“Why did you?”
Because you’re my bullshit-free zone, but I’m not giving him that. Because you’re the one I came out of the wilderness for, no, not that, either. And not Because you’re the one person I still trust.
Instead, I
say, “You caught me at a weak moment.”
“Well.” Then the Ben Parish smile, the smile it almost hurts to look at. “If you’re ever in need of an egotistical prick, I’m your man.” He waits two breaths, then adds, “Oh, come on, Ringer. Come on. Smile. That joke works on so many levels, it isn’t even funny.”
“You’re right,” I answer. “It’s not funny.”
58
I SLIDE OUT of my clothes beside the outdoor shower. The overhead container was empty, so I had to fill it from the cistern next to the welcome center. The cistern must have weighed over a hundred pounds, but I hoisted it onto my shoulder as if it weighed no more than little Nugget.
I know the water is cold, but like I told Zombie, I’m protected by Vosch’s gift. I feel nothing but wetness. The water bears away the blood and dirt.
I run my hands over my stomach. He sacrificed his life for me. The boy in the doorway lit up by a funeral pyre, carving letters into his arm.
I touch my shoulder. The skin is smooth and soft. The 12th System repaired the damage minutes after I inflicted it. I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur.
I close my eyes and see his. Sharp, glittering, brilliant blue, eyes that knife deeper than your bones. You created me, and now your creation is coming back for you. Like rain to parched earth, I come back.
And water bears away the blood and dirt.
59
CASSIE
HERE’S SOMETHING to chew on. Here’s the charming truth about the world the Others are creating:
My little brother has forgotten the alphabet, but he knows how to make bombs.
A year ago it was crayons and coloring books, construction paper and Elmer’s glue. Now it’s fuses and blasting caps, wires and black powder.
Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?
Beside me, Megan watches him the way she watches everything else: silently. She clutches Bear to her chest, another silent witness to the evolution of Samuel J. Sullivan.
He’s working with Ringer, the two of them kneeling next to each other, a two-person assembly line. I guess they took the same IED class at camp. Ringer’s damp hair shines like a blacksnake’s skin in the lamplight. Her ivory skin gleams. A couple of hours ago, I smashed my forehead into her nose and broke it, but there’s no swelling, no sign I inflicted any damage at all. Unlike my nose, which will be crooked till the day I die. Life is not fair.
“How’d you get on that chopper?” I ask her. It’s been bugging me.
“Same way you did,” she answers. “I jumped.”
“The plan was for me to jump.”
“Which you did. You were hanging on by a fingernail,” she said. “I didn’t think I had a choice at that point.”
In other words, I saved your worthless, freckly, crooked-nosed ass. What are you bitching about?
Not that my nose has an ass. I really should stop putting thoughts into other people’s heads.
She tucks a strand of her silky locks behind her ear. There’s something so effortlessly and inexplicably graceful about the gesture that it borders on creepy. What the hell happened to you, Ringer?
Of course, I know what happened to her. The gift, Evan called it. All human potential times a hundred. I have the heart to do what I have to do, Evan told me once. He neglected to say at the time he meant that both literally and figuratively. He neglected to say a lot of things, the bastard who doesn’t even deserve rescuing.
What the hell am I thinking? Looking at Ringer’s delicate fingers dance in the complicated ballet of constructing a bomb, I realize the scariest thing about her isn’t what Vosch has done to her body; it’s what that amped-up body has done to her mind. When you tear down our physical limitations, what happens to our moral ones? I’m pretty certain the pre-enhanced Ringer couldn’t have single-handedly massacred five heavily armed, well-trained recruits. I also suspect pre-enhanced Ringer couldn’t have shoved her thumb into another human being’s eyeball. That required a leap in evolution of an entirely different kind.