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.