48

“OKAY,” BEN SAYS. Time to get down to the gnarly nub of it. “No on the pods but yes on the bombs. Which means we can’t stay here—too close to Urbana. That’s fine with me, because I really fucking hate Urbana. So where? South? My vote is south. Find a source of fresh water, miles from anywhere, as in the middle of nowhere.”

“And?” Ringer asks.

“And what?”

“And what then?”

“What then?”

“Yes. After we get to nowhere, then what?”

Ben lifts a hand. Lets it fall. His mouth curls into a smile. He looks so boyishly cute in this moment that I feel like bursting into tears. “There’s five of us. I say we form a band.”

I laugh out loud. Sometimes Ben’s like a bracing mountain stream I dip my toe into.

“Anyway,” Ben says after two seconds of Ringer staring blankly at him. “What the hell else are we going to do?”

He looks at her. He looks at me.

“Oh Christ, Sullivan,” he moans, tapping the back of his head against the wall. “Don’t even go there.”

“He came for me,” I tell him. He knows I’m thinking it, so I might as well say it. We’re both a little surprised that I’ve gone there. “He saved your life—twice. He saved mine three times.”

“Ben’s right,” Ringer butts in. “It’s suicide, Sullivan.”

I roll my eyes. I’ve heard this shit before—from Evan Walker himself, when he realized I was bulling my way into a death camp to find my baby brother. Why must I always be the isle of crazy alone in an ocean of sensibility? The should to everybody else’s shouldn’t? The I-will to their better-nots?

“Staying here is suicide, too,” I argue. “So is running to nowhere. Anything we do now is suicide. We’re at the point in the story where we have to choose, Ringer—a meaningful death, or a senseless one. Besides,” I add, “he’d do it for us.”

“No,” Ben says quietly. “He would do it for you.”

“The base they’re taking him to is over a hundred miles away,” Ringer says. “Even if you reached it, you won’t reach it in time. Vosch will be finished with him and Evan will be dead.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I do know that.”

“No, you say you know that, but you don’t really know that, just like you don’t know everything else you say you know, but we’re just supposed to believe it because, hell, you’re just brilliant little you.”

And Ben goes, “Huh?”

“Whatever we do,” Ringer says coolly to Ben, as if nothing I just said wasn’t a major-league smackdown, “staying is not an option. As soon as that chopper delivers its cargo, it’s coming back.”

“Cargo?” Ben asks.

“She means Evan,” I translate.

“Why would it . . . ?” Then he gets it. Ringer’s victims buried down the road. The chopper’s coming back to extract the strike team. “Oh.” He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. “Crap.”

And I’m thinking, Hey. Chopper! and Ringer is watching me and thinking she knows what I’m thinking, which she does, but that doesn’t prove she’s always right.

“Forget it, Sullivan.”

“Forget what?” And right away I acknowledge my coyness: “You did it. Or at least you said you did it.”

“Did what?” Ben asks.

“That was different,” Ringer says.

“Different how?”

“Different in that the pilot was in on it. My ‘escape’ from Vosch wasn’t an escape; it was a test of the 12th System.”

“Well, we can pretend this is a test, too, if that helps.”

“Pretend what is a test?” Ben’s voice rises an octave in his frustration. “What the hell are you two talking about?”

Ringer sighs. “She wants to hijack the Black Hawk.”

Ben’s mouth drops open. I don’t know what or why it is, but when he’s around Ringer, the smart drains out of him like spaghetti water through a colander.

“What about him?” Ringer nods toward Sams. “He’s coming, too?”

“That’s your business?” I ask.

“Well, I’m not babysitting while you go all Don Quixote on this.”

“You know, making obscure literary references doesn’t impress me. And yes, I happen to know who Don Quixote is.”

“Okay, wait a minute,” Ben says. “He’s from The Godfather, right?” Straight-faced, so I’m not sure if he’s joking. Back in the day, there was serious talk about Ben becoming a Rhodes Scholar. No lie. “You’re gonna make Vosch an offer he can’t refuse?”

“Ben can stay with the kids,” I inform Ringer, as if I’ve thought it all out, as if the plan for rescuing Evan has been in the works for months. “We go, just you and me.”

She’s shaking her head. “Why would I do that?”

“Why wouldn’t you do that?”

She stiffens and then, for some unclear reason, she looks over at Ben. So I look over at Ben, and Ben is looking straight down at the floor like he’s never seen one before. What is this amazing hard surface under my feet?

“How about this.” I won’t stop trying. Why won’t I stop? I try to stop, and then I fail. “Forget me. Forget Evan. Do it for yourself.”

“Myself?” She’s genuinely puzzled. Ha! For once she can’t pretend she knows what I’m thinking.

“He’s finished with you. He’s done. So you have to go to him if you want to end it.”

Ringer recoils like somebody slapped her. She wants to pretend she doesn’t know who I’m talking about. Fat chance.

I saw it in her face when she told the story. I heard it in her voice. Between the frowns and long silences, it was there. When she said his name and when she couldn’t bring herself to say his name, it was there: He’s the reason she hasn’t given up, why she hangs on, her raison d’être.

The thing worth dying for.

“Vosch thinks you’re going to zig—so you zag. He thinks you’re going to run away—so you run toward. You can’t undo what he’s done, but you can undo him.”

“It won’t solve anything,” she whispers.

“Probably not. But he’ll be dead. There’s that.”

I hold out my hand. I’m not sure why. It really isn’t my deal to make because I can’t promise final delivery of the goods. That little, rational, calm, ancient, wise voice in my head chirps, She’s right, it’s suicide, Cassie. Evan’s gone and this time there’ll be no miracles. Let him go.

My place is with Sam; it’s always been with Sam. Sam is my raison d’être. Not some delusional Ohio farm boy crazy all the way down to the bottom of his bones. Jesus, if Ringer is right, even Evan’s love may be part of the crazy. He thinks he’s in love with me like he thinks he’s an Other.

So what’s the difference between thinking it and actually being it? Is there a difference?

There are times I hate my own brain.

“The dead,” Ringer says in a voice that reflects the word: nothing there, gone, empty. “I came here to kill one innocent person. I killed five. If I go back, I’ll kill until I lose count. I’ll kill until counting doesn’t matter.” She isn’t looking at me. She’s looking at Ben. “And it’ll be easy.” She turns to me. “You don’t understand. I am what he made me.”

I wish she’d cry. I want her to shout, scream, shake her fist, punch something, howl until her voice gave out. Anything would be better than the scooped-out, empty way she talked. What she said didn’t match how she said it, and that’s scary.

“And in the end, we’ll both fail,” she tells me. “Evan will die and Vosch will live.”

She takes my hand anyway.

Even scarier.