49

BY THIS POINT, Ben has reached the end of his endurance—physical and mental. He can’t remain standing any longer or keep up with this very strange, very quick turnabout, from She’s a traitor! to She’s my partner! He hops over to the stairs and lowers himself down, stretching his bad leg out in front of him. He stares at the ceiling, stroking the underside of his chin.

“Ringer, maybe you better get up there again. In case you missed somebody.”

She shakes her head and her shiny black hair swings back and forth, a silky obsidian curtain. “I didn’t miss anybody.”

“Well. In case somebody else comes along.”

“Like who?”

His head turns slowly in her direction. “Bad people.”

She looks at me. Then she nods. She steps around him and stoops halfway up to retrieve her rifle. I hear her whisper, “Don’t,” to him, before disappearing from view.

Don’t? “What is it with you two?” I ask.

“What’s what?”

“The little looks. The ‘don’t’ just now.”

“It’s nothing, Cassie.”

“Nothing would be no little looks and no ‘don’ts.’”

He shrugs, then glances up the stairs to the hole that opened to bare sky where the house used to be. “No getting there,” he says. He smiles as if he’s embarrassed for saying something stupid. “No matter how well you know someone, there’s still a part of them you won’t. You can’t. Like, ever. A locked room. I don’t know.” He shakes his head and laughs. The laugh collapses the moment it’s born.

“With Ringer, that’s more like all the rooms in the Louvre,” I point out.

Ben hauls himself to his feet and limps over to me, using his rifle as a crutch. By the time he arrives, his face is a study in exhaustion and pain. There you go. Parish heals up from one Ringer-inflicted wound, so she gives him another. Gotta keep the streak going.

“Have you lost your mind?” he asks.

“What do you think?”

“I think you have.”

“How can you tell?” I’m fully confident he won’t understand my question.

“The Cassie Sullivan I know would never leave her little brother.”

“Maybe I’m not the Cassie Sullivan you know.”

“So you’re just gonna leave him—”

“With you.”

“Maybe you haven’t noticed, but when it comes to protecting people, I suck.”

“It’s not about you, Parish.”

He slides down the wall beside me. Takes a few deep breaths. Then he blurts out, “Let’s get real, okay? She won’t get to Vosch and you won’t get to Evan. That part’s done. Time for the next part.”

“The next part?”

“Them.” He nods toward Sammy and Megan curled beneath the blanket. “It’s always been about them, from day one. The enemy always knew it. The really sad and freaky part is why it’s been so easy for us to forget.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I tell him. “Why do you think I’m going? This isn’t about Evan Walker. And it isn’t about you or me. If Ringer is right, Evan’s our last hope.” I look at my baby brother’s face, angelic in sleep. “His last hope.”

“Then I’ll go with Ringer. You stay here.”

I shake my head. “You’re broken. I’m not.”

“Bullshit. I can get around . . .”

“I’m not talking about your leg.”

He flinches. His jaw tightens. “That’s not fair, Cassie.”

“I’m not worried about fair. This isn’t about fair. This is about the odds. And risk. This is about my brother living to see next Christmas. It would be great if there were someone I could tag to do it for me, but I’m it, Parish. It’s down to me. Because I’m still there, Ben, under that car on the highway—I never got out and I never got up. I’m still there waiting for the bogeyman to come get me. And if I run now, anywhere or nowhere, he’s going to find me. He’s going to find Sam.” I tug Bear from the blanket and hug him to my chest. “I don’t care about whether Evan Walker is an alien or a human or an alien-human or a freaking turnip. I don’t care about your baggage or Ringer’s baggage, and I especially don’t care about my baggage. The world existed for a very long time before this particular set of seven billion billion atoms came along, and it will go right on after they’re scattered up, down, and sideways.”

Ben reaches out and touches my wet cheek. I push his hand away. “Don’t touch me.” You Has-Ben. You What-Might-Have-Ben.

“Look, Cassie. I’m not your boss and I’m not your daddy. I can’t stop you any more than you could have stopped me from going to the caves.”

I press my face into the top of Bear’s ratty old head. Bear smells like smoke and sweat and dirt and my little brother. “He loves you, Ben. More than me, I think. But that—”

“Not true, Cassie.”

“Don’t. Interrupt. Me. That’s, like, one of my things. Just so you know. And now I would like to say something.”

“Okay.”

“There is something I’d like to say.”

“I’m listening.”

Looking away. Looking at nothing. Deep breath. Don’t say it, Cass. What’s the point now? There is no point. Maybe that’s something we both need to understand.

“I’ve had a crush on you since the third grade,” I whisper. “I wrote your name in notebooks. I drew hearts around it. I decorated it with flowers. Mostly daisies. I had daydreams and dream-dreams, and nobody knew except my best friend. Who is dead. Like everybody else.”

Looking away. Looking at nothing. “But you were where you were and I was where I was. You could have been in China for all it mattered. When you showed up out of nowhere at Sammy’s camp—I thought it had to mean something. Because you lived when you should have died, and I lived when I should have died, and we were both there for Sam, who also should have died. Just—just too many coincidences to be just a coincidence, you know? But that’s all it is, a coincidence. There’s no divine plan. There’s nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that’s okay. These seven billion billion atoms are good with that.”

I press my lips onto that nasty stuffed animal’s head. Really neat that human beings conquered the Earth, invented poetry and mathematics and the combustion engine, discovered that time and space are relative, built machines big and small to ferry us to the moon for some rocks or carry us to McDonald’s for a strawberry-banana smoothie. Very cool we split the atom and bestowed upon the Earth the Internet and smartphones and, of course, the selfie stick.

But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature’s most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child.