The 5th Wave

65

WE FELL ASLEEP last night in front of the fireplace, and this morning I woke up in our bed—no, not our bed. My bed. Val’s bed? The bed, and I don’t remember climbing the stairs, so he must have carried me up and tucked me in, only he isn’t in bed with me now. I’m a little panicky when I realize he’s not here. It’s a lot easier to push down my doubt when he’s with me. When I can see those eyes the color of melted chocolate and hear his deep voice that falls over me like a warm blanket on a cold night. Oh, you’re such a hopeless case, Cassie. Such a train wreck.

I dress quickly in the weak light of dawn and go downstairs. He’s not there, either, but my M16 is, cleaned and loaded and leaning against the mantel. I call out his name. Silence answers.

I pick up the gun. The last time I fired it was on Crucifix Soldier Day.

Not your fault, Cassie. And not his fault.

I close my eyes and see my father lying gut-shot in the dirt, telling me, No, Cassie, right before Vosch walked over and silenced him.

His fault. Not yours. Not the Crucifix Soldier’s. His.

I have a very vivid image of ramming the end of the rifle against Vosch’s temple and blowing his head off his shoulders.

First I have to find him. And then politely ask him to stand still so I can ram the end of my rifle against his temple and blow his head off his shoulders.

I find myself on the sofa next to Bear, and I cradle them both, Bear in one arm, my rifle in the other, like I’m back in the woods in my tent under the trees that were under the sky that was under the baleful eye of the mothership that was beneath the explosion of stars of which ours is just one—and what are the freaking odds that the Others would pick our star out of the 100 sextillion in the universe to set up shop?

It’s too much for me to handle. I can’t defeat the Others. I’m a cockroach. Okay, I’ll go with Evan’s mayfly metaphor; mayflies are prettier, and at least they can fly. But I can take out a few of the bastards before my single day on Earth is over. And I plan to start with Vosch.

A hand falls on my shoulder. “Cassie, why are you crying?”

“I’m not. It’s my allergies. This damn bear is full of dust.”

He sits down next to me, on the bear side, not the gun side.

“Where were you?” I ask to change the subject.

“Checking out the weather.”

“And?” Full sentences, please. I’m cold and I need your warm-blanky voice to keep me safe. I draw my knees up to my chest, resting my heels on the edge of the sofa cushion.

“I think we’re good for tonight.” The morning light sneaks through a crack in the sheets hung over the window and paints his face golden. The light shimmers in his dark hair, sparkles in his eyes.

“Good.” I snuffle loudly.

“Cassie.” He touches my knee. His hand is warm; I feel its heat through my jeans. “I had this weird idea.”

“All of this is just a really bad dream?”

He shakes his head, laughs nervously. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, so hear me out before you say anything, okay? I’ve been thinking a lot about this, and I wouldn’t even mention it if I didn’t think—”

“Tell me, Evan. Just—tell—me.” Oh God, what’s he going to tell me? My body tightens up. Never mind, Evan. Don’t tell me.

“Let me go.”

I shake my head, confused. Is this a joke? I look down at his hand on my knee, fingers gently squeezing. “I thought you were going.”

“I mean, let me go.” Giving my knee a tiny shake to get me to look at him.

Then I get it. “Let you go by yourself. I stay here, and you go find my brother.”

“Okay, now, you promised to hear me out—”

“I didn’t promise you anything.” I push his hand off my knee. The thought of his leaving me behind isn’t just offensive—it’s terrifying. “My promise was to Sammy, so drop it.”

He doesn’t. “But you don’t know what’s out there.”

“And you do?”

“Better than you.”

He reaches for me; I put my hand against his chest. Oh no, buddy. “Then tell me what’s out there.”

He throws up his hands. “Think about who has a better chance of living long enough to keep your promise. I’m not saying it’s because you’re a girl or because I’m stronger or tougher or whatever. I’m saying if just one of us goes, then the other one would still have a chance of finding him in case the worst happens.”

“Well, you’re probably right about that last part. But it shouldn’t be you who tries first. He’s my brother. Like hell I’m going to wait around here for a Silencer to knock on the door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar. I’ll just go by myself.”

I push myself off the sofa like I’m heading out at that very second. He grabs my arm; I yank it back.

“Stop it, Evan. You keep forgetting that I’m letting you go with me, not the other way around.”

He drops his head. “I know. I know that.” Then a rueful laugh. “I also knew what your answer would be, but I had to ask.”

“Because you think I can’t take care of myself?”

“Because I don’t want you to die.”

66

WE’VE BEEN PREPARING for weeks. On this last day, there wasn’t much left to do except wait for nightfall. We’re traveling light; Evan thought we could reach Wright-Patterson in two or three nights, barring an unexpected delay like another blizzard or one of us getting killed—or both of us getting killed, which would delay the operation indefinitely.

Despite keeping my supplies to a bare minimum, I have trouble getting Bear to fit into the backpack. Maybe I should cut off his legs and tell Sammy they were blown off by the Eye that took out Camp Ashpit.

The Eye. That would be better, I decided: not a bullet to Vosch’s brain, but an alien bomb jammed down his pants.

“Maybe you shouldn’t take him,” Evan says.

“Maybe you should shut up,” I mutter, pushing Bear’s head down into his stomach and tugging the zipper closed. “There.”

Evan is smiling. “You know, when I first saw you in the woods, I thought he was your bear.”

“Woods?”

His smile fades.

“You didn’t find me in the woods,” I remind him. Suddenly the room feels about ten degrees colder. “You found me in the middle of a snowbank.”

“I meant I was in the woods, not you,” he says. “I saw you from the woods a half mile away.”

I’m nodding. Not because I believe him. I’m nodding because I know I’m right not to.

“You’re not out of those woods yet, Evan. You’re sweet and you have incredible cuticles, but I’m still not sure why your hands are so soft, or why you smelled like gunpowder the night you supposedly visited your girlfriend’s grave.”

“I told you last night, I haven’t helped around the farm in two years, and I was cleaning my gun earlier that day. I don’t know what else I can—”

I cut him off. “I’m only trusting you because you’re handy with a rifle and haven’t killed me with it, even though you’ve had about a thousand opportunities. Don’t take this personally, but there’s something I don’t get about you and this whole situation, but that doesn’t mean I’m never going to get it. I’ll figure it out, and if the truth is something that puts you on the other side of me, then I will do what I have to do.”

“What?” Smiling that damned lopsided, sexy grin, shoulders up, hands stuffed deep in his pockets with a sort of aw-shucks attitude, which I guess is meant to drive me the good kind of crazy. What is it about him that makes me want to slap him and kiss him, run from him and to him, throw my arms around him and knee him in the balls, all at the same time? I’d like to blame the Arrival for the effect he has on me, but something tells me guys have been doing this to us for a lot longer than a few months.

“What I have to do,” I tell him.

I head upstairs. Thinking about what I have to do reminded me of something I meant to do before we left.

In the bathroom, I poke around in the drawers until I find a pair of scissors, and then proceed to lop off six inches of my hair. The floorboards creak behind me, and I shout, “Stop lurking!” without turning around. A second later, Evan sticks his head into the room.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Symbolically cutting my hair. What are you doing? Oh, that’s right. Following me, lurking in doorways. One of these days maybe you’ll work up the courage to step over the threshold, Evan.”

“It looks like you’re actually cutting your hair.”

“I’ve decided to get rid of all the things that bug me.” Giving him a look in the mirror.

“Why does it bug you?”

“Why are you asking?” Looking at my reflection now, but he’s there in the corner of my eye. Damn it, more symbolism.

He wisely makes an exit. Snip, snip, snip, and the sink fills up with my curls. I hear him clumping around downstairs, then the kitchen door slamming. I guess I was supposed to ask his permission first. Like he owns me. Like I’m a puppy he found lost in the snow.

I step back to examine my handiwork. With the short cut and no makeup, I look about twelve years old. Okay, no older than fourteen. But with the right attitude and the right prop, someone might mistake me for a tween. Maybe even offer me a ride to safety on their friendly yellow school bus.

That afternoon a gray sheet of clouds draws itself across the sky, bringing an early dusk. Evan disappears again and comes back a few minutes later carrying two five-gallon containers of gasoline. I give him a look, and he says, “I was thinking a diversion might help.”

It takes me a minute to process. “You’re going to burn down your house?”

He nods. He seems kind of excited about the prospect.

“I’m going to burn down my house.”

He lugs one of the containers upstairs to douse the bedrooms. I go out onto the porch to escape the fumes. A big black crow is hopping across the yard, and he stops and gives me a beady-eyed look. I consider pulling out my gun and shooting him.

I don’t think I’d miss. I’m a pretty good shot now, thanks to Evan, and also I really hate birds.

The door opens behind me and a wave of nauseating fumes roars out. I step off the porch and the crow takes off, screeching. Evan splashes down the porch, then tosses the empty can against the side of the house.

“The barn,” I say. “If you wanted to create a diversion, you should have burned down the barn. That way the house would still be here when we get back.” Because I’d like to believe we’re coming back, Evan. You, me, and Sammy, one big happy family.

“You know we’re not coming back,” he says, and lights the match.

67

TWENTY-FOUR HOURS LATER and I’ve completed the circle that connects me and Sammy as if by a silver cord, returning to the place where I made my promise.

Camp Ashpit is exactly how I left it, which means there is no Camp Ashpit, just a dirt road cutting through woods interrupted by a mile-wide emptiness where Camp Ashpit used to be, the ground harder than steel and bare of everything, even the tiniest weed or blade of grass or dead leaf. Of course, it’s winter, but somehow I don’t think when springtime comes this Other-made clearing will blossom like a meadow.

I point to a spot on our right. “That’s where the barracks was. I think. It’s hard to tell without any point of reference except the road. Over there the storage shed. Back that way the ash pit, and farther back the ravine.”

Evan is shaking his head with wonder. “There’s nothing left.” He stamps his foot on the rock-hard ground.

“Oh yeah, there is. I’m left.”

He sighs. “You know what I mean.”

“I’m being too intense,” I say.

“Hmmm. Not really like you.” He tries out a smile, but his smile isn’t working that well lately. He’s been very quiet since we left his house burning in the middle of farm country. In the waning daylight, he kneels on the hard ground, pulls out the map, and points at our location with his flashlight.

“The dirt road over there isn’t on the map, but it must connect with this road, maybe around here? We can follow it to 675, and then it’s a straight shot to Wright-Patterson.”

“How far?” I ask, peering over his shoulder.

“About twenty-five or thirty miles. Another day if we push it.”

“We’ll push it.”

I sit down beside him and dig through his pack for something to eat. I find some cured mystery meat wrapped in wax paper and a couple of hard biscuits. I offer one to Evan. He shakes his head no.

“You need to eat,” I scold him. “Stop worrying so much.”

He’s afraid we’ll run out of food. He has his rifle, of course, but there’ll be no hunting during this phase of the rescue operation. We have to pass quietly through the countryside—not that the countryside has been particularly quiet. The first night, we heard gunfire. Sometimes the echo of a single gun going off, sometimes more than one. Always in the distance, though, never close enough to freak us out. Maybe lone hunters like Evan, living off the land. Maybe roving gangs of Twigs. Who knew? Maybe there are other sixteen-year-old girls with M16s stupid enough to think they are humanity’s last representatives on Earth.

He gives in and takes one of the biscuits. Gnaws off a hunk. Chews thoughtfully, looking around the wasteland as the light dies. “What if they’ve stopped running buses?” he asks for the hundredth time. “How do we get in?”

“We come up with something else.” Cassie Sullivan: expert strategic planner.

He gives me a look. “Professional soldiers. Humvees. And Black Hawks. And this—what did you call it?—green-eyed bomb. We better come up with something good.”

He jams the map into his pocket and stands up, adjusting the rifle over his shoulder. He’s on the verge of something. I’m not sure what. Tears? Screams? Laughter?

Me too. All three. And maybe not for the same reasons. I’ve decided to trust him, but like somebody once said, you can’t force yourself to trust. So you put all your doubts in a little box and bury it deep and then try to forget where you buried it. My problem is that buried box is like a scab I can’t stop picking at.

“We better go,” he says tightly, glancing up at the sky. The clouds that moved in the day before still linger, hiding the stars. “We’re exposed here.”

Suddenly, Evan snaps his head to the left and goes all statuelike.

“What is it?” I whisper.

He holds up his hand. Gives a sharp shake of his head. Peers into the near perfect darkness. I don’t see anything. Don’t hear anything. But I’m not a hunter like Evan.

“A damned flashlight,” he murmurs. He presses his lips to my ear. “What’s closer, the woods on the other side of the road or the ravine?”

I shake my head. I really don’t know. “The ravine, I guess.”

He doesn’t hesitate. He grabs my hand, and we take off in a quick trot toward where I hoped the ravine was. I don’t know how far we ran till we came to it. Probably not as far as it seemed, because it seemed like we ran forever. Evan lowers me down the rocky face to the bottom, then jumps in beside me.

“Evan?”

He presses his finger to his lips. Scoots up the side to peek over the edge. He motions to his pack, and I fish around until I find his binoculars. I tug on his pant leg—What’s going on?—but he shakes off my hand. He taps his fingers against his thigh, thumb tucked. Four of them? Is that what he meant? Or is he using some kind of hunter’s code, like, Get down on all fours!

He doesn’t move for a long time. Finally he shimmies back down and puts his lips to my ear again.

“They’re coming this way.” He squints in the gloom toward the opposite wall of the ravine, which is much steeper than the one we came down, but there are woods on the other side, or what’s left of them: shattered stumps of trees, tangles of broken branches and vines. Good cover. Or at least better cover than being totally exposed in a gully where the bad guys can pick you off like fish in a barrel. He bites his lip, weighing the odds. Do we have time to scale the other side before being spotted?

“Stay down.”

He swings his rifle off his shoulder and braces his boots against the unsteady surface, resting his elbows on the ground above. I’m standing directly beneath him, cradling the M16. Yeah, he told me to stay down, I know. But I’m not about to huddle in a heap waiting for the end. I’ve been there before, and I’m never going back.

Evan fires; the twilight stillness shatters. The kickback of the rifle knocks him off balance, his foot slips, and he falls straight down. Luckily, there’s a moron directly beneath him to break his fall. Lucky for him. Not so lucky for the moron.

He rolls off me, yanks me to my feet, and shoves me toward the opposite side. But it’s kind of difficult to move fast when you can’t breathe.

A flare drops into the ravine, ripping apart the dark with a hellish red glare. Evan slides his hands under my arms and hurls me toward the top. I catch hold of the edge with my fingertips and furiously dig into the wall with my toes, like some crazy bicyclist. Then Evan’s hands on my butt for the final heave-ho, and I’m on the other side.

I swing around to help him up, but he shouts for me to run—no reason to be quiet now—as a small, pineapple-shaped object plops into the ravine behind him.

I scream, “Grenade!” which gives Evan an entire second to take cover.

That’s not quite enough time.

The blast drops him, and at that moment a figure wearing fatigues appears on the opposite side of the ravine. I open up with my M16, screaming incoherently at the top of my lungs. The figure scrambles backward, but I keep firing at the spot where he stood. I don’t think he was expecting Cassie Sullivan’s answer to his invitation to party down post–alien apocalypse style.

I empty my clip, slap home a fresh one. Count to ten. Make myself look down, sure of what I’m going to see when I do. Evan’s body at the bottom of the ravine, ripped to shreds, all because I was the one thing he found worth dying for. Me, the girl who let him kiss her but never kissed him first. The girl who never thanked him for saving her life but paid him back with sarcasm and accusations. I know what I’m going to see when I look down, but that’s not what I see.

Evan is gone.

The little voice inside my head whose job it is to keep me alive shouts, Run!

So I run.

Leaping over fallen trees and winter dry scrub, and now the familiar pop-pop-pop of rapid-arms fire.

Grenades. Flares. Assault weapons. These aren’t Twigs after us. These are pros.

Outside the fiendish glow of the flare, I hit a wall of dark, then run smack into a tree. The impact knocks me off my feet. I don’t know how far I ran, but it must be a good distance, because I can’t see the ravine, can’t hear anything but my own heartbeat roaring in my ears.

I scuttle forward to a fallen pine tree and huddle behind it, waiting for the breath I left back at the ravine to catch up with me. Waiting for another flare to drop into the woods in front of me. Waiting for the Silencers to come crashing through the underbrush.

A rifle pops in the distance, followed by a high-pitched scream. Then an answering barrage of automatic weapons and another grenade explosion, and then silence.

Well, it isn’t me they’re shooting at, so it must be Evan, I think. Which makes me feel better and a whole lot worse, because he’s out there alone against pros, and where am I? Hiding behind a tree like a girl.

But what about Sams? I can run back into a fight I’ll probably lose, or stay down to stay alive long enough to keep my promise.

It’s an either/or world.

Another crack! of a rifle. Another girly scream.

More silence.

He’s picking them off one by one. A farm boy with no combat experience against a squad of professional soldiers. Outnumbered. Outgunned. Cutting them down with the same brutal efficiency as the Silencer on the interstate, the hunter in the woods who chased me under a car and then mysteriously disappeared.

Crack!

Scream.

Silence.

I don’t move. I wait behind my log, terrified. Over the past ten minutes, it’s become such a dear friend, I consider naming it: Howard, my pet log.

You know, when I first saw you in the woods, I thought he was your bear.

The snap and crunch of dead leaves and twigs underfoot. A darker shadow against the dark of the woods. The soft call of the Silencer. My Silencer.

“Cassie? Cassie, it’s safe now.”

I heave myself upright and point my rifle directly at Evan Walker’s face.

68

HE PULLS UP QUICKLY, but the look of confusion comes slowly.

“Cassie, it’s me.”

“I know it’s you. I just don’t know who you are.”

His jaw tightens. His voice is strained. Anger? Frustration? I can’t tell. “Lower the gun, Cassie.”

“Who are you, Evan? If that’s evan your name. Even your name.”

He smiles wanly. And then he falls to his knees, sways, topples over, and lies still.

I wait, the gun trained on the back of his head. He doesn’t move. I hop over Howard and poke him with my toe. He still doesn’t move. I kneel beside him, resting the butt of my rifle on my thigh, and press my fingers against his neck, feeling for a pulse. He’s alive. His pants are shredded from the thighs down. Wet to the touch. I smell my fingertips. Blood.

I lean my M16 against the fallen tree and roll Evan onto his back. His eyelids flutter. He reaches up and touches my cheek with his bloody palm.

“Cassie,” he whispers. “Cassie for Cassiopeia.”

“Stop it,” I say. I notice his rifle lying next to him and kick it out of his reach. “How bad are you hurt?”

“I think pretty bad.”

“How many were there?”

“Four.”

“They never had a chance, did they?”

Long sigh. His eyes lift up to mine. I don’t need him to speak; I can see the answer in his eyes. “Not much, no.”

“Because you don’t have the heart to kill, but you have the heart to do what you have to do.” I hold my breath. He must know where I’m going with this.

He hesitates. Nods. I can see the pain in his eyes. I look away so he can’t see the pain in mine. But you started down this road, Cassie. No turning back now.

“And you’re very good at what you have the heart to do, aren’t you?”

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Yours, too: What do you have the heart to do, Cassie?

He saved my life. How could he also be the one who tried to take it? It doesn’t make sense.

Do I have the heart to let him bleed to death because now I know he lied to me—that he isn’t gentle Evan Walker the reluctant hunter, the grieving son and brother and lover, but something that might not even be human? Do I have what it takes to follow the first rule down to its final, brutal, unforgiving conclusion and put a bullet through his finely sculpted forehead?

Oh, crap, who are you kidding?

I start to unbutton his shirt. “Got to get these clothes off,” I mutter.

“You don’t know how long I’ve waited to hear you say that.” Smile. Lopsided. Sexy.

“You’re not charming your way out of this one, buddy. Can you sit up a little? A little more. Here, take these.” A couple of pain pills from the first aid kit. He swallows them with two long gulps of water from a bottle I hand him.

I pull off his shirt. He’s looking up into my face; I avoid his gaze. While I tug off his boots, he unbuckles his belt and pulls down the zipper. He lifts his butt, but I can’t get his pants off—they’re plastered to his body with tacky blood.

“Rip them,” he says. He rolls over onto his stomach. I try, but the material keeps slipping through my fingers when I pull.

“Here, use this.” He holds up a bloody knife. I don’t ask him where the blood came from.

I cut from hole to hole slowly; I’m terrified of cutting him. Then I strip the pants away from each leg, like peeling a banana. That’s it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana. I have to know what the truth is, and you can’t get to the tasty fruit without stripping off the outer layer.

Speaking of fruit, I’m down—I mean, he’s down—to his underwear.

Confronted with them, I ask, “Do I need to look at your butt?”

“I’ve been wondering about your opinion.”

“Enough with the lame attempts at humor.” I slice the material at both hips and peel back the underwear, exposing him. His butt is bad. I mean bad as in peppered with shrapnel wounds. Otherwise, it’s pretty good.

I dab at the blood with some gauze from the kit, fighting back hysterical giggles. I blame it on the unbearable stress, not on the fact that I’m wiping Evan Walker’s ass.

“God, you’re a mess.”

He’s gasping for air. “Just try to stop the bleeding for now.”

I pack the wounds on this side of him the best I can. “Can you roll back over?” I ask.

“I’d rather not.”

“I need to see the front.” Oh my God. The front?

“The front’s okay. Really.”

I sit back, exhausted. Guess that’s one thing I’ll take his word for. “Tell me what happened.”

“After I got you out of the ravine, I ran. Found a shallow spot to climb out. Circled around them. The rest you probably heard.”

“I heard three shots. You said there were four guys.”

“Knife.”

“This knife?”

“That knife. This is his blood on my hands, not mine.”

“Oh, thanks.” I scrub my cheek where he touched me. I decide to just come out with the worst explanation for what’s going on. “You’re a Silencer, aren’t you?”

Silence. How ironic.

“Or are you human?” I whisper. Say human, Evan. And when you say it, say it perfectly so there’s no doubt. Please, Evan, I really need you to take the doubt away. I know you said you can’t make yourself trust—so, damn it, make somebody else trust. Make me trust. Say it. Say you’re human.

“Cassie…”

“Are you human?”

“Of course I’m human.”

I take a deep breath. He said it, but not perfectly. I can’t see his face; it’s tucked beneath his elbow. Maybe if I could see his face that would make it perfect and I could let this awful thought go. I pick up some sterile wipes and begin to clean his blood—or whoever’s—from my hands.

“If you’re human, why have you been lying to me?”

“I haven’t lied to you about everything.”

“Just the parts that matter.”

“Those are the parts I haven’t lied about.”

“Did you kill those three people on the interstate?”

“Yes.”

I flinch. I didn’t expect him to say yes. I expected an Are you kidding? Stop being so paranoid. Instead I get a soft, simple answer, as if I asked him if he ever skinny-dipped.

Next question is the hardest yet: “Did you shoot me in the leg?”

“Yes.”

I shudder and drop the bloody wipe between my legs. “Why did you shoot me in the leg, Evan?”

“Because I couldn’t shoot you in the head.”

Well. There you have it.

I pull out the Luger and hold it in my lap. His head is about a foot from my knee. The one thing that puzzles me is the person with the gun is shaking like a leaf and the one at her mercy is perfectly calm.

“I’m going now,” I tell him. “I’m going to leave you to bleed to death the way you left me under that car.”

I wait for him to say something.

“You’re not leaving,” he points out.

“I’m waiting to hear what you have to say.”

“This is complicated.”

“No, Evan. Lies are complicated. The truth is simple. Why were you shooting people on the highway?”

“Because I was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” I ask.

“Afraid they weren’t people.”

I sigh and fish out a bottle of water from my backpack, lean back against the fallen tree, and take a deep drink.

“You shot those people on the highway—and me, and God knows who else; I know you weren’t going out every night hunting animals—because you already knew about the 4th Wave. I’m your Crucifix Soldier.”

He nods into the crook of his elbow. Muffled voice: “If you want to put it that way.”

“If you wanted me dead, why did you pull me out of the snow instead of letting me freeze to death?”

“I didn’t want you dead.”

“After shooting me in the leg and leaving me to bleed to death under a car.”

“No, you were on your feet when I ran.”

“You ran? Why did you run?” I’m having trouble picturing it.

“I was afraid.”

“You shot those people because you were afraid. You shot me because you were afraid. You ran because you were afraid.”

“I might have some issues with fear.”

“Then you find me and bring me to the farmhouse, nurse me back to health, cook me a hamburger and wash my hair and teach me how to shoot and make out with me for the purpose of… what?”

He rolls his head around to look at me with one eye. “You know, Cassie, this is a little unfair of you.”

My mouth drops open. “Unfair of me?”

“Grilling me while I’m shot up with shrapnel.”

“That isn’t my fault,” I snap. “You’re the one who insisted on coming.” A thrill of fear rockets down my spine. “Why did you come, Evan? Is this some kind of trick? Are you using me for something?”

“Rescuing Sammy was your idea,” he points out. “I tried to talk you out of it. I even offered to go myself.”

He’s shivering. He’s naked and it’s forty degrees. I drape his jacket over his back and cover the rest of him the best I can with his denim shirt.

“I’m sorry, Cassie.”

“For which part?”

“All the parts.” His words are slurring: the pain pills kicking in.

I’m gripping the gun hard now with both hands. Shaking like him, but not from the cold.

“Evan, I killed that soldier because I didn’t have a choice—I didn’t go looking for people to kill every day. I didn’t hide in the woods by the side of the road and take out every person who came along because they might be one of them.” I’m nodding to myself. It really is simple. “You can’t be who you say you are because who you say you are could not have done what you did!”

I don’t care about anything but the truth now. And not being an idiot. And not feeling anything for him, because feeling something for him will make what I have to do that much harder, maybe impossible, and if I want to save my brother, nothing can be impossible.

“What’s next?” I say.

“In the morning, we’ll have to get the shrapnel out.”

“I mean after this wave. Or are you the last wave, Evan?”

He’s looking up at me with that one exposed eye and wiggling his head back and forth. “I don’t know how I can convince you—”

I press the muzzle of the gun against his temple, right beside the big chocolaty eye staring up at me, and snarl, “1st Wave: lights out. 2nd Wave: surf’s up. 3rd Wave: pestilence. 4th Wave: Silencer. What’s next, Evan? What is the 5th Wave?”

He doesn’t answer. He’s passed out.

69

AT DAWN he’s still out cold, so I grab my rifle and hike out of the woods to assess his handiwork. Probably not the smartest thing to do. What if our midnight raiders called for backup? I’d be the prize in a turkey shoot. I’m not a bad shot, but I’m no Evan Walker.

Well, even Evan Walker is no Evan Walker.

I don’t know what he is. He says he’s human, and he looks like a human, talks like a human, bleeds like a human and, okay, kisses like a human. And a rose by any other name, blah, blah, blah. He says the right things, too, like the reason he was sniping people is the same reason I shot the Crucifix Soldier.

The problem is, I don’t buy it. And now I can’t decide which is better, a dead Evan or a live Evan. Dead Evan can’t help me keep my promise. Live Evan can.

Why did he shoot me, then save me? What did he mean when he said that I’d saved him?

It’s weird. When he held me in his arms, I felt safe. When he kissed me, I was lost in him. It’s like there are two Evans. There is the Evan I know and the Evan I don’t. Evan the farm boy with the soft hands who strokes me till I’m purring like a cat. Evan the pretender who is the cold-blooded killer who shot me.

I’m going to assume he’s human—at least biologically. Maybe he’s a clone grown on board the mothership from harvested DNA. Or maybe something less Star Warsy and more despicable: a traitor to his species. Maybe that’s what the Silencers are: human mercenaries.

The Others are giving him something to kill us. Or they threatened him—like kidnapping someone he loves (Lauren? I never actually saw her grave) and offering him a deal. Kill twenty humans and you get them back.

The last possibility? That he is what he says he is. Alone, scared, killing before someone can kill him, a firm adherent to the first rule, until he broke it by letting me go and then bringing me back.

It explains what happened as well as the first two possibilities. Everything fits. It could be the truth. Except for one niggling little problem.

The soldiers.

That’s why I don’t leave him in the woods. I want to see what he did for myself.

Since Camp Ashpit is now more featureless than a salt flat, I have no trouble finding Evan’s kills. One by the lip of the ravine. Two more side by side a few hundred yards away. All three head shots. In the dark. While they were shooting at him. The last one is lying near where the barracks used to be, maybe even the exact spot where Vosch murdered my father.

None of them are older than fourteen. All of them are wearing these weird silver eye patches. Some kind of night vision technology? If so, it makes Evan’s accomplishment all the more impressive, in a sickening sort of way.

Evan’s awake when I get back. Sitting up against the fallen tree. Pale, shivering, eyes sunk back in his head.

“They were kids,” I tell him. “They were just kids.”

I kick my way into the dead brush behind him and empty out my stomach.

Then I feel better.

I go back to him. I’ve decided not to kill him. Yet. He’s still worth more to me alive. If he is a Silencer, he may know what happened to my brother. So I grab the first aid kit and kneel between his spread legs.

“Okay, time to operate.”

I find a pack of sterile wipes in the kit. Silently, he watches me clean his victim’s blood off the knife.

I swallow hard, tasting the fresh vomit. “I’ve never done this before,” I say. Kind of obvious thing to say, but it feels like I’m talking to a stranger.

He nods, rolls onto his stomach. I pull the shirt away, exposing his bottom half.

I’ve never seen a naked guy before. Now here I am kneeling between his legs, though I can’t see his total nakedness. Just the back half. Strange, I never thought my first time with a naked guy would be like this. Well, I guess that isn’t so strange.

“You want another pain pill?” I ask. “It’s cold and my hands are shaking…”

“No pill,” he grunts, face tucked into the crook of his arm.

I work slowly at first, gingerly poking into the wounds with the tip of the knife, but I quickly learn that isn’t the best way to dig metal out of human—or maybe nonhuman—flesh: You just prolong the agony.

His butt takes the longest. Not because I’m lingering. There’s just so much shrapnel. He doesn’t squirm. He barely flinches. Sometimes he goes, “Oooh!” Sometimes he sighs.

I lift the jacket off his back. Not too many wounds here, and mostly concentrated along the lower part. Stiff fingers, sore wrists, I force myself to be quick—quick but careful.

“Hang in there,” I murmur. “Almost done.”

“Me too.”

“We don’t have enough bandages.”

“Just get the worst.”

“Infection…?”

“There’s some penicillin tablets in the kit.”

He rolls back over as I dig out the pills. He takes two with a sip of water. I sit back, sweating, though it isn’t much above freezing.

“Why kids?” I ask.

“I didn’t know they were kids.”

“Maybe not, but they were heavily armed and knew what they were doing. Their problem was, so did you. You must have forgotten to mention your commando training.”

“Cassie, if we can’t trust each other—”

“Evan, we can’t trust each other.” I want to crack him in the head and burst into tears at the same time. I’ve reached the point of being tired of being tired. “That’s the whole problem.”

Overhead, the sun has broken free from the clouds, exposing us to a bright blue sky.

“Alien clone children?” I guess. “America scraping the bottom of the conscription barrel? Seriously, why are kids running around with automatic weapons and grenades?”

He shakes his head. Sips some water. Winces. “Maybe I will take another one of those pain pills.”

“Vosch said just the kids. They’re snatching children to turn them into an army?”

“Maybe Vosch isn’t one of them. Maybe the army took the kids.”

“Then why did he kill everybody else? Why did he put a bullet in my dad’s head? And if he isn’t one of them, where’d he get the Eye? Something’s wrong here, Evan. And you know what’s going on. We both know you do. Why can’t you just tell me? You’ll trust me with a gun and to pull shrapnel out of your ass, but you won’t trust me with the truth?”

He stares at me for a long moment. Then he says, “I wish you hadn’t cut your hair.”

I would have lost it, but I’m too cold, too nauseated, and too strung out. “I swear to God, Evan Walker,” I say in a dead voice, “if I didn’t need you, I would kill you right now.”

“I’m glad you need me, then.”

“And if I find out you’re lying to me about the most important part, I will kill you.”

“What’s the most important part?”

“About being human.”

“I’m as human as you are, Cassie.”

He pulls my hand into his. Both our hands are stained with blood. Mine with his. His with that of a boy not much older than my brother. How many people has this hand killed?

“Is that what we are?” I ask. I’m about to lose it big-time. I can’t trust him. I have to trust him. I can’t believe. I have to believe. Is this the Others’ ultimate goal, the wave to end all waves, stripping our humanity down to its bare, animalistic bones, until we’re nothing but soulless predators doing their dirty work for them, as solitary as sharks and with as much compassion?

He notices the cornered-animal look in my eyes. “What is it?”

“I don’t want to be a shark,” I whisper.

He looks at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. He could have said, Shark? Who? What? Huh? Who said you were a shark? Instead, he begins to nod, like he totally gets it. “You aren’t.”

You, not we. I give his long look back to him. “If the Earth was dying and we had to leave,” I say slowly, “and we found a planet but someone was there before us, someone who for some reason we weren’t compatible with…”

“You’d do whatever was necessary.”

“Like sharks.”

“Like sharks.”

I guess he was trying to be gentle about it. It mattered to him, I guess, that my landing wouldn’t be too hard, that the shock wouldn’t be too great. He wanted, I think, for me to get it without his having to say it.

I fling his hand away. I’m furious that I ever let him touch me. Furious at myself for staying with him when I knew there were things he wasn’t telling me. Furious at my father for letting Sammy get on that bus. Furious at Vosch. Furious at the green eye hovering on the horizon. Furious at myself for breaking the first rule for the first cute guy that came along, and for what? For what? Because his hands were large but gentle and his breath smelled like chocolate?

I pound his chest over and over until I forget why I’m hitting him, until I’m emptied of fury and all that’s left inside is the black hole where Cassie used to be.

He grabs at my flailing fists. “Cassie, stop it! Settle down! I’m not your enemy.”

“Then whose enemy are you, huh? Because you’re somebody’s. You weren’t out hunting every night—not animals, anyway. And you didn’t learn killer ninja moves working on your daddy’s farm. You keep saying what you’re not, and all I want to know is what you are. What are you, Evan Walker?”

He lets go of my wrists and surprises me by pressing his hand against my face, running his smooth thumb over my cheek, across the bridge of my nose. As if he’s touching me for the last time.

“I am a shark, Cassie,” he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he’s seeing me for the last time. “A shark who dreamed he was a man.”

I’m falling faster than the speed of light into the black hole that opened with the Arrival and then devoured everything in its path. The hole my father stared into when my mother died, the one I thought was out there, separate from me, but really never was. It was inside me, and it had been inside me since the beginning, growing, eating up every ounce of hope and trust and love I had, chewing its way through the galaxy of my soul while I clung to a choice—a choice who is looking at me now as if for the last time.

So I do the thing most reasonable people would in my situation.

I run.

Crashing through the woods in the bitter winter air, bare branch, blue sky, withered leaf, then bursting from the tree line into an open field, the frozen ground crunchy beneath my boots, under the dome of the indifferent sky, the brilliant blue curtain drawn over a billion stars that are still there, still looking down at her, the running girl with her short hair bouncing and tears streaming down her cheeks, not running from anything, not running to anything, just running, running like hell, because that’s the most logical thing to do when you realize the one person on Earth you’ve decided to trust isn’t from the Earth. Never mind that he saved your ass more times than you can remember, or that he could have killed you a hundred times over, or that there’s something about him, something tormented and sad and terribly, terribly lonely, like he was the last person on Earth, not the girl shivering in a sleeping bag, hugging a teddy bear in a world gone quiet.

Shut up, shut up, just shut up.

70

HE’S GONE when I come back. And, yes, I came back. Where was I supposed to go, without my gun and especially without that damned bear, my reason for living? I wasn’t scared to go back—he’d had ten billion opportunities to kill me; what did one more matter?

There’s his rifle. His backpack. The first aid kit. And there’s his shredded jeans by Howard the log. Since he didn’t pack another pair of pants, my guess is that he’s cavorting about the freezing woods in just his hiking boots, like a calendar pinup. No, wait. His shirt and jacket are missing.

“Come on, Bear,” I growl, snatching up my backpack. “It’s time to get you back to your owner.”

I grab my rifle, check the magazine, ditto for the Luger, pull on a pair of black knit gloves because my fingers have gone numb, steal the map and flashlight from his backpack, and head for the ravine. I’ll risk the daylight to put distance between me and Sharkman. I don’t know where he went, maybe to call in the drone strikes now that his cover’s blown, but it doesn’t matter. That’s what I decided on the way back, after running until I couldn’t run anymore: It really doesn’t matter who or what Evan Walker is. He kept me from dying. Fed me, bathed me, protected me. He helped me to get strong. He even taught me how to kill. With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

Into the ravine. Ten degrees colder in the shadows. Up and over onto the blasted landscape of Camp Ashpit, running on ground as hard as asphalt, and there’s the first body, and I think, If Evan is one of them, whose team do you play for? Would Evan kill one of his own kind to keep up the facade with me—or was he forced to kill them because they thought he was human? Thinking that makes me sick with despair: There’s no bottom to this crap. The more you dig, the further down it goes.

I pass another body with barely a glance, and then that bare glance registers and I turn back. The kid soldier has no pants on.

It doesn’t matter. I keep moving. On the dirt road now, heading north. Still trotting. Move, Cassie, move, move. Forgot the food. Forgot the water. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. The sky is cloudless, huge, a gigantic blue eye staring down. I run along the edge of the road near the woods abutting the west side. If I see a drone, I’ll dive for cover. If I see Evan, I’ll shoot first and ask questions later. Well, not just Evan. Anyone.

Nothing matters but the first rule. Nothing matters except getting Sammy. I forgot that for a while.

Silencers: human, semihuman, clone human, or alien-projecting-human holograph? Doesn’t matter. The ultimate goal of the Others: eradication, internment, or enslavement? Doesn’t matter. My chances of success: one, point one, or point zero zero zero one percent? Doesn’t matter.

Follow the road, follow the road, follow the dusty dirt road…

After a couple miles it veers to the west, connecting with Highway 35. Another few miles on Highway 35 to the junction of 675. I can take cover at the overpass there and wait for the buses. If the buses still run on Highway 35. If they’re still running at all.

At the end of the dirt road, I pause long enough to scan the terrain behind me. Nothing. He’s not coming. He’s letting me go.

I head a few feet into the trees to catch my breath. The minute I sink to the ground, everything I’ve been running from catches up to me long before my breath.

I am a shark who dreamed he was a man…

Someone is screaming—I can hear her screams echoing through the trees. The sound goes on and on. Let it bring a horde of Silencers down upon me, I don’t care. I press my hands against my head and rock back and forth, and I have this weird sensation of floating above my body, and then I’m rocketing into the sky at a thousand miles an hour and watching myself dwindle into a tiny spot before the immensity of the Earth swallows me. It’s as if I’ve been loosed from the Earth. As if there were nothing to hold me down anymore and I’m being sucked into the void. As if I were bound by a silver cord and now that cord has snapped.

I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don’t know what real loneliness is until you’ve known the opposite.

“Cassie.”

Two seconds: on my feet. Another two and a half: swinging the M16 toward the voice. A shadow darts between the trees on my left and I open up, spraying bullets willy-nilly at tree trunks and branches and empty air.

“Cassie.”

In front of me, about two o’clock. I empty the clip. I know I didn’t hit him. Know I don’t have a prayer of hitting him. He’s a Silencer. But if I keep shooting, maybe he’ll back off.

“Cassie.”

Directly behind me. I take a deep breath, reload, and then deliberately turn and pump some more lead into the innocent trees.

Don’t you get it, dummy? He’s getting you to use up your ammo.

So I wait, feet wide, shoulders square, gun up, scanning right and left, and I can hear his voice in my head, giving instruction back at the farm: You have to feel the target. Like it’s connected to you. Like you’re connected to it…

It happens in the space of time between one second and the next. His arm drops around my chest, he rips the rifle from my hands, then relieves me of the Luger. After another half second, he’s locked me in a bear hug, crushing me into his chest and lifting my feet a couple inches off the ground as I kick furiously with my heels, twisting my head back and forth, snapping at his forearm with my teeth.

And the whole time his lips tickling the delicate skin of my ear. “Cassie. Don’t. Cassie…”

“Let… me… go.”

“That’s been the whole problem. I can’t.”

71

EVAN LETS ME KICK and squirm until I’m exhausted, then he plops me down against a tree and steps back.

“You know what happens if you run,” he warns me. His face is flushed. He’s having a hard time catching his breath. When he turns to retrieve my weapons, his movements are stiff, deliberate. Catching me—after taking the grenade for me—has cost him. His jacket hangs open, exposing his denim shirt, and the pants he took from the dead kid are two sizes too small, tight in all the wrong places. It looks like he’s wearing a pair of capris.

“You’ll shoot me in the back of the head,” I say.

He tucks my Luger into his belt and swings the M16 over one shoulder.

“I could have done that a long time ago.”

I guess he’s talking about the first time we met. “You’re a Silencer,” I say. It takes everything in me not to jump up and tear off through the trees again. Of course, running from him is pointless. Fighting him is pointless. So I have to outsmart him. It’s like I’m back under that car on the day we first met. No hiding from it. No running from it.

He sits down a few feet away, resting his rifle across his thighs. He’s shivering.

“If your job is to kill us, why didn’t you kill me?” I ask.

He answers without hesitating, as if he’s decided long before I asked the question what his answer would be.

“Because I’m in love with you.”

My head falls back against the rough bark of the tree. The bare branches overhead are hard-edged against the bright blue sky. “Well, this is a tragic love story, isn’t it? Alien invader falls for human girl. The hunter for his prey.”

“I am human.”

“‘I am human… but.’ Finish it, Evan.” Because I’m finished now, Evan. You were the last one, my only friend in the world, and now you’re gone. I mean, you’re here, whatever you are, but Evan, my Evan, he’s gone.

“Not but, Cassie. And. I am human and I’m not. I’m neither and I’m both. I am Other and I am you.”

I look into his eyes, deep-set and very dark in the shadowy air, and say, “You make me want to puke.”

“How could I tell you the truth when the truth meant you would leave me and leaving me meant you would die?”

“Don’t preach to me about dying, Evan.” Wagging my finger at his face. “I watched my mother die. I watched one of you kill my father. I’ve seen more death in six months than anyone else in human history.”

He pushes my hand down and says through gritted teeth, “And if there had been something you could have done to protect your father, to save your mother, wouldn’t you have done it? If you knew a lie would save Sammy, wouldn’t you lie?”

You bet I would. I would even pretend to trust the enemy to save Sammy. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around Because I’m in love with you. Trying to come up with some other reason he betrayed his species.

Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters. A door slammed closed behind Sammy the day he got on that bus, a door with a thousand locks, and I realize sitting in front of me is the guy with the keys.

“You know what’s at Wright-Patterson, don’t you?” I say. “You know exactly what happened to Sam.”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t nod yes. Doesn’t shake his head no. What’s he thinking? That it’s one thing to spare a single measly random human but something seriously different to give away the master plan? Is this Evan Walker’s under-the-Buick moment, when you can’t run, can’t hide, and your only option is to turn and face?

“Is he alive?” I ask. I lean forward; the rough tree bark is cutting into my spine.

He hesitates for a half breath, then: “He probably is.”

“Why did they… why did you bring him there?”

“To prepare him.”

“To prepare him for what?”

Waits a full breath this time. Then: “The 5th Wave.”

I close my eyes. For the first time, looking at that beautiful face is too much to endure. God, I’m tired. So frigging tired, I could sleep for a thousand years. If I slept for a thousand years, maybe I’d wake up and the Others would be gone and there’d be happy children frolicking in these woods. I am Other and I am you. What the hell does that mean? I’m too tired to chase the thought.

I open my eyes and force myself to look at him. “You can get us in.”

He’s shaking his head.

“Why not?” I ask. “You’re one of them. You can say you captured me.”

“Wright-Patterson isn’t a prison camp, Cassie.”

“Then what is it?”

“For you?” Leaning toward me; his breath warms my face. “A death trap. You won’t last five seconds. Why do you think I’ve been trying everything I can think of to keep you from going there?”

“Everything? Really? How about telling me the truth? How about something like, ‘Hey, Cass, about this rescue thingy of yours. I’m an alien like the guys who took Sam, so I know what you’re doing is absolutely hopeless’?”

“Would it have made a difference if I had?”

“That isn’t the point.”

“No, the point is your brother is being held at the most important base we—I mean, the Others—have established since the purge began—”

“Since the what? What did you call it? The purge?”

“Or the cleansing.” He can’t meet my eyes. “Sometimes it’s called that.”

“Oh, that’s what you’re doing? Cleaning up the human mess?”

“That’s not my word for it, and purging or cleansing or whatever you want to call it wasn’t my decision,” he protests. “If it makes you feel any better, I never thought we should—”

“I don’t want to feel better! The hatred I’m feeling at this moment is all I need, Evan. All I need.” Okay, that was honest, but don’t go too far. He’s the guy with the keys. Keep him talking. “Never thought you should do what?”

He takes a long drink from the water flask, offers it to me. I shake my head. “Wright-Patterson isn’t just any base—it’s the base,” he says, weighing each word carefully. “And Vosch isn’t just any commander—he’s the commander, the leader of all field operations and the architect of the cleans—the one who designed the attacks.”

“Vosch murdered seven billion people.” The number sounds weirdly hollow in my ears. After the Arrival, one of Dad’s favorite themes was how advanced the Others must be, how high they must have climbed on the evolutionary ladder to reach the stage of intergalactic travel. And this is their solution to the human “problem”?

“There were some of us who didn’t think annihilation was the answer,” Evan says. “I was one of them, Cassie. My side lost the argument.”

“No, Evan, that would be my side that lost.”

It’s more than I can take. I stand up, expecting him to stand, too, but he stays where he is, looking up at me.

“He doesn’t see you as some of us do… as I do,” he says. “To him, you’re a disease that will kill its host unless it’s wiped out.”

“I’m a disease. That’s what I am to you.”

I can’t look at him anymore. If I look at Evan Walker for one more second, I’m going to be sick.

Behind me, his voice is soft, level, almost sad. “Cassie, you’re up against something that is way beyond your capacity to fight. Wright-Patterson isn’t just another cleansing camp. The complex underneath it is the central coordinating hub for every drone in this hemisphere. It’s Vosch’s eyes, Cassie; it’s how he sees you. Breaking in to rescue Sammy isn’t just risky—it’s suicidal. For both of us.”

“Both of us?” I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He hasn’t moved.

“I can’t pretend to take you prisoner. My assignment isn’t to capture people—it’s to kill them. If I try to walk in with you as my prisoner, they’ll kill you. And then they’ll kill me for not killing you. And I can’t sneak you in. The base is patrolled by drones, protected by a twenty-foot-high electric fence, watchtowers, infrared cameras, motion detectors… and a hundred people just like me, and you know what I can do.”

“Then I sneak in without you.”

He nods. “It’s the only possible way—but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it isn’t suicidal. Everyone they bring in—I mean the people they don’t kill right away—is put through a screening program that maps their entire psyche, including their memories. They’ll know who you are and why you’re there… and then they’ll kill you.”

“There’s got to be a scenario that doesn’t end with them killing me,” I insist.

“There is,” he says. “The scenario where we find a safe spot to hide and wait for Sammy to come to us.”

My mouth drops open, and I think, Huh? Then I say it: “Huh?”

“It might take a couple of years. How old is he, five? The youngest allowed is seven.”

“The youngest allowed to do what?”

He looks away. “You saw.”

The little kid whose throat he cut at Camp Ashpit, wearing fatigues, toting a rifle almost as big as he was. Now I do want a drink. I walk over to him, and he gets very still while I bend over and pick up the flask. After four big swallows, my mouth is still dry.

“Sam is the 5th Wave,” I say. The words taste bad. I take another long drink.

Evan nods. “If he passed his screening, he’s alive and being…” He searches for the word. “Processed.”

“Brainwashed, you mean.”

“More like indoctrinated. In the idea that the aliens have been using human bodies, and we—I mean humans—have figured out a way to detect them. And if you can detect them, you can—”

“That isn’t fiction,” I interrupt. “You are using human bodies.”

He shakes his head. “Not the way Sammy thinks we are.”

“What does that mean? Either you are or you aren’t.”

“Sammy thinks we look like some kind of infestation attached to human brains, but—”

“Funny, that’s exactly the way I picture you, Evan. An infestation.” I can’t help myself.

His hand comes up. When I don’t slap it away or take off running into the woods, he slowly wraps his fingers around my wrist and gently pulls me to the ground beside him. I’m sweating slightly, though it’s bitingly cold. What now?

“There was a boy, a real human boy, named Evan Walker,” he says, looking deeply into my eyes. “Just like any kid, with a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters, completely human. Before he was born, I was inserted into him while his mother slept. While we both slept. For thirteen years I slept inside Evan Walker, while he learned to sit up, to eat solid food, to walk and talk and run and ride a bike, I was there, waiting to wake up. Like thousands of Others in thousands of other Evan Walkers around the world. Some of us were already awake, setting up our lives to be where we needed to be when the time came.”

I’m nodding, but why am I nodding? He came to a human body? What the hell does that mean?

“The 4th Wave,” he says, trying to be helpful. “Silencers. It’s a good name for us. We were silent, hiding inside human bodies, hiding inside human lives. We didn’t have to pretend to be you. We were you. Human and Other. Evan didn’t die when I awakened. He was… absorbed.”

Ever the noticer, Evan notices I’m totally creeped out by this. He reaches out to touch me and flinches when I pull away.

“So what are you, Evan?” I whisper. “Where are you? You said you were… what did you say?” My mind’s racing a gazillion miles an hour. “Inserted. Inserted where?”

“Maybe inserted isn’t the best word. I guess the concept that comes closest is downloaded. I was downloaded into Evan when his brain was still developing.”

I shake my head. For a being centuries more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question.

“But what are you? What do you look like?”

He frowns. “You know what I look like.”

“No! Oh God, sometimes you can be so…” Careful, Cassie, don’t go there. Remember what matters. “Before you became Evan, before you came here, when you were on your way to Earth from wherever it is you came from, what did you look like?”

“Nothing. We haven’t had bodies in tens of thousands of years. We had to give them up when we left our home.”

“You’re lying again. What, you look like a toad or a warthog or a slug or something? Every living thing looks like something.”

“We are pure consciousness. Pure being. Abandoning our bodies and downloading our psyches into the mothership’s mainframe was the only way we could make the journey.” He takes my hand and curls my fingers into a fist. “This is me,” he says softly. He covers my fist with his hands, enfolding it. “This is Evan. It’s not a perfect analogy, because there’s no place where I end and he begins.” He smiles shyly. “I’m not doing very well, am I? Do you want me to show you who I am?”

Holy crap! “No. Yes. What do you mean?” I picture him peeling off his face like a creature from a horror movie.

His voice shakes a little. “I can show you what I am.”

“It doesn’t involve any kind of insertion, does it?”

He laughs softly. “I guess it does. In a way. I’ll show you, Cassie, if you want to see.”

Of course I want to see. And of course I don’t want to see. It’s clear he wants to show me—will showing me get me one step closer to Sams? But this isn’t totally about Sammy. Maybe if Evan shows me, I’ll understand why he saved me when he should have killed me. Why he held me in the dark night after night to keep me safe—and to keep me sane.

He’s still smiling at me, probably delighted that I’m not clawing his eyes out or laughing him off, which might hurt worse. My hand is lost in his, gently bound, like the tender heart of a rose within the bud, waiting for the rain.

“What do I have to do?” I whisper.

He lets go of my hand. Reaches toward my face. I flinch. “I would never hurt you, Cassie.” I breathe. Nod. Breathe some more. “Close your eyes.” He touches my eyelids gently, so gently, a butterfly’s wings.

“Relax. Breathe deep. Empty your mind. If you don’t, I can’t come in. Do you want me to come in, Cassie?”

Yes. No. Dear God, how far do I have to go to keep my promise?

I whisper, “Yes.”

It doesn’t begin inside my head like I expected. Instead a delicious warmth spreads through my body, expanding from my heart outward, and my bones and muscles and skin dissolve in the warmth that spreads out from me, until the warmth overcomes the Earth and the boundaries of the universe. The warmth is everywhere and everything. My body and everything outside my body belongs to it. Then I feel him; he is in the warmth, too, and there’s no separation between us, no spot where I end and he begins, and I open up like a flower to the rain, achingly slow and dizzyingly fast, dissolving in the warmth, dissolving in him and there’s nothing to see, that’s just the convenient word he used because there is no word to describe him, he just is.

And I open to him, a flower to the rain.

72

THE FIRST THING I do after I open my eyes is break out in heart-wrenching sobs. I can’t help it: I’ve never felt so abandoned in my life.

“Maybe that was too soon,” he says, pulling me into his arms and stroking my hair.

And I let him. I’m too weak, too confused, too empty and forlorn to do anything else but let him hold me.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, Cassie,” he murmurs into my hair.

The cold squeezes back down. Now I have just the memory of the warmth.

“You must hate being trapped inside there,” I whisper, pressing my hand against his chest. I feel his heart push back.

“It doesn’t feel like I’m trapped,” he says. “In a way, it feels like I’ve been freed.”

“Freed?”

“To feel something again. To feel this.” He kisses me. A different kind of warmth spreads through my body.

Lying in the enemy’s arms. What’s the matter with me? These beings burned us alive, crushed us, drowned us, infected us with a plague that made us bleed to death from the inside out. I watched them kill everyone I knew and loved—with one special exception—and here I am, playing sucky-face with one! I let him inside my soul. I shared something with him more precious and intimate than my body.

For Sammy’s sake, that’s why. A good answer, but complicated. The truth is simple.

“You said you lost the argument over what to do about the human disease,” I say. “What was your answer?”

“Coexistence.” Talking to me, but addressing the stars above us. “There aren’t that many of us, Cassie. Only a few hundred thousand. We could have inserted ourselves in you, lived out our new lives without anyone ever knowing we were here. Not many of my people agreed with me. They saw pretending to be human as beneath them. They were afraid the longer we pretended to be human, the more human we would become.”

“And who would want that?”

“I didn’t think I would,” he admits. “Until I became one.”

“When you… ‘woke up’ in Evan?”

He shakes his head and says simply, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, “When I woke up in you, Cassie. I wasn’t fully human until I saw myself in your eyes.”

And then there are real human tears in his real human eyes, and it’s my turn to hold him while his heart breaks. My turn to see myself in his eyes.

Somebody might say that I’m not the only one lying in the enemy’s arms.

I am humanity, but who is Evan Walker? Human and Other. Both and neither. By loving me, he belongs to no one.

He doesn’t see it that way.

“I’ll do whatever you say, Cassie,” he says helplessly. His eyes shine brighter than the stars overhead. “I understand why you have to go. If it were you inside that camp, I would go. A hundred thousand Silencers couldn’t stop me.”

He presses his lips against my ear and whispers low and fierce, as if he’s sharing the most important secret in the world, which maybe he is.

“It’s hopeless. And it’s stupid. It’s suicidal. But love is a weapon they have no answer for. They know how you think, but they can’t know what you feel.”

Not we. They.

A threshold has been crossed, and he isn’t stupid. He knows it’s the kind you can’t cross back over.

73

WE SPEND OUR LAST DAY TOGETHER sleeping under the highway overpass like two homeless people, which literally we both are. One person sleeps, the other keeps watch. When it’s his turn to rest, he gives my guns back without hesitating and falls asleep instantly, as if it doesn’t occur to him I could easily run away or shoot him in the head. I don’t know; maybe it does occur to him. Our problem has always been that we don’t think like they do. It’s why I trusted him in the beginning and why he knew I would trust him. Silencers kill people. Evan didn’t kill me. Ergo, Evan couldn’t be a Silencer. See? That’s logic. Ahem—human logic.

At dusk we finish the rest of our provisions and hike up the embankment to take cover in the trees bordering Highway 35. The buses run only at night, he tells me. And you’ll know when they’re coming. You can hear the sound of their engines for miles because that’s the only sound for miles. First you see the headlights, and then you hear them, and then they’re whizzing past like big yellow race cars because the highway’s been cleared of wrecks and there aren’t speed limits anymore. He doesn’t know: Maybe they’ll stop, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just slow down long enough for one of the soldiers on board to put a bullet between my eyes. Maybe they won’t come at all.

“You said they were still gathering people,” I point out. “Why wouldn’t they come?”

He’s watching the road beneath us. “At some point the ‘rescued’ will figure out they’ve been duped, or the survivors on the outside will. When that happens, they’ll shut down the base—or the part of the base that’s dedicated to cleansing.” He clears his throat. Staring down at the road.

“What does that mean, ‘shut down the base’?”

“Shut it down the way they shut down Camp Ashpit.”

I think about what he’s saying. Like him, looking at the empty road.

“Okay,” I say finally. “Then we hope Vosch hasn’t pulled the plug yet.”

I scoop up a handful of dirt and twigs and dead leaves and rub it over my face. Another handful for my hair. He watches me without saying anything.

“This is the point where you bop me over the head,” I say. I smell like the earth, and for some reason I think about my father kneeling in the rose bed and the white sheet. “Or offer to go in my place. Or bop me in the head and then go in my place.”

He jumps to his feet. For a second I’m afraid he is going to bop me over the head, he’s that upset. Instead, he wraps his arms around himself like he’s cold—or he does it to keep himself from bopping me over the head.

“It’s suicide,” he snaps. “We’re both thinking it. One of us might as well say it. Suicide if I go, suicide if you go. Dead or alive, he’s lost.”

I pull the Luger from my waistband. Put it on the ground at his feet. Then the M16.

“Save these for me,” I tell him. “I’m going to need them when I get back. And by the way, somebody should say this: You look ridiculous in those pants.” I scooch over to the backpack without getting up. Pull out Bear. No need to dirty him up; he’s already rough-looking.

“Are you listening to me?” he demands.

“The problem is you don’t listen to yourself,” I shoot back. “There’s only one way in, and that’s the way Sammy took. You can’t go. I have to. So don’t even open your mouth. If you say anything, I’ll slap you.”

I stand up, and a weird thing happens: As I rise, Evan seems to shrink. “I’m going to get my little brother, and there’s only one way I can do it.”

He’s looking up at me, nodding. He has been inside me. There has been no place where he ended and I began. He knows what I’m going to say:

Alone.

74

THERE ARE THE STARS, the pinpricks of light stabbing down.

There is the empty road beneath the light stabbing down and the girl on the road with the smudged face and twigs and dead leaves entangled in her short, curly hair, clutching a battered old teddy bear, on the empty road, beneath the stars stabbing down.

There is the growl of engines and then the twin bars of the headlights cutting across the horizon, and the lights grow larger, brighter, like two stars going supernova, bearing down on the girl, who has secrets in her heart and promises to keep, and she faces the lights that bear down on her, she does not run or hide.

The driver sees me with plenty of time to stop. The brakes squeal, the door hisses open, and a soldier steps onto the asphalt. He has a gun but he doesn’t point it at me. He looks at me, pinned in the headlights, and I look back at him.

He’s wearing a white armband with a red cross on it. His name tag says PARKER. I remember that name. My heart skips a beat. What if he recognizes me? I’m supposed to be dead.

What’s my name? Lizbeth. Am I hurt? No. Am I alone? Yes.

Parker does a slow 360, surveying the landscape. He doesn’t see the hunter in the woods who is watching this play out, his scope trained on Parker’s head. Of course Parker doesn’t see him. The hunter in the woods is a Silencer.

Parker takes my arm and helps me onto the bus. It smells like blood and sweat. Half the seats are empty. There are kids. Adults, too. They don’t matter, though. Only Parker and the driver and the soldier with the name tag HUDSON matter. I flop into the last seat by the emergency door, the same seat Sam sat in when he pressed his little hand to the glass and watched me shrink until the dust swallowed me.

Parker hands me a bag of smushed gummies and a bottle of water. I don’t want either, but I consume both. The gummies have been in his pocket and are warm and gooey, and I’m afraid I’m going to be sick.

The bus picks up speed. Someone near the front is crying. Besides that, there’s the hum of the wheels and the high rev of the engine and the cold wind rushing through the cracked windows.

Parker comes back with a silver disk that he presses against my forehead. To take my temperature, he tells me. The disk glows red. I’m good, he says. What’s my bear’s name?

Sammy, I tell him.

Lights on the horizon. That’s Camp Haven, Parker tells me. It’s perfectly safe. No more running. No more hiding. I nod. Perfectly safe.

The light grows, seeps slowly through the windshield, then rushes in as we get closer, flooding the bus now, and we’re pulling up to the gate and a loud bell goes off and the gate rolls open. The silhouette of a soldier high in the watchtower.

We stop in front of a hangar. A fat man bounds onto the bus, light on the balls of his feet like a lot of fat guys. His name is Major Bob. We shouldn’t be afraid, he tells us. We are perfectly safe. There are only two rules to remember. Rule one is remember our colors. Rule two is listen and follow.

I fall into line with my group and follow Parker to the side door of the hangar. He pats Lizbeth on the shoulder and wishes her good luck.

I find a red circle and sit down. There are soldiers everywhere. But most of these soldiers are kids, some not much older than Sam. They all look very serious, especially the younger ones. The really young ones are the most serious of all.

You can manipulate a kid into believing almost anything, into doing almost anything, Evan explained in our mission briefing. With the right training, there are few things more savage than a ten-year-old.

I have a number: T-sixty-two. T for Terminator. Ha.

The numbers are called out over a loudspeaker.

“SIXTY-TWO! TEE-SIXTY-TWO! PROCEED TO THE RED DOOR, PLEASE! NUMBER TEE-SIXTY-TWO!”

The first station is the shower room.

On the other side of the red door is a thin woman wearing green scrubs. Everything comes off and into the hamper. Underwear, too. They love children here but not lice and ticks. There’s the shower. Here’s the soap. Put on the white robe when you’re finished and wait to be called.

I sit the bear against the wall and step naked onto the cold tiles. The water is tepid. The soap has a pungent mediciny smell. I’m still damp when I slip on the paper robe. It clings to my skin. You can almost see through it. I pick up Bear and wait.

Prescreening is next. A lot of questions. Some are nearly identical. That’s to test your story. Stay calm. Stay focused.

Through the next door. Up onto the exam table. A new nurse, heavier, meaner. She barely looks at me. I must be, like, the thousandth person she’s seen since the Silencers took the base.

What’s my full name? Elizabeth Samantha Morgan.

How old am I? Twelve.

Where am I from? Do I have any brothers or sisters? Is anyone in my family still alive? What happened to them? Where did I go after I left home? What happened to my leg? How was I shot? Who shot me? Do I know where any other survivors are? What are my siblings’ names? My parents’? What did my father do for a living? What was the name of my best friend? Tell her again what happened to my family.

When it’s over, she pats me on the knee and tells me not to be scared. I’m perfectly safe.

I hug Bear to my chest and nod.

Perfectly safe.

The physical’s next. Then the implant. The incision is very small. She’ll probably seal it with glue.

The woman named Dr. Pam is so nice, I like her in spite of myself. The dream doctor: kind, gentle, patient. She doesn’t rush right in and start poking me; she talks first. Lets me know everything she’s going to do. Shows me the implant. Like a pet chip, only better! Now if something happens, they’ll know where to find me.

“What’s your teddy bear’s name?”

“Sammy.”

“Okay if I sit Sammy in this chair while we put in the tracker?”

I roll onto my stomach. I’m irrationally concerned she can see my butt through the paper robe. I tense, anticipating the bite of the needle.

The device can’t download you until it’s linked to Wonderland. But once it’s in you, it’s fully operational. They can use it to track you, and they can use it to kill you.

Dr. Pam asks what happened to my leg. Some bad people shot it. That won’t happen here, she assures me. There are no bad people at Camp Haven. I’m perfectly safe.

I’m tagged. I feel like she’s hung a twenty-pound rock around my neck. Time for the last test, she tells me. A program seized from the enemy.

They call it Wonderland.

I grab Bear from his seat and follow her into the next room. White walls. White floor. White ceiling. White dentist chair, straps hanging from the arms and the leg rests. A keyboard and monitor. She tells me to have a seat and steps over to the computer.

“What does Wonderland do?” I ask.

“Well, that’s kind of complicated, Lizbeth, but essentially Wonderland records a virtual map of your cognitive functions.”

“A brain map?”

“Something like that, yes. Have a seat in the chair, honey. It won’t take long, and I promise it doesn’t hurt.”

I sit down, hugging Bear to my chest.

“Oh no, honey, Sammy can’t be in the chair with you.”

“Why not?”

“Here, give him to me. I’ll put him right over here by my computer.”

I give her a suspicious look. But she’s smiling and she has been so kind. I should trust her. After all, she completely trusts me.

But I’m so nervous, Bear slips out of my hand when I hold him out for her. He falls beside the chair onto his fat, fluffy head. I twist around to scoop him up, but Dr. Pam says to sit still, she’ll get him, and then she bends over.

I grab her head with both hands and bring it straight down into the arm of the chair. The impact makes my forearms sing with pain. She falls, stunned by the blow, but doesn’t collapse completely. By the time her knees hit the white floor, I’m out of the chair and swinging around behind her. The plan was a karate punch to her throat, but her back is to me, so I improvise. I grab the strap hanging from the chair arm and wrap it twice around her neck. Her hands come up, too late. I yank the strap tight, putting my foot against the chair for leverage, and pull.

Those seconds waiting for her to pass out are the longest of my life.

She goes limp. I immediately let go of the strap, and she falls face-first onto the floor. I check her pulse.

I know it’ll be tempting, but you can’t kill her. She and everyone else running the base is linked to a monitoring system located in the command center. If she goes down, all hell breaks loose.

I roll Dr. Pam onto her back. Blood runs from both nostrils. Probably broken. I reach up behind my head. This is the squishy part. But I’m jacked up on adrenaline and euphoria. So far everything has gone perfectly. I can do this.

I rip off the bandage and pull hard on either side of the incision, and it feels like a hot match pressing down as the wound comes open. A pair of tweezers and a mirror would come in handy right about now, but I don’t have either one of those, so I use my fingernail to dig out the tracker. The technique works better than I expected: After three tries, the device jams beneath my nail and I bring it cleanly out.

It only takes ninety seconds to run the download. That give you three, maybe four minutes. No more than five.

How many minutes in? Two? Three? I kneel beside Dr. Pam and shove the tracker as far as I can up her nose. Ugh.

No, you can’t shove it down her throat. It has to be near her brain. Sorry about that.

You’re sorry, Evan?

Blood on my finger, my blood, her blood, mixed together.

I step over to the keyboard. Now the truly scary part.

You don’t have Sammy’s number, but it should be cross-referenced to his name. If one variation doesn’t work, try a different one. There should be a search function.

Blood is trickling down the back of my neck, trailing down between my shoulder blades. I’m shivering uncontrollably, which makes it hard to type. In the blinking blue box I tap out the word search. It take two tries to spell it correctly.

ENTER NUMBER.

I don’t have a number, damn it. I have a name. How do I get back to the blue box? I hit the enter button.

ENTER NUMBER.

Oh, I get it now. It wants a number!

I key in Sullivan.

DATA ENTRY ERROR.

I’m wavering between throwing the monitor across the room and kicking Dr. Pam until she’s dead. Neither will help me find Sam, but both would make me feel better. I hit the escape button and get the blue box and type search by name.

The words vanish. Vaporized by Wonderland. The blue box blinks, blank again.

I fight back a scream. I’m out of time.

If you can’t find him in the system, we’ll have to go to Plan B.

I’m not crazy about Plan B. I like Plan A, where his location pops up on a map and I run right to him. Plan A is simple and clean. Plan B is complicated and messy.

One more try. Five more seconds can’t make that big a difference.

I type Sullivan into the blue box.

The display goes haywire. Numbers begin to race across the gray background, filling the screen, like I just gave it a command to calculate the value of pi. I panic and start hitting random buttons, but the scroll doesn’t stop. I’m well past five minutes. Plan B sucks, but B it is.

I duck into the adjoining room, where I find the white jumpsuits. I grab one off the shelf and wisely attempt to dress without taking off the robe first. With a grunt of frustration, I shrug out of it, and for a second I’m totally naked, the second in which that door beside me will fly open and a battalion of Silencers will flood into the room. That’s the way things happen in all Plan Bs. The suit is way too big, but better too big than too small, I think, and I’m quickly zipped up and back in the Wonderland room.

If you can’t find him through the main interface, there’s a good possibility she has a handheld unit somewhere on her. It works on the same principle, but you have to be very careful. One function is a locator, the other is a detonator. Key in the wrong command and you won’t find him, you’ll fry him.

When I burst back in, she’s sitting up, holding Bear in one hand and a small silver thing that looks like a cell phone in the other.

Like I said, Plan B sucks.

75

HER NECK IS FLAMING RED where I choked her. Her face is covered in blood. But her hands are steady, and her eyes have lost all their warmth. Her thumb hovers over a green button below a numeric display.

“Don’t press it,” I say. “I’m not going to hurt you.” I squat down, hands open, palms toward her. “Seriously, you really do not want to press that button.”

She presses the button.

Her head snaps back, and she flops down. Her legs kick twice, and she’s gone.

I leap forward, snatch Bear out of her dead fingers, and race back through the jumpsuit room and into the hallway beyond. Evan never bothered to tell me how long after the alarm sounds before the Stormtroopers are mobilized, the base is locked down, and the interloper captured, tortured, and put to a slow and agonizing death. Probably not that long.

So much for Plan B. Hated it anyway. The only downside is Evan and I never drew up a Plan C.

He’ll be in a squad with older kids, so your best bet is the barracks that ring the parade grounds.

Barracks that ring the parade grounds. Wherever that is. Maybe I should stop someone and ask for directions, because I only know one way out of this building, and that’s the way I came in, past the dead body and the old fat mean nurse and the young thin nice nurse and right into the loving arms of Major Bob.

There’s an elevator at the end of the hall with a single call button: It’s a one-way express ride to the underground complex, where Evan says Sammy and the other “recruits” are shown the phony creatures “attached” to real human brains. Festooned with security cameras. Crawling with Silencers. Only two other ways out of this hallway: the door just to the right of the elevator and the door I came out of.

Finally, a no-brainer.

I slam through the door and find myself in a stairwell. Like the elevator, the stairs go in one direction: down.

I hesitate for a half second. The stairwell is quiet and small, but it’s a good, cozy kind of small. Maybe I should stay here awhile and hug my bear, perhaps suck my thumb.

I force myself to take it slow down the five flights to the bottom. The steps are metal, cold against my bare feet. I’m waiting for the shriek of alarms and the pounding of heavy boots and the rain of bullets from above and below. I think of Evan at Camp Ashpit, taking out four heavily armed, highly trained killers in near total darkness, and wonder why I ever thought it was wise to stroll into the lion’s den alone when I could have had a Silencer by my side.

Well, not totally alone. I do have the bear.

I press my ear against the door at the bottom and rest my hand on the lever. I hear my own heartbeat and that’s all.

The door flies inward, forcing me back against the wall, and then I do hear the pounding of boots as men toting semiautomatics race up the stairs. The door starts to swing closed and I grab the lever to keep the door in front of me until they make the first turn and thunder out of sight.

I whip around into the corridor before the door closes. Red lights mounted from the ceiling spin, throwing my shadow against the white walls, wiping it away, throwing it again. Right or left? I’m a little turned around, but I think the front of the hangar is to the right. I jog in that direction, then stop. Where am I most likely to find the majority of Silencers in an emergency? Probably clustered around the main entrance to the scene of the crime.

I turn around and run smack into the chest of a very tall man with piercing blue eyes.

I wasn’t close enough to see his eyes at Camp Ashpit.

But I remember the voice.

Deep, hard-edged, razor-sharp.

“Well, hello there, little lamb,” Vosch says. “You must be lost.”

76

HIS GRIP ON MY SHOULDER is as hard as his voice.

“Why are you down here?” he asks. “Who is your group leader?”

I shake my head. The tears welling up in my eyes aren’t fake. I have to think fast, and my first thought is Evan was right: This solo act was doomed, no matter how many backup plans we concocted. If only Evan were here…

If Evan were here!

“He killed her!” I blurt out. “That man killed Dr. Pam!”

“What man? Who killed Dr. Pam?”

I shake my head, bawling my little eyes out, crushing my battered teddy against my chest. Behind Vosch, another squad of soldiers races down the corridor toward us. He shoves me at them.

“Secure this one and meet me upstairs. We have a breach.”

I’m dragged to the nearest door, shoved inside a dark room, and the lock clicks. The lights flicker on. The first thing I see is a frightened, young-looking girl in a white jumpsuit holding a teddy bear. I actually give a startled yelp.

Beneath the mirror is a long counter on which a monitor and keyboard sit.

I’m in the execution chamber Evan described, where they show the new recruits the fake brain-spiders.

Forget the computer. I’m not about to start hitting buttons again. Options, Cassie. What are your options?

I know there’s another room on the other side of the mirror. And there has to be at least one door, which may or may not be locked. I know the door to this room is locked, so I can wait for Vosch to come back for me or I can bust through this looking glass to the other side.

I pick up one of the chairs, rear back, and hurl it against the mirror. The impact rips the chair from my hands and it falls to the floor with a deafening—at least to me—clatter. I’ve put a large scratch in the thick glass, but that’s the only damage I see. I pick up the chair again. Take a deep breath. Lower my shoulders, rotate my hips as I bring the chair around. That’s what they teach you in karate class: Power is in rotation. I aim for the scratch. Focus every ounce of my energy on that single spot.

The chair bounces off the glass, throwing me off balance, and I land on my butt with a teeth-jarring thump. So jarring, in fact, that I bite down hard on my tongue. My mouth fills with blood, and I spit it out, hitting the girl in the mirror right in the nose.

I yank up the chair again, breathing deep. I forgot one thing I learned in karate: your eich! The war cry. Laugh at it all you want; it does concentrate your power.

The third and final blow shatters the glass. My momentum slams me into the waist-high counter, and my feet come off the floor as the chair tumbles into the adjoining room. I can see another dentist chair, a bank of processors, wires running across the floor, and another door. Please, God, don’t let it be locked.

I pick up Bear and climb through the hole. I imagine Vosch returning and the look on his face when he sees the busted mirror. The door on the other side isn’t locked. It opens into another white cinder-block corridor lined with unmarked doors. Ah, the possibilities. But I don’t step into that corridor. I hover in the doorway. Before me, the unmarked path. Behind me, the one I’ve marked: They’ll see the hole. They’ll know which direction I’ve taken. How long can I stay ahead of them? My mouth has filled with blood again, and I force myself to swallow it. Can’t make it too easy for them to track me.

Too easy: I forgot to jam the chair under the door handle in the first room. It won’t stop them from getting in, but it would drop some precious seconds into my piggy bank.

If something goes wrong, don’t overthink, Cassie. You have good instincts; trust them. Thinking through every step is fine if you’re playing chess, but this isn’t chess.

I run back through the killing room and dive through the hole. I misjudge the width of the counter and flip off the edge, somersaulting onto my back, smacking my head hard against the floor. I lie there for a fuzzy second, bright red stars burning in my vision. I’m looking at the ceiling and the metal ductwork running beneath it. I saw the same setup in the corridors: the bomb shelter’s ventilation system.

And I think, Cassie, that’s the bomb shelter’s freaking ventilation system.

77

SCUTTLING FORWARD on my stomach, worrying that I’m too heavy for the supports and that at any second the entire section of pipe will collapse, I scoot along the shaft, pausing at each juncture to listen. Listen for what, I’m not really sure. The crying of frightened children? The laughter of happy children? The air in the shaft is cold, brought in from the outside and funneled underground, sort of like me.

The air belongs here; I don’t. What did Evan say?

Your best bet is the barracks that ring the parade grounds.

That’s it, Evan. That’s the new plan. I’ll find the nearest air shaft and climb up to the surface. I won’t know where I am or how far I am from the parade grounds, and of course the entire base is going to be in full lockdown, crawling with Silencers and their brainwashed child-soldiers looking for the girl in the white jumpsuit. And don’t forget the teddy bear. Talk about a dead giveaway! Why did I insist on bringing this damn bear? Sam would understand if I left Bear behind. My promise wasn’t to bring Bear to him. My promise was to bring me to him.

What is the deal with this bear?

Every few feet a choice: turn right, turn left, or keep going straight? And every few feet a pause to listen and to clear the blood from my mouth. Not worried about my blood dripping in here: It’s the bread crumbs that mark my way back. My tongue is swelling, though, and throbs horribly with each beat of my heart, the human clock ticking down, measuring out the minutes I have left before they find me, take me to Vosch, and he finishes me the way he finished my father.

Something brown and small is scurrying toward me, very fast, like he’s on an important errand. A roach. I’ve encountered cobwebs and loads of dust and some mysterious slimy substance that might be toxic mold, but this is the first truly gross thing I’ve seen. Give me a spider or a snake over a cockroach any day. And now he’s heading right toward my face. With very vivid mental images of the thing crawling inside my jumpsuit, I use the only thing available to squash it. My bare hand. Yuck.

I keep moving. There’s a glow up ahead, sort of greenish gray; in my head I call it mothership green. I inch toward the grate from which the glow emanates. Peek through the slats into the room below—only calling it a room doesn’t do it justice. It’s huge, easily the size of a football stadium, shaped like a bowl, with rows and rows of computer stations at the bottom, manned by over a hundred people—only to call them people is doing real people an injustice. They’re them, Vosch’s inhuman humans, and I have no clue what they’re up to, but I’m thinking this must be it, the heart of the operation, ground zero of the “cleansing.” A massive screen takes up an entire wall, projecting a map of the Earth that’s dotted with bright green spots—the source of the sickly green light. Cities, I’m thinking, and then I realize the green dots must represent pockets of survivors.

Vosch doesn’t need to hunt us down. Vosch knows exactly where we are.

I wiggle on, forcing myself to go slowly until the green glow is as small as the dots on the map in the control room. Four junctures down I hear voices. Men’s voices. And the clang of metal on metal, the squeak of rubber soles on hard concrete.

Keep moving, Cassie. No more stopping. Sammy’s not down there and Sammy is the objective.

Then one of the guys says, “How many did he say?”

And the other one goes, “At least two. The girl and whoever took out Walters and Pierce and Jackson.”

Whoever took out Walters, Pierce, and Jackson?

Evan. It has to be.

What the…? For a whole minute or two, I’m really furious at him. Our only hope was in my going alone, sliding past their defenses unnoticed and snatching Sam before they realized what was going on. Of course, it hadn’t quite worked out that way, but Evan had no way of knowing that.

Still. The fact that Evan had ignored our carefully thought-out plan and infiltrated the base also means that Evan is here.

And Evan does what he has the heart to do.

I edge closer to their voices, passing right over their heads until I reach the grating. I peer through the metal slats and see two Silencer soldiers loading eye-shaped globes into a large handcart. I recognize what they are right away. I’ve seen one before.

The Eye will take care of her.

I watch them until the cart is loaded and they wheel it slowly out of sight.

A point will come when the cover isn’t sustainable. When that happens, they’ll shut down the base—or the part of the base that’s expendable.

Oh boy. Vosch is going all Ashpit on Camp Haven.

And the minute that realization hits me, the siren goes off.