Razor barbed wire and electric fencing reinforced the barricade on the other side of the dam, which required all of our foot and vehicle traffic to use the main gate. But that didn’t stop the mobs from gathering outside both walls to get a glimpse through the metal bars.
The woman strode toward us, a hand on her pregnant belly and her long legs eating up the distance. None of the soldiers accompanied her, and the look of determination etching her pixie-like features compelled me to step forward. But Roark stopped me, his arms holding my back to his chest.
“Let her come to us.” He glanced over his shoulder at the elevators. “The crowd is contained, but we want to keep ye close.”
“Contained how? What if spiders come? All those people—”
“We have patrols around the perimeter.” Jesse leaned a hip against the ledge beside me, arms crossed, and his bow on his back. “Hundreds of troops are spread out within a two mile radius of the dam.”
They must’ve brought in Link’s army from Vegas, and they’d kept me in the dark about what was going on.
I studied Jesse’s relaxed posture for concealed signs of tension and found none. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Before he could answer, the woman closed the final distance and stopped within arm’s reach.
She stood a head taller than me, her body firm and toned despite the roundness of her stomach. A very large stomach. Probably due any day. Sweat sheened her scalp, and her cropped blonde hair stuck to her hairline. She watched me with shrewd gray eyes, but I didn’t miss the slight tremble in her hands as she rested them over her belly. Why was she nervous?
She licked her bottom lip and lowered her head, peering up at me through her lashes. “You’re Eve?”
“Evie.”
“Evie,” she breathed, and it sounded like a plea. Or a prayer. “You’re…” Her gaze roamed my face. “You’re as beautiful as they say.”
“Uh…thank you?” Embarrassed and completely off guard, I rubbed the back of my neck, sweating like a hog with my gut hanging out. “Who’s they?”
She glanced behind her at the armed men and returned to me. “Whoever has seen you, I guess. Your name is whispered on every breath from here to the coast.”
Questions lumped in my throat, but I managed to remember my manners. “What’s your name?”
Her shoulders squared, even as her chin remained tucked to her chest. “Selene.”
“Where did you come from?”
She looked around at my guardians. “They didn’t tell you?”
I clenched my teeth. They hadn’t told me shit. Jesse and Michio watched our interaction with soft smiles and even softer eyes. And Roark, still curved around my back, brushed my wet hair from my face and kissed my shoulder.
I returned my attention to Selene. “You’re from the coast? Which one?”
Her trousers and tank top were clean, bearing a few haphazard stitches over holes and tears. No blood, dirt, or injuries. She didn’t appear to have fought her way here, but her athletic physique and strong eye-contact suggested she could hold her own.
“I’m from Minnesota originally, but I came here from Oregon.” Her eyes clouded, and she blinked it away. “I escaped one of the Drone’s breeding facilities.”
My insides flipped and tumbled, and my questions poured out, each one more rushed than the one before. “How? How many women? Where is it? Do you know where the other facilities are? Oh my God, are there still women at—”
“Evie.” Michio gave me a stern look. “Let her speak.”
When I gave her a nod, she explained how she and three hundred other pregnant women used chains, forks, and whatever makeshift weapons they could find to fight their way out of a tunnel system beneath Oregon State Hospital. They managed to kill the thirty spiders and human men imprisoning them, but only seventy women made it out alive. She knew nothing about the other facilities or how to find them, and she had never seen an aphid—only heard about them. She said there hadn’t been any known aphid sightings since the day the Drone died.
My breaths scattered beneath the gravity of her news, and my fingers trembled against my lips.
She straightened her spine. “When we were cured, some of the human men…the men who…” She glanced ruefully at her belly and cleared her throat. “They explained a few things, such as how the world died with the Drone’s virus and was rebuilt with the blood of one woman. His queen.”
Fierce resentment growled through my voice. “I was never his queen.”
“I know. But it wasn’t until we escaped and asked questions of every man and woman we passed that we learned who you really were and the salvation you would bring.”
There was that word from Roark’s discourse on Our Lady of Akita. Salvation. I couldn’t see his face behind me, but I bet those jade eyes were glowing like the Virgin’s mandorla.