The Last Star (34 page)

90

I LEAVE HER
for a little while. First I make her promise to stay. She’s not interested in making promises; she wants to hear them. So I promise I’ll come back for her.

She seems better when I get back. Her face is still red, but the hives or boils or whatever they were have almost disappeared. She’s not happy about it, but she throws her arm around my neck and leans against me on the way to the command center.

The entire base is eerily quiet. Our footsteps fall like thunder.
You’re watching us,
I silently tell Vosch.
I know you’re watching.
Sullivan pushes away when we reach the door.

“How’re you gonna do this?” she demands. “We’ll be burned alive by the toxin.”

“Don’t think so. I just shut off the water main.”

I smash my fist through the steel door and push down the bar on the opposite side. No alarm sounds. No light blinds us. No bullets take us down. The silence is stifling.

Sullivan breathes in my ear, “It’s the waves, Ringer. The power. The water. The plague. You know what’s next. You know what’s coming.”

I nod. “I know.”

We find the bodies in the stairwell that leads to the underground complex. Seven recruits, no blood, and not a scratch on them. Obviously, whoever did this was enhanced. Two of the kids have their heads completely twisted around so they stare up at us, though their bodies are facedown. I hand Sullivan one of their pistols. We pick our way through the pile and continue down. She holds the gun in one hand; the other is clutching my sleeve. She couldn’t see the recruits and didn’t ask what happened or what I saw. She either doesn’t want to know or she figures it doesn’t matter.

Only one thing matters,
she said. She’s right. I’m just not sure either one of us can explain what that is.

At the very bottom there is darkness and silence and a hallway even my enhanced eyes cannot see the end of. But I remember
where I am. I’ve been here before, beneath the constant glow. This is where Razor found me, rescued me, gave me hope, and then betrayed me.

I stop. Her hand grips my sleeve hard.

“I can’t see a goddamned thing,” Sullivan whispers. “Where’s the green door?”

“You’re standing in front of it.”

I ease her to one side and trot down the hall a dozen yards to get a running start. For all I know, even an enhanced human being can’t bust through that door’s locking mechanism. No choice, though. Halfway to the door, I’ve reached full velocity and nearly don’t have the space to pull up when Sullivan steps in front of me and tries the handle.

The door opens. I slide six feet to a stop. And I’m glad she can’t see the startled expression on my face. She’d laugh.

“They don’t need to lock the door if there’s no power,” she points out. “Wonderland needs juice, right?”

Of course she’s right. I feel stupid for not foreseeing the obvious.

“I understand,” she says, reading my mind. “You’re not used to feeling stupid. Trust me, you get used to it.” She smiles. “Maybe Wonderland has its own dedicated power system—just in case.”

We step into the room. Sullivan closes the door behind us. Her fingertips brush over the dead keypad for a second before dropping to her side. After everything, her capacity to hope has not died.

“What now?” she asks after I’ve pressed several buttons on the console with no result.

I don’t know, Sullivan. You’re the one who demanded we come here when you knew they killed the power.

“There’s no backup?” she asks. “You’d think it’d have batteries or something, in case they
accidentally
lost power.”

Then she says, more to fill the silence than anything else, “I’ll stay here. You go find the power station or whatever and get the lights back on.”

“Sullivan. I’m thinking.”

“You’re thinking.”

“Yes.”

“That’s what you’re doing. Thinking.”

“It’s what I do best.”

“And all this time I thought killing people was what you did best.”

“Well, if I had to pick two things to be really good at . . .”

“Don’t joke,” she says.

“I never do.”

“See? That’s fundamental. That’s a critical flaw.”

“So is talking too much.”

“You’re right. I should kill more and talk less.”

I’m running my hands along the tabletop. Nothing. I drop to the floor and crawl beneath the counter. A tangle of wires, couplings, extension cords. I stand up. On the wall, flat-screen monitors—no cords, probably wirelessly connected to the system. Nothing else to Wonderland except the keyboard, but there has to be something else. Where is the data stored? Where’s the processor? Of course, this is alien technology. Vosch could be carrying the processor in his pocket. It could be on a chip the size of a single grain of sand embedded in his brain.

The most puzzling thing is the risk. Wonderland is a vital piece of machinery, an important component in the winnowing of the 5th Wave, key to picking out the bad apples, including Evan Walker, the most rotten apple in the barrel.

The room is dry. No sprinklers came on in here. So where’s the
power? The power might be out in every other part of the complex, but it should be on in this room. The risk is too great.

“Ringer?” Being unable to see me has unnerved her. I see her hand reaching out in my direction. “What are you thinking about now?”

“They can’t risk losing power to Wonderland.”

“Which is why I asked about backup batteries or—”

Stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.
I hope Sullivan is right. I hope I can get used to feeling stupid. I step around her and hit the light switch.

Wonderland comes to life.

91

CASSIE SITS.
The white chair whines. She rotates back to face the white ceiling. I fastened her in.

“I’ve never done this,” she confesses. “Almost, back at Camp Haven.”

“What happened?”

“I strangled Dr. Pam with one of these straps.”

“Good for you,” I say sincerely. “I’m impressed.”

I step over to the keyboard. I’m certain I’ll be asked for a password. I’m not. I touch a random key and the launch page pops up on the central monitor.

“What’s going on?” she asks. She can’t see anything from the chair except the white ceiling.

Data bank.
“Found it.” I click the button.

“Now what?” she demands.

Everything is in code. Thousands of numerical combinations, which I guess represent the individuals whose memories have been captured by the program. Impossible to know which sequence is Walker’s. We could try the first one, and if that isn’t him, work our way down the list, but—

“Ringer, you’re not talking.”

“I’m thinking.”

She sighs loudly. She wants to say something like
I thought you said you were
good
at that,
but she doesn’t.

“You can’t figure out which one is Evan’s,” she says finally.

“We’ve gone over this,” I remind her. “Even if I could locate his data, you don’t know that his memories will lead you to him. After he was downloaded, Vosch probably—”

She lifts her head as far as she can from the chair and snaps, “He’s in there somewhere.
Give me all of them.
”

At first I’m sure I didn’t hear her correctly. “Sullivan, there are thousands of them.”

“I don’t care. I’ll go through every goddamned one till I find him.”

“I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work that way.”

“Oh, what the hell do you know, huh? How much do you really
know,
Ringer, and how much of what you ‘know’ is shit that Vosch wants you to know? The truth is you don’t know shit. I don’t know shit. Nobody knows shit.”

Her head flops back. Her hands clutch the straps. Maybe she’s thinking of strangling me with one.

“You said Vosch downloaded them all,” she goes on. “And that’s how he knew the way to manipulate you.
He
carries all those memories inside him, so it must be safe.
Perfectly safe.
”

I’m ready to execute the command, if for nothing else but to shut her up.

“Why are you afraid?” she asks.

I shake my head. “Why aren’t you?”

I hit the execute button, sending tens of millions of unfiltered memories into Cassie Sullivan’s brain.

92

HER BODY JERKS
against the restraints. The fabric starts to tear; it may rip apart. Then she stiffens like someone suffering a seizure. Her eyes roll back in her head. Her jaw clenches. One of her fingernails snaps off and flies across the room.

On the monitors the sequences race by in a blur, too fast even for my enhanced vision to follow. How much data is contained in the minds of ten thousand people? What’s happening to Sullivan is like trying to stuff the solar system into a walnut. It will kill her. Her mind will blow apart like the singularity at the moment of creation.

I’ve no doubt Vosch used Wonderland to download individuals’ experiences—I’m certain he downloaded mine—I also have little doubt those experiences were purged somehow after they served their purpose. No single human being can contain the sum of all that human experience. At the least, it would shatter your personality. How can you hold on to the core of your reality in the midst of so many alternatives?

Sullivan moans. Her cries are soft, coming from deep in her gut.
She’s weak. You knew better. You should have taken her place.
The technology they’ve infected you with could handle this; the 12th System would have protected you. Why did you let her do it?

But I know the answer to that question. The 12th System can only enhance the human body—it is helpless against fear. It cannot give me the one thing that Cassie Sullivan has in abundance.

I thought I knew what courage was. I was even arrogant enough to lecture Zombie about it. But I had no idea what true, undiluted courage was until this moment. That unidentifiable something I saw in her eyes is part of it, the root from which her courage sprang.

My finger hovers over the abort button. Would it be an act of courage to push it? Or the final failure of my human side—the part of me that hopes when there is no hope, believes when there is no reason to believe, trusts when all trust has been broken? Would pushing the button be Vosch’s ultimate victory over me?
See, Marika, even you belong to us now. Even you.

It’s over in less than five minutes. An eternal five minutes; the universe took shape in less time.

The monitors go blank. Cassie goes limp. I approach her gingerly. I’m afraid to touch her. Afraid of what I might feel. I’m in fear for my own mind, my own sanity. Plunging into a single human consciousness is dangerous enough; I can’t fathom being immersed in thousands.

“Cassie?”

Her eyelids flutter. I see the white ceiling reflected in her green eyes. And something else. Something shocking. Not horror. Not sorrow. No confusion or pain or fear. None of the things she must have found in Wonderland.

Instead, her eyes, her face, her entire body has ignited with the opposite of all those things, there all along, unconquerable,
undefeatable, immortal. The root of her courage. The foundation of all life, often obscured, never lost.

Joy.

She takes a long, shuddering breath and says, “We’re here.”