“Vosch murdered seven billion people.” The number sounds weirdly hollow in my ears. After the Arrival, one of Dad’s favorite themes was how advanced the Others must be, how high they must have climbed on the evolutionary ladder to reach the stage of intergalactic travel. And this is their solution to the human “problem”?
“There were some of us who didn’t think annihilation was the answer,” Evan says. “I was one of them, Cassie. My side lost the argument.”
“No, Evan, that would be my side that lost.”
It’s more than I can take. I stand up, expecting him to stand, too, but he stays where he is, looking up at me.
“He doesn’t see you as some of us do…as I do,” he says. “To him, you’re a disease that will kill its host unless it’s wiped out.”
“I’m a disease. That’s what I am to you.”
I can’t look at him anymore. If I look at Evan Walker for one more second, I’m going to be sick.
Behind me, his voice is soft, level, almost sad. “Cassie, you’re up against something that is way beyond your capacity to fight. Wright-Patterson isn’t just another cleansing camp. The complex underneath it is the central coordinating hub for every drone in this hemisphere. It’s Vosch’s eyes, Cassie; it’s how he sees you. Breaking in to rescue Sammy isn’t just risky—it’s suicidal. For both of us.”
“Both of us?” I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He hasn’t moved.
“I can’t pretend to take you prisoner. My assignment isn’t to capture people—it’s to kill them. If I try to walk in with you as my prisoner, they’ll kill you. And then they’ll kill me for not killing you. And I can’t sneak you in. The base is patrolled by drones, protected by a twenty-foot-high electric fence, watchtowers, infrared cameras, motion detectors…and a hundred people just like me, and you know what I can do.”
“Then I sneak in without you.”
He nods. “It’s the only possible way—but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it isn’t suicidal. Everyone they bring in—I mean the people they don’t kill right away—is put through a screening program that maps their entire psyche, including their memories. They’ll know who you are and why you’re there…and then they’ll kill you.”
“There’s got to be a scenario that doesn’t end with them killing me,” I insist.
“There is,” he says. “The scenario where we find a safe spot to hide and wait for Sammy to come to us.”
My mouth drops open, and I think, Huh? Then I say it: “Huh?”
“It might take a couple of years. How old is he, five? The youngest allowed is seven.”
“The youngest allowed to do what?”
He looks away. “You saw.”
The little kid whose throat he cut at Camp Ashpit, wearing fatigues, toting a rifle almost as big as he was. Now I do want a drink. I walk over to him, and he gets very still while I bend over and pick up the flask. After four big swallows, my mouth is still dry.
“Sam is the 5th Wave,” I say. The words taste bad. I take another long drink.
Evan nods. “If he passed his screening, he’s alive and being…” He searches for the word. “Processed.”
“Brainwashed, you mean.”
“More like indoctrinated. In the idea that the aliens have been using human bodies, and we—I mean humans—have figured out a way to detect them. And if you can detect them, you can—”
“That isn’t fiction,” I interrupt. “You are using human bodies.”
He shakes his head. “Not the way Sammy thinks we are.”
“What does that mean? Either you are or you aren’t.”
“Sammy thinks we look like some kind of infestation attached to human brains, but—”
“Funny, that’s exactly the way I picture you, Evan. An infestation.” I can’t help myself.
His hand comes up. When I don’t slap it away or take off running into the woods, he slowly wraps his fingers around my wrist and gently pulls me to the ground beside him. I’m sweating slightly, though it’s bitingly cold. What now?
“There was a boy, a real human boy, named Evan Walker,” he says, looking deeply into my eyes. “Just like any kid, with a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters, completely human. Before he was born, I was inserted into him while his mother slept. While we both slept. For thirteen years I slept inside Evan Walker, while he learned to sit up, to eat solid food, to walk and talk and run and ride a bike, I was there, waiting to wake up. Like thousands of Others in thousands of other Evan Walkers around the world. Some of us were already awake, setting up our lives to be where we needed to be when the time came.”
I’m nodding, but why am I nodding? He came to a human body? What the hell does that mean?
“The 4th Wave,” he says, trying to be helpful. “Silencers. It’s a good name for us. We were silent, hiding inside human bodies, hiding inside human lives. We didn’t have to pretend to be you. We were you. Human and Other. Evan didn’t die when I awakened. He was…absorbed.”
Ever the noticer, Evan notices I’m totally creeped out by this. He reaches out to touch me and flinches when I pull away.
“So what are you, Evan?” I whisper. “Where are you? You said you were…what did you say?” My mind’s racing a gazillion miles an hour. “Inserted. Inserted where?”
“Maybe inserted isn’t the best word. I guess the concept that comes closest is downloaded. I was downloaded into Evan when his brain was still developing.”
I shake my head. For a being centuries more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question.
“But what are you? What do you look like?”
He frowns. “You know what I look like.”
“No! Oh God, sometimes you can be so…” Careful, Cassie, don’t go there. Remember what matters. “Before you became Evan, before you came here, when you were on your way to Earth from wherever it is you came from, what did you look like?”
“Nothing. We haven’t had bodies in tens of thousands of years. We had to give them up when we left our home.”
“You’re lying again. What, you look like a toad or a warthog or a slug or something? Every living thing looks like something.”
“We are pure consciousness. Pure being. Abandoning our bodies and downloading our psyches into the mothership’s mainframe was the only way we could make the journey.” He takes my hand and curls my fingers into a fist. “This is me,” he says softly. He covers my fist with his hands, enfolding it. “This is Evan. It’s not a perfect analogy, because there’s no place where I end and he begins.” He smiles shyly. “I’m not doing very well, am I? Do you want me to show you who I am?”
Holy crap! “No. Yes. What do you mean?” I picture him peeling off his face like a creature from a horror movie.
His voice shakes a little. “I can show you what I am.”
“It doesn’t involve any kind of insertion, does it?”
He laughs softly. “I guess it does. In a way. I’ll show you, Cassie, if you want to see.”
Of course I want to see. And of course I don’t want to see. It’s clear he wants to show me—will showing me get me one step closer to Sams? But this isn’t totally about Sammy. Maybe if Evan shows me, I’ll understand why he saved me when he should have killed me. Why he held me in the dark night after night to keep me safe—and to keep me sane.
He’s still smiling at me, probably delighted that I’m not clawing his eyes out or laughing him off, which might hurt worse. My hand is lost in his, gently bound, like the tender heart of a rose within the bud, waiting for the rain.
“What do I have to do?” I whisper.
He lets go of my hand. Reaches toward my face. I flinch. “I would never hurt you, Cassie.” I breathe. Nod. Breathe some more. “Close your eyes.” He touches my eyelids gently, so gently, a butterfly’s wings.
“Relax. Breathe deep. Empty your mind. If you don’t, I can’t come in. Do you want me to come in, Cassie?”
Yes. No. Dear God, how far do I have to go to keep my promise?
I whisper, “Yes.”
It doesn’t begin inside my head like I expected. Instead a delicious warmth spreads through my body, expanding from my heart outward, and my bones and muscles and skin dissolve in the warmth that spreads out from me, until the warmth overcomes the Earth and the boundaries of the universe. The warmth is everywhere and everything. My body and everything outside my body belongs to it. Then I feel him; he is in the warmth, too, and there’s no separation between us, no spot where I end and he begins, and I open up like a flower to the rain, achingly slow and dizzyingly fast, dissolving in the warmth, dissolving in him and there’s nothing to see, that’s just the convenient word he used because there is no word to describe him, he just is.
And I open to him, a flower to the rain.
72
THE FIRST THING I do after I open my eyes is break out in heart-wrenching sobs. I can’t help it: I’ve never felt so abandoned in my life.