Eve of Man (The Harvest Book 2) (16 page)

“That’s why I feel so... so strong?”

Eve nodded.

Austin thought this over. He had so many more
questions, but didn’t know where to begin.  “How old is he?” Austin nodded at
Caleb.

“I’m seven,” Caleb announced, not content with being
ignored after having waited so long to meet his father in person.

Austin turned to Eve. “How is that possible? We were
on Bliss only two months ago.”

“He will be fully grown by the ninth moon,” Eve
responded.

“And when is that?”

“By the ninth month of Earth’s calendar,” Caleb
replied.

Austin marinated on this for a moment. “That doesn’t
answer my question.”

“You want to know if he’s human,” Eve stated. “He’s
not. He’s Adita, with a few human traits. Those that were the best of you.”

 “I’m a species that has never existed before,” Caleb
announced in a proud voice.

Austin knelt on one knee and looked Caleb in the eyes.
They were the same clear blue as Austin’s, not a speck of black anywhere. His
hair was blonde and his complexion healthy, human. He saw nothing of Eve and
despite his desire to find something of Roxanne, she wasn’t visible in the
boy’s features either. In him, Austin only saw himself. Austin pulled Caleb to
him, hugging him tight. His heart ached for many reasons. This was his son, yet
he felt him a stranger. As a father he would never experience sleepless nights,
diapers, or first steps to video and send out to friends and family. Austin
leaned back from Caleb. He hadn’t thought about his own mother in a long time.
She’d abandoned him as a child, never to be heard from again. He’d never tried
to find her and she’d never contacted him. She was Caleb’s grandmother and he’d
no idea if she was alive. He hugged Caleb again, vowing his son would not grow
up without his parents, like he and Eve, like...like Roxanne.

Roxanne. He repeated her name, pondering over his thoughts,
over a specific thought, one he hadn’t considered until now. Roxanne had been
born in Russia and was orphaned when only a baby. An American couple adopted
her, but again tragedy struck when she was five and they were killed in a plane
crash. From there Roxanne bounced around the foster care system until she
turned eighteen and vanished from the state’s records. No one cared. It was one
less in millions for the overworked, underpaid social workers to worry about.

Agra had said Austin never knew the human Roxanne. Had
he been the maestro behind her parent’s death, planning for Austin to fall in
love with her and have a child? Had Agra targeted Roxanne because of her lack
of family ties? Or was Agra responsible for the tragedies that orphaned
Roxanne? The questions swarmed around inside his mind. He didn’t have the
answers, but she did. Eve did.

Austin kissed Caleb on the forehead and stood up. “Who
are you? Who are you really?”

 Eve heard his unspoken questions, understood his
anxiety over the past. “If truths are what you desire I will tell them.”

“Yes. I want to hear them, all of them,” Austin
replied without hesitation.

Eve didn’t mock him with a doubtful smile. In her
experience humans were skilled in denying the truth, were quick to turn deaf
ears to the truth and, even more so, were incapable of comprehending the
meaning of such. For Austin, though, the truth might be all that was acceptable,
no matter how difficult hearing the words might be for him. He would listen
with an attentive mind and understand the meaning behind her words. She
directed him out to the living room where they sat, he on the couch, and she on
a chair facing him. In between, Caleb, who knew most of the story, occupied
himself with his toys.

 “Most all of what I am about to share I learned after
arriving on Paru. Some parts were told to me by Agra and Arati, others I found
through listening to those around me. I have few memories of my own from the
time before my people left Earth,” Eve began. “Agra told you the Adita are one
of the oldest civilizations to exist and the first to occupy this planet. This
he spoke in truth. As he did about the human’s disease causing my people to
flee. However, in the period prior to the spread of the disease the Adita
prospered and multiplied. Not all unions were pure. Many Adita males took to
keeping human females as servants. Many of these ownerships produced offspring,
as the males often mated with their servants. In the beginning the Elders
granted permission for these offspring to live. But from these unions a stronger
human evolved, one that questioned their place in the evolutionary chain. The Elders
decided having them continue to breed was a threat to the Adita’s way of life.
From then on all Adita males were forbidden to reproduce with humans. The
Elders took this decree a step further by ordering all humans carrying the
Adita gene to be eradicated.”

“Eradicated?”

“Beheaded and burned. Any Adita caught disobeying was beheaded.
Humans were burned, usually alive.”

“Like the witch hunts back in the fifteenth century.”

Eve nodded, but knew that witch hunts, in one form or
another, occurred all throughout human history, including modern day. “Shortly
after the eradication, the disease began to spread. Thousands of Svan and Adita
perished. My people evacuated the planet, leaving me behind. At this point my
own memories begin, at this point I first heard the voice. My father of course,
but I didn’t know who or what he was, only that I should listen and obey his commands.”

“And it was Agra that led you to me?”

“Yes. Although many were tested before you, I knew as
soon as I saw you, and smelled your blood that you were the human he’d been
searching for.”

“And Roxanne?”

“Agra’s doing. He instructed me to take on her persona,
her features, her characteristics. He identified her as being a good match, one
you would be attracted to.”

Austin mulled this over. “So what about Caleb? How was
he possible?”

“Our union was the first of its kind. An Adita woman
would never consider carrying a human’s spawn. It was beneath them. Of course my
father didn’t tell me this until after we met face to face.”

 Austin laughed, sarcastic and disbelieving.
“Otherwise you never would have,” he paused, “never would have mated with me.”

“No I would not have. Not in those days anyway.” She
looked over at Caleb. “Things do change.”

“Was any of it real?” Austin asked and wished he
hadn’t.

“You want to know if Roxanne loved you. I was her, so
the answer is no.”

“Ouch, that hurts.” Austin’s hand went to his heart in
jest, but the pain he felt was genuine.

“Adita do not love, we survive.”

“Charming people.” Austin couldn’t keep the sarcasm
out of his voice, the wounds of the past were too fresh.

“Charms get you nowhere. Knowing your place in the
universe is all that has meaning. Humans do not know why they exist. You
function on emotions and without real purpose. We function on instinct our
purpose is to survive above all others. You squander the strongest agile
specimen on fields of sport, playing silly games. You hunt not to provide food,
but for sport. Your soldiers are led by governments not generals, and are ill-equipped--”

“Hold up there,” Austin interrupted. “Our military is
not ill-equipped.”

“On a level playing field I would agree with you, but you
are no longer on that field and the rules have changed. You have no idea of
what is out there, beyond your planet, beyond your comprehension. Do you think
the Adita are the worst thing that could have happened to your people?”

After a minute of thought Austin shook his head. Eve
was right, things had changed. Up until a year ago he’d never given the
universe much thought, but he now understood how little he knew about anything
out beyond the stars. “What happened before you came to Deadbear?”

“I walked the Earth from the deserts to the seas to
the mountains searching, for what I did not know. I knew not who I was or where
I came from, but I knew I wasn’t like those around me. I listened to a voice
that guided me and at times abandoned me. During the dark years the voice was all
I had for company.”

“The dark years?”

“Many thousands of years after my people departed the
planet, the human population had dwindled close to extinction. Only a few
thousand remained. My life source was vanishing before my eyes and I was
powerless to stop the ebb. With no other means of survival, I faced a death,
but in the worst imaginable way.”

“What about animals? Couldn’t you survive on their
blood?”

“The seas had diminished to almost nothing, turning
the planet into a barren wasteland. Few animals remained, but the humans needed
those to live. Survival is a powerful motivator.” Eve paused, recalling Chase
and admiring his strong desire to live. “The voice told me to leave, to travel
in search of food. The only way I knew how to travel was on foot. Knowledge of
my powers was kept hidden from me. I trusted in the voice like a blind child.”

Austin took notice of her tone, the hint of tension in
her voice. Her face was relaxed and her eyes, as always, unreadable, but he
knew he hadn’t imagined hearing the underlying anger, maybe even hatred. “Go
on,” he encouraged.

“I traveled from the only home I knew, the place you
call Egypt, to a place named Cape Dezhnev located at the tip of Russia. I
walked nonstop for one hundred and fifty days, seven thousand miles, leaving
behind my only source of food. It was a death march through the land of the
dead. At the point I thought the journey a failure and my death imminent, I came
upon a small pack of humans. They were struggling to stay alive and losing. The
smell of their blood was so overwhelming and my hunger so consuming, but —”

“But you didn’t kill them,” Austin finished.

Her lip turned up at one corner, not in a smile, but maybe
something denoting twisted amusement. “No. I didn’t kill them. I persuaded them
to journey with me to the Cape. Three hundred miles remained before reaching my
destination. If I had arrived at the Cape and found it no more hospitable than
the land I’d left behind, my future would have been decided.”

“They were your back-up plan,” Austin noted. “To
ensure you wouldn’t starve to death.”

“Bravo captain,” Eve commended him. That he understood
the gravity of her situation was surprising, that his voice carried a note of
empathy she had not expected. Most would have called her actions inhumane or
barbaric, to which she would have pointed out she was neither.

“What did you find at the Cape?”

“An abundance of life. Colonies of people, wildlife,
crops, everything needed for sustained living. They were saved and so was I.”

“I guess ten thousand years ago Russia wasn’t the
frozen tundra it is today?”

“It was lush and thriving. Like the planet where my
people currently wait. Bliss as your generals called it. Paru as we know it.”

“Why won’t the Adita stay on Bliss, or Paru? Why come
back here?”

“This is home.” 

This answer seemed too simple, but Austin sensed she
didn’t have another to offer. “So what happened next?”

“I live amongst the humans in Russia. They worshipped
me as a god, offering up their own as sacrifices. I did not ask of them to do
this, they did so on their own accord. They thought of me as their protector,
which suited me better than hiding in the shadows, taking lives at random. I
stayed for several thousand years, before returning to Egypt and then to
America. The humans in your Russia grew in number, spreading out, repopulating
the planet. Soon racial lines blurred, new lines were created while others
faded away.” Eve glanced over at Caleb. “I knew the old from the new, the
strong from the weak.”

“How?”

“Your genetic code, DNA sequence you might call it. Each
unique to the owner, and what you can’t see, I can. Those with the strongest
genes are easy to distinguish and always prevail.” Eve took Austin’s arm and
turned it over. Using her finger tip, she traced his vein. “Your genetic
sequence is very old. It’s the strongest human sequence in existence, to ever
have existed. You are the descendent of a great warrior from a tribe of great warriors.
They survived the dark days on Earth, but as is always the case with your
species, they didn’t safeguard their lines. Eventually the superior genes were
lost amongst the inferior. Except for yours.”

Austin stared at his vein unimpressed. “How does Caleb
fit into Agra’s plan?”

“His plan,” she paused, choosing her words with caution
before continuing. “His plan is to protect the Adita’s way of life by improving
their DNA sequence, making it stronger than before.”

“You don’t sound like you’re on board with his plan.”

“On board?”

“That you agree with his vision for preservation of
life,” Austin clarified. “You say ‘their DNA’ not ‘our DNA’. As if you don’t
think of yourself as one of them.”

“I am one of them. And I believe in the preservation
of life.”

That wasn’t his question or the answer he was looking
for, but it occurred to him that she knew exactly what he’d asked and answered
by saying exactly what she’d meant. Eve didn’t mince words.