Third Wave: Bones of Eden Read online

  Third Wave

  By Zaide Bishop

  A new battle has begun, and the struggle to survive is not only for Eden but for the fate of all life on Earth

  Once divided, the Elikai and Varekai tribes have unified. Now called Kai, they’ve come to look beyond rebuilding their world to secure a life for the new Children of Eden. For the tribe leaders, there is another way to protect the future: revisit the past.

  In unearthing their origins as a people, in learning the truth behind the cataclysm that wiped out most of the world’s population, the few survivors will discover the very reason for their existence.

  They’ve never been more united—or more vulnerable to a new enemy. Their once-peaceful archipelago is now under threat from an army of outsiders with their own unfathomable purpose.

  The desperate families of Kai must make it back to the mainland. Before their dream of Eden mutates into a nightmare.

  Don’t miss the first two books in this series, First Fall and Second Heart, available now!

  This book is approximately 97,000 words

  Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Alissa Davis

  For Meg and Annie:

  You’re both my favorite, okay?

  Contents

  Part Five: The Tree of Knowledge

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Part Six: The Others

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Part Seven: The Last People

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Acknowledgments

  Also by Zaide Bishop

  About the Author

  PART FIVE:

  THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE

  Chapter One

  Eden—Before the World was Born

  Everything Teacher Steve had said was true. The Varekai were monsters. Outwardly they looked like Elikai, but inside they were rotten, twisted by cruelty or insanity. They had massacred the teachers, and now bodies littered Eden. It was impossible to move without bumping into corpses. Tare’s hands slid into pools of fetid, rotting flesh. Maggots wriggled as he crawled blindly across the dead turf. He could feel death caked on his skin, across his fingers, up his arm to his elbow, on his knees and shins, crusted between his bare toes.

  All of this in the unending blackness, so complete and unwavering, Tare was losing his mind. He wasn’t sure he remembered what things looked like anymore. Memories of faces seemed to be leaking away, replaced only with the sound of voices and the now-familiar scent of sour sweat.

  All the plants were dying. Without the sunlight and the fifteen-minute rain showers, they had withered. Some dried up, some melted into soggy mush. The food was running out.

  The chickens had stopped laying, and now the only food left was the animal feed. Dry corn and oats. The corn at least could be made into a paste, but they had no way to cook it. With the rot and death all around them, on their skin, Tare was afraid to eat—unable to see what else had fallen into the mortar and pestle with the corn.

  He was hungry, and the water in the pools was drying up and starting to smell. It seemed the rot from the corpses had found its way through the soil to the water and contaminated it. His piss was starting to stink and it stung as it was coming out. Dehydration was giving him headaches.

  Still, he persevered.

  The whoosh whack-clunk, whoosh whack-clunk as he swung the pick was the only sound. Sometimes bits of the wall would fly off and strike his bare chest, arms or even his face. Sometimes they drew blood. His hands were blistered, shoulders screaming in silent agony with every heft and strike.

  At first his brothers had helped, particularly when he showed them his progress, but now they were too exhausted or hungry or hopeless to bother. The tunnel into the wall was nearly four feet deep now. Sugar said the wall probably went on forever. That there would be no end to it and that Tare was digging for nothing.

  He couldn’t stay here any longer, though. He had to get out. He had to get away from the dark and the smell. The Varekai were in their own dome still, but sometimes the Elikai would hear them stalking around, seeking an escape. Tare hadn’t been the only one to piss himself with fear when the noises got closer.

  Those terrifying, confusing minutes, with doors opening and blood-streaked teachers bursting in. Tare had watched the Varekai bludgeon them to death. Watched other teachers fall and die with their eyes ruptured and blood flowing from their noses and mouths.

  Now, every waking moment was taut with the fear the Varekai would descend on him, tearing him to shreds. As his own hunger grew, he imagined them stripping his flesh and stuffing it into their mouths.

  The pinhole of light was so unexpected that it blinded him. He stumbled back, pain lancing into his head as he sank to his knees, damp and filthy hands pressed over his face.

  Slowly he peered around them, and for the first time in a week he saw his own fingers; his nail beds were raw and bloody, his hands gray with dirt and wet with sweat. The ruptured blisters on his hands looked like pulverized meat.

  He gave a horrified sob, then another of hope and desperation. He scrambled to the tiny hole, pressing his face to the jagged concrete and peering out. He could see a road and the square corner of a building, like in the videos the teachers made them watch. A fly buzzed past. It was sunny and hot.

  “Tare?” He could hear the movement of several of his brothers picking their way toward him but stopping short of the painful debris he had strewn around.

  “Help me!” he demanded, clawing at the wall with bare, bloody hands. The stone was unyielding, and he grabbed the pick again, slamming it against the stone with unskilled panic.

  “Stop it, you’ll break it!” Fox said.

  “Break what?” Tare paused only an instant.

  “The light!”

  “It’s not a light!” Tare said, frustration boiling over. “Help me, we have to get outside.”

  His brothers were dumbfounded. “Outside...what?” Sugar asked. His tone was gentle, wheedling, as if Tare had lost his mind.

  “Outside Eden!”

  Xícara tried to come closer but was almost hit by another wide swing of the pick. “Tare, there is nothing outside Eden. What can you mean, ‘outside’?”

  A fist-sized chunk of concrete fell away, and the light dazzled them, filling the empty space and illuminating all their faces. The street and building became a little clearer. A fresh breeze curled in, smelling of heat, baking tar and brine. It carried the sounds of seagulls and a deep, rolling grumble like thunder or machinery from somewhere nearby.

  “Oh...”

  For the first time in a week, Tare could see the shock on their filthy faces. He battered at the wall, ripping and tearing with the pick, an animal
need for freedom overwhelming any sense of pain.

  Another vicious thrust and a much larger chunk of concrete gave way, toppling outward into the fresh new world. The gap was now as big as a clipboard, and Tare lunged at it, his narrow shoulders and hips wriggling through. He ignored the stone that tore at his back and thighs, tumbling out onto a thin strip of overgrown grass beside the wall. A cheery sea breeze buffeted him. The sunlamp high overhead burned down with a brightness and intensity beyond anything Tare had ever known before.

  The ceiling rose up and up, far beyond reason, blue and white and filled with birds. The space terrified Tare, and if he had anything in him to piss, it would have been running down his leg. The street ran long in one direction, so far the buildings seemed to get smaller and smaller. The distance gave him vertigo, and he had to cling to the ground, as if he were suddenly just dust that might be swept in any direction, stupid and helpless in the vastness.

  His brothers were wriggling out behind him, and he could hear their cries of alarm. Inside, those who had yet to see were calling for the others to come, to escape into the light.

  Tare opened his mouth and croaked, trying to warn those still inside. They needed to stay. The darkness and hunger was a better fate. Anything to save them from the sheer, unending vastness of what Tare had unwittingly thrust them into.

  The words didn’t come, and one by one the Elikai wriggled into the light, and the world shifted in a way that meant they could never, ever go back.

  Sugar took a few tottering steps away from the vast, white wall behind them and onto the street. He stood, jaw slack, eyes wide. The grumbling Tare had heard was growing closer, and with it, the steady pounding of massive feet.

  The creature walked slowly into view. An unholy mix between an elephant and a giraffe with a horse’s head, some sixteen feet tall at the shoulder, with a body mass of fourteen tons. In the bestiary of the world before, the paraceratherium had been listed as extinct, the largest mammal ever to have walked the earth. Yet here it was. Behind it, close to a dozen more, some as small as cars, others towering almost as tall as their patriarch.

  Tare was rendered mute and stupid. At his side, Love was trembling violently, sinking down onto his hands and knees. The rules of Eden no longer applied.

  * * *

  Construction was progressing slower than usual, and India was trying not to lose her temper. The Varekai had been back in their village for a month, and only half their huts were rebuilt. They had left Pinnacle Island in much worse condition than usual, and the season’s devastation had been more extensive than they were anticipating. Finding materials for building was tricky without damaging any of the new island growth, and Charlie and Whiskey were not as much help as they would normally have been, which left India picking up the slack.

  Whiskey had been pregnant now for the entire wet season and several months prior to it. Nine whole months, by India’s count, and she just kept getting larger. Her belly was swollen beyond reason, sticking out in front of her as she waddled from place to place. They could feel the babies inside, kicking and wriggling in the womb.

  Seeing Whiskey like this, India was almost glad she hadn’t fallen pregnant yet herself. It was both fascinating and terrifying to see her sister so deformed. Even Whiskey’s breasts had swelled, as big now as Charlie’s.

  At six months now, and with a more regular food supply, Charlie had started to show too. She had kept it from the tribe for a time, but the bloating of her belly had become too noticeable, and she had finally confessed why she had been forced to drive the Elikai away to starve. She had not told Sugar yet, and India had convinced Tare to keep it from the other Elikai for now. He wasn’t happy about it, though he rarely saw his brothers. The tribes were still very much at odds.

  That each village now had one member of the opposite sex in residence, the Varekai with Tare and the Elikai with Romeo, was irrelevant. There was even a chance the birth of Whiskey’s offspring would bring about war again, with the Elikai demanding a share of the young.

  India had more pressing concerns, however.

  “Rinse, chop and on the gardens! Rinse, chop and on the gardens!” Her temper was reaching the end of its limits.

  Her garden had been ruined. A storm surge from the wide expanse of the ocean to the east had swamped the island, and almost all of the plants had withered over the summer. A few of the hardier fruit trees were still clinging to life, but without proper care, they would soon die.

  Without enough chickens to fertilize the soil, India had her sisters gathering seaweed off the beaches. The brown clumps then had to be thoroughly rinsed in the freshwater spring near the Varekai camp before being sliced as thinly as possible and turned into the soil to feed the seedlings. She would have preferred to cook it a little and start the breakdown of the fibers, but there was too much seaweed and they had too few large pots.

  “Is this really necessary?” Tango groaned, hauling another shoulder-load of sopping wet, salt-free seaweed to the circle of Varekai shredding it.

  “More than ever,” India said. “Who knows how many new mouths we will have to feed? Whiskey’s bitches have litters of nine, even twelve pups. Whiskey looks like she’s carrying an entire pack. What if, between Whiskey and Charlie, we have twenty new Varekai? What do you think they’re going to eat?”

  Tango paused, hands on her hips. “I see why you want to expand the gardens. But I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep in...” She paused, lips moving as she counted backward. “Well, a long time. Maybe since the start of summer. I’d prefer to be finishing my hut and lining it properly. If it rains again tonight, half of us are going to sleep wet.”

  “I know, but we’re not going to have any food grown before the babies arrive. We’re already behind schedule. I want to know I’ve done everything to make sure we’re fed.”

  “You’re amazing.” Tare appeared at her side, kissing India on the cheek. “Everything you do is a miracle.”

  She leaned into him. No matter how frustrated or tired she was, Tare was always the sweet taste amid the sour. “Less praise, more work.”

  He arched an eyebrow at her. “You sure? Seeing you boss everyone around makes me want to drag you off somewhere private so you can boss me around.”

  She wrinkled her nose. “While you’re dripping sweat and smell like dead crabs? I’ll pass.”

  “Then if you can spare me for the rest of the afternoon, I’d like to see how my brothers are faring.”

  “Will you tell them about this?” Tango asked. “About how we prepare the garden?”

  Tare nodded. India glanced at Tango, waiting to see if this annoyed or pleased her, but under the scars, her expression was unreadable. She simply nodded, turning away from them to take more seaweed to the pool.

  “Tell them they need to find black soil,” India told Tare. “The more sand in it, the less will grow. Pig and chicken poop, blood, fish scraps, seaweed, rotting plants—they’ll all make the soil better. No dog or Kai poop.”

  “I don’t think the Elikai have any dogs left, but I’ll tell them.”

  He kissed her on the temple, and she watched him leave, resisting the urge to call after him. To remind him of the things he needed not to say. The secrets he still had to keep.

  * * *

  Xícara lifted another stone into place, twisting and wriggling it until it fit snugly against the others. The stone-and-wood structures of the Elikai usually withstood the storm season, but this year the walls had crumbled, destroyed by storm surges and gale-force winds that had carried whole trees spinning through the air. In some cases even the foundations were completely absent, scattered into the trees or perhaps dragged out in the king tides to the shallow waters around the island. Being one of the largest of the Elikai, Xícara had been tasked with a lot of the heavy lifting.

  He saw the Varekai canoe gliding through the emeral
d water and straightened up, stretching the kinks out of his spine. He grinned when he saw who it was, then jogged down the beach to help Tare pull the craft out of the water. Xícara slapped him on the shoulder.

  “I didn’t recognize you.” He indicated the black-and-white swirls on Tare’s skin. Not as many as the other Varekai, but they were there. Patches, stripes and swirls in squid ink and white clay.

  Tare gave him a wry look. “The hunters insist. Besides, India likes it.”

  “So how are they?” Xícara asked, wondering what he would look like with paint on his skin and glass in his hair. News about the Varekai was sparse. It had been more than a month since Xícara had seen one particular Varekai who always seemed to be playing on his mind.

  “Good. Fine. Whiskey is as fat as a blowfish. She can barely move. Is Sugar around? It’s about time I told him something.”

  “What about Tango?” Xícara pressed.

  “Tango? She’s not fat,” Tare said, confused.

  Xícara bit back the desire to shake him until information came out. “No. Is she well?”

  “Oh. Yes, she’s fine. I saw her right before I came over here. She’s helping replant the gardens.”

  He bit his lip. “Did she say anything?”

  “Give me a message, you mean? Sorry. You know what she’s like. You’ll get more conversation out of a rock.”

  Xícara sighed, trying to ignore the lump in his throat.

  “There he is.” Tare spotted Sugar, and Xícara fell into step behind him.

  Sugar was talking to Fox. The Elikai leader’s shoulders were slumped, eyes searching, but Fox was impassive, picking up his spears and gear.

  “—hunt with your brothers,” Sugar was saying.

  “I prefer the silence,” Fox said, and without meeting Sugar’s sad gaze, he walked calmly away.

  Sugar looked defeated a moment, but his eyebrows rose when he saw Tare. “You’re back.”

  “Just quickly. What was that about?” Tare asked.

  Sugar glared at the grass around their feet. “He refuses to forgive me. I was wrong, telling him to leave; I’ve said I’m sorry. We were starving, and he was giving away our food. I was sick and delirious. I didn’t mean it, but now he’s a ghost. He flits in, trades supplies and leaves again. I don’t know how to make him stay.”