“Not true, Cassie.”
“Don’t. Interrupt. Me. That’s, like, one of my things. Just so you know. And now I would like to say something.”
“Okay.”
“There is something I’d like to say.”
“I’m listening.”
Looking away. Looking at nothing. Deep breath. Don’t say it, Cass. What’s the point now? There is no point. Maybe that’s something we both need to understand.
“I’ve had a crush on you since the third grade,” I whisper. “I wrote your name in notebooks. I drew hearts around it. I decorated it with flowers. Mostly daisies. I had daydreams and dream-dreams, and nobody knew except my best friend. Who is dead. Like everybody else.”
Looking away. Looking at nothing. “But you were where you were and I was where I was. You could have been in China for all it mattered. When you showed up out of nowhere at Sammy’s camp—I thought it had to mean something. Because you lived when you should have died, and I lived when I should have died, and we were both there for Sam, who also should have died. Just—just too many coincidences to be just a coincidence, you know? But that’s all it is, a coincidence. There’s no divine plan. There’s nothing fated in our stars. No meant-to-be in any of it. We are accidental people occupying an accidental planet in an accidental universe. And that’s okay. These seven billion billion atoms are good with that.”
I press my lips onto that nasty stuffed animal’s head. Really neat that human beings conquered the Earth, invented poetry and mathematics and the combustion engine, discovered that time and space are relative, built machines big and small to ferry us to the moon for some rocks or carry us to McDonald’s for a strawberry-banana smoothie. Very cool we split the atom and bestowed upon the Earth the Internet and smartphones and, of course, the selfie stick.
But the most wonderful thing of all, our highest achievement and the one thing for which I pray we will always be remembered, is stuffing wads of polyester into an anatomically incorrect, cartoonish ideal of one of nature’s most fearsome predators for no other reason than to soothe a child.
50
THERE ARE PREPARATIONS to make. Details to work out.
First, I’ll need a uniform. Ben sits with the kids while Ringer and I dig up the bodies. There’s the smallest recruit, whose uniform seems like the right size, but there’s a bullet hole in the back of the jacket. Might be hard to explain. Ringer hauls out the next body, whose duds are dirty but unmarred by bullet holes and nearly blood-free. She explains that she crushed his skull with a twenty-inch steel rim. He didn’t feel it, she assures me. Didn’t see it coming. It’s okay. I feel my gorge rise. It’s okay. I change right there by the side of the road under the naked sky. Ha. Naked sky. And there is Cassiopeia above me, chained to her chair, watching her namesake bare herself
and the dead boy, too. I catch Ringer looking at him, and her face is even paler than usual. I follow her gaze to the kid’s arm, where cruddy-looking scabs glisten in the starlight. What are those? Letters?
“What is that?” I ask while rolling up the pant legs; they’re a good four inches too long.
“It’s Latin,” she answers. “It means ‘he conquers who endures.’”
“Why is it cut into his arm like that?”
She shakes her head. Her hand wanders to her own shoulder. She thinks I don’t notice.
“You have one, too, don’t you?”
“No.” She kneels beside the boy, his combat knife in her hand. She slices along the tiny scar on the back of his neck and gingerly digs the tracking device from the cut.
“Here. Put this in your mouth.”
“Like fuck.”
She cups it in the palm of her hand and spits on it. Rolls the rice-sized pellet around in her spit to clean off the blood.
“Better?”
“In what way could that possibly be better?”
She grabs my hand and deposits the gooey pellet into my palm. “You clean it, then.”
I lace up the boots as she cuts into another kid’s neck, dips out the tracker with the tip of the knife, then slides the blade between her lips. There is something matter-of-factly savage about it, and her words echo in my head: I am what he made me.
51
PREPARATIONS. DETAILS.
I’ll need gear, but only what I can fit into the pockets and pouches of the uniform. Extra magazines for the rifle and sidearm, a knife, a penlight, a couple of grenades, two bottles of water, and three power bars, at Ben’s insistence. Parish has this weird, superstitious faith in power bars, which is totally bogus, unlike my belief in the talismanic force of teddy bears.