She understood why it was one of her father’s favorites.
Up until last night, her familiarity with Oswin Brahm extended no further than her familiarity with her principal back in San Diego. She knew Brahm’s face, his voice, his demeanor, his most notable accomplishments. She also knew he was an underdog who’d risen above his tragic circumstances to become a national hero. She just hadn’t known any of the specifics. Now she knew plenty.
Eden shared the highlights.
He was an only child. His father had been a police officer. His mother stayed at home. The biography contained a picture of both. His father was handsome. His mother, hauntingly beautiful and unnaturally thin. When Oswin was eight years old, his father was killed in the line of duty during a riot. After which, his mother succumbed to addiction. Oswin was placed into the foster system where he was subjected to all manner of abuse. When he was twelve, his fifth-grade teacher noticed his exceptional intellect. He was awarded a scholarship to one of the country’s most prestigious boarding schools. This was where Oswin’s path had crossed with Lark’s.
“Their boarding school was shut down halfway through his junior year, because of widespread protests,” Eden said. “He had to go back into foster care.”
Cleo took a deep breath, then let it out in a low whistle. “Suddenly, this utopian society he wants to create is making more sense.”
Caelum In Terra.
Heaven on Earth.
A world where fathers didn’t die in riots and schools weren’t shut down by protests and children weren’t abused in broken systems. Like Cleo, Eden could understand his motive. In a disturbing way, she could even appreciate his vision. Who didn’t want to live in a world unmarred by death and war and suffering? What she couldn’t understand, what she would never appreciate, was the means by which he was choosing to get there.
“He sees division as the enemy,” Eden said.
“Of course he does,” Cleo replied. “It’s what led to the riot that killed his father and ruined his mother. It’s what led to the protests that shut down his boarding school, the only place he wasn’t abused.”
“I guess in his own warped way he’s trying to eliminate that division.”
“By eliminating freedom.”
Cleo’s words reminded Eden of the first time they’d met, in Cleo’s dorm room back when Eden hadn’t known anything. Not the truth about herself. Not the truth about her parents. Or why this mysterious stranger named Cassian Gray had driven up on his motorcycle offering to help. Back then, Eden believed the forfeiture of their freedoms was a good thing.
“They brainwashed you good, little sis,” Cleo had said.
Until that conversation, Eden hadn’t thought to question or examine any of it. It just was what it was—the world in which she lived. But now, she could never view anything in such an uncritical light again. Nor could she ignore the fact that more freedoms were being stripped away at this very moment. The borders were closing. Authorities were radically enforcing fingerprinting and retinal scans—all under the guise of safety, with the public’s full approval.
Eden shook her head. “Do you think this is how he’s going to use his army—to eliminate freedom?”
“I don’t think he needs soldiers for that,” Cleo said. “Not when he’s doing it just fine without them.”
Eden made a humming sound in the back of her throat. “Did you know he had a wife who died in The Attack?”
“I did, actually. Mainly because I saw a picture of her once and she looked almost identical to my aunt.” Cleo shuddered, like the thought of Uncle Oswin couldn’t be creepier. “They had a son.”
“I know,” Eden said, just as surprised about it now as she was when she read it last night.
“Who, tragedy of all tragedies, went the same way as Oswin’s dear mother.” The declaration didn’t belong to Cleo. The declaration belonged to Asher. He swept inside the room. Apparently, he’d been standing outside, eavesdropping on their conversation. “Addiction is said to be hereditary. Lucky for Oswin, it must have skipped a generation.”
“His mother and his son died of addiction,” Eden retorted. “I would hardly call that lucky.”
Asher stopped at the foot of Cleo’s bed, his six foot six, broad-shouldered frame making the room feel claustrophobic. Like Eden, he had cleaned himself up and was wearing basic clothing—a much larger pair of sweatpants in a darker shade of gray and a sage green henley with sleeves pushed up his forearms. He gave his eyebrows a challenging lift. “Are you defending him?”
“Never. But I won’t make light of his pain, either.”
“How very noble of you,” he drawled.
The muscles across Eden’s chest pulled tight. She kept her mouth shut as he adjusted the backpack slung over his shoulder and tapped the rolled-up newspaper he was holding against his palm.
Cleo pushed herself up. “Is that America Underground?”
“Concordia Times.”
She made a face.
He tossed the paper onto her tray, knocking her empty yogurt container to the bed. “Your mom’s on the cover.”
She snatched the paper up and quickly unrolled it. Eden came out of her chair to see the cover for herself.
A black-and-white photograph of Dr. Beverly Randall-Ransom took up a significant portion of the front page. A candid of her looking distraught, attempting to shield her face from reporters as she made her way through a hospital parking garage. Above it, a headline read Famous Neurosurgeon’s Daughter Confirmed Dead.
Eden scanned the article, noting the details Concordia had uncovered about Cleo, a resident advisor at Marquette who had been running an illegal newspaper called The People’s Press out of her dorm room. She disappeared after her cousin, Cassian Ransom, and his partner in crime, Eden Pruitt, shot and killed the Brysons, a family of three in a suburb outside Chicago. Now she was dead, killed in a government raid upon Interitus Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Asher clucked his tongue. “It’s a tough spot to be in, when a parent thinks you’re dead.” The words might have been sympathetic, but he packaged them in a dispassionate tone that rang of mockery.
Cleo looked up from the article and glared. “I need to speak with her.”
Asher chuckled.
“Did I say something funny?”
“Oh,” he said. “You’re serious.”
“As a heart attack.”
He crossed his arms. “Are you an idiot?”
“Excuse me?”
“Or do you just like to say idiotic things?”
Cleo pulled back her chin.
“Your mother is being watched. Her phone. Her email. Her work. Her house. I guarantee you every aspect of her life is under surveillance. If you contact her, they’ll know you’re alive. And if they know you’re alive, they’ll deploy every resource to find you. They find you, they find us. That happened once. Let’s not go there again.”
Cleo scowled.
So did Eden.
Dr. Beverly Randall-Ransom had already lost her husband. Now she was being led to believe she’d lost her daughter, too. Eden understood Asher’s point—trying to contact Beverly would probably be too risky—but did he really have to be so condescending when he made that point?
“Why are you here?” Cleo lifted the newspaper. It crinkled in her grip. “What’s the point in showing me this if you won’t let me do anything about it?”
“I thought you’d find it interesting.”
Cleo huffed.
“And Fran is hyperventilating.”
“About my mom?”
“About the volatility of our size these past forty-eight hours. We went from fifty to almost nothing, and now we’re in the hundreds. Assuming everyone here is on board. That’s the rub though. We don’t know. She especially has a high level of distrust in the pair of you.”
Eden thought about the asset locked in a refrigerator. The vials of poison stored in a freezer. If she were being honest, the feeling was mutual.
“I told her I’d come check in, make sure you weren’t doing anything stupid. I also wanted to give you these.” He slid off his backpack and removed a pair of tablets from inside. He handed one to Cleo, the other to Eden. “You insisted on being part of the prison break. Here’s your part.”
“What are we supposed to do with them?” she asked.
“Amir sent us a database of names. It includes every person even marginally connected to the prison outside Annapolis. The list is long, so I divided it into several subsets. Your tablet has one. Your tablet has another.” He nodded at Eden, then at Cleo. “I installed a plug-in that will allow you to insert names from your lists. The plug-in will cull together all the information about the person available online, dark web included. Then it runs that information through an algorithm that will flag potential weak spots.”
“Like?”
“Skeletons in the closet. Unsavory habits. Debts in need of paying. Anything we could use that might motivate a person to lend a helping hand.”
“Blackmail,” Cleo said, her voice wooden.
