CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Eve was watching her papa. He was struggling with the two opposing forces. He was weak, and vulnerable, and ready to fall off the fence in either direction. Eve was close to tears as she watched him toss and turn in his bed feverishly, his eyelids fluttering with, no doubt, terrible dreams.
They were the only ones in the room. Her brothers and sisters had risen and left a couple of hours ago to be out in the daylight.
She was deeply upset that her papa might be the next victim of this malicious human sickness, but as she reminded herself, she couldn't let it take her down, as well. After all, humans weren't the real enemy. It was their nature, something that had been a part of their existences for thousands of years. It would be easy to blame them for taking her papa's life, not to mention the rest of her family, and vow revenge, but she must not let that happen. She must stay firm and true in her love for her papa, but not let selfish ambition betray her.
She looked up at the sunrays coming in through the window. She felt her heart jolt when she thought suddenly of Autumn. He, on the other hand, was no longer struggling. Unknowingly, he had lost his battle and would soon lose his life. But who, Eve thought, would he take down with him? She felt saddened by the loss of her brother and fearful for what may lay ahead.
Lir, too, was vengeful. She could only thank God that Benjamen and Nela were still untouched.
A shivering in the ferns outside echoed the excitement that was building among the townspeople. Something was about to happen, and the men and women knew it. Eve, on the other hand, knew what it was. Autumn.
Something strange happened at the airbase just hours after they sent the latest probe. It returned to them, intact, as though it had started on its course, stopped, then turned right back around to come back.
It puzzled General Garrison. "Didn't you tell it to go close to the anomaly?" he asked.
"Yes, sir. We ordered it on a course 300 knots from the center of the storm."
They were calling it "the storm" now, for lack of a better term.
"Well, did you goof up on the programming? Did the probe, somehow, malfunction?"
"No, sir. We checked the log three times, and our calculations were right on course. As for the probe itself, well, you can take a look at it, it's in the observation room. Our technicians have found no malfunctions or abnormalities."
Suddenly they were interrupted by a young technician with wavy blond hair. "Sir, you better come look at this."
Garrison grumbled. If this was yet another person who didn't know how to do his job, he was about ready to quit his own job.
But when he was face-to-face looking at it, he could scarcely believe what he was seeing. On the screen was the very same probe they claimed was sitting in the observation room, only it was sailing directly towards the mouth of the storm.
"My God, how can that be?" He got up and rushed to the room where the probe was supposed to be. The young technician followed him. "Sir, we lost it when the signal went off. We just rediscovered its location, and apparently, it's gotten closer to the storm than we had hoped."
The general pushed his way through several people and barged through the door.
There it was. Fully intact, glittering with lights, it was the probe.
He pulled up the picture of the same probe on the nearest console. Before his very eyes, he saw both duplicates at the exact same time.
"General Garrison..."
"Not now."
He rubbed his forehead, not even knowing where to begin to try and find an explanation for this.
"General Garrison, the reason why the probe has gotten closer to the storm than we had hoped is because the storm is sucking it up."