“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?