Emergence (Eden's Root Trilogy) (40 page)

An eye for an eye.

She’d never been so sorry
to be right in her entire life. Suddenly, she felt heavy, like she was one of those lead sinkers Uncle John always used to put on the line when he fished. Down, down, down, she sank, until the water turned biting cold and the shafts of sunlight no longer penetrated.

She drew a deep, s
haky breath and turned to the radio, leaning down to the microphone. “Did you hear that everyone? I don’t know about all of you, but I vote that we stop killing each other and start fixing things…”

Fionnuala Marie Kelly Grey…
Out
, she thought. She switched the radio back to listening and spun the dial through the channels, both Nets and Truthers alike. It was pandemonium.

“
…all this time he was lying to everyone…”

“…
who is Bailey? What just happened? Did anyone else hear?”

“…
sabotage! I knew it! I just knew it!”

“…
can’t believe he would do something like that…not Father…”

“…
should go to jail…he basically killed people…”

“…People are fallible, but do not give up on the WORD, Truthers!”

“…come up with a prison system of some kind…”

“…
heartbroken, absolutely heartbroken…”

“…
the girl’s right, we need to start focusing on the future…”

As the room filled with the outraged and saddened voices of the listeners, Carter’s meltdown came to an end. He sat still against the wall, unblinking, the tears drying on his cheeks. He seemed to shrink into himself with each shallow breath. He was the man become ghost, his flesh crumbling with his power.

The
General opened the door. As it swung wide she heard the roar of conversation outside, the rise and fall of voices like a stormy sea. The Truthers had heard.

She met General Zelinski’s eyes.
“So we did it, General. We won?”

“
Yes, Mrs. Grey,” he said. “You did it. We won.”

Army members turned and saw them emerging from the radio room.
A cry went up. “Long live Eden! Long live Eden!”

Tears pricked at her eyes again as she took in the scene.
Hundreds raised clenched fists into the smoky air, triumphant. The battlefield looked like the surface of the moon, pocked and split with smoldering ruins, and in the distance, the medics and others were shuttling the dead and wounded on makeshift pallets.
This,
she thought.
This is our victory.
She shook her head. It had to be about more than Eden. This kind of sacrifice was bigger.

She stepped forward and held up her hand.
The cry died as a wave of shushing crossed the settlement. From her vantage point, she could see the “Great Wall” extending all the way down the hillside and around the lake. All eyes were on her. And within their bounds, the shocked Truthers turned to her as well, unsure.

She pulled the small baggie of
heirloom seeds from her waistband. When she’d tucked it into her leggings, she’d mostly meant it as a personal reminder. But it wasn’t just for her. This was what they had been fighting for in the end. Not just their children, but their children’s children, and their children after that. For all the children yet to be born. She thrust the bag of seeds aloft. “Long live Truefood!”

Her cry
echoed in the thick air and then, it was more than an echo, it was drumbeat, a heartbeat, as hundreds of voices shouted at once. “Long live Truefood! Long live Truefood!”

She turned and saw that even the gruff General had joined the cheer, and her heart filled.
The Truthers watched in stunned silence as the Army members screamed and cried and hugged one another. Perhaps, Fi thought, there was a chance for the Truthers. Maybe they would rather live in hope than fear.
Maybe they would rather live in Truth than Lies.

She
turned to see the General’s soldiers leading a cable-tied Carter from the radio room. The “Father” appeared nearly comatose as he trudged forward. Some of the Truthers cried out to him, but his expression never changed.

“Wait!”
Fi cried, running back into Carter’s cabin. She came back out and ran to a startled General Zelinski.

“What’s wrong, Fi?”

She shook her head and turned to Carter. He didn’t meet her gaze. She took the photograph of Bailey and tucked it into his pants pocket. As she’d imagined so many times before, she held his gaze, her eyes locked on his. Only this time, she wasn’t centering her gun between his brows as she’d expected.

His eyes were empty.
She looked into them, but her vision slipped and slid inside of him and through him and out the other side to where he was falling, falling, falling over the cliff and into the river. Her throat tightened for this man who was nothing, one of billions, but who knew that one of billions could
matter.
“I’m sorry for your loss.”

He didn’t acknowledge her, not that she’d expected it.
She stood still as the General steered her former enemy away. There was something strangely empty in it. It wasn’t just the cost of their victory, but the loss of the enemy himself. She didn’t know what she’d do now with the part of her heart that had burned in anguish and hate for so long.

“So, n
ow what, baby?” Asher laid a hand on her shoulder gently.

She
jumped, unsettled by the question coming at the precise moment she thought it.
What was next?
Her shoulders sagged. “Now someone needs to find me my children.”

“Fi!”

She looked up. A distant voice was screaming.

“Fi!”
Sara came sprinting their way. “It’s Sean!”

Fi’s heart skipped.

Sara slammed into her like a battering ram, her arms clamping around her. “He’s been shot! He’s in surgery, but he…he…” she stopped, her sobs overwhelming her.

No.
Fi’s mind glitched.

“Fi?”
Asher’s voice was distant, foggy.

She sank to her knees
.

-------
------ Fi ------------

The
words struck and bounced like pebbles off a window.
Sean. Shot. Sean. Shot.
Her brain was a white sheet, snapped clean of thought by the wind. Had the “nothing” returned? She blinked.

Then her mind peeled back
like a blistering sunburn and she was staring down into a grave at a small white coffin. The lid flew open and five-year-old Sean grinned up at her. An electric flash of agony blew through her, sending her atoms scattering and spinning away.

Sean
.

Shot
.

Her chest heaved
as she buckled, sliding from Sara’s grasp. She sucked and gasped, but every breath was a trickle of acid down a burning throat. She couldn’t get that grin out of her mind. Sean grinning, poking her on the bus. Sean, grinning, even when she’d put him down on the mat. Sean, grinning and pink as a seashell, when she’d introduced him to Sara. It was the first time she’d ever wished to have the “nothing” back. On her hands and knees, she gasped for air, pressing her forehead to the ground and begging it to swallow her up.

Somehow Asher
tugged her to her feet and maneuvered both her and Sara to the makeshift hospital, but it was a blur. She was a balloon, tethered to Earth by her husband’s grasp on her wrist. Now
she
was the “nothing,” moving where told, nodding when spoken to. The faces floated past, as ephemeral and airy as a dream.

“It’s lucky that you’re
O+, Fi,” Doc Ron Cooper was saying, sliding his glasses back up onto his nose as he connected the tube that ran from her arm to Sean’s. “It’s the most that anyone could do for him now.”

Her head bobbed but she couldn’t tear her mind away from the burn of her blood as it left her…and entered him.
He was white, a shade most books would refer to as “waxy” or “chalky,” but it seemed more “deathly” to her and she couldn’t bear to look at him. She hoped her blood would fill him up, turning him pink from his toes to his scalp until his dark eyes opened and squeezed, ready to poke fun at her again.

Every whispered word from the medics drove her pain deeper, farther inside of her.

“Blood loss, that’s the real worry.”

Acid
.

“…
about secondary infection? Sepsis?”

Knives
.

“Not enough morphine for all of them.”

Needles
.

“Doc says he could still be ok, Fi.”
This from Hannah Lemly, the only one whose eyes were darker and puffier than Sara’s.

Sara.
Fi’s heart closed in on itself, folding into smaller and smaller bits until it became a single point, heavy and dense. The only thing clear in the entire world right now was Sara. She was a curled seedling, blackening and dying at his side. No tall Amazonian with streaming hair. No girl made of sinew and fire and spit. She was shadow, negative space, naught.

When the transfusio
n was done, Doc Ron insisted that Fi leave and get some rest. At this point, he said, they just had to wait for Sean to wake up. She started to protest when one of the medics reached for Sara. They wanted her to leave as well.

An alarm tripped and roared to life in Fi’s head
as she took in the bobbed hair and tunic of the man reaching for Sara. There was a glint of metal and Fi lunged, slamming the Truther medic back against the wall. “Don’t,” she growled, unsure for a second whether she meant the struggling medic or Sara, who now stood behind her with her daggers in her hands and bloodlust in her eyes.

The
Truther medic wrestled free of Fi’s grasp. He pointed at Sara, shaking. “She…she was going to
hurt
me and I’m only trying to help. We’re helping you. Even after you attacked us.”

Sara roared and Asher stepped between them,
holding her back. “Enough! This is a hospital!” He turned to the medic. “Leave now. Go help others.”

Fi dropped her head, exhausted.
“And the girl stays,” she added. She didn’t even have time to ask why the Truthers were helping. It didn’t matter. “We’ll go.” As they turned to leave she couldn’t help looking back, her gaze scanning the busy medics. Her eyes narrowed when they came across Dr. Rossi, the Truther who’d cut Sara at her Baptism, leaning over a soldier laid out on a picnic table.

Asher
tugged at her sleeve. “C’mon, Fi. It’s ok. Doc Ron will watch over them.”

Fi didn’t register the words.
All she saw was her sister, bent and broken over the body of her brother. She pointed at the Truther medic who still stood nearby, flushed and muttering. “You.” She took a step toward him and he cowered. She closed the gap in two more steps and jabbed her finger into his chest, her eyes locked on his. “You tell Rossi that if he touches either one of them, I’ll kill him. You get me?” Asher grabbed her wrist and dragged her out the door.

She almost fought him, her mind cons
idering hammering his chest in protest as she had when she’d gone into labor.

“Fi!”

She whirled.
Lucy was striding toward her with Luke in her arms and Kiara and Zoe in tow. Fi’s chest tightened. Already hollow from starvation, Lucy’s eyes had sunken inside of her. They were hooded, their spark hidden deep within, in a place where daughters got cancer and sons were shot saving little girls.

Luke fussed and snorted as Lucy handed him over.
“This guy’s real hungry for a little thing.” Her eyes filled. “That’s good. Good appetite.”

Fi
took her son gratefully, avoiding Lucy’s eyes. She held him and fought the urge to squeeze him too hard. He waved his fists, unmoved by her love while he still felt hunger pangs. She knelt to hug Kiara. “You ok, Ki? And Zo?”

“Yeah.”
Zoe popped her thumb in her mouth, to Fi’s surprise. She hadn’t sucked her thumb in years.

Kiara hugged Fi
fiercely and then let go. “I heard about Uncle Sean.”

Lucy’s face crumpled
as she put her hand to her mouth and turned away. Fi didn’t move. She held her sister’s gaze. Something about the need in Kiara’s eyes kept her from faltering. “He’s going to make it, Ki. Did you hear that too?”

Kiara’s eyes filled as she shook her head.

“Well he is. All of our strongest people lined up to give him their blood, and their love…and their bones and flesh if need be.” She hugged Kiara tight. “Do you understand?”

Kiara hiccupped and nodded.

Lucy swept Zoe up in her arms.
Her lips were white with pressure. “How is he?” Her words were clipped, staccato.

T
he tears came, against Fi’s will. “We don’t know. Doc says it’s a good chance.” It was all she could manage. The acid was burning her throat again and her chest was falling in on itself, the breath pushing out, out, out, only, and never in. She turned and gulped. “A good chance, he said.”