98

THE SEVEN BILLION BILLION

WE ARE HUMANITY.

We are one.

We are the girl with the broken back sprawled in an empty room, waiting for the end to come.

We are the man who’s fallen a half mile away, and the only thing still living in us is not alive, but an alien device that directs every resource at its disposal to saving our body lying on the cold stone, to shock our heart back to life. There is no difference between us and the system. The 12th System is us and we are the 12th System. If one should fail, the other will die.

We are the prisoners aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that circles the base while its fuel runs low, swinging over a broad river, its waters black and swift, and our voices are quelled by the wind that roars through the open hold, and our hands are clasped; we are bound to one another in an unbroken chain.

We are the recruits hustling to our battle stations, the rescued ones, the winnowed ones, the harvest gathered into buses and separated into groups in which our bodies were hardened and our souls emptied only to be filled with hate and hope, and we know as we break from our bunkers that dawn approaches and with it the war, and this is what we’ve longed for and dreaded, the end of winter, the end of us. We remember Razor and the price he paid; we carved the initials VQP into our bodies in his honor. We remember the dead but we can’t remember our own names.

We are the lost ones, the solitary ones, the ones who did not board those buses chugging down the highways, the empty city streets, the lonely country roads. We dug in for the winter and watched the skies and trusted no stranger. Those of us who did not die from starvation or the bitter cold or simple infections that antibiotics we did not have could have relieved, we endured. We bent, but we did not break.

We are the lonely hunters designed by our makers to drive survivors onto the buses that scavenge the countryside and to kill those who refuse. We are special, we are apart, we are Other. We have been awakened into a lie so compelling that to not believe it would be madness. Now our work is done and we watch the skies, waiting for a deliverance that will never come.

We are the seven billion who were sacrificed, our bodies stripped down to our bones. We are the ones swept aside, the discarded ones, our names forgotten, our faces lost to wind and earth and sand. No one will remember us, our footprints erased, our legacies wiped out, our children and their children and their children’s children at war against one another unto the last generation, to the end of the world.

We are humanity. Our name is Cassiopeia.

In us the rage, in us the grief, in us the fear.

In us the faith, the hope, the love.

We are the vessel of ten thousand souls. We carry them; we hold them; we keep them. We bear their burden, and through us, their lives are redeemed.

They rest in us and we in them. Our heart contains all others. One heart, one life, on the advent of a mayfly’s final flight.

CASSIE

ALIENS ARE STUPID.

Ten thousand years to pick us apart, to know us down to the last electron, and they still don’t get it. They still don’t understand.

Dumbasses.

The pod rests on a raised platform three stairsteps off the floor. Egg-shaped, tortoiseshell-green, about the size of a big SUV, like a Suburban or an Escalade. The hatch is closed, but I’ve got the key. I press the pad of Vosch’s severed thumb against the round sensor beside the door and the hatch soundlessly slides open. Lights flicker on, bathing the interior in a wash of iridescent green. Inside, a single seat and another touchpad and that’s it. No instrument panel. No little monitors. Nothing but the chair, the pad, and a small window through which I guess you can wave good-bye.

Evan was wrong and he was right. He believed all their lies but he knew the only truth that matters. The one truth that mattered before they came, when they came, after they came.

They had no answer for love.

They thought they could crush it out of us, burn it from our brains, replace love with its opposite—not hate, indifference. They thought they could turn men into sharks.

But they couldn’t account for that one little thing. They had no answer for it because it wasn’t answerable. It wasn’t even a question.

The problem of that damned bear.

RINGER

AFTER CASSIE LEAVES, I drop the gun.

I don’t need it. I have Vosch’s gift in my pocket.

I am the child in the wheat.

The slap of boots on pavement, on polished concrete floors, on metal risers, from the airstrip to the command center, the sound of thousands of feet running like the scratch-scratch of the rats behind the walls of the old hotel.

I’m surrounded.

I’ll give her the only thing I can, I think, reaching for the green capsule in my pocket. The only thing I’ve got left.

My fingers dig into the jacket pocket.

The empty jacket pocket.

I pat my other pockets. No. Not my pockets. They’re Cassie’s pockets: I switched clothes with her in the supply shed before we entered the command center.

I don’t have the green capsule. Cassie does.

The slap of boots on pavement, on polished concrete floors, on metal risers. I push myself from the wall and crawl toward the door.

He isn’t far. Just across this room, through that door, a few feet down the hall. If I can get to him before they reach this level, I may still have a chance—they won’t, but I will.

Cassie will.

Door. I yank the handle down, swing it halfway open, then quickly slide into the space between to prop it open with my body. I can see him, the faceless murderer of seven billion who should have killed me when he had the chance—and he had several—but couldn’t. He couldn’t, because even he was confounded by love’s unpredictable trajectory.

Hall. He must still have the device. He carried it everywhere he went. Lightweight and no larger than a cell phone, it tracked every implanted recruit on the base. And with a swipe of the thumb, it can send a signal to the implants inside their necks, killing each one of them.

Vosch. Lying on my stomach, I reach for him, grab the back of his uniform, and roll him over. The bloody crater that was his face is turned to the sterile glow of the ceiling. I hear them on the stairs, boots on metal risers, growing louder. Where is it? Give it up, you son of a bitch.

Breast pocket. Right where he always kept it. The display screen swarms with green dots, a three-squad cluster’s worth heading straight toward me. I highlight all of them—every recruit on the base, over five thousand people, and the green button beneath my thumb flashes, and this is why I didn’t want to come back. I knew what would happen. I knew:

I’ll kill until I lose count. I’ll kill until counting doesn’t matter.

I’m staring at the screen lit up with five thousand tiny pulsing lights, each a hapless victim, each a human being.

Telling myself I don’t have a choice.

Telling myself I’m not his creation. I’m not what he has made me.

ZOMBIE

ON OUR SEVENTEENTH PASS around the perimeter—or maybe the eighteenth; I’ve lost count—the lights of the air base abruptly blaze back on, and across from me, Sergeant Sprinter barks into her headset, “Status?”

We’ve been circling for over an hour and our fuel must be low. We’ll have to set down soon; the only question is where, inside the base or out. Right now we’re approaching the river again. I expect the pilot to change course, bring us over some land, but she doesn’t.

Megan is nestled under my arm, her head tucked beneath my chin. Nugget presses against the other arm, watching the base below. His sister is down there somewhere. Possibly alive, probably dead. The restoration of the lights is a bad sign.

We bank over the river, keeping the base on our left, and I can see other choppers circling over it, too, waiting for the all clear to land. Their spotlights cut through the predawn mist, pillars of glistening white. We’re over the river now, swollen from an early spring thaw.

Above us, the sky lightens to gray and the stars begin to fade.

This is it. Green Day. The day the bombs fall. I look for the mothership but can’t spot it in the brightening sky.

Conversation with the ground over, the sergeant pulls off her headset. Her eyes on my face, her hand resting on the butt of her sidearm. Nugget stiffens beside me; he knows what’s coming before I do; his hands claw at his harness, though there’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide.

The orders have changed. She draws her weapon and levels it at his head.

I throw myself in front of him. Finally the circle comes round. Time to pay the debt.

CASSIE

THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR behind me, soldiers flood into the room. They quickly spread out shoulder to shoulder from wall to wall, in two rows, the closest one kneeling, two dozen rifles aimed at a single curly-headed, crooked-nosed target. I turn and face them. They don’t know me, but I know them. I recognize each and every face of the ones who have come to kill me.

I know what they remember and what they can’t. I hold them inside me. It’s like I’m about to be murdered by a human mosaic of myself. Makes you wonder: Is this murder? Or suicide?

I close my eyes. I’m sorry, Sams. I tried.

He is with me now, my brother; I feel him.

And that’s good. At least when I die, I will not be alone.

RINGER

THE STAIRWAY DOOR slams open and they pound into the hall, weapons drawn. Fingers tighten on triggers.

Too late for them.

Too late for me.

I press the button.

ZOMBIE

ACROSS THE AISLE, the sergeant jerks in her seat; her beautiful dark eyes roll back; her skull pops against the bulkhead; and then she slumps against her harness. Megan bolts upright with a startled cry. Every recruit in the hold has followed the sergeant’s lead.

Including the pilot.

The chopper’s nose dips, whipping hard to the right and slamming me into Nugget, who’s not wasting any time unbuckling himself. The damn kid gets everything before I do. I play a fast, desperate game of slappies with Megan, struggling to free her first. Nugget’s hurled from his seat—I catch hold of his sleeve and yank him into my chest. Then Megan’s loose but I’m not, holding on to her with one hand and Nugget with the other.

“The river!” I scream at him.

He nods. He’s the coolest one among us. His little fingers fly over the buckles to set me free.

The chopper barrels toward the water. “Hang on to me!” I shout. “Don’t let go!”

We’re falling sideways. The river is a featureless black wall rushing toward the open hatch on Nugget’s side.

“ONE!”

Nugget closes his eyes.

“TWO!”

Megan screams.

“THREE!”

I swivel out of the seat, a kid under each arm, and drop feetfirst toward the opening.

CASSIE

THE SOLDIERS FALL to the ground. One second they’re up, the next they’re down. Somebody’s fried their brains. I’m not sure how, but I’m pretty sure who.

I turn away. I’ve seen enough bodies to last my ten thousand lifetimes, from my mother drowning in her own blood to my father writhing gut-shot in the dirt, from the ones before and the ones after and the ones in between, my dead and their dead, our dead.

Yeah, I’ve seen enough.

Plus, those kids who just fell, they’re my bodies, too, in a way. It’s like looking down at your own corpse. Times twelve.

I step inside the pod. I lower myself into the chair. I buckle myself in, pulling tight the straps that cross my chest. In my hand a dead man’s thumb. In my pocket a green capsule encased in plastic. In my head ten thousand voices that strangely sing as one. And in my heart, a stillness, a quiet place untouched by anything, beyond space, unbounded by time.

Cassie, do you want to fly?

The green pill fell out when I ripped myself from the Wonderland chair, and I picked it up without thinking about it, without even looking at it. Then I saw Ringer lying in that hallway and I remembered we’d swapped jackets. She’d been carrying around the bomb the whole time and didn’t tell anyone. I think I know why. I know her as well as she knows herself. Better, even, because I can remember what she’s forgotten.

I press Vosch’s severed thumb against the launch button. The hatch door closes, the locking mechanism hums. The ventilation system kicks on; cool air brushes against my cheek.

The pod shivers. I feel like raising my hands.

Yes, Daddy, I want to fly.

ZOMBIE

I LOSE THE KIDS when we hit the water. The force of our landing snatches them away. The chopper tumbles into the river several hundred yards upstream and the fireball paints the surface a dusky orange. I see Megan first, her face breaking the surface enough to allow her a gurgling scream. I grab her wrist and yank her toward me.

“Captain!” she yells.

Huh?

“I lost Captain!”

She kicks against my legs, reaching with her free hand toward the teddy bear that spins lazily away from us. Oh Christ. That damned bear.

I look over my shoulder. Nugget, where are you? Then I see him at the shoreline, half in, half out, back arching as he coughs up a gallon of river water. The kid is truly indestructible.

“Okay, Megan. Climb aboard; I’ll get him.”

She hitches herself onto my back, wrapping her thin arms around my neck and her stick legs around my torso. I kick over to the bear. Gotcha. Then the long swim to shore, which isn’t that far, but the water’s freezing and Megan on my back bears me down. Bears me down. That’s a good one.

We collapse on the shore beside Nugget. Nobody speaks for a few minutes. Then Nugget goes, “Zombie?”

“Somebody hit the kill switch. Only thing that makes sense, Private.”

“Corporal,” he corrects me. Then he says, “Ringer?”

I nod. “Ringer.”

He processes for a second. Then, his voice shaking because he’s afraid to ask: “Cassie?”

CASSIE

THE HAND OF GOD slams down as the pod explodes up the launch shaft, a massive fist flattens my body into the chair, and then the fist closes around me, squeezing. Some wiseass has dropped a two-ton rock on my chest and I’m finding it very difficult to breathe. Also, somebody with no regard whatsoever for my comfort and safety has turned off all the lights—I can’t even see the eerie green glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Either that or my eyes have been shoved to the back of my skull.

ZOMBIE

NO, NUGGET. She probably didn’t make it. Before I can say the words, Megan slaps my chest and points toward the base. A shining ball of green light shoots over the treetops into the rose-colored sky. The afterimage lingers in our eyes long after it’s lost in the atmosphere.

“It’s a shooting star!” she says.

I shake my head. “Wrong direction.”

I guess, in the end, I was wrong.

CASSIE

THE FEELING OF being slowly crushed to death in total darkness lasts for several minutes. In other words, forever. Okay, forever is one word.

A word we throw around like we can even grasp it, like forever is something the human mind can comprehend.

The straps across my chest loosen. The two-ton boulder dissolves. I take a huge, shuddering breath and open my eyes. The pod is dark—gone is the green light and good riddance; I always hated Other-green, not my shade at all. I look out the window and gasp.

Hello, Earth.

So this is how God sees you, sparkling blue against the dullest black. No wonder he made you. No wonder he made the sun and the stars so he could see you.

Beautiful is another word we tossed around too casually, slopping it over everything from cars to nail polish until the word collapsed under the weight of all the banality. But the world is beautiful. I hope they never forget that. The world is beautiful.

A water droplet bobs before my eyes. Floating free, the oddest tear I’ve ever brushed away.

Never forget, Sams. Love is forever. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be love. The world is beautiful. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the world.

The wildest thing about holding my brother’s memories inside me? Seeing myself through his eyes, hearing myself with his ears, sailing the Cassiopeian sea in three dimensions, the way we experience practically everything except the one thing we’re supposed to understand the best: ourselves. To Sam, there is the bundle of colors and smells and sensations that make up Cassie, and that Cassie is not Ben’s Cassie or Marika’s Cassie or Evan’s Cassie or even Cassie’s Cassie; she belongs to Sam and to Sam alone.

The pod rolls, the shining blue gem slips from sight, and for the last time in my life I am afraid, as if I’ve fallen off the edge of the world—which I guess in a sense I have. Instinctively, I reach for the vanished Earth; my fingertips bump against the window.

Good-bye.

Oh, I am too far away. And too close. There I am, hearing a tiny voice scratching in the wilderness, Alone, alone, alone, Cassie, you’re alone. And there I am looking through Evan’s eyes at the girl with the indispensable teddy bear and the useless M16, huddled in her sleeping bag deep in the woods, thinking she’s the last person on Earth. I watch her night after night and go through her things while she’s away foraging. What a bastard I am, touching her stuff and reading her journals, why can’t I just kill her already?

That’s my name. Cassie for Cassiopeia. Alone as the stars and lonely as the stars.

Now I discover myself in him and I am not the person I expected to find. His Cassie sears the darkness with the brightness of a billion suns. He’s as baffled by this as I am, as humanity is, as the Others are. He can’t say why. There’s no reason, no neat explanation. It’s impossible to understand and impossibly irrelevant, like asking why anything exists in the first place.

He had the answer, all right. It just wasn’t the answer I was looking for.

I’m sorry, Evan; I was wrong. It wasn’t the idea of me that you loved, I know that now. The stars outside the window fade, overtaken by that nauseating green glow, and after a minute the hull of the mothership slides into view.

Oh, you bitch. For a year, I’ve hated your green guts. I’ve watched you, filled with hate and fear, and now here we are, just the two of us, Other and humanity.

That’s my name. Not Cassie for Cassandra. Or Cassie for Cassidy. And it’s not Cassie for Cassiopeia. Not anymore. I am more than her now.

I am all of them, Evan and Ben and Marika and Megan and Sam. I am Dumbo and Poundcake and Teacup. I am all the ones you emptied, the ones you corrupted, the ones you discarded, the thousands you thought you had killed, but who live on in me.

But I am even more than this. I am all those they remember, the ones they loved, everyone they knew, and everyone they only heard about. How many are contained in me? Count the stars. Go on, number the grains of sand. That’s me.

I am humanity.

ZOMBIE

WE MOVE TO the cover of the trees. If what I suspect has actually happened—that someone inside the base has zapped everyone else—there’s not much risk in bringing them with me, but there’s some risk, and somebody who should know once told me it’s all about the risk.

Nugget is furious. Megan seems relieved.

“Who’s gonna watch her if you come with me?” I ask him.

“I don’t care!”

“Well, one of us does. And that person happens to be in charge.”

Through the woods and into the no-man’s-land boundary that runs the perimeter of the base, toward the closest entrance and the watchtower beside it. I have no weapon, no means to defend myself. An easy target. No choice, though. I keep walking.

I’m soaked to my bones, and the temperature hovers in the midforties, but I am not cold. I feel great; even my leg doesn’t hurt anymore.

CASSIOPEIA

THE GLISTENING GREEN SKIN of the ship fills the window, blotting out the stars. It’s all I can see now, and the light from the sun sparks off its featureless surface. How big did they say it was? Twenty-five miles from tip to tip, roughly the size of Manhattan. I’m seeing only a tiny slice of an enormous whole. My heart pounds. My breath shortens, exploding from my mouth in roiling plumes of white. It’s freezing in here. I don’t remember ever feeling so cold.

With shaking fingers, I reach into my pocket and fish out the capsule. It slips from my grasp and spins like a lure through water toward the top of the pod. I catch it after a couple of tries, closing my fist tightly around it.

Damn, I’m cold. My teeth are chattering. I can’t keep my thoughts still. What else? Is there anything else? What have I left undone? There isn’t much—I am more than the sum of my own experience now. I’ve got ten thousand times my fair share.

Because here’s the thing: Seeing yourself through another’s eyes shifts your center of gravity. It doesn’t change the way you look at yourself. It changes the way you look at the world. Not the you. The everything-but-you.

I don’t hate you anymore, I tell the mothership. And I’m not afraid of you anymore. I don’t hate anything. I’m not afraid of anything.

At the center, right in the middle of my view, a black hole grows, reminding me of a mouth slowly opening. I’m headed right for it.

I slip the capsule between my lips.

No, the answer is not hate.

The black hole expands. I’m falling into a lightless pit, a void, the universe before the universe was the universe.

And the answer is not fear.

Somewhere in the mothership’s belly, thousands of bombs twenty times the size of the one in my mouth are rolling down chutes into launching bays. I hope they’re still in there. I hope they haven’t started to fall. I hope I’m in time.

The pod crosses the threshold into the mothership and jerks to a stop. The window’s frosted over, but there’s light outside; it glimmers in the ice. The hatch behind me hisses. I must wait until it opens. Then I must rise from this chair. Then I must turn and face what waits for me out there.

We’re here, and then we’re gone, he said to me, and it’s not about the time we’re here.

There’s no unraveling us, no place where I end and he begins.

There’s no unraveling any of it. I am entwined with everything, from mayflies to the farthest star. I have no boundaries, I am limitless, and I open to creation like a flower to the rain.

I’m not cold anymore. The arms of the seven billion enfold me.

I rise.

Now I lay me down to sleep . . .

I draw in deep my final breath.

When in the morning light I wake . . .

I bite down hard. The seal breaks.

Teach me the path of love to take.

I step into the out there, and breathe.

ZOMBIE

I’VE REACHED THE GRAVEL PATH that borders the security fence when the sun breaks the horizon—no, not the sun, it can’t be, unless the sun’s decided to rise in the north and has swapped its gold for green. I whip to my right and see the stars winking out one by one, obliterated by a massive burst of light on the edge of the northern horizon, an explosion in the upper atmosphere that washes over the landscape in a flood of blinding green.

My first thought is for the kids. I don’t know what the hell is happening and I haven’t connected the projectile hurtling from the base to the enormous northern flare. It doesn’t occur to me that for the first time in a very long time, something might have actually gone our way. Honestly, when I saw the light, I thought the bombardment had begun and I was witnessing the first salvo in the destruction of every city on Earth. The idea that the mothership could actually be gone didn’t even cross my radar. How could it be gone? That ship’s unassailable as the moon.

I hesitate, trying to decide whether to keep going or turn back. But the green light fades, the sky glows rosy again, and no terrified children burst from the woods seeking rescue. I decide to maintain my heading. I’ve got faith in Nugget. He’ll know to stay put till I return.

Ten minutes inside the base and I find the first of many bodies. The place is a tomb. I walk through fields of the dead. They lie in piles, groups of six to ten, their bodies contorted into portraits of silent agony. I stop to examine every gruesome stack, looking for two familiar faces; I’m not going to rush, though a voice screams in my head with each passing minute to hurry, hurry. And in the back of my mind I’m remembering what happened at Camp Haven—how Vosch was willing to sacrifice the village in order to save it.

This might not be Ringer’s doing—it may be the result of Vosch exercising the final option.

It takes me hours to reach the last level, the bottom of this death pit.

She barely lifts her head when I open the stairwell door. I may have shouted her name; I don’t remember.

I also don’t remember stepping over Vosch’s body, but I must have: It was in my way. My boot hits the kill switch lying beside her. It skitters across the floor.

“Walker . . . ,” she gasps, pointing over my shoulder down the long hallway. “I think he’s—”

I shake my head. She’s hurt and still imagines I’d worry about him for even one second? I touch her shoulder. Her dark hair brushes the back of my hand. Her eyes shine. Their brightness goes all the way down.

“You found me,” she says.

I kneel beside her. I take her hand. “I found you.”

“My back is broken,” she says. “I can’t walk.”

I slide my arms beneath her. “I’ll carry you.”