Luke spent the next three days planning.
By the time he focused back on the group, Zoe and Eve were both eager to get out of the place. Although Zoe wanted to leave for good, Luke satisfied them temporarily by offering a trip out to the city. That was what they had been planning to do anyways when Michael had been taken, but after chasing the Mutated, which was going the opposite direction that they had been traveling, they ended up almost back at their camp when they lost it, so they just went there to recover anyway.
Luke knew that Zoe would need some time to recover after spitting bile. It was a sign of massive damage, and she needed to rebuild her strength before going anywhere or doing anything strenuous. If they were closer to a facility, then Luke would have brought her there, or rather, he would have sent Kane there with her and stayed with Eve, and she would have been operational within three hours at most, based on the amount she had spat up.
The problem with his current situation was that no one had ever been willing to take the time off to test for him how long it took for their strength to rebuild on their own. The associate families valued power and efficiency, and if you couldn't deliver on those two things, then it wasn't unlikely that there would be a punishment, or at least a retraction of privileges.
And since there weren't any sane examples of people who had allowed their strength to recover naturally after spitting bile instead of using a machine to stimulate the regrowth, Luke unfortunately just didn't know exactly.
Normally, Luke would be perfectly fine with using the testimony of individuals that were considered not to be sane. And even in this case, he didn't have any problems with it at all. The problem was that even the insane people refused to talk to him.
They were all either shocked mute from blunt force trauma or, in some extreme examples, reduced to the level of an animal's consciousness. They could speak, and follow directions, and their brains could perform basic utilities like keeping them alive and following muscle memory in regards to actions, but they couldn't do much else, and they were unable to recall anything more than a week or so old.
Normally if a member of the associate families had a period of strainuous activity, especially one that was physically stressful enough to cause their guardian to spit bile, they would willfully ensure that their guardian immediately got proper resting time in a machine.
Even the people who had had Eve for a guardian hadn't been willing to waste their time taking care of her when they could get her back to her top condition within a few minutes. Even though they didn't like her, they scheduled the appointments and got her in. Of course, by the time they did, she was generally completely recovered already.
Luke smiled. True, it was probably a result of her harsh past, but Eve wouldn't stay down for even a day. She got nervous sitting around for just a couple of hours. Of course, she was better around him, but only just. He still had to find her things to do.
Then she had discovered a gym.
Luke had known it was there already. She hadn't been surprised by this. But she had demanded he take her, on pain of dealing with her disappointment and sulking for the rest of the day. And while Luke didn't want her to have to face the disappointment, his head would hurt too much if he had to listen to her whining, or worse, her pitiful silence, for him to make his decision based on her feelings.
Besides, she would be angry with him anyway, so it didn't really matter.
So they had gone, and as expected, she hadn't been anywhere near as pleased as she had been hoping. But to be fair, it wasn't a bad idea on her part. She had just looked for it in the wrong place.
Eve seemed not to understand. There was no karma. There really couldn't be a more repulsive term. Nothing would ever go right for her, just the same way that everything would go right for him. It was the way that it was. A gym was far too simple of a solution. So Luke made his own for her.
It wasn't anything special at all, certainly nothing professional. But it was custom, and it could handle her, for a while at least, though of course it wore out quickly.