“Those times you nearly died, you were sort of protected, though, right?” I asked. “The technology that made you superhuman—which you said crashed on the way to the hotel. You won’t have that this time.”
He shrugged. There’s the aw-shucks thing I thought I missed. Seeing it again reminded me how far we’d traveled from the farmhouse, and I fought the urge to slap it off his face.
“What you’re going to do—it isn’t for me, or . . . it isn’t just for me, you get that, right?”
“There’s no other way to stop it, Cassie,” he said. Slingshotting back to his tormented-poet look.
“What about the way you mentioned right before the last time you almost died? Remember? Rigging Megan’s throat-bomb to blow it up.”
“Hard to do without the bomb,” he said.
“Grace didn’t have a stash hidden in the house somewhere?” Instead, she kept the place well-stocked with men’s aftershave. Postapocalyptic priorities.
“Grace’s assignment wasn’t to blow things up. It was to kill people.”
“And have sex with them.” I didn’t mean for that to come out—but I don’t mean to say about 80 percent of what I say.
Really, though, who cares if they had sex? It’s a silly thing to worry about when the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. Trivial. Unimportant. The hands that held me holding Grace. The body that warmed me warming hers. The lips that touched mine touching hers. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care, Grace is dead. I plucked at the sheets and wished I hadn’t said it.
“Grace lied. We never—”
“I don’t care, Evan,” I told him. “It’s not important. Anyway, Grace was a fantastically good-looking homicidal killing machine. Who could say no?”
He placed a hand over mine to still my plucking fingers. “I would tell you if we had.”
What a liar. I could fill the Grand Canyon with all the things he’s refused to tell me. I pulled my hand away and looked right into those chocolate-fondue-fountain eyes. “You’re a liar,” I said.
He surprised me by nodding. “I am. But not about that.”
I am? “What have you lied about?”
He shook his head. Silly human girl! “About who I really was.”
“And who is that exactly? You’ve told me what you were, but you’ve never said who you are. Who are you, Evan Walker? Where do you come from? What did you look like before you looked like nothing? What was your planet like? Did it look like ours? Were there plants and trees and rocks and did you live in cities and what did you do for fun and was there music? Music is universal like mathematics. Can you sing me a song? Sing me an alien song, Evan. Tell me what it was like growing up. Did you go to school or was knowledge just downloaded into your brain? What were your parents like? Did they have jobs like human parents? Brothers and sisters? Sports. Start anywhere.”
“We had sports.” With a tiny, indulgent smile.
“I don’t like sports. Start with music.”
“We had music, too.”
“I’m listening.” I folded my arms over my chest and waited.
His mouth opened. His mouth closed. I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or cry. “It isn’t that simple, Cassie.”
“I’m not expecting performance quality. I can’t carry a tune, either, but that never kept me from lighting up a little Beyoncé.”
“Who?”
“Oh, come on. You gotta know who she was.”
He shook his head. Maybe he didn’t grow up on a farm but under a rock. Then I thought it would be a little odd for a ten-thousand-year-old superbeing to have his finger on the pulse of pop culture. Still, we’re talking about Beyoncé!
He’s even weirder than I thought.
“Everything is different. Structurally, I mean.” He pointed at his mouth, stuck out his tongue. “I can’t even pronounce my own name.” For a moment, the pathos was so thick, it almost snuffed out the lamp.
“Then hum something. Or whistle. Could you whistle or didn’t you have lips?”
“None of that matters anymore, Cassie.”
“You’re wrong. It matters a lot. Your past is what you are, Evan.”
Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt. “God, Cassie, I hope not.” He lifted his freshly scrubbed hands, with their trimmed and buffed nails, toward me. The hands that held the gun that slaughtered innocent people before he almost murdered me. “If the past is what we are . . .”
I might have pointed out that we’ve all done things we aren’t proud of, but that was too flippant. Even for me.
Damn it, Cassie. Why were you forcing him to think about that? I was so obsessed with the past I didn’t know about that I forgot the one I did: To save the ones he had come to destroy, Evan Walker the Silencer was planning to silence an entire civilization—his civilization—forever.
No, Ben Parish, I thought. Not for a girl. For the past he can’t escape. For the seven billion. Your little sister, too.
Before I knew what was happening or even how it happened, I was holding him with hands that had never comforted him, never lifted him up, never found him when he was lost. I was the taker, the recipient, always; from the moment he pulled me from that snowbank, I have been his charge, his mission, his cross. Cassie’s pain, Cassie’s fear, Cassie’s anger, Cassie’s despair. These have been the nails that impaled him.
I stroked his damp hair. I rubbed his arched back. I pressed his smooth, sweet-smelling face into my neck, and his tears were warm against my skin. He whispered something that sounded like Mayfly.
Heartless bitch would have been more accurate.
“I’m sorry, Evan,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
I bowed my head; he raised his. I kissed his wet cheek. Your pain, your fear, your anger, your despair. Give them to me, Evan. I’ll carry them for a while.
He reached up and ran his fingertips lightly over my lips, moist with his tears.
“‘The last person on Earth,’” he murmured. “Do you remember when you wrote that?”
I nodded. “Stupid.”
He shook his head. “I think that’s what did it. When I read that. ‘The last person on Earth’—because I felt the same way.”
My hands were mauling that old OSU shirt. It was very maulable. That’s a good word, maulable. It applies to so many things.
“You’re not coming back,” I said, because he couldn’t say it.
His fingers combed through my hair. I shivered. Don’t do that, you bastard. Don’t touch me like you’ll never touch me again. Don’t look at me like you’ll never see me again. I shut my eyes. Our lips touched.
The last person on Earth. With my eyes closed, I could see her walking down a wooded path in Vermont, a place she has never been and will never go, and the leaves that embrace the trail sing arias of bright red and gold. And there is a big dog named Pericles running ahead of her in that self-important way of dogs, and she has everything she ever wanted, this girl—no, this woman—nothing left behind, nothing left undone. She traveled the world and wrote books and took lovers and broke hearts. She didn’t allow life just to happen to her. She punched and pummeled and beat the living shit out of it. She mauled it.
His breath hot in my ear. I’m clawing at his chest, digging my nails into his skin, the hungry lioness with her catch. Resistance is futile, Walker. I’ll never take that path in the golden woods or own a dog named Pericles or travel the world. There’ll be no recognition of a life well-lived, no street named after me, no difference in the world because I once occupied it. My life is a catalog of the undone and the never-will-be-done. The Others stole all of my unmade memories, but I won’t let them steal this one.
My hands roamed his body, an undiscovered country, which henceforth I shall call Evanland. Hills and valleys, desert plains and forest glens, the landscape pockmarked with the scars of battle,
crisscrossed by fault lines and unexpected vistas. And I am Cassie the Conquistador: The more territory I conquer, the more I want.
His chest heaved: a subterranean quake that rose to the surface like a tsunamic wave. His eyes were wide and wet and filled with something that closely resembled fear.
“Cassie . . .”
“Shut up.” My mouth surveying the valley beneath his rolling chest.
His fingers entangled now in my hair. “We shouldn’t.”
I almost laughed. Well, the shouldn’t list is awfully long, Evan. I scored my teeth across his stomach. The land beneath my tongue quivered, shock and aftershock.
Shouldn’t. No, we probably shouldn’t. Some cravings can never be satisfied. Some discoveries demean the quest.
“Not the time . . . ,” he gasped.
I rested my cheek on his tummy and tugged the hair from my eyes. “When is the time, Evan?”
His hands captured my roving ones and held them still.
“You said you loved me,” I whispered. Damn you, Evan Walker, why did you ever say such a ridiculous, crazy, imbecilic thing?
No one tells you how close rage is to lust. I mean, the space between molecules is thicker. “You’re a liar,” I told him. “You’re the worst kind of liar, the kind who lies to themselves. You’re not in love with me. You’re in love with an idea.”
His eyes cut away. That’s how I knew I nailed him. “What idea?” he asked.
“Liar, you know what idea.” I got up. I pulled off my shirt. I stared him down, daring him to look at me. Look at me, Evan. Look at me. Not the last person on Earth, the stand-in for all the people you shot on the highway. I’m not the mayfly; I’m Cassie, an ordinary girl from an ordinary place who was dumb enough or unlucky enough to live long enough for you to find. I am not your charge, your mission, or your cross.
I am not humanity.
He turned his face toward the wall, hands beside his head as if in surrender. Well. I’d gone this far. I tugged the jeans over my hips and kicked them away. I couldn’t remember a time when I was this angry—or this sad—or this . . . I wanted to punch him, caress him, kick him, hold him. I wanted him to die. I wanted me to die. I wasn’t self-conscious, not at all, and it wasn’t because he’d seen me naked before—he had.
That time I didn’t have a choice. Then I’d been unconscious, close to death. Now I was awake and very much alive.
I wished there were a hundred lamps to light me up. I wanted a spotlight and a magnifying glass so he could examine every imperfectly perfect human inch of me.
“It’s not about the time, Evan,” I reminded him, “but what we do with it.”
23
RINGER
AT THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET, it’s hard to tell which seems smaller: the Earth below or the person above it, looking down.
Due north and a couple of miles from the caverns, Constance unbuckles her harness and grabs her chute assembly from the overhead. One last check-through before the jump. We’ll be inserted from this altitude to reduce the chance of being spotted from the ground. It’s called a HALO insertion. High Altitude—Low Opening. Risky as hell, but no more risky than jumping from five thousand feet with no parachute at all.
Constance must know about my jump from the doomed chopper, because she says, “Gonna be a lot easier than last time, huh?”
I tell her to fuck off, and she grins at me. I’m glad. I want to find nothing sympathetic or likable about her. Those things might make killing her hard.
Well, harder. I’m still going to kill her.
“Thirty seconds!” the pilot’s voice squawks in our ears. Constance checks my assembly. I check hers. We toss our headsets onto the seats as the rear bay door opens. Sliding our gloved fingers over the guide cable, we shuffle toward the screaming maw, the subzero wind like a fist pummeling our faces. My stomach tightens as the C-160 rocks side to side, buffeted by turbulence. I’ve been fighting the urge to throw up for nearly the entire flight. Better to do it now than in freefall. If I position myself correctly, the vomit will land directly in Constance’s face.
I wonder why the hub doesn’t subdue my digestive system; weird, but I feel let down by a trusted friend.
I follow Constance into the black gullet of a moonless night. We won’t deploy the chutes until well after we’ve reached terminal velocity. I can see her clearly with my enhanced vision, fifty feet farther down and off to my left. Time slows as my speed picks up; I’m not sure if that’s the hub’s doing or a natural reaction to falling at 120 miles per hour. I don’t hear the plane. The world is wind.
Twenty thousand feet. Fifteen. Ten. I can make out a highway, rolling fields, clusters of bare-limbed trees. The closer I get, the faster they seem to rush toward me. Five thousand feet. Four. Minimum distance to ground for a safe deployment is eight hundred feet, but that’s pushing the envelope.
Constance pulls her cord at eight-fifty. I’m a little below that, and the ground roars toward me like the face of a runaway locomotive.
I bend my knees on impact and duck my shoulder toward the ground, rolling twice before stopping flat on my back, tangled in cords. Constance is there before I can take my next breath, slicing me free with her combat knife. She yanks me to my feet, gives me a thumbs-up, and then takes off across the field toward a couple of silos that stand next to the ubiquitous red barn and, a stone’s throw away, the white farmhouse.
White house, red barn, a narrow country lane: We couldn’t have fallen into a more quintessential slice of Americana. The name of the hamlet where the caverns are? West Liberty.
I join her at the base of a silo, where she’s busy stripping off her jumpsuit. Beneath it, she’s wearing mom jeans and a hoodie. She has no weapon except the knife, which she tucks into a sheath strapped to her leg.
“Half a click south and west of our position,” she breathes. The entrance to the caverns. “We’re a couple of hours ahead of them.” Zombie and whoever was crazy enough to come with him to look for me and Teacup. Poundcake, probably. My gut tightens at the thought of telling Zombie about Teacup. “You hang here and wait for my signal.”
I shake my head. “I’m coming with you.”
She flashes that goddamned stupid smile. “Honey, you don’t want to do that.”
“Why?”
“Our cover story won’t fly if there’s anyone around to contradict it.”
The vise around my stomach tightens another turn. Survivors. Constance is going to kill everyone she finds hiding in those caves, and that’s probably a lot of people. Dozens, maybe hundreds. It will be tough work. They’ll be well-armed and wary of strangers—it’s hard to imagine that anyone’s unaware of the 4th Wave this late in the game. Which means I might not have to kill Constance after all. Maybe they’ll do it for me.
It’s a pleasant thought. Unrealistic, but pleasant. My next thought is not pleasant at all, so I blurt out the first thing that pops into my head.
“We don’t need to take the caverns. We can intercept Zombie before he gets there.”
Constance shakes her head. “Not our orders.”
“Our orders are to rendezvous with Zombie,” I argue. I’m not letting this go. If I let it go, innocent people will die. I’m not totally against people dying—I am planning to kill her and Evan Walker—but this is avoidable.
“I know it bothers you, Marika,” she says kindly. “That’s why I’m going in solo.”
“It’s a stupid risk.”
“You’ve reached a conclusion without knowing all the facts,” she scolds me.
That’s been a problem from the beginning—as in the beginning of human history.
My hand drops to the butt of my sidearm. She doesn’t miss it. Her answering smile lights up the night.
“You know what happens if you do that,” she says gently, a kindly aunt, a caring big sister. “Your friends—the ones you?
??ve come back for—how many lives are their lives worth? If a hundred had to die so they could live, or a thousand, or ten thousand, or ten million . . . When would you say enough?”
I know this argument. It’s Vosch’s. It’s theirs. What are seven billion lives when existence itself is at stake? My throat burns. I can taste stomach acid in my mouth.
“It’s a false choice,” I answer. One last try, a plea: “You don’t have to kill anyone to get Walker.”
She shrugs. Apparently, I’m just not getting it. “If I don’t, neither of us is going to live long enough to have that chance.” She lifts her chin and turns her face slightly away. “Hit me.” Taps her right cheek. “Here.”
Why not? The blow rocks her back on her heels. She shakes her head impatiently, turns the other cheek. “Again. Harder this time, Marika. Hard.”
I hit her harder. Hard enough to break bone. Her left eye immediately begins to swell. She feels no pain from the punch. Neither do I.
“Thanks,” she says brightly.
“No problem. Anything else you need busted, let me know.”
She laughs softly. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear she likes me, finds me charming. Then she’s gone so quickly that only enhanced vision like mine could follow her, zipping across the field to the road that leads to the caverns, then cutting into the woods on the northwest side.
As soon as she’s out of sight, I sink to the ground, shaky, light-headed, my gut churning. I’m beginning to wonder if something is wrong with the 12th System. I feel like shit.
I lean against the cold metal of the silo and close my eyes. The darkness behind my lids spins around an invisible center, the singularity before the universe was born. Teacup is there, falling away from me; the blast from Razor’s weapon resounds in timeless space. She falls away, but she will always be mine.
Razor is there, too, in the absolute center of absolute nothing, the blood still fresh on his arm from the self-inflicted wound, VQP, and he knew the cost of sacrificing Teacup would be his own life. I’m certain by the time we spent the night together, he’d already decided to kill her—because killing her was the only way to set me free.