The Last Star (33 page)

86

I’M YANKED
to my feet and shoved into the house with Nugget, Megan, and two offensive-lineman-sized guys who’ve removed their jackets just to show how tough they are. They have identical tattoos on their ripped biceps:
VQP.
We hang in the front parlor, Megan on the sofa holding the teddy bear, Nugget glued to my side, though he isn’t happy with me right now.

“You
told,
” he accuses me.

I shrug. “Bullet’s left the chamber, Nugget. Not much they can do about it now.”

He shakes his head. The metaphor’s lost on him. I lean over and whisper in his ear: “At least I didn’t tell them about Cassie, right?”

The mention of his sister’s name nearly sends him over the edge. His bottom lip juts out; his eyes fill up.

“Hey, okay now, what’s this? Huh? Private, your actions tonight have shown extraordinary courage above and beyond the call of duty. You know what a field promotion is?”

Nugget shakes his head solemnly. “No.”

“Well, you just got one, Corporal Nugget.”

I place the edge of my hand to my forehead. His chest pops out, his chin comes up, his eyes burn with the ol’ Sullivan fire. He returns the salute smartly.

On the porch, the sarge is having a heated debate with her second-in-command. The topic’s no mystery; you can hear them clearly through the open door. They’ve completed the mission, the 2IC argues, time to off these bastards and return to base.
Capture and contain,
the sarge shoots back.
My orders don’t say nothing about offing anybody.
She’s wavering, though; you can hear it in her voice. Her 2IC comes back with my point about the bomb-shitting beast in high orbit: Whatever she decides about the Dorothys, they have to return to base before dawn or enjoy a front-row seat to Armageddon.

The screen door bangs open and she charges right up to my face, close enough for me to catch a whiff of perfume. It’s been so long since I smelled any that my headache disappears in a single, wondrous instant.

“How’s she gonna do all this?” she shouts. “How can one person . . . ?”

“It only takes one.” My quiet answer in counterpoint to her loud question. “Just one, and the world changes. It’s not unheard-of, Sergeant.”

She stares at me with those dark, flinty eyes filled with a hundred daggers of light. “Corporal,” she snaps to her 2IC without looking away from my face, “we’re bugging out. Escort the prisoners to the chopper. They’re gonna take a little trip down the rabbit hole.” Then to me: “You remember Wonderland.”

I nod. “I sure do.”

87

BLACK BIRD RISING,
the Earth falling away—from the air, the caverns are invisible. The farmhouse and the fields shine silver, and the blast of cold wind is like the voice of the world screaming. The last time I rode in a chopper, I was heading back to a different camp, on a mission to save the kid who sits beside me now, whose once-round face is now lean and stern and full of grim purpose. One day he’ll ask his grandkids,
Ever tell you about the time I was promoted to corporal at the age of six?

His grandkids. According to Ringer, they’ll be fighting the same war he is. So will
their
grandkids and their grandkids’ grandkids. The war that can’t end while the enemy’s ship sails serenely over our heads. How could it end when all our descendants have to do is look up?

Like Sergeant Sprinter watching me from across the narrow aisle of the hold. The perfectly scary and scarily perfect thing about their plan is it doesn’t matter that she knows I’m Ted-free.
Whoever’s not with us is against us.
That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This time it has.

I look away from her face to the screaming world outside the chopper. I can’t see the ground. Just the thin black line of the horizon, the congregation of a million stars, and the green eye-shaped orb that hangs just above the line separating heaven from Earth.

Someone’s touching my thigh. And it’s not the someone I expect. Dirty, scratched-up hands, chipped nails, pencil-thin arms, pinched face, a headful of tangled hair despite Sullivan’s valiant
attempts to keep it combed. I touch that hair, drawing it back to tuck behind her ear, and Megan glances shyly at me but doesn’t pull away. The last time she rode in a chopper, the people she trusted had just placed a bomb inside her throat. The same people she was going back to now. How do you deal with something like that? How do you make it make sense? I almost say it; the words push against my lips and almost escape.
Not going to let it happen, Megs. This time you’re safe.

The sergeant is shouting something over the headset. I catch only about 10 percent.
Go four? Go four, you sure?
And
We got the juice for that?
And a bunch of expletives you really can’t include in the percentage. At hearing the words
Go four,
the other recruits in the hold tighten up. I don’t know what the hell
Go four
means, but it doesn’t sound good.

Not good at all.

88

RINGER

FROM THE ROOF
of the command center, I hear the window shatter two hundred yards away. A body tumbles out and writhes in the dirt beneath the broken window, its uniform speckled with shards of glass, groaning in pain. I can’t see her face—but even from this distance, I recognize the tangle of strawberry curls.

I sprint across the rooftop, leap forty feet to the roof of the adjacent building, then jump three stories to the ground. Sullivan sees my boots hit the grass a foot from her head and screams. She fumbles with her sidearm. I kick it out of her hand and haul her to her feet. Her uniform is soaked. Her eyes are swollen and red, her face pockmarked with angry crimson boils. She’s shaking uncontrollably, going into shock. I’ll have to act fast.

I throw her over my shoulder and sprint toward a small storage shed located on the back side of the building. The door’s padlocked. I bust it apart with one kick and carry her inside. The hub processes the data transmitted by the olfactory drones: something in the water, something toxic.

I strip off her jacket. Rip off her shirt and undershirt. Slipping in and out of consciousness, she barely resists. Boots, socks, pants, underwear. Her skin’s inflamed and clammy to the touch. I press my hand against her chest; her heart slams against my palm. I look into her weeping, unseeing eyes and shove my way into her. The toxin won’t kill her—I hope—but her terror might.

I tamp down the panic to slow her heart. The primitive part of her brain pushes back: The fight-or-flight response is older and more powerful than the technology I contain. The struggle continues for several minutes.

Our hearts, the war.

Her body, the battlefield.

89

I THROW MY JACKET
over her bare shoulders. She pulls it tight across her chest, a good sign that I haven’t lost her yet.

“Where. The hell. Were you?”

“Watching this entire camp bunker-dive,” I tell her. “They’ve cut the power . . .”

She laughs harshly, then turns her head and spits. Her spittle is flecked with blood, and I think of the plague. “Did they? I hadn’t noticed.”

“It’s pretty smart,” I say. “Flush us outside, where our options are limited, then dispatch enhanced personnel to finish—”

She’s shaking her head. “We have no options, Ringer. Wonderland. We have to get to Wonderland . . .” She tries to stand. Her knees buckle and she goes down. “Where the fuck are my clothes?”

“Here, take mine. I’ll wear yours.”

For some reason she laughs. “
Commando.
That’s funny.”

I don’t get it.

I can feel the toxin worm its way into my legs after I pull on her fatigues, and thousands of microscopic bots swarm to neutralize its effects. I hand her my dry shirt, shrug into her wet one.

“The poison doesn’t do anything to you?” she asks.

“I don’t feel anything.”

She rolls her eyes. “I already
knew
that.”

“I’ll take it from here,” I tell her. “You stay.”

“Like hell.”

“Sullivan, the risk is—”

“I don’t give a shit about your risk.”

“I’m not talking about the risk to the mission.
Your
risk.”

“That doesn’t matter.” She stands up. This time she stays up. “Where’s my rifle?”

I shake my head. “Didn’t see it.”

“Okay then. What about my gun?”

I take a deep breath. This isn’t going to work. She’s more a liability now than an asset, and she’s never been much of an asset. She’ll slow me down. She might get me killed. I should leave her here. Knock her out if I have to. Screw our deal. Walker’s dead; he must be; there’s no reason Vosch would keep him alive once he’s been downloaded into Wonderland. Which means Sullivan is risking everything for nothing.

I am, too. For something I can’t even put into words. The same something I saw in her eyes that I cannot name. Something that has nothing to do with Vosch or avenging what he’s done to me. It’s more important than that. More solid. But that’s about as close as I can come to describing it.

Something inviolable.

But I don’t say any of that. My mouth comes open and these words come out instead: “You won’t need a weapon, Sullivan. You’ll have me.”