I fired. The shadow whirled toward me, then pitched forward, reaching for me.
I slammed my foot down on its neck and jammed the muzzle of the rifle against the back of the shadow’s head.
“Excuse me,” I gasped; I had no breath. “But you have the wrong room.”
15
AS A CHILD, he dreamed of owls.
He hadn’t thought of the dream in years. Now, as his life slipped away, the memory came back to him.
The memory was not pleasant.
The bird perched on the windowsill, staring into his room with bright yellow eyes. The eyes blinked slowly, rhythmically; otherwise, the owl never moved.
Watching the owl watching him, paralyzed with fear without understanding why, unable to call for his mother and, afterward, the sick feeling all over, nauseated, dizzy, feverish, and the jittery, unnerving sensation of being watched that lingered for days.
When he turned thirteen, the dreams stopped. He had awakened; there was no need to hide the truth anymore. When the time came, his awakened self would need the gifts that the “owl” had given. He understood the dreams’ purpose because his purpose had been revealed.
Make ready. Prepare the way.
The owl had been a lie to protect the tender psyche of his host body. After he awakened, another lie took its place: his life. His humanity was a lie, a mask, like the dream of owls in the dark.
Now he was dying. And the lie was dying with him.
There was no pain. He did not feel the bitter cold. His body seemed to float on a warm, boundless sea. The alarm signals from his nerves to the pain centers of his brain had been shut down. This gentle, painless easing of his human body into oblivion would be the final gift.
And then, after the last human being was dead: rebirth.
A new human body unburdened by the memory of being human. He would not remember the past eighteen years. Those memories and the emotions attached to them would be forever lost—and there was nothing that could be done about the agony attending that knowledge.
Lost. Everything lost.
The memory of her face. Lost. The time with her. Lost. The war declared between what he was and what he pretended to be. Lost.
In the quiet of the winter-draped woods, floating on a boundless sea, he reached for her, and she slipped away.
He knew what would come of it. He had always known. Once he found her imprisoned in snow and carried her back and made her whole, his death would be the price. Virtues are vices now, and death is the cost of love. Not the death of his body. His body was the lie. True death. The death of his humanity. The death of his soul.
In the woods, in the bitter cold, on the surface of a boundless sea, whispering her name, entrusting her memory to the wind, to the embrace of the silent sentinel trees and to the care of the faithful stars, her namesake, pure and everlasting, the uncontained universe contained in her:
Cassiopeia.
16
HE WOKE TO PAIN.
Blinding pain in his head, his chest, his hands, his ankle. His skin was on fire. He felt as if he’d been dipped in boiling water.
A bird perched on a tree branch above him, a crow, regarding him with regal indifference. The world belonged to the crows now, he thought. The rest were interlopers, short-timers.
Smoke curled in the bare branches overhead: a campfire. And the smell of meat sizzling in a pan.
He was propped up against a tree, covered by a heavy wool blanket, with a rolled-up winter parka for a pillow. Slowly, he lifted his head an inch and realized immediately that any movement at all was a very bad idea.
A tall woman came into view carrying an armload of wood, then vanished from sight for a moment while she fed the fire.
“Good morning.” Her voice was low-pitched, lilting, and vaguely familiar.
She sat beside him, pulled her knees to her chest, and wrapped her long arms around her legs. Her face was familiar, too. Fair-skinned, blond, Nordic features, like a Viking princess.
“I know you,” he whispered. His throat burned. She pressed the mouth of her canteen against his raw lips, and he drank for a long time.
“That’s good,” she said. “You were talking nonsense last night. I was worried you’d suffered something a little more serious than a concussion.”
She stood up and disappeared from view again. When she came back, she was holding a frying pan. She sat next to him, placing the pan on the ground between them. She was studying him with the same haughty indifference as the crow.
“I’m not hungry,” he said.
“You have to eat.” Not pleading. Stating a fact. “Fresh rabbit. I made a stew.”
“How bad is it?”
“Not bad. I’m a good cook.”
He shook his head and forced a smile. She knew what he meant.
“It’s pretty bad,” she said. “Sixteen broken bones, skull fracture, second-degree burns over most of your body. Not your hair, though. You still have your hair. That’s the good news.”
The woman dipped a spoon into the stew, brought the spoon to her lips, blew gently, swiped her tongue slowly around the edge.
“What’s the bad news?” he asked.
“Your ankle is fractured. Fairly badly. That’s going to take some time. The rest . . .” She shrugged, sipped the stew, pursed her lips. “Needs salt.”
He watched her dig into her rucksack, searching for the salt. “Grace,” he said softly. “Your name is Grace.”
“One of them,” the woman said. Then she said her real name, the one she bore for ten thousand years. “I have to be honest. I like Grace better. So much easier to pronounce!”
She swirled the soup with the spoon. Offered him a sip. His lips tightened. The thought of food . . . She shrugged and took another sip. “I thought it was debris from the explosion,” she went on. “I never expected to find one of the escape pods—or you in it. What happened to the guidance system? Did you disarm it?”
He thought carefully before he answered. “Malfunction.”
“Malfunction?”
“Malfunction,” he said louder. His throat was on fire. She held the canteen for him while he drank.
“Not too much,” she cautioned him. “You’ll get sick.”
Water dribbled down his chin. She wiped it for him.
“The base was compromised,” he said.
She seemed surprised. “How?”
He shook his head. “Not sure.”
“Why were you there? That’s the curious thing.”
“I followed someone in.” This was not going well. For a person whose entire life had been a lie, lying did not come easily to him. He knew Grace would not hesitate to terminate his current body if she suspected that the “compromise” extended to him. They all understood the risk in donning the human mantle. Sharing a body with a human psyche carried with it the danger of adopting human vices—as well as human virtues. And far more dangerous than greed or lust or envy or any of those things—or anything—was love.
“You . . . followed someone? A human?”
“I didn’t have a choice.” That much was true at least.
“The base was compromised. By a human.” She shook her head with wonder. “And you abandoned your patrol to stop it.”
He closed his eyes. Perhaps she’d think he passed out. The smell of the stew made his stomach roll.
“Very curious,” Grace said. “There was always risk of a compromise, but from within the processing center. How could a human in your sector know anything about the cleansing?”
Playing possum wasn’t going to work. He opened his eyes. The crow had not moved. The bird stared at him, and he remembered the owl on the sill and the little boy in the bed and the fear. “I’m not sure she did.”
“She?”
“Yes. It was a . . . a female.”
&nbs
p; “Cassiopeia.”
He looked sharply at her, couldn’t help it. “How do you . . . ?”
“I’ve heard it a lot over the past three days.”
“Three days?”
His heart quickened. He had to ask. But how could he? Asking might make her more suspicious than she already was. It would be foolish to ask. So he said, “I think she might have escaped.”
Grace smiled. “Well, if she did, I’m sure we’ll find her.”
He let his breath out slowly. Grace would have no reason to lie. If she had found Cassie, she would have killed her and had no reservations in telling him. Though Grace not finding her was no proof of life: Cassie still may not have survived.
Grace reached into her rucksack again and took out a bottle of cream. “For the burns,” she explained. Gingerly, she pulled the blanket down, exposing his naked body to the freezing air. Above them, the crow cocked its polished black head and watched.
The cream was cold. Her hands were warm. Grace had brought him out of fire; he had brought Cassie out of ice. He’d carried her through the undulating sea of white to the old farmhouse, where he removed her clothes and plunged her freezing body into warm water. As Grace’s hands, slick with salve, roamed his body, his fingers had worked through the ice encrusted in Cassie’s thick hair. Removing the bullet as she floated in the water stained pink by her blood. The bullet meant for her heart. His bullet. And, after he pulled her from the water and bandaged the wound, carrying her to his sister’s bed, averting his eyes as he dressed her in his sister’s gown; Cassie would have been mortified when she realized he’d seen her unclothed.
Grace’s eyes fixed on him. His eyes fixed on the teddy bear on the pillow. He pulled the covers to Cassie’s chin. Grace pulled the blanket to his.
You’re going to live, he told Cassie. More of a prayer than a promise.
“You’re going to live,” Grace told him.
You have to live, he said to Cassie. “I have to,” he said to Grace.
The way she cocked her head as she looked at him, like the crow in the tree, the owl on the sill.
“We all have to,” Grace said, nodding slowly. “It’s why we came.”
She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the cheek. Warm breath, cool lips, and the faint odor of wood smoke. Her lips slid from his cheek toward his mouth. He turned his head.
“How did you know her name?” she whispered in his ear. “Cassiopeia. How did you know Cassiopeia?”
“I found her camp. Abandoned. She kept a journal . . .”
“Ah. And that’s how you knew she planned to storm the base.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it all makes perfect sense, then. Did she say in her journal why she was storming the base?”
“Her brother . . . taken from a refugee camp to Wright-Patterson . . . she escaped . . .”
“That’s remarkable. Then she overcomes our defenses and destroys the entire command center. That’s even more remarkable. It borders on the unbelievable.”
She picked up the pan, slung the contents into the brush, and rose to her feet. She towered over him, a six-foot blond colossus. Her cheeks were flushed, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the kiss.
“Rest,” she said. “You’re well enough to travel now. We’re leaving tonight.”
“Where’re we going?” Evan Walker asked.
She smiled. “My place.”
17
AT SUNSET, Grace killed the fire, slipped the backpack and rifle over her shoulder, and scooped Evan from the ground for the sixteen-mile hike to her station house on the southern outskirts of Urbana. She would keep to the highway to make better time. There was little risk in it at this stage of the game: She hadn’t seen a human being in weeks. Those she hadn’t killed had been taken by the buses or had taken refuge against the onslaught of winter. This was the in-between time. In another year, perhaps two, though no more than five, there would be no need for stealth, because there would be no more prey to stalk.
The temperature plunged with the sun. Ragged clouds raced across the indigo sky, driven by a north wind that toyed with her bangs and playfully flipped the collar of her jacket. The first stars appeared, the moon rose, and the road shone ahead, a silver ribbon twisting across the black backdrop of dead fields and empty lots and the gutted shells of houses long abandoned.
She stopped once to rest and drink and spread more salve over Evan’s burns.
“There’s something different about you,” she mused. “I can’t put my finger on it.” Putting her fingers all over him.
“I didn’t have an easy awakening,” he said. “You know that.”
She grunted softly. “You’re a brooder, Evan, and a very sore loser.” She wrapped him back up in the blanket. Ran her long fingers through his hair. Looked deeply into his eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
He said nothing.
“I felt it,” she said. “The first night, when I hauled you out of the wreckage. There’s a . . .” She searched for the right words. “A hidden room that wasn’t there before.”
His voice sounded hollow to him, empty as the wind. “Nothing is hidden.”
Grace laughed. “You should never have been integrated, Evan Walker. You feel far too much for them to be one of them.”
She picked him up as easily as a mother her newborn child. She lifted her face to the night sky and gasped. “I see her! Cassiopeia, the queen of the night.” She pressed her cheek against the top of his head. “Our hunt is over, Evan.”
18
GRACE’S STATION WAS an old, one-story wooden frame house on Highway 68, located at the exact center of her assigned six-square-mile patrol sector. Aside from boarding up the broken windows and repairing the exterior doors, she’d left the house as she found it. Family portraits on the walls, heirlooms and mementos too large to carry easily, smashed furniture and open drawers and the thousand pieces of the occupants’ lives deemed worthless by looters were scattered in every room. Grace did not bother to clean up the mess. When spring arrived and the 5th Wave rolled out, she would be gone.
She carried Evan to the second bedroom at the rear of the house, the kids’ room, with bright blue wallpaper and toys littering the floor and a mobile of the solar system hanging dejectedly from the ceiling. She laid him in one of the twin beds. A child had scratched his initials into the headboard: K.M. Kevin? Kyle? The tiny room smelled like the plague. There wasn’t much light—Grace had boarded the window in here, too—but his eyesight was much more acute than an ordinary human’s, and Evan could see the dark splotches of blood that had been flung on the blue walls during someone’s death throes.
She left the room, returning after a few minutes with more salve and a roll of bandages. She worked quickly wrapping the burns, as if she had pressing business elsewhere. Neither spoke until she had covered him again.
“What do you need?” Grace asked. “Something to eat? Bathroom?”
“Clothes.”
She shook her head. “Not a good idea. A week on the burns. Two, maybe three on the ankle.”
I don’t have three weeks. Three days is too long.
For the first time, he thought it might be necessary to neutralize Grace.
She touched his cheek. “Call if you need anything. Stay off that ankle. I have to get some supplies; I wasn’t expecting company.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“No more than a couple hours. Try to sleep.”
“I’ll need a weapon.”
“Evan, there isn’t anyone within a hundred miles.” She smiled. “Oh. You’re worried about the saboteur.”
He nodded. “I am.”
She pressed her pistol into his hand. “Don’t shoot me.”
He wrapped his fingers around the grip. “I won’t.”
“I’ll knock first.”
>
He nodded again. “That would be a good idea.”
She paused by the door. “We lost the drones when the base fell.”
“I know.”
“Which means we’re both off the grid. If something should happen to one of us—or any of us . . .”
“Does it matter now? It’s almost over.”
Grace nodded thoughtfully. “Do you think we’ll miss them?”
“The humans?” He wondered if she was making a joke. He’d never heard her try before; joking wasn’t in her character.
“Not the ones out there.” She gestured beyond the walls, at the wider world. “The ones in here.” Hand to her chest.
“You can’t miss what you don’t remember,” he said.
“Oh, I think I’ll keep her memories,” Grace said. “She was a happy little girl.”
“Then there’ll be nothing to miss, will there?”
She folded her arms over her chest. She was leaving and now she wasn’t. Why didn’t she leave?
“I won’t keep all of them,” she said, meaning the memories. “Only the good ones.”
“That’s been my worry from the beginning, Grace: The longer we play at being human, the more human we become.”
She looked at him quizzically and said nothing for a very long, very uncomfortable moment.
“Who’s playing at being human?” she asked.
19
HE WAITED UNTIL her footfalls faded. Wind whistled in the cracks between the plywood and the window frame; otherwise, he heard nothing. Like his eyesight, his hearing was exquisitely acute. If Grace was sitting on the porch combing her hair, he would hear it.
First the gun. He pulled the magazine from the frame. Just as he suspected: no bullets. He thought the gun had been too light. Evan allowed himself a quiet laugh. The irony was too much. Their primary mission had not been to kill, but to sow mistrust among the survivors and drive them like frightened sheep to slaughterhouses like Wright-Patterson. What happens when the sowers of mistrust become its reapers? Reapers. He fought back a hysterical giggle.