59

CASSIE

HERE’S SOMETHING to chew on. Here’s the charming truth about the world the Others are creating:

My little brother has forgotten the alphabet, but he knows how to make bombs.

A year ago it was crayons and coloring books, construction paper and Elmer’s glue. Now it’s fuses and blasting caps, wires and black powder.

Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?

Beside me, Megan watches him the way she watches everything else: silently. She clutches Bear to her chest, another silent witness to the evolution of Samuel J. Sullivan.

He’s working with Ringer, the two of them kneeling next to each other, a two-person assembly line. I guess they took the same IED class at camp. Ringer’s damp hair shines like a blacksnake’s skin in the lamplight. Her ivory skin gleams. A couple of hours ago, I smashed my forehead into her nose and broke it, but there’s no swelling, no sign I inflicted any damage at all. Unlike my nose, which will be crooked till the day I die. Life is not fair.

“How’d you get on that chopper?” I ask her. It’s been bugging me.

“Same way you did,” she answers. “I jumped.”

“The plan was for me to jump.”

“Which you did. You were hanging on by a fingernail,” she said. “I didn’t think I had a choice at that point.”

In other words, I saved your worthless, freckly, crooked-nosed ass. What are you bitching about?

Not that my nose has an ass. I really should stop putting thoughts into other people’s heads.

She tucks a strand of her silky locks behind her ear. There’s something so effortlessly and inexplicably graceful about the gesture that it borders on creepy. What the hell happened to you, Ringer?

Of course, I know what happened to her. The gift, Evan called it. All human potential times a hundred. I have the heart to do what I have to do, Evan told me once. He neglected to say at the time he meant that both literally and figuratively. He neglected to say a lot of things, the bastard who doesn’t even deserve rescuing.

What the hell am I thinking? Looking at Ringer’s delicate fingers dance in the complicated ballet of constructing a bomb, I realize the scariest thing about her isn’t what Vosch has done to her body; it’s what that amped-up body has done to her mind. When you tear down our physical limitations, what happens to our moral ones? I’m pretty certain the pre-enhanced Ringer couldn’t have single-handedly massacred five heavily armed, well-trained recruits. I also suspect pre-enhanced Ringer couldn’t have shoved her thumb into another human being’s eyeball. That required a leap in evolution of an entirely different kind.

Speaking of Bob.

“You people are wacked,” he goes. He’s been watching, too, with his good eye.

“No, Bob,” Ringer says without looking up from her task. “The world is wacked. We just happen to be occupying it.”

“Not for long! You won’t get within a hundred miles of the base.” His panicky voice fills the little chamber, which smells of chemicals and old blood. “They know where you are—there’s a fucking GPS on that chopper—and they’re coming after you with everything they’ve got.”

Ringer looks up at him. A flip of the bangs. A flash of the dark eyes. “That’s what I’m counting on.”

“How much longer?” I ask her. Everything depends on our reaching the base before sunrise.

“A couple more and we’ll be ready.”

“Yeah!” Bob shouts. “Get ready! Say your prayers, because it’s goin’ down, Dorothy!”

“She’s not a Dorothy!” Sam shouts at him. “You’re a Dorothy!”

“You shut the fuck up!” Bob yells back.

“Hey, Bob,” I call over to him. “Leave my brother alone.”

Bob’s all balled up in the corner, quivering, sweating, the buttload of morphine apparently not enough. He couldn’t be older than twenty-five. Young by pre-Arrival standards. Middle-aged by the new ones.

“What’s gonna stop me from crashing us into a fucking cornfield, huh?” he demands. “Whatcha gonna do—punch out my other eye?” Then he laughs.

Ringer ignores him, which throws gas on Bob’s fire.

“Not that it matters. Not that you have a chance in hell. They’ll cut you down the minute we land. They’ll carve you up like fucking Halloween pumpkins. So make your little bombs and hatch your little plots; you’re all dead meat.”

“You’re right, Bob,” I tell him. “That pretty much sums it up.”

I’m not being snarky (for once). I mean every word. Assuming he doesn’t crash us into a cornfield, assuming we aren’t shot down by the armada that’s surely on its way, assuming we aren’t captured or killed inside the camp by the thousands of soldiers who will be expecting us, assuming by some miracle Evan is still alive and by some bigger miracle I find him, and assuming Ringer kills Vosch, the closest thing our species has to the indestructible cockroach, we still have no exit strategy. We’re buying a one-way ticket to oblivion.

And those tickets don’t come cheap, I think while I watch my Sams put the finishing touches on a bomb.

Oh, Sam. Crayons and coloring books. Construction paper and glue. Teddy bears and footy pajamas, swing sets and storybooks and everything else we knew you’d leave behind, though not this soon, not this way. Oh, Sam, you have the face of a child but the eyes of an old man.

I was too late. I risked everything to rescue you from the end, but the end already had you.

I push myself to my feet. Everybody looks at me except Sam. He’s humming softly, slightly off-key. Theme music to build explosives by. He’s the happiest I’ve seen him in a long time.

“I need to talk to Sam,” I tell Ringer.

“That’s fine,” she says. “I can spare him.”

“I wasn’t asking for permission.”

I grab his wrist and pull him from the chamber, into the narrow corridor, up the path toward the surface until I’m sure they can’t hear us. Fairly sure, anyway. Ringer can probably hear a butterfly beating its wings in Mexico.

“What is it?” he asks, frowning, or maybe-frowning. I didn’t bring a light; I can barely see his face.

That’s a damn good question, kid. Once again, here I go, half-cocked and winging it. This should be a speech weeks in the making.

“You know I’m doing this for you,” I tell him.

“Doing what?”

“Leaving you.”

He shrugs. Shrugs! “You’re coming back, aren’t you?”

There it is: the invitation to a promise I cannot make. I take his hand and say, “Remember that summer you chased the rainbow?” He looks up at me, utterly baffled. “Well, maybe not. I think you were still in diapers. We were in the backyard and I had the sprayer. When the sunlight hit the water . . . you know, a rainbow. And I was making you chase it. Telling you to catch the rainbow . . .” I’m about to let loose with some waterworks of my own. “Kind of cruel when I think about it.”

“Why are you thinking about it, then?”

“I just don’t want . . . I don’t want you to forget things, Sam.”

“Things like what?”

“You need to remember it wasn’t always like this.” Making bombs and hiding in caves and watching everyone you know die.

“I remember things,” he argues. “I remember what Mommy looked like now.”

“You do?”

He nods emphatically. “I remembered right before I shot that lady.”

Something in my expression must give me away. I’m guessing a mixture of shock and horror and a sadness that has no bottom. Because he turns on his heel and barrels back to the weapons chamber only to return after a minute with Bear in his arms.

Oh, that goddamned bear.

“No, Sams,” I whisper.

“He brought you luck last time.”

“He’s . . . he’s Megan’s now.”

“No, he’s mine. He’s always been mine.” Holding him out to me.

I gently push Bear back into his chest. “And you need to keep him. I know you’ve outgrown him. I know you’re a soldier or commando or whatever now. But one day, maybe there’ll be a little kid who really needs Bear. Because . . . well, just because.”

I kneel at his feet. “So hang on to him, understand? You take care of him and protect him and don’t let anybody hurt him. Bear is very important to the grand scheme of things. He’s like gravity. Without him, the universe would fall apart.”

He stares at his big sister’s face for a long, silent moment. Memorize it, Sams. Study every bruised, scratched-up, scarred, crooked inch of it. So you don’t forget. So you never forget. Remember my face no matter what. No. Matter. What.

“That’s crazy, Cassie,” he says, and for an instant—and only an instant—the little boy is back, and I see in his now-face his then-face, hysterical with wonder and laughter, chasing rainbows.