His fingers entangled now in my hair. “We shouldn’t.”
I almost laughed. Well, the shouldn’t list is awfully long, Evan. I scored my teeth across his stomach. The land beneath my tongue quivered, shock and aftershock.
Shouldn’t. No, we probably shouldn’t. Some cravings can never be satisfied. Some discoveries demean the quest.
“Not the time . . . ,” he gasped.
I rested my cheek on his tummy and tugged the hair from my eyes. “When is the time, Evan?”
His hands captured my roving ones and held them still.
“You said you loved me,” I whispered. Damn you, Evan Walker, why did you ever say such a ridiculous, crazy, imbecilic thing?
No one tells you how close rage is to lust. I mean, the space between molecules is thicker. “You’re a liar,” I told him. “You’re the worst kind of liar, the kind who lies to themselves. You’re not in love with me. You’re in love with an idea.”
His eyes cut away. That’s how I knew I nailed him. “What idea?” he asked.
“Liar, you know what idea.” I got up. I pulled off my shirt. I stared him down, daring him to look at me. Look at me, Evan. Look at me. Not the last person on Earth, the stand-in for all the people you shot on the highway. I’m not the mayfly; I’m Cassie, an ordinary girl from an ordinary place who was dumb enough or unlucky enough to live long enough for you to find. I am not your charge, your mission, or your cross.
I am not humanity.
He turned his face toward the wall, hands beside his head as if in surrender. Well. I’d gone this far. I tugged the jeans over my hips and kicked them away. I couldn’t remember a time when I was this angry—or this sad—or this . . . I wanted to punch him, caress him, kick him, hold him. I wanted him to die. I wanted me to die. I wasn’t self-conscious, not at all, and it wasn’t because he’d seen me naked before—he had.
That time I didn’t have a choice. Then I’d been unconscious, close to death. Now I was awake and very much alive.
I wished there were a hundred lamps to light me up. I wanted a spotlight and a magnifying glass so he could examine every imperfectly perfect human inch of me.
“It’s not about the time, Evan,” I reminded him, “but what we do with it.”
23
RINGER
AT THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET, it’s hard to tell which seems smaller: the Earth below or the person above it, looking down.
Due north and a couple of miles from the caverns, Constance unbuckles her harness and grabs her chute assembly from the overhead. One last check-through before the jump. We’ll be inserted from this altitude to reduce the chance of being spotted from the ground. It’s called a HALO insertion. High Altitude—Low Opening. Risky as hell, but no more risky than jumping from five thousand feet with no parachute at all.
Constance must know about my jump from the doomed chopper, because she says, “Gonna be a lot easier than last time, huh?”
I tell her to fuck off, and she grins at me. I’m glad. I want to find nothing sympathetic or likable about her. Those things might make killing her hard.
Well, harder. I’m still going to kill her.
“Thirty seconds!” the pilot’s voice squawks in our ears. Constance checks my assembly. I check hers. We toss our headsets onto the seats as the rear bay door opens. Sliding our gloved fingers over the guide cable, we shuffle toward the screaming maw, the subzero wind like a fist pummeling our faces. My stomach tightens as the C-160 rocks side to side, buffeted by turbulence. I’ve been fighting the urge to throw up for nearly the entire flight. Better to do it now than in freefall. If I position myself correctly, the vomit will land directly in Constance’s face.
I wonder why the hub doesn’t subdue my digestive system; weird, but I feel let down by a trusted friend.
I follow Constance into the black gullet of a moonless night. We won’t deploy the chutes until well after we’ve reached terminal velocity. I can see her clearly with my enhanced vision, fifty feet farther down and off to my left. Time slows as my speed picks up; I’m not sure if that’s the hub’s doing or a natural reaction to falling at 120 miles per hour. I don’t hear the plane. The world is wind.
Twenty thousand feet. Fifteen. Ten. I can make out a highway, rolling fields, clusters of bare-limbed trees. The closer I get, the faster they seem to rush toward me. Five thousand feet. Four. Minimum distance to ground for a safe deployment is eight hundred feet, but that’s pushing the envelope.
Constance pulls her cord at eight-fifty. I’m a little below that, and the ground roars toward me like the face of a runaway locomotive.
I bend my knees on impact and duck my shoulder toward the ground, rolling twice before stopping flat on my back, tangled in cords. Constance is there before I can take my next breath, slicing me free with her combat knife. She yanks me to my feet, gives me a thumbs-up, and then takes off across the field toward a couple of silos that stand next to the ubiquitous red barn and, a stone’s throw away, the white farmhouse.
White house, red barn, a narrow country lane: We couldn’t have fallen into a more quintessential slice of Americana. The name of the hamlet where the caverns are? West Liberty.
I join her at the base of a silo, where she’s busy stripping off her jumpsuit. Beneath it, she’s wearing mom jeans and a hoodie. She has no weapon except the knife, which she tucks into a sheath strapped to her leg.