“Not enough to reduce the population to a sustainable level,” Ringer says softly. “Not enough to level what we built. We’ll repopulate. We’ll rebuild. To save the planet, to save our species, they have to change us.” She touches her chest. “Here. If the Others can take away trust, they take away cooperation. Take away cooperation, and civilization is impossible.”
48
“OKAY,” BEN SAYS. Time to get down to the gnarly nub of it. “No on the pods but yes on the bombs. Which means we can’t stay here—too close to Urbana. That’s fine with me, because I really fucking hate Urbana. So where? South? My vote is south. Find a source of fresh water, miles from anywhere, as in the middle of nowhere.”
“And?” Ringer asks.
“And what?”
“And what then?”
“What then?”
“Yes. After we get to nowhere, then what?”
Ben lifts a hand. Lets it fall. His mouth curls into a smile. He looks so boyishly cute in this moment that I feel like bursting into tears. “There’s five of us. I say we form a band.”
I laugh out loud. Sometimes Ben’s like a bracing mountain stream I dip my toe into.
“Anyway,” Ben says after two seconds of Ringer staring blankly at him. “What the hell else are we going to do?”
He looks at her. He looks at me.
“Oh Christ, Sullivan,” he moans, tapping the back of his head against the wall. “Don’t even go there.”
“He came for me,” I tell him. He knows I’m thinking it, so I might as well say it. We’re both a little surprised that I’ve gone there. “He saved your life—twice. He saved mine three times.”
“Ben’s right,” Ringer butts in. “It’s suicide, Sullivan.”
I roll my eyes. I’ve heard this shit before—from Evan Walker himself, when he realized I was bulling my way into a death camp to find my baby brother. Why must I always be the isle of crazy alone in an ocean of sensibility? The should to everybody else’s shouldn’t? The I-will to their better-nots?
“Staying here is suicide, too,” I argue. “So is running to nowhere. Anything we do now is suicide. We’re at the point in the story where we have to choose, Ringer—a meaningful death, or a senseless one. Besides,” I add, “he’d do it for us.”
“No,” Ben says quietly. “He would do it for you.”
“The base they’re taking him to is over a hundred miles away,” Ringer says. “Even if you reached it, you won’t reach it in time. Vosch will be finished with him and Evan will be dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that.”
“No, you say you know that, but you don’t really know that, just like you don’t know everything else you say you know, but we’re just supposed to believe it because, hell, you’re just brilliant little you.”
And Ben goes, “Huh?”
“Whatever we do,” Ringer says coolly to Ben, as if nothing I just said wasn’t a major-league smackdown, “staying is not an option. As soon as that chopper delivers its cargo, it’s coming back.”
“Cargo?” Ben asks.
“She means Evan,” I translate.
“Why would it . . . ?” Then he gets it. Ringer’s victims buried down the road. The chopper’s coming back to extract the strike team. “Oh.” He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. “Crap.”
And I’m thinking, Hey. Chopper! and Ringer is watching me and thinking she knows what I’m thinking, which she does, but that doesn’t prove she’s always right.
“Forget it, Sullivan.”
“Forget what?” And right away I acknowledge my coyness: “You did it. Or at least you said you did it.”
“Did what?” Ben asks.
“That was different,” Ringer says.
“Different how?”
“Different in that the pilot was in on it. My ‘escape’ from Vosch wasn’t an escape; it was a test of the 12th System.”
“Well, we can pretend this is a test, too, if that helps.”
“Pretend what is a test?” Ben’s voice rises an octave in his frustration. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
Ringer sighs. “She wants to hijack the Black Hawk.”
Ben’s mouth drops open. I don’t know what or why it is, but when he’s around Ringer, the smart drains out of him like spaghetti water through a colander.
“What about him?” Ringer nods toward Sams. “He’s coming, too?”
“That’s your business?” I ask.
“Well, I’m not babysitting while you go all Don Quixote on this.”
“You know, making obscure literary references doesn’t impress me. And yes, I happen to know who Don Quixote is.”
“Okay, wait a minute,” Ben says. “He’s from The Godfather, right?” Straight-faced, so I’m not sure if he’s joking. Back in the day, there was serious talk about Ben becoming a Rhodes Scholar. No lie. “You’re gonna make Vosch an offer he can’t refuse?”
“Ben can stay with the kids,” I inform Ringer, as if I’ve thought it all out, as if the plan for rescuing Evan has been in the works for months. “We go, just you and me.”
She’s shaking her head. “Why would I do that?”
“Why wouldn’t you do that?”
She stiffens and then, for some unclear reason, she looks over at Ben. So I look over at Ben, and Ben is looking straight down at the floor like he’s never seen one before. What is this amazing hard surface under my feet?
“How about this.” I won’t stop trying. Why won’t I stop? I try to stop, and then I fail. “Forget me. Forget Evan. Do it for yourself.”
“Myself?” She’s genuinely puzzled. Ha! For once she can’t pretend she knows what I’m thinking.
“He’s finished with you. He’s done. So you have to go to him if you want to end it.”
Ringer recoils like somebody slapped her. She wants to pretend she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. Fat chance.
I saw it in her face when she told the story. I heard it in her voice. Between the frowns and long silences, it was there. When she said his name and when she couldn’t bring herself to say his name, it was there: He’s the reason she hasn’t given up, why she hangs on, her raison d’être.
The thing worth dying for.
“Vosch thinks you’re going to zig—so you zag. He thinks you’re going to run away—so you run toward. You can’t undo what he’s done, but you can undo him.”
“It won’t solve anything,” she whispers.
“Probably not. But he’ll be dead. There’s that.”
I hold out my hand. I’m not sure why. It really isn’t my deal to make because I can’t promise final delivery of the goods. That little, rational, calm, ancient, wise voice in my head chirps, She’s right, it’s suicide, Cassie. Evan’s gone and this time there’ll be no miracles. Let him go.
My place is with Sam; it’s always been with Sam. Sam is my raison d’être. Not some delusional Ohio farm boy crazy all the way down to the bottom of his bones. Jesus, if Ringer is right, even Evan’s love may be part of the crazy. He thinks he’s in love with me like he thinks he’s an Other.
So what’s the difference between thinking it and actually being it? Is there a difference?
There are times I hate my own brain.
“The dead,” Ringer says in a voice that reflects the word: nothing there, gone, empty. “I came here to kill one innocent person. I killed five. If I go back, I’ll kill until I lose count. I’ll kill until counting doesn’t matter.” She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at Ben. “And it’ll be easy.” She turns to me. “You don’t understand. I am what he made me.”
I wish she’d cry. I want her to shout, scream, shake her fist, punch something, howl until her voice gave out. Anything would be better than the scooped-out, empty way she talked. What she said didn
’t match how she said it, and that’s scary.
“And in the end, we’ll both fail,” she tells me. “Evan will die and Vosch will live.”
She takes my hand anyway.
Even scarier.
49
BY THIS POINT, Ben has reached the end of his endurance—physical and mental. He can’t remain standing any longer or keep up with this very strange, very quick turnabout, from She’s a traitor! to She’s my partner! He hops over to the stairs and lowers himself down, stretching his bad leg out in front of him. He stares at the ceiling, stroking the underside of his chin.
“Ringer, maybe you better get up there again. In case you missed somebody.”
She shakes her head and her shiny black hair swings back and forth, a silky obsidian curtain. “I didn’t miss anybody.”
“Well. In case somebody else comes along.”
“Like who?”
His head turns slowly in her direction. “Bad people.”
She looks at me. Then she nods. She steps around him and stoops halfway up to retrieve her rifle. I hear her whisper, “Don’t,” to him, before disappearing from view.
Don’t? “What is it with you two?” I ask.
“What’s what?”
“The little looks. The ‘don’t’ just now.”
“It’s nothing, Cassie.”
“Nothing would be no little looks and no ‘don’ts.’”
He shrugs, then glances up the stairs to the hole that opened to bare sky where the house used to be. “No getting there,” he says. He smiles as if he’s embarrassed for saying something stupid. “No matter how well you know someone, there’s still a part of them you won’t. You can’t. Like, ever. A locked room. I don’t know.” He shakes his head and laughs. The laugh collapses the moment it’s born.
“With Ringer, that’s more like all the rooms in the Louvre,” I point out.
Ben hauls himself to his feet and limps over to me, using his rifle as a crutch. By the time he arrives, his face is a study in exhaustion and pain. There you go. Parish heals up from one Ringer-inflicted wound, so she gives him another. Gotta keep the streak going.
“Have you lost your mind?” he asks.
“What do you think?”
“I think you have.”
“How can you tell?” I’m fully confident he won’t understand my question.
“The Cassie Sullivan I know would never leave her little brother.”
“Maybe I’m not the Cassie Sullivan you know.”
“So you’re just gonna leave him—”
“With you.”
“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but when it comes to protecting people, I suck.”
“It’s not about you, Parish.”
He slides down the wall beside me. Takes a few deep breaths. Then he blurts out, “Let’s get real, okay? She won’t get to Vosch and you won’t get to Evan. That part’s done. Time for the next part.”
“The next part?”
“Them.” He nods toward Sammy and Megan curled beneath the blanket. “It’s always been about them, from day one. The enemy always knew it. The really sad and freaky part is why it’s been so easy for us to forget.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” I tell him. “Why do you think I’m going? This isn’t about Evan Walker. And it isn’t about you or me. If Ringer is right, Evan’s our last hope.” I look at my baby brother’s face, angelic in sleep. “His last hope.”
“Then I’ll go with Ringer. You stay here.”
I shake my head. “You’re broken. I’m not.”
“Bullshit. I can get around . . .”
“I’m not talking about your leg.”
He flinches. His jaw tightens. “That’s not fair, Cassie.”
“I’m not worried about fair. This isn’t about fair. This is about the odds. And risk. This is about my brother living to see next Christmas. It would be great if there were someone I could tag to do it for me, but I’m it, Parish. It’s down to me. Because I’m still there, Ben, under that car on the highway—I never got out and I never got up. I’m still there waiting for the bogeyman to come get me. And if I run now, anywhere or nowhere, he’s going to find me. He’s going to find Sam.” I tug Bear from the blanket and hug him to my chest. “I don’t care about whether Evan Walker is an alien or a human or an alien-human or a freaking turnip. I don’t care about your baggage or Ringer’s baggage, and I especially don’t care about my baggage. The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along, and it will go right on after they’re scattered up, down, and sideways.”
Ben reaches out and touches my wet cheek. I push his hand away. “Don’t touch me.” You Has-Ben. You What-Might-Have-Ben.
“Look, Cassie. I’m not your boss and I’m not your daddy. I can’t stop you any more than you could have stopped me from going to the caves.”
I press my face into the top of Bear’s ratty old head. Bear smells like smoke and sweat and dirt and my little brother. “He loves you, Ben. More than me, I think. But that—”
“Not true, Cassie.”
“Don’t. Interrupt. Me. That’s, like, one of my things. Just so you know. And now I would like to say something.”
“Okay.”
“There is something I’d like to say.”
“I’m listening.”
Looking away. Looking at nothing. Deep breath. Don’t say it, Cass. What’s the point now? There is no point. Maybe that’s something we both need to understand.
“I’ve had a crush on you since the third grade,” I whisper. “I wrote your name in notebooks. I drew hearts around it. I decorated it with flowers. Mostly daisies. I had daydreams and dream-dreams, and nobody knew except my best friend. Who is dead. Like everybody else.”
Looking away. Looking at nothing. “But you were where you were and I was where I was. You could have been in China for all it mattered. When you showed up out of nowhere at Sammy’s camp—I thought it had to mean something. Because you lived when you should have died, and I lived when I should have died, and we were both there for Sam, who also should have died. Just—just too many coincidences to be just a coincidence, you know? But that’s all it is, a coincidence. There’s no divine plan. There’s nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that’s okay. These seven billion billion atoms are good with that.”
I press my lips onto that nasty stuffed animal’s head. Really neat that human beings conquered the Earth, invented poetry and mathematics and the combustion engine, discovered that time and space are relative, built machines big and small to ferry us to the moon for some rocks or carry us to McDonald’s for a strawberry-banana smoothie. Very cool we split the atom and bestowed upon the Earth the Internet and smartphones and, of course, the selfie stick.
But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature’s most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child.
50
THERE ARE PREPARATIONS to make. Details to work out.
First, I’ll need a uniform. Ben sits with the kids while Ringer and I dig up the bodies. There’s the smallest recruit, whose uniform seems like the right size, but there’s a bullet hole in the back of the jacket. Might be hard to explain. Ringer hauls out the next body, whose duds are dirty but unmarred by bullet holes and nearly blood-free. She explains that she crushed his skull with a twenty-inch steel rim. He didn’t feel it, she assures me. Didn’t see it coming. It’s okay. I feel my gorge rise. It’s okay. I change right there by the side of the road under the naked sky. Ha. Naked sky. And there is Cassiopeia above me, chained to her chair, watching her namesake bare herself
and the dead boy, too. I catch Ringer looking at him, and her face is even paler than usual. I follow her gaze to the kid’s arm, where cruddy-looking scabs glisten in the starlight. What are those? Letters?
“What is that?” I ask while rolling up the pant legs; they’re a good four inches too long.
“It’s Latin,” she answers. “It means ‘he conquers who endures.’”
“Why is it cut into his arm like that?”
She shakes her head. Her hand wanders to her own shoulder. She thinks I don’t notice.
“You have one, too, don’t you?”
“No.” She kneels beside the boy, his combat knife in her hand. She slices along the tiny scar on the back of his neck and gingerly digs the tracking device from the cut.
“Here. Put this in your mouth.”
“Like fuck.”
She cups it in the palm of her hand and spits on it. Rolls the rice-sized pellet around in her spit to clean off the blood.
“Better?”
“In what way could that possibly be better?”
She grabs my hand and deposits the gooey pellet into my palm. “You clean it, then.”
I lace up the boots as she cuts into another kid’s neck, dips out the tracker with the tip of the knife, then slides the blade between her lips. There is something matter-of-factly savage about it, and her words echo in my head: I am what he made me.
51
PREPARATIONS. DETAILS.
I’ll need gear, but only what I can fit into the pockets and pouches of the uniform. Extra magazines for the rifle and sidearm, a knife, a penlight, a couple of grenades, two bottles of water, and three power bars, at Ben’s insistence. Parish has this weird, superstitious faith in power bars, which is totally bogus, unlike my belief in the talismanic force of teddy bears.
“What if you’re wrong?” I ask Ringer. “What if nobody comes looking for the strike team?”