The 5th Wave (50 page)

“So what are you, Evan?” I whisper. “Where are you? You said
you were…what did you say?” My mind’s racing a gazillion miles an hour. “Inserted.
Inserted where?”

“Maybe
inserted
isn’t the best word. I guess the concept that comes closest is
downloaded
. I was downloaded into Evan when his brain was still developing.”

I shake my head. For a being centuries more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard
time answering a simple question.

“But what are you? What do you look like?”

He frowns. “You know what I look like.”

“No! Oh God, sometimes you can be so…”
Careful, Cassie, don’t go there. Remember what matters.
“Before you became Evan, before you came here, when you were on your way to Earth
from wherever it is you came from, what did you look like?”

“Nothing. We haven’t had bodies in tens of thousands of years. We had to give them
up when we left our home.”

“You’re lying again. What, you look like a toad or a warthog or a slug or something?
Every living thing looks like something.”

“We are pure consciousness. Pure being. Abandoning our bodies and downloading our
psyches into the mothership’s mainframe was the only way we could make the journey.”
He takes my hand and curls my fingers into a fist. “This is me,” he says softly. He
covers my fist with his hands, enfolding it. “This is Evan. It’s not a perfect analogy,
because there’s no place where I end and he begins.” He smiles shyly. “I’m not doing
very well, am I? Do you want me to show you who I am?”

Holy crap!
“No. Yes. What do you mean?” I picture him peeling off his face like a creature from
a horror movie.

His voice shakes a little. “I can show you what I am.”

“It doesn’t involve any kind of insertion, does it?”

He laughs softly. “I guess it does. In a way. I’ll show you, Cassie, if you want to
see.”

Of course I want to see. And of course I don’t want to see. It’s clear he wants to
show me—will showing me get me one step closer to Sams? But this isn’t totally about
Sammy. Maybe if Evan shows me, I’ll understand why he saved me when he should have
killed me. Why he held me in the dark night after night to keep me safe—and to keep
me sane.

He’s still smiling at me, probably delighted that I’m not clawing his eyes out or
laughing him off, which might hurt worse. My hand is lost in his, gently bound, like
the tender heart of a rose within the bud, waiting for the rain.

“What do I have to do?” I whisper.

He lets go of my hand. Reaches toward my face. I flinch. “I would never hurt you,
Cassie.” I breathe. Nod. Breathe some more. “Close your eyes.” He touches my eyelids
gently, so gently, a butterfly’s wings.

“Relax. Breathe deep. Empty your mind. If you don’t, I can’t come in. Do you want
me to come in, Cassie?”

Yes. No. Dear God, how far do I have to go to keep my promise?

I whisper, “Yes.”

It doesn’t begin inside my head like I expected. Instead a delicious warmth spreads
through my body, expanding from my heart outward, and my bones and muscles and skin
dissolve in the warmth that spreads out from me, until the warmth overcomes the Earth
and the boundaries of the universe. The warmth is everywhere and everything. My body
and everything outside my body belongs to it. Then I feel him; he is in the warmth,
too, and there’s no separation between us, no spot where I end and
he begins, and I open up like a flower to the rain, achingly slow and dizzyingly fast,
dissolving in the warmth, dissolving in him and there’s nothing to
see
, that’s just the convenient word he used because there is no word to describe him,
he just
is
.

And I open to him, a flower to the rain.

72

THE FIRST THING I do after I open my eyes is break out in heart-wrenching sobs. I
can’t help it: I’ve never felt so abandoned in my life.

“Maybe that was too soon,” he says, pulling me into his arms and stroking my hair.

And I let him. I’m too weak, too confused, too empty and forlorn to do anything else
but let him hold me.

“I’m sorry I lied to you, Cassie,” he murmurs into my hair.

The cold squeezes back down. Now I have just the memory of the warmth.

“You must hate being trapped inside there,” I whisper, pressing my hand against his
chest. I feel his heart push back.

“It doesn’t feel like I’m trapped,” he says. “In a way, it feels like I’ve been freed.”

“Freed?”

“To feel something again. To feel this.” He kisses me. A different kind of warmth
spreads through my body.

Lying in the enemy’s arms. What’s the matter with me? These
beings burned us alive, crushed us, drowned us, infected us with a plague that made
us bleed to death from the inside out. I watched them kill everyone I knew and loved—with
one special exception—and here I am, playing sucky-face with one! I let him inside
my soul. I shared something with him more precious and intimate than my body.

For Sammy’s sake, that’s why. A good answer, but complicated. The truth is simple.

“You said you lost the argument over what to do about the human disease,” I say. “What
was your answer?”

“Coexistence.” Talking to me, but addressing the stars above us. “There aren’t that
many of us, Cassie. Only a few hundred thousand. We could have inserted ourselves
in you, lived out our new lives without anyone ever knowing we were here. Not many
of my people agreed with me. They saw pretending to be human as beneath them. They
were afraid the longer we pretended to be human, the more human we would become.”

“And who would want that?”

“I didn’t think I would,” he admits. “Until I became one.”

“When you…‘woke up’ in Evan?”

He shakes his head and says simply, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world,
“When I woke up in
you
, Cassie. I wasn’t fully human until I saw myself in your eyes.”

And then there are real human tears in his real human eyes, and it’s my turn to hold
him while his heart breaks. My turn to see myself in his eyes.

Somebody might say that I’m not the only one lying in the enemy’s arms.

I am humanity, but who is Evan Walker? Human and Other. Both and neither. By loving
me, he belongs to no one.

He doesn’t see it that way.

“I’ll do whatever you say, Cassie,” he says helplessly. His eyes shine brighter than
the stars overhead. “I understand why you have to go. If it were you inside that camp,
I would go. A hundred thousand Silencers couldn’t stop me.”

He presses his lips against my ear and whispers low and fierce, as if he’s sharing
the most important secret in the world, which maybe he is.

“It’s hopeless. And it’s stupid. It’s suicidal. But love is a weapon they have no
answer for. They know how you think, but they can’t know what you feel.”

Not
we
.
They
.

A threshold has been crossed, and he isn’t stupid. He knows it’s the kind you can’t
cross back over.

73

WE SPEND OUR LAST DAY TOGETHER sleeping under the highway overpass like two homeless
people, which literally we both are. One person sleeps, the other keeps watch. When
it’s his turn to rest, he gives my guns back without hesitating and falls asleep instantly,
as if it doesn’t occur to him I could easily run away or shoot him in the head. I
don’t know; maybe it does occur to him. Our problem has always been that we don’t
think like they do. It’s why I trusted him in the beginning and why he knew I would
trust him. Silencers kill people. Evan didn’t kill me. Ergo, Evan couldn’t be a Silencer.
See? That’s logic. Ahem—human logic.

At dusk we finish the rest of our provisions and hike up the embankment to take cover
in the trees bordering Highway 35. The buses run only at night, he tells me. And you’ll
know when they’re coming. You can hear the sound of their engines for miles because
that’s the only sound for miles. First you see the headlights, and then you hear them,
and then they’re whizzing past like big yellow race cars because the highway’s been
cleared of wrecks and there aren’t speed limits anymore. He doesn’t know: Maybe they’ll
stop, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll just slow down long enough for one of the soldiers
on board to put a bullet between my eyes. Maybe they won’t come at all.

“You said they were still gathering people,” I point out. “Why wouldn’t they come?”

He’s watching the road beneath us. “At some point the ‘rescued’ will figure out they’ve
been duped, or the survivors on the outside will. When that happens, they’ll shut
down the base—or the part of the base that’s dedicated to cleansing.” He clears his
throat. Staring down at the road.

“What does that mean, ‘shut down the base’?”

“Shut it down the way they shut down Camp Ashpit.”

I think about what he’s saying. Like him, looking at the empty road.

“Okay,” I say finally. “Then we hope Vosch hasn’t pulled the plug yet.”

I scoop up a handful of dirt and twigs and dead leaves and rub it over my face. Another
handful for my hair. He watches me without saying anything.

“This is the point where you bop me over the head,” I say. I smell like the earth,
and for some reason I think about my father
kneeling in the rose bed and the white sheet. “Or offer to go in my place. Or bop
me in the head and then go in my place.”

He jumps to his feet. For a second I’m afraid he is going to bop me over the head,
he’s that upset. Instead, he wraps his arms around himself like he’s cold—or he does
it to keep himself from bopping me over the head.

“It’s suicide,” he snaps. “We’re both thinking it. One of us might as well say it.
Suicide if I go, suicide if you go. Dead or alive, he’s lost.”

I pull the Luger from my waistband. Put it on the ground at his feet. Then the M16.

“Save these for me,” I tell him. “I’m going to need them when I get back. And by the
way, somebody should say this: You look ridiculous in those pants.” I scooch over
to the backpack without getting up. Pull out Bear. No need to dirty him up; he’s already
rough-looking.