A
plan was laid out as the Evolution crushed mankind, a plan that was right under
Eden’s nose all along. And Eve is the key to everything. New Eden—mankind—they
have a small chance at fixing their dismembered planet.
But
it will be a reckless sprint against time and the coming Bane to retrieve the
final piece to the plot. New Eden’s worst fears have become reality. The Bane
are back in the city and they’re smarter and more aggressive than ever. They
know where the humans are and they’re coming to finish what they’ve nearly
completed.
Eve has been content with the family she’s
found—Avian, West, Gabriel, Royce. But she’s about to discover she may have the
one family Eve never thought she would: blood. With
every odd stacked against her, all the lies and all the secrets of her origins
will be exposed.
The
past and the future are about to come full circle.
About the Author
Keary
Taylor grew up along the foothills of the Rocky Mountains where she started
creating imaginary worlds and daring characters who always fell in love. She
now resides on a tiny island in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and
their two young children. She continues to have an overactive imagination that
frequently keeps her up at night. She is the author of THE EDEN TRILOGY, the
FALL OF ANGELS trilogy, and WHAT I DIDN'T SAY.
Except
“Start checking
vehicles,” I said, racing across the street to a parking lot. “Maybe
we’ll find something with keys.”
“Eve,” West said as we
started yanking car doors open. “You know if that kid was infected that
it’s too late for Avian. He’ll get infected.”
I shook my head, my
jaw set hard. “No,” I said as I checked another car. No keys.
“There’s a chance the boy wasn’t infected. And if it just barely
happened, he won’t be able to spread the infection for a few hours.”
But even as I made my
argument, I knew it wasn’t true. Those bodies had been dead for days,
maybe even over a week. If the kid was infected, TorBane would be fully
saturated into his system.”
“Got it!” West
shouted. He held up a pair of keys as a floor mat came tumbling out of the
truck. “Get in!”
I hopped into the
passenger seat and slammed the door shut. I tossed our supplies in the
back seat. “You don’t know how to drive,” I said, my voice breathy.
“Today seems like a
good day to learn,” West said, shoving the key in the ignition.
The truck clicked and
sputtered. It had been a sitting, rusting dinosaur for six years.
We’d been stupid to think any of these vehicles might start.
“Come on!” West
shouted, pounding the steering wheel. He slammed one of the pedals with
his foot and suddenly it roared to life. “Yes!”
“That there puts it
into drive, I think,” I said, pointing to the stick on the side of the driving
column.
West yanked on it and
the truck jerked backwards and slammed into the vehicle behind us.
“Okay,” West said,
shifting the stick again. “R stands for reverse. So D for drive?”
“Let’s assume,” I
said, my blood racing and pounding in my ears. “Let’s go!”
D was indeed for drive
and we rocketed forward, clipping another vehicle as we swung wildly out of the
parking lot and onto the street.
“That woman was
touched,” I said, bracing myself as we swerved madly. “She had probably
gone out to look for food or something when a Hunter must have found her.
West, this means they’re starting to come back into the city.”
The speedometer crept
up to eighty miles an hour as we peeled back onto the onramp. Just as we
pulled onto the freeway, there was a figure ahead of us. There was no
time to stop and the truck plowed right into it.
The mechanical body
broke right in half, completely cybernetic by this time. The upper half
of the body crashed into the windshield, shattering it.
We both screamed as
the glass burst into tiny glittering pieces and an arm dangled between the two
of us.
“Holy…” West bellowed
as the truck swerved violently back and forth and we ran over the lower half of
the body.
“Keep driving!” I
shouted. I was about to reach for the shoulders of the body, when its
hand suddenly flung out at me, and wrapped around my throat.
West swore
loudly. “It’s still alive?!”
“Keep…” I gasped for
air as West swerved in an attempt to put distance between himself and the Bane
that was somehow still attacking. “Driving!”
Wrapping my hands
around the wrist, I squeezed until the cybernetic bones crumpled and bent and
the hand let go. Plowing the heel of my hand into what was left of where
its nose should have been, its head whipped back with a sickening crunch.
The thing was instantly still.
But still carrying
active TorBane.
I coughed violently,
unbuckling my seatbelt.
“You okay?” West
asked, wild fear in his eyes as he attempted to drive straight. He leaned
as far to the left as possible, attempting to put some space between him and
the mangled Bane.
“Yeah,” I
croaked. My throat was probably bruised. “Keep driving. I’ll take
care of this.”
I half stood as well
as I could in the cramped space. Placing my hands on its shoulders, I
gave a good shove. The body slid forward two feet and to the right.
But one of its arms slipped down the front of the hood and caught in the grill.
“Oh, come on,” West
said, looking at the body in disbelief.
“Keep driving,” I
repeated. I used my boot to knock out the rest of the glass hanging
around the frame of the window. Crawling up onto the dash, I slowly
worked my way out onto the hood of the truck.
As we drove over the
bumpy freeway, the arm wedged its way tighter and tighter into the grill.
Finally, I simply snapped the arm off at the elbow. The rest of the body
crashed to the ground. I tried yanking the rest of the arm free, but it wouldn’t
budge.
“Get back in here,
Eve!” West shouted. “We can have it melted down later. Sit down
before I kill you!”
An amused chuckle
worked its way through my lips as I carefully climbed back up the hood and into
the vehicle.
“Well, this turned
into an exciting day,” West said, shaking his head.
“Yeah, I think the
Bane are getting back into the city,” I said, pushing my windblown hair back
off my forehead. “That store was supposed to be fifteen miles inside our
perimeter. They’ll be getting back into the center of the city
soon. I thought I’d cleared all of them out for five hundred miles after
the beacon went off.”
“Just another day in
the world of the Evolution,” West said. “Must have been a Sleeper that
recently woke up. It could have been inactive when you called them all
out to the desert.
“For once, could the
element of time just be on our side?” I said, exasperated.
“What,” West said,
smiling at me as he swerved around a particularly large crack in the
road. “And make life simple and boring?”
I shook my head and
laughed. “Seriously.”
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