“I do believe we have some talking to do.” She couldn’t hide the quake in her voice or the fear in her eyes.
“I should just have Eve shoot you right now,” he seethed.
“Trust me,” I said, my jaw clenched tight. “It took everything I had in me not to.”
“Elijah,” Royce barked, turning. Elijah limped forward. There was a shirt tied tightly around his calf, no doubt stopping up a bullet wound. “Watch her people. I swear, if any of them makes a wrong move, shoot them.”
Protests were shouted and firearms were raised again.
“You will do as he says!” Margaret bellowed and instantly the contention died. “You will stand down until I come out. You will wait for my word.”
Eyes shifted and fingers remained poised on their triggers. But they did lower their weapons. Elijah and his team quickly surrounded the Undergrounders.
“Move,” Royce commanded.
Avian stepped forward as if to follow us and Royce immediately threw up a hand. “Now isn’t the time to be the protective boyfriend,” he said, his voice quiet so the entire crowd wouldn’t hear him. “I released you because you’re needed out here. This right now is between the three of us.”
Avian met my eyes and for a moment there was pain and panic there. I could only nod and try to assure him that somehow, everything was going to be okay.
There was a loud, large crowd just inside the hospital doors. Guards, including Tristan, stood armed and ready with the masses behind them.
“Move!” Royce bellowed as we made our way through the crowd toward the stairs. The tension inside of me built as we ascended.
How much time did we have before we were all dead?
As soon as Royce closed the door to his office he turned and shoved Margaret back into a chair. Her eyes grew wide with fear as she fell back.
Good.
“What have you done?” he growled. He placed his hands on each of the arm rests, his face again coming within an inch of hers.
“If you weren’t going to use that Pulse on your own, we thought we’d force you to see reason,” she started explaining in a shaky breath. “It was all too easy to plant false information and stage a supposed escape. We knew you’d listen to one of your own soldiers. You would never suspect she was in fact the beacon.”
Royce slapped Margaret across the face. The sound was sharp and startling. Margaret jerked to the side, her hair whipping across her face.
“How far is that beacon going to reach?” he demanded.
Margaret faced forward again, her mouth slightly agape, her eyes not quite meeting Royce’s. Her hand rose to her cheek gingerly. “We had no certain way to test it. But we estimated it would reach at least five-hundred-miles.”
Royce was silent for a moment. I had little doubt he was calculating the size of the cities within that five-hundred-mile radius.
“There is about to be over a million Bane flooding into this city. We were in the middle of an evacuation but there is no way we will get everyone out in time. And we have no way to defend ourselves,” Royce said. “What do you have to say about that?”
We heard a shot fired, followed by another.
Royce swore and we both sprinted for the stairwell.
“Do you have any idea how much time we have before they start arriving?” Royce asked as we ran.
I shook my head, tightening my grip on my handgun, wishing I had more firepower. “We were clear for at least seventy five miles. Three hours?”
Royce swore again as we sprinted through the lobby and back out the front doors. There was the faint sound of glass shattering.
The crowd had disbanded again and the fighting resumed.
Elijah lay on the ground, pressing fingers into a bleeding wound in his chest.
Avian had another man pinned beneath him and his fist connected with the man’s face. Even West was in the brawl at this point, scuffling in the dirt, his hands wrapped around a soldier’s throat.
Down the street another shot was fired.
A woman from the Underground tried rushing the entrance to the hospital. I threw myself at her, knocking her to the ground. We rolled to the ground and she hitched the barrel of her gun up into my stomach.
My breath caught in my throat and I froze on top of her.
“You don’t have to do this,” I said, my voice breathy. “We are about to be invaded. We don’t have time for all this fighting.”
“You’re one to talk,” she spat. “After you just murdered Margaret?”
“What?”
The woman shoved me off of her and pointed somewhere just behind me.
There was broken glass everywhere. And in the middle of it was Margaret.
She was dead. There was no question about it. Her right arm was bent back underneath her at an impossible angle. Her neck was cocked sharply to the left, broken. There were huge chunks of glass embedded into her skin and blood poured from her lifeless body.
“She jumped,” I said, my voice horrified and disgusted. I’d heard glass shatter just before Royce and I had gotten back outside.
Royce told her how she’d killed everyone, and she jumped to her death.
“Don’t lie to me,” the woman said, her voice harsh and emotional. She wedged the barrel of her gun back between my ribs.
“No,” I insisted, meeting her brown eyes again. “I promise you, that wasn’t us.”
The woman’s features hardened and she shook her head as she cocked the trigger.
I spun quickly, grabbing her wrist as I did. With a quick flip of my own hand, I pulled the gun from her grasp and completed the spin to turn and point both my own firearm and hers at her chest.
“I will not fire unless I have to,” I said quietly. “But right now I am not your enemy. There are about to be hundreds of thousands of Bane flooding this city and I am your only shot at staying alive and human.”
And then I knew exactly what I had to do.
Throwing the gun out of her reach, I turned east.
There was a wide open desert out there where no people would get hurt. A wide open desert big enough to hold the enemy that would soon be arriving.
I scanned the fighting crowd for Avian but he was nowhere in sight.
There would be no time for a goodbye.
I dashed around the side of the hospital and dropped down into the garage. I hopped on an oversized ATV. It would get me through the mountains, over the rough terrain, and it would do it quickly.
The engine growled to life and I shot out of the garage.
The crowd parted as I ripped down the street. Members of New Eden shouted after me as I moved. But Royce, Gabriel, and Avian were nowhere in sight.
Spotting Bill, I slowed momentarily. He caught sight of me and I waved him over. He rushed the ATV and hopped on, grabbing onto the cargo rack.
“You’re going to head them off, aren’t you?” he asked, his eyes serious and dark.
“There’s no other way,” I said. “We’re all dead if I don’t do something.”
Bill nodded, glancing back at the fighting crowd. They had barely paused when I barreled through them. “Hopefully there are still some of us left to save.”
And then West shot through the crowd, stumbling over debris. He stopped next to the ATV, his hands braced on his knees for a moment as he caught his breath.
“I’m sorry I lied, again, Eve,” he said, looking up at me with regret on his face. He straightened and pulled something from the cargo pocket of his pants and extended it towards me.
His grandfather’s notebook.
“The truth is in there,” he said. “You’re going to hate me for hiding it, but it’s there.”
In that moment, there wasn’t anything to say. I took the notebook and looked back at the fighting masses, my heart hurting.