Read Dark Eden for Free Online

with a metal housing that was rusting in one corner. And it was not the only screen; there were six more.
    There were seven monitors—one in the middle and six wrapped around the outside in a circle, all of them staring vacantly in my direction—and a set of four buttons in the middle. One button was black; the others were marked with letters: G , B , and M .
    “Why are you here?” I whispered, staring at a wall that made no sense. The monitors had that old, 1950s era quality about them, so they sort of fit—but how? The room was beginning to feel less like a bomb shelter and more like a safe room. A room that would allow someone to see outside after the door had been sealed shut from a dangerous world outside. There was a part of me—the same part that had been listening to recordings for weeks—that liked the idea of secretly observing the world outside. This could be interesting.
    I set my backpack on the smooth floor, retrieving one of the water bottles and gulping down half of its contents. My finger hovered over the M button, then I pushed it in and a loud, flat click echoed in the bomb shelter. The center monitor sparked to life. It was dim at first, like a retrograde TV that hadn’t been used in a long time and needed a few seconds to wake up. As the image grew brighter, I saw them: a group in an open room, sitting around a large table as if they were taking turns telling ghost stories. The light was faint, but I knew these people.
    Ben Dugan’s back, a mop of dark hair spilling over the neck of a polo shirt. To his right, the shape of Connor Bloom’s cropped, domed head. On Ben’s left, Alex Chow. And the faces of the girls as the circle went around: Kate, Avery, Marisa.
    I could see that they were talking, but what they were saying was a mystery to me. The monitor was showing, but it wasn’t telling. There was no audio whatsoever, and after examining the wall, I found no sign of a speaker or volume control. I felt as if I was ten feet underwater, staring through the filmy surface of a pond at talking heads I couldn’t hear. It also felt like a trick or a punishment for what I’d done: the missing half of what I’d stolen. I’d been listening to their disembodied voices for weeks. Now I was seeing them but couldn’t hear what they were saying.
    The oppressive silence of the bomb shelter made the images feel haunted, as if they were people long since dead and I was watching silent home movies from a hundred years before. Either that or I’d gone totally deaf in the basement of Mrs. Goring’s bunker. I squeezed the water bottle in my hand and heard the cheap plastic crinkling between my fingers. At least I hadn’t lapsed into a nightmare.
    I thought my luck might improve with one of the other buttons, so I pushed in the white G button. When I did, the M button popped back out, and the screen began to fill with the image of a different room. The tube inside the monitor struggled to life, the image fluttering and weak. It was dimmer than the first, and the picture never settled down entirely. Whatever camera it was attached to was pointed directly at a chair, which was empty. Behind the chair was a gray concrete wall with the numbers 2 , 5 , and 7 stenciled in red, just like the bomb shelter door. I backed away from the monitor, sensing that there was a connection here. Whoever had painted the bomb shelter door had also painted the 2 , the 5 , and the 7 . I suspected that the room was upstairs in the Bunker, and I just hadn’t seen it. Either that or it was in Fort Eden.
    I crept forward and pushed in the B button. The screen died again, then slowly shimmered back to life. It was the same as the last scene: an empty chair, a gray wall, and four other numbers, stenciled in red: 1 , 3 , 4 , 6 .
    “Creepy,” I whispered, drinking down the last of the water and hoping that the toilet would flush quietly when the time came to use it. I felt suddenly tired and looked at my watch for the first time in