66

TURNING LEFT off the stairs brought you down the mile-long hallway to Wonderland’s green door. Turning right brought you to a dead end, a blank wall.

Vosch pressed his thumb against the wall. Gears whined, a seam appeared, and the wall split down the middle, the two halves pulling back to reveal a narrow corridor that faded past the sterile glow of fluorescents into utter black.

A recording sprang from a hidden speaker: “Warning! You are entering an area restricted to authorized personnel pursuant to Special Order Eleven. All unauthorized persons found in this area will be subject to immediate disciplinary action. Warning! You are entering an area restricted to authorized personnel . . .”

The voice followed them into the dark. Warning! A smudge of sickly green light bathed the end of the narrow corridor. They stopped there, at a door with no handle. Vosch pressed his thumb against the middle of the door and it swung silently open. He turned to Evan.

“We call this Area 51,” Vosch informed him without a trace of irony.

Lights flickered on as they crossed the threshold. The first thing that caught Evan’s eye was the egg-shaped pod, identical to the pod in which he escaped Camp Haven, except for its size: This pod was twice as large. It dominated half the chamber. Above it, he could see the concrete-reinforced launch shaft that led to the surface.

“This is what you wanted to show me?” He didn’t understand. He knew Vosch would have a pod on base to return to their vessel after the 5th Wave was unleashed. In a matter of hours, identical pods would be dispatched from the mothership to retrieve the rest of their embedded people. Why did Vosch want him to see his?

“It’s unique,” Vosch said. “There are only twelve others like it in the world. One for each of us.”

“Why are you doing this?” He was losing his temper. “Why do you speak in riddles and lies as if I am one of your human victims? There are more than twelve. There are tens of thousands.”

“No. Only twelve.” He gestured toward their right. “Come over here. I think you’re going to find this very interesting.”

Hanging at eye level from the ceiling, its skin a glistening greenish gray, a twenty-foot-long cigar-shaped object. After the 3rd Wave, drones like this one filled the sky. Vosch’s eyes, he had told Cassie. It’s how he sees you.

“An important component of the war,” Vosch said. “Important, but not critical. Their loss demanded a bit of improvisation in our hunt for you—you have wondered why it was necessary to enhance an ordinary human, yes?”

He was referring to Ringer. But Evan didn’t see the connection. “Why did you?”

“The purpose of the drones was not to pinpoint the location of survivors—it was to track you. You and the thousands like you who will abandon your assigned territories in the days ahead as the 5th Wave is launched and you realize that there will be no rescue, no escape to the mothership.”

Evan shook his head. For the first time it occurred to him that Vosch may have gone mad. It was their greatest fear when designing the purification of the Earth. Sharing the body with a human consciousness might prove to be an overwhelming burden, a strain that could not be borne.

“Now you are wondering if I am not altogether in my right mind,” Vosch said with a small smile. “I don’t sound like the person you’ve known most of your ten-thousand-year-old life. The truth is we have never met, Evan. Until today, I did not even know what you looked like.” Vosch took him by the elbow, gently, and guided him toward the back of the chamber.

Evan’s unease deepened. There was something profoundly disturbing about this. He didn’t understand why Vosch had brought him here, why he simply hadn’t killed him—what did it matter if his human body died? His consciousness still existed on the mothership. What was the point of this bizarre show-and-tell?

In the corner was a wooden stand, and on the stand perched a large bird of prey, its head tilted forward, its eyes closed, apparently asleep. Evan’s stomach fluttered. The years collapsed and he was a boy again, lying in his bed in that hazy space between dreaming and waking, watching the owl on the windowsill watching him, bright round eyes shining in the dark, and his body feeling as if it had been frozen in amber, unable to move, unable to look away.

Behind him, Vosch murmured, “Bubo virginianus. The great horned owl. Magnificent, isn’t he? A fearsome predator, nocturnal, solitary—his prey rarely know he’s coming until it’s too late. He is your demon, your spirit animal in a sense. You were designed to be his human equivalent.”

The wings stirred. The thick chest heaved. The head lifted, the eyes came open, and their eyes met.

“Of course, it isn’t real,” Vosch went on. “It is a delivery device. A machine. One came to your mother while you were still in her womb, bearing the program that was transmitted into your developing brain. Another visited you after that program booted up. Your awakening, I think it’s called, to endow you with the 12th System.”

He could not turn away. The owl’s eyes filled his vision, engulfed him.

“There is no alien entity inside you,” Vosch said. “None inside any of us and none aboard the mothership. It is completely automated, like your old friend here, designed by its makers after centuries of careful study and deliberation and sent to this planet to wean the human population to a sustainable level. And, of course, to keep it there indefinitely by changing human nature itself.”

Evan found his voice, and said, “I don’t believe you.” The eyes. He could not look away.

“A flawless, self-sustaining loop, an immaculate system in which trust and cooperation can never take root. Progress becomes impossible, for all strangers are potential enemies, the ‘other’ who must be hunted down until the last bullet is spent. You were never meant to be an agent of destruction, Evan. You are part of Earth’s salvation—or you were until something in your programming went wrong. That is why I’ve brought you here. Not to torture you or kill you. I have brought you here to save you.”

He placed a consoling hand on Evan’s shoulder, and his touch broke the hold of the owl’s eyes. Evan whirled upon his captor. He would kill him. He would choke the life out of him with his bare hands.

His fist punched empty air. The momentum nearly carried him off his feet.

Vosch had vanished.