by Keary Taylor
We carefully searched through every single apartment, finding each and every one empty. All of them were in the state West had described. Ripped apart, a mess, torn to shambles.
The offices on the main floor were empty as well and we quietly descended into the lower first floor.
The first and second underground floors were clear. We told Avian to lock himself and Creed in a room until we gave the all-clear.
I had hoped to avoid the lower floors all together. I’d accepted my past—and the fact that I couldn’t remember it. I didn’t need to have the memories stirred up when I had moved on. But as we descended a floor lower, flashes of memory danced just under the surface of my conscious.
We checked the room that held the treadmills. I had spent hours and hours here. A window faced the line of three treadmills, where long ago chocolaty brown eyes had watched me.
We checked a weight training room where I lifted amounts a person three times my size couldn’t have handled.
Still, we descended another floor lower and I knew exactly where my room was from the time I stepped out of the stairwell.
“Familiar?” West asked, his eyes flickering from the line of his handgun to my face.
“More than a little,” I said between clenched teeth.
We passed the playroom, the one where West and I fought, the one where he and my sister spent hours bonding.
“I hate that room,” I said. My past feelings crept up inside of me, whispering to my memory like a ghost.
West chuckled.
“This was her room,” I said as we stepped inside a simple room that contained a narrow bed, a dresser, and a nightstand with a cracked lamp. “Right?”
West nodded.
It was empty.
She really wasn’t here. And it looked like she hadn’t been here in a very long time. Everything was covered in a thick layer of dust.
“Let’s keep moving,” Dr. Evans said. His voice sounded tight and he wouldn’t meet my eyes.
We dropped down the hall, checking doors as we moved. All empty.
And I knew this was my room when I stepped into it.
Exactly like my sister’s room was, this one was covered in dust and forgotten. No longer needed.
I ran my fingers along the gouge mark in the wall where I had thrown a lamp just before I had gone in for surgery to get my chip. The lamp had shattered and scraped the paint and drywall off.
“This is still too weird to accept the truth that you aren’t her,” West said, shaking his head as he looked around. “I avoided the girl from this room as much as humanly possible.”
“Still wise advice sometimes,” I said, trying to make a joke.
It wasn’t a good one, but West smiled anyway.
“Let’s keep moving,” Bill encouraged. He fidgeted in the doorway, not wanting to step into my past when he couldn’t even dwell in his own.
The rest of the fourth floor was clear and it would be difficult to tell if the fifth and final was hiding anyone. It was packed full of storage supplies. Someone could hide there and we would have a very difficult time ever finding them. We even checked the back elevator and found no traces of anyone.
“Maybe they moved on,” I said, knowing any number of possibilities could be viable.
“Maybe,” West said, looking around one more time before he and Bill headed back up.
I was just about to start up the stairs after them, when Dr. Evans called out to me from behind. I turned to see him walking toward me, a box in his hands.
“What is that?” I asked.
But he didn’t have to answer the question before I read the single word written on the front of it.
Emma.
“My mom?” I asked. My eyes darted up to Dr. Evans, questions and uncertainty in them.
Dr. Evans nodded. “Any of her research, files, scientific notes were taken by NovaTor, but she left behind some personal effects when she…” his voice cut out once again, just briefly, like it had before. I wasn’t sure if it was pain in saying what happened to her, or if his voice simply failed. “I boxed her things up myself and brought them down here.”
Considering my purpose before the Evolution, I was quite certain I was never intended to inherit this box. But the world had changed. Now the contents of that box would matter to me.
“It belongs to you now,” he said, extending it toward me. “If you want it.”
“Yes,” I said, my voice coming out breathy. “Thank you.”
In a way, it felt like reading his notebook all over again. There were secrets within this box, secrets to my past and my origins. Secrets to a woman I had never been able to meet.
Secrets to my mother.
NINETEEN
As badly as I wanted to immediately tear into that box, I couldn’t abandon my duties. Undeniably there was someone else around. We hadn’t seen them yet, but they were toying with us. West and I kept constant watch the rest of that day.
Creed got her third dosage of TorBane just before bed. Very slowly, her vitals were stabilizing.
Finally, the evening fell into night and I asked Bill to keep watch. It was a selfish move. But he agreed without hesitation.
Eagerly, I went into Creed’s room, where Avian checked her tubes and wires one last time before we let her settle for the night.
He met my eyes as soon as I walked in and then they quickly fell to the box on the floor, right next to the door.
“Is that…” he hesitantly asked.
I stood stiff and nervous in the doorway and nodded.
“Do you want to do this alone?” he asked. “Or would you like some company?”
A small smile tugged in the corner of my mouth. “You’re my family, Avian. Of course I want you here.”
A crooked smile crept onto Avian’s face and his eyes seemed to brighten.
I stepped in the room and quietly closed the door behind me. I scooped the box up and went to sit on the sleeping bag that was rolled out along the far wall. Avian sank down next to me, his shoulder barely brushing mine.
Avian handed me a scalpel which I used to cut the tape. Taking a deep breath, I pulled the flaps open.
There wasn’t much inside the box. Two leather bound books, an envelope, and two framed photographs.
The first framed picture showed a snowy black and white image. I could make out a few shapes, an oval here, a circle there.
“It’s an ultrasound,” Avian said quietly. “It’s a picture taken of the inside of a womb.”
“Me and my sister?” I breathed. I ran a finger over the image as I started making sense of the shapes. A tiny arm. Three visible feet. Two round heads. The shape of a spine.
“I would guess your mother was about half way through her pregnancy when this was taken,” Avian said.
I nodded, simply staring at it. It was eerie, all that was tied to this image. A sister I hoped to find, knowing I was a different kind of creature when this was taken—fully human. Knowing the woman whose stomach I resided in would die just a few short weeks later. The fact that this image had been taken in this very building.
Blinking hard several times, I set the photograph aside and picked up the next.
The girl in the picture looked just like me. I would have thought it was me, except for the pre-Evolution world around her, and the bronze colored glasses perched on her nose.
My mother held some kind of certificate in her hands with scrawling print on it. On either side of her stood two people who both resembled her. They all bore smiles. Emma wore an odd set of robes and a square hat on her head. Draped around her shoulders was a golden scarf.
“That must have been her graduation when she got her bachelor’s degree,” Avian explained. When I didn’t understand, he continued. “When she first finished college. People have multiple milestones when they’re at university. She must have been top of her class to get those,” he said, tapping the golden scarf.
“I wonder what happened to her parents,” I said, looking them o
ver. “Dr. Beeson has always said that she didn’t have any family.”
“They must have passed away sometime between when this picture was taken and when you were born.”
I observed their faces. These were my grandmother and grandfather. My family. I thought about stories Sarah had told me, about her own grandparents. How they went fishing and hunting with their grandpa. How her grandma had tried to teach Sarah to sew.
My life could have turned out so differently if only a few things had changed.
I set that photo aside as well and opened the envelope.
Inside was a small stack of photographs. Every one of them featured two people: my mother and a young man.
His hair was a light brown, bordering on dirty blond. His eyes were gray. His features were strong and pronounced.
In some pictures they were kissing, in some they were simply smiling at the camera. In others they appeared to be in a school setting.
“Is that…?” Avian started to ask.
I nodded, my hands feeling stiff and half numb. “I think so.”
I laid the pictures on the floor and pulled out the books.
They were journals. Emma didn’t write often, but seemed to write when milestones happened, the first entry being when she graduated high school.
I scanned the pages, not reading them in detail. She started college immediately after she graduated, had a heavy school load. She worked a few shifts at a diner waiting tables for the first few years. She graduated with her bachelor’s degree, as depicted in the picture.
Nine months before graduation though, a boy’s name started popping up. Rider.
They had classes together. Chemistry, molecular biology. Other scientific studies. They started dating.
Then they’d break up.
Then they’d get back together.
Eventually, they both got jobs in their fields while going through graduate school. She started at NovaTor, he took a government job. It was family tradition apparently. All of his family had worked for the United States government for generations.
As they headed to their separate destinies, their relationship continued to decline.
But there was one weekend before they both had to return to their prestigious school. One weekend when they thought they could make things work again.
“Oh wow,” I said, flushing as I read. I turned the journal over in my lap and held it away from me. “This is embarrassing to read.”
Avian chuckled. “I guess most people don’t get to read about their conception.”
I cringed at Avian’s stark words as I hesitantly turned the journal back over.
As the weekend drew to a close, there was a fight. Emma recorded that it started as something trivial, but escalated into something bigger. The long distance was just too much. Their highs and lows in the past were stacking too heavy.
They finally called it quits. This time for real.
Emma returned to NovaTor and continued her work. She threw herself into it, working harder and longer hours than ever.
At first she thought she wasn’t feeling well simply for how hard she was pushing herself in the lab.
But then she finally took a test. And it came back positive.
She briefly considered telling Rider. But she had her career and he had his. As bad as it made her feel, she knew what this pregnancy was going to do to hers. It could possibly end it. If she told Rider, it would affect his career too. He had worked so hard for it, had so much pressure on him from his family to succeed. She couldn’t imagine how he could be happy about this.
So she kept it a secret. And a few months later, she found she carried not one child, but two.
In a moment of weakness and emotion, she tried calling the number she had for Rider. Someone else answered the phone—Rider’s brother.
“Holy…” I breathed. “Avian, look.”
I pointed to the end of one page. It only said the name once, and talked about him for only one sentence to say he answered the phone. But it was there, blazing from the page.
Royce.
“Avian, Royce is my uncle,” I breathed. The air in my chest caught, and the back of my eyes stung. Two moments later, my vision swam as moisture pooled in them. “It has to be him. My mom said Rider’s entire family worked for the government. Royce worked for the government as a weapons specialist for years!”
“Eve, you know what this means?” Avian said, looking over at me. He took one of my hands in his. “You have family. You’ve had family for the past five months. I mean…” a breathy laugh bubbled up from his chest. “No wonder you and him have had this bond. You’re blood family, Eve. You’re his niece.”
I covered my mouth with a hand and realized I was trembling. With my other hand, I grabbed one of the pictures from the floor. Rider was looking right at the camera. He had the same grey eyes as Royce. The same strong jaw. The same piercing look.
Royce and I had always gotten along. Sure, we’d had a few ups and downs, but I’d always known he supported me. And even though I didn’t throw the word around often, I loved Royce and did think of him as a father figure.
He was pretty damn close.
TWENTY
I didn’t say anything about my new discovery the next day. As Avian would have so nicely put it, I was still processing that information. Instead, Bill, West, and I kept watch again, not saying much of anything all day. No intruders came.
Dr. Evans helped Avian take care of Creed from afar, making sure the ingredients that went down her feeding tube were right, that they’d give her the best chance of surviving. They started gathering the supplies they would need to get her back to New Eden. And they gave her the last dosage of TorBane.
On our fifth day at NovaTor we were all stir crazy to get moving. This was our final day. We were giving TorBane twenty-four hours to settle into Creed’s system. Her vitals were good. She was still fragile and underdeveloped, but Dr. Evans said she was comparable to what a one month premature baby would be like instead of one that was over three months.
While Bill continued to watch for unwanted visitors, West and I started packing the solar van.
“These are the supplies we’ll need to finish off the transmitter,” Dr. Evans said, handing a box off to me. “Careful with them.”
I imagined if he had more flesh and hair on him, he might have raised an eyebrow at me and given me a “look.” Just like West often did.
I nodded and turned toward the stairs. West followed, oxygen tanks under his arms.
“We’re supposed to leave in the morning,” I said, my voice echoing off the walls.
“Yeah,” West said. His voice sounded dead.
“I’ll understand if you stay,” I said as I stepped out into the main floor. “If you have to go look for her.”
“Where am I supposed to even start?” West said, his voice harsh, even though I knew it wasn’t me he was mad at, for once. “I don’t know what I expected. I didn’t really think she’d be waiting here, but I…”
“I know,” I said as we walked into the garage. I pulled the back door to the solar tank open. “I think I kind of thought the same thing.”
West set the oxygen tanks in the fourth row of seats, the one Morgan had occupied on the way out. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said, leaning against the vehicle and crossing his arms over his chest. “I don’t think I can decide that until we’re heading out tomorrow morning.”
I nodded, closing the back doors again. I leaned against the van and stuffed my hands into my pockets. “Your grandfather says this transmitter won’t kill off the first generation of TorBane. That the coding works different, or something. If this really works, you’ll be able to spend as much time as you like looking for her after it goes off. There won’t be any danger of getting attacked by the Bane. You can take this,” I said, knocking my knuckles against the side of the solar tank. “And drive for as long as you’ve got sun to power it.”
West nodded, a small smile curling in
one corner of his mouth. “I guess that’s true. I mean, I can hardly picture having that ability, to just go out in the country and look. Without the fear of getting infected. Without the possibility of it.”
“It’s a pretty amazing looking possibility, right?” I said, returning his smile.
“I’d ask you to come with me, ‘cause I know you want to find her too,” West said, catching my eyes. “But I’m pretty sure you’ll be too busy helping with Creed and restoring society.”
A full smile spread on my face. I shook my head. “I don’t really know how this is going to work. We’ll try to find a family to adopt her. I know nothing about caring for a baby, a kid. But I think it’s my responsibility. And I think I kind of want to help her find the right family, have some small part in helping her find a normal life, if that makes any bizarre sense.”
West nodded. “It does. She’ll be like you. You’ll understand each other”
I gave him a small smile, and we walked back into the belly of NovaTor.
The last night at NovaTor Biotics, West had night watch. I needed to be fresh for our journey back home tomorrow, to keep any Bane we might happen upon away from us. But I couldn’t sleep for more than ten minutes at a time
I stared up at the ceiling of Creed’s room, running through all the things we needed to bring back with us in my head. The code, other files, supplies, medical things. I pictured the journey back, wondering if we would run into any Bane along the way or if we had somehow stumbled upon a rare part of the country that was clear. It wouldn’t stay that way, since the Bane were gaining more and more sweeps, but for this small window, were we, and any other humans survivors safe? I hoped Susan and Karmen made it to New Eden safely.
A small cry rang out through the room and I startled in my sleeping bag. I looked over to see Avian asleep on the floor, his head buried under his pillow. Smiling, I climbed up and walked over to Creed’s tiny dome bed.
She had kicked her blankets off and was swinging her tiny arms and legs wildly in the air. She continued her soft cries. Trying to remember how Avian had so skillfully wrapped her tightly, I tried to mimic his technique.