Once An Eve Novel

universally bad. Life after the plague seemed to prove that, over and over again. But there were also the few who still remembered husbands or past loves fondly. Many called Regina and me hopeless, to our faces and behind our backs. But when I awoke in the middle of the night, my hands searching the bed for where Caleb should’ve been, hopeless seemed too mild a term for how love made me feel.
    Delia and Missy were arguing now, the packed tables quieting as their voices grew louder. Everyone’s attention shifted to their side of the room. “Let it be! Enough!” Delia yelled. She gripped her drink, letting the green coin clink around the bottom of the glass.
    “Just tell her,” Missy urged. She turned around in her seat, waving frantically at me. “Eve! Hey, Eve—”
    Delia reached over the table and gave Missy one good push, sending her tumbling backward onto the floor. “I told you to shut it,” she said. Missy rubbed her head where it had met the hard wood. “Just shut your stupid mouth,” Delia continued. She got up and started around the table, but Maeve pulled her back.
    “All right now. Enough.” Maeve glanced around the room. “Guess you two need to learn to slow down. Isis—get them to bed, will you?” Her eyes darted to me and Arden, as if gauging our reactions.
    “Tell me what?” I asked, still stuck on Missy’s words.
    Isis laughed. “Missy’s just drunk—right, Delia?” she urged. Delia wiped the sweat from her forehead, but didn’t respond.
    “Somebody saw him,” Missy muttered, brushing the dirt off her pants. She was speaking so low I had to stoop down to hear. “Someone saw that boy Caleb. She knows,” she repeated, pointing at Delia again.
    Maeve stood and grabbed Missy’s other arm, helping her up. “That’s silly. This is just—”
    “I didn’t want to tell you,” Delia started, cutting her off. Everyone in the hall was quiet. Even Betty had stopped talking, standing silently behind the bar with a stack of dirty dishes in her hands. “But when I was in the city the other day, scavenging for supplies, I ran into a Stray. I’d seen him around last week. He’d asked me where I’d come from, where I was heading—”
    “You said nothing, right?” Maeve interrupted, her voice flat.
    “Of course,” Delia snapped. She was calmer now that she was in Isis’s and Maeve’s grip. She refused to look them in the eye. “He had tried to barter with me for my boots. And then the other day he pointed to the new ones he was wearing and laughed, saying he’d stolen them from a guy he found out on Route Eighty.”
    Every part of me was awake, alive, my fingers and toes pulsing with energy. “What did they look like … the boots?”
    Delia wiped the corners of her mouth, where a thin coat of spittle had formed. “They were brown with green laces. Came up to about here.” She pointed to the soft flesh above her ankle.
    I let out a deep breath, determined to keep calm. They sounded like the boots Caleb had worn as he walked beside me, winding our way through the city streets. I couldn’t be certain. “Was the boy alive?”
    “He said he found him in that furniture warehouse on the side of the road, in that stretch right before San Francisco,” she said, looking at one of the older women. “IKEA? He said that he was badly injured. His leg was infected from a stab wound.”
    I only saw Delia’s lips moving, heard the words that were coming out of her mouth. I tried to process them one by one. “Where? Where is that?”
    “Now listen.” Maeve put up her hands. “This is probably just a rumor. There’s nothing to prove that—”
    “He could be dead by now,” I said softly, the thought even more frightening now that I’d spoken it aloud.
    Isis shook her head. “He was probably making it up. He’s a Stray.”
    Regina was smiling. “She loves him. She can’t just leave him out there.”
    A few of the women started to agree, but Maeve raised her hand to silence them. “No one is going to find Caleb,” Maeve announced. “Because Caleb isn’t even there. The Stray probably lied. They always do.” Then she turned to me, her face full of concern. “Besides, we couldn’t have you going back into the wild now, not with the King after you.”
    All I heard were the intentions lurking behind each word. You will never leave here , she seemed to say. I won’t let you . She grabbed my arm and ushered me out, following close behind Isis, who was taking Delia. A