Текст книги "The 5th Wave"

Автор книги: Rick Yancey

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Текущая страница: 21 (всего у книги 27 страниц)

69

AT DAWN he’s still out cold, so I grab my rifle and hike out of the woods to assess his handiwork. Probably not the smartest thing to do. What if our midnight raiders called for backup? I’d be the prize in a turkey shoot. I’m not a bad shot, but I’m no Evan Walker.

Well, even Evan Walker is no Evan Walker.

I don’t know what he is. He says he’s human, and he looks like a human, talks like a human, bleeds like a human and, okay, kisses like a human. And a rose by any other name, blah, blah, blah. He says the right things, too, like the reason he was sniping people is the same reason I shot the Crucifix Soldier.

The problem is, I don’t buy it. And now I can’t decide which is better, a dead Evan or a live Evan. Dead Evan can’t help me keep my promise. Live Evan can.

Why did he shoot me, then save me? What did he mean when he said that I’d saved him?

It’s weird. When he held me in his arms, I felt safe. When he kissed me, I was lost in him. It’s like there are two Evans. There is the Evan I know and the Evan I don’t. Evan the farm boy with the soft hands who strokes me till I’m purring like a cat. Evan the pretender who is the cold-blooded killer who shot me.

I’m going to assume he’s human—at least biologically. Maybe he’s a clone grown on board the mothership from harvested DNA. Or maybe something less Star Warsy and more despicable: a traitor to his species. Maybe that’s what the Silencers are: human mercenaries.

The Others are giving him something to kill us. Or they threatened him—like kidnapping someone he loves (Lauren? I never actually saw her grave) and offering him a deal. Kill twenty humans and you get them back.

The last possibility? That he is what he says he is. Alone, scared, killing before someone can kill him, a firm adherent to the first rule, until he broke it by letting me go and then bringing me back.

It explains what happened as well as the first two possibilities. Everything fits. It could be the truth. Except for one niggling little problem.

The soldiers.

That’s why I don’t leave him in the woods. I want to see what he did for myself.

Since Camp Ashpit is now more featureless than a salt flat, I have no trouble finding Evan’s kills. One by the lip of the ravine. Two more side by side a few hundred yards away. All three head shots. In the dark. While they were shooting at him. The last one is lying near where the barracks used to be, maybe even the exact spot where Vosch murdered my father.

None of them are older than fourteen. All of them are wearing these weird silver eye patches. Some kind of night vision technology? If so, it makes Evan’s accomplishment all the more impressive, in a sickening sort of way.

Evan’s awake when I get back. Sitting up against the fallen tree. Pale, shivering, eyes sunk back in his head.

“They were kids,” I tell him. “They were just kids.”

I kick my way into the dead brush behind him and empty out my stomach.

Then I feel better.

I go back to him. I’ve decided not to kill him. Yet. He’s still worth more to me alive. If he is a Silencer, he may know what happened to my brother. So I grab the first aid kit and kneel between his spread legs.

“Okay, time to operate.”

I find a pack of sterile wipes in the kit. Silently, he watches me clean his victim’s blood off the knife.

I swallow hard, tasting the fresh vomit. “I’ve never done this before,” I say. Kind of obvious thing to say, but it feels like I’m talking to a stranger.

He nods, rolls onto his stomach. I pull the shirt away, exposing his bottom half.

I’ve never seen a naked guy before. Now here I am kneeling between his legs, though I can’t see his total nakedness. Just the back half. Strange, I never thought my first time with a naked guy would be like this. Well, I guess that isn’t so strange.

“You want another pain pill?” I ask. “It’s cold and my hands are shaking…”

“No pill,” he grunts, face tucked into the crook of his arm.

I work slowly at first, gingerly poking into the wounds with the tip of the knife, but I quickly learn that isn’t the best way to dig metal out of human—or maybe nonhuman—flesh: You just prolong the agony.

His butt takes the longest. Not because I’m lingering. There’s just so much shrapnel. He doesn’t squirm. He barely flinches. Sometimes he goes, “Oooh!” Sometimes he sighs.

I lift the jacket off his back. Not too many wounds here, and mostly concentrated along the lower part. Stiff fingers, sore wrists, I force myself to be quick—quick but careful.

“Hang in there,” I murmur. “Almost done.”

“Me too.”

“We don’t have enough bandages.”

“Just get the worst.”

“Infection…?”

“There’s some penicillin tablets in the kit.”

He rolls back over as I dig out the pills. He takes two with a sip of water. I sit back, sweating, though it isn’t much above freezing.

“Why kids?” I ask.

“I didn’t know they were kids.”

“Maybe not, but they were heavily armed and knew what they were doing. Their problem was, so did you. You must have forgotten to mention your commando training.”

“Cassie, if we can’t trust each other—”

“Evan, we can’t trust each other.” I want to crack him in the head and burst into tears at the same time. I’ve reached the point of being tired of being tired. “That’s the whole problem.”

Overhead, the sun has broken free from the clouds, exposing us to a bright blue sky.

“Alien clone children?” I guess. “America scraping the bottom of the conscription barrel? Seriously, why are kids running around with automatic weapons and grenades?”

He shakes his head. Sips some water. Winces. “Maybe I will take another one of those pain pills.”

“Vosch said just the kids. They’re snatching children to turn them into an army?”

“Maybe Vosch isn’t one of them. Maybe the army took the kids.”

“Then why did he kill everybody else? Why did he put a bullet in my dad’s head? And if he isn’t one of them, where’d he get the Eye? Something’s wrong here, Evan. And you know what’s going on. We both know you do. Why can’t you just tell me? You’ll trust me with a gun and to pull shrapnel out of your ass, but you won’t trust me with the truth?”

He stares at me for a long moment. Then he says, “I wish you hadn’t cut your hair.”

I would have lost it, but I’m too cold, too nauseated, and too strung out. “I swear to God, Evan Walker,” I say in a dead voice, “if I didn’t need you, I would kill you right now.”

“I’m glad you need me, then.”

“And if I find out you’re lying to me about the most important part, I will kill you.”

“What’s the most important part?”

“About being human.”

“I’m as human as you are, Cassie.”

He pulls my hand into his. Both our hands are stained with blood. Mine with his. His with that of a boy not much older than my brother. How many people has this hand killed?

“Is that what we are?” I ask. I’m about to lose it big-time. I can’t trust him. I have to trust him. I can’t believe. I have to believe. Is this the Others’ ultimate goal, the wave to end all waves, stripping our humanity down to its bare, animalistic bones, until we’re nothing but soulless predators doing their dirty work for them, as solitary as sharks and with as much compassion?

He notices the cornered-animal look in my eyes. “What is it?”

“I don’t want to be a shark,” I whisper.

He looks at me for a long, uncomfortable moment. He could have said, Shark? Who? What? Huh? Who said you were a shark? Instead, he begins to nod, like he totally gets it. “You aren’t.”

You, not we. I give his long look back to him. “If the Earth was dying and we had to leave,” I say slowly, “and we found a planet but someone was there before us, someone who for some reason we weren’t compatible with…”

“You’d do whatever was necessary.”

“Like sharks.”

“Like sharks.”

I guess he was trying to be gentle about it. It mattered to him, I guess, that my landing wouldn’t be too hard, that the shock wouldn’t be too great. He wanted, I think, for me to get it without his having to say it.

I fling his hand away. I’m furious that I ever let him touch me. Furious at myself for staying with him when I knew there were things he wasn’t telling me. Furious at my father for letting Sammy get on that bus. Furious at Vosch. Furious at the green eye hovering on the horizon. Furious at myself for breaking the first rule for the first cute guy that came along, and for what? For what? Because his hands were large but gentle and his breath smelled like chocolate?

I pound his chest over and over until I forget why I’m hitting him, until I’m emptied of fury and all that’s left inside is the black hole where Cassie used to be.

He grabs at my flailing fists. “Cassie, stop it! Settle down! I’m not your enemy.”

“Then whose enemy are you, huh? Because you’re somebody’s. You weren’t out hunting every night—not animals, anyway. And you didn’t learn killer ninja moves working on your daddy’s farm. You keep saying what you’re not, and all I want to know is what you are. What are you, Evan Walker?”

He lets go of my wrists and surprises me by pressing his hand against my face, running his smooth thumb over my cheek, across the bridge of my nose. As if he’s touching me for the last time.

“I am a shark, Cassie,” he says slowly, drawing the words out, as if he might be speaking to me for the last time. Looking into my eyes with tears in his, as if he’s seeing me for the last time. “A shark who dreamed he was a man.”

I’m falling faster than the speed of light into the black hole that opened with the Arrival and then devoured everything in its path. The hole my father stared into when my mother died, the one I thought was out there, separate from me, but really never was. It was inside me, and it had been inside me since the beginning, growing, eating up every ounce of hope and trust and love I had, chewing its way through the galaxy of my soul while I clung to a choice—a choice who is looking at me now as if for the last time.

So I do the thing most reasonable people would in my situation.

I run.

Crashing through the woods in the bitter winter air, bare branch, blue sky, withered leaf, then bursting from the tree line into an open field, the frozen ground crunchy beneath my boots, under the dome of the indifferent sky, the brilliant blue curtain drawn over a billion stars that are still there, still looking down at her, the running girl with her short hair bouncing and tears streaming down her cheeks, not running from anything, not running to anything, just running, running like hell, because that’s the most logical thing to do when you realize the one person on Earth you’ve decided to trust isn’t from the Earth. Never mind that he saved your ass more times than you can remember, or that he could have killed you a hundred times over, or that there’s something about him, something tormented and sad and terribly, terribly lonely, like he was the last person on Earth, not the girl shivering in a sleeping bag, hugging a teddy bear in a world gone quiet.

Shut up, shut up, just shut up.

70

HE’S GONE when I come back. And, yes, I came back. Where was I supposed to go, without my gun and especially without that damned bear, my reason for living? I wasn’t scared to go back—he’d had ten billion opportunities to kill me; what did one more matter?

There’s his rifle. His backpack. The first aid kit. And there’s his shredded jeans by Howard the log. Since he didn’t pack another pair of pants, my guess is that he’s cavorting about the freezing woods in just his hiking boots, like a calendar pinup. No, wait. His shirt and jacket are missing.

“Come on, Bear,” I growl, snatching up my backpack. “It’s time to get you back to your owner.”

I grab my rifle, check the magazine, ditto for the Luger, pull on a pair of black knit gloves because my fingers have gone numb, steal the map and flashlight from his backpack, and head for the ravine. I’ll risk the daylight to put distance between me and Sharkman. I don’t know where he went, maybe to call in the drone strikes now that his cover’s blown, but it doesn’t matter. That’s what I decided on the way back, after running until I couldn’t run anymore: It really doesn’t matter who or what Evan Walker is. He kept me from dying. Fed me, bathed me, protected me. He helped me to get strong. He even taught me how to kill. With an enemy like that, who needs friends?

Into the ravine. Ten degrees colder in the shadows. Up and over onto the blasted landscape of Camp Ashpit, running on ground as hard as asphalt, and there’s the first body, and I think, If Evan is one of them, whose team do you play for? Would Evan kill one of his own kind to keep up the facade with me—or was he forced to kill them because they thought he was human? Thinking that makes me sick with despair: There’s no bottom to this crap. The more you dig, the further down it goes.

I pass another body with barely a glance, and then that bare glance registers and I turn back. The kid soldier has no pants on.

It doesn’t matter. I keep moving. On the dirt road now, heading north. Still trotting. Move, Cassie, move, move. Forgot the food. Forgot the water. Doesn’t matter. Doesn’t matter. The sky is cloudless, huge, a gigantic blue eye staring down. I run along the edge of the road near the woods abutting the west side. If I see a drone, I’ll dive for cover. If I see Evan, I’ll shoot first and ask questions later. Well, not just Evan. Anyone.

Nothing matters but the first rule. Nothing matters except getting Sammy. I forgot that for a while.

Silencers: human, semihuman, clone human, or alien-projecting-human holograph? Doesn’t matter. The ultimate goal of the Others: eradication, internment, or enslavement? Doesn’t matter. My chances of success: one, point one, or point zero zero zero one percent? Doesn’t matter.

Follow the road, follow the road, follow the dusty dirt road…

After a couple miles it veers to the west, connecting with Highway 35. Another few miles on Highway 35 to the junction of 675. I can take cover at the overpass there and wait for the buses. If the buses still run on Highway 35. If they’re still running at all.

At the end of the dirt road, I pause long enough to scan the terrain behind me. Nothing. He’s not coming. He’s letting me go.

I head a few feet into the trees to catch my breath. The minute I sink to the ground, everything I’ve been running from catches up to me long before my breath.

I am a shark who dreamed he was a man…

Someone is screaming—I can hear her screams echoing through the trees. The sound goes on and on. Let it bring a horde of Silencers down upon me, I don’t care. I press my hands against my head and rock back and forth, and I have this weird sensation of floating above my body, and then I’m rocketing into the sky at a thousand miles an hour and watching myself dwindle into a tiny spot before the immensity of the Earth swallows me. It’s as if I’ve been loosed from the Earth. As if there were nothing to hold me down anymore and I’m being sucked into the void. As if I were bound by a silver cord and now that cord has snapped.

I thought I knew what loneliness was before he found me, but I had no clue. You don’t know what real loneliness is until you’ve known the opposite.

“Cassie.”

Two seconds: on my feet. Another two and a half: swinging the M16 toward the voice. A shadow darts between the trees on my left and I open up, spraying bullets willy-nilly at tree trunks and branches and empty air.

“Cassie.”

In front of me, about two o’clock. I empty the clip. I know I didn’t hit him. Know I don’t have a prayer of hitting him. He’s a Silencer. But if I keep shooting, maybe he’ll back off.

“Cassie.”

Directly behind me. I take a deep breath, reload, and then deliberately turn and pump some more lead into the innocent trees.

Don’t you get it, dummy? He’s getting you to use up your ammo.

So I wait, feet wide, shoulders square, gun up, scanning right and left, and I can hear his voice in my head, giving instruction back at the farm: You have to feel the target. Like it’s connected to you. Like you’re connected to it…

It happens in the space of time between one second and the next. His arm drops around my chest, he rips the rifle from my hands, then relieves me of the Luger. After another half second, he’s locked me in a bear hug, crushing me into his chest and lifting my feet a couple inches off the ground as I kick furiously with my heels, twisting my head back and forth, snapping at his forearm with my teeth.

And the whole time his lips tickling the delicate skin of my ear. “Cassie. Don’t. Cassie…”

“Let…me…go.”

“That’s been the whole problem. I can’t.”

71

EVAN LETS ME KICK and squirm until I’m exhausted, then he plops me down against a tree and steps back.

“You know what happens if you run,” he warns me. His face is flushed. He’s having a hard time catching his breath. When he turns to retrieve my weapons, his movements are stiff, deliberate. Catching me—after taking the grenade for me—has cost him. His jacket hangs open, exposing his denim shirt, and the pants he took from the dead kid are two sizes too small, tight in all the wrong places. It looks like he’s wearing a pair of capris.

“You’ll shoot me in the back of the head,” I say.

He tucks my Luger into his belt and swings the M16 over one shoulder.

“I could have done that a long time ago.”

I guess he’s talking about the first time we met. “You’re a Silencer,” I say. It takes everything in me not to jump up and tear off through the trees again. Of course, running from him is pointless. Fighting him is pointless. So I have to outsmart him. It’s like I’m back under that car on the day we first met. No hiding from it. No running from it.

He sits down a few feet away, resting his rifle across his thighs. He’s shivering.

“If your job is to kill us, why didn’t you kill me?” I ask.

He answers without hesitating, as if he’s decided long before I asked the question what his answer would be.

“Because I’m in love with you.”

My head falls back against the rough bark of the tree. The bare branches overhead are hard-edged against the bright blue sky. “Well, this is a tragic love story, isn’t it? Alien invader falls for human girl. The hunter for his prey.”

“I am human.”

“‘I am human…but.’ Finish it, Evan.” Because I’m finished now, Evan. You were the last one, my only friend in the world, and now you’re gone. I mean, you’re here, whatever you are, but Evan, my Evan, he’s gone.

“Not but, Cassie. And. I am human and I’m not. I’m neither and I’m both. I am Other and I am you.”

I look into his eyes, deep-set and very dark in the shadowy air, and say, “You make me want to puke.”

“How could I tell you the truth when the truth meant you would leave me and leaving me meant you would die?”

“Don’t preach to me about dying, Evan.” Wagging my finger at his face. “I watched my mother die. I watched one of you kill my father. I’ve seen more death in six months than anyone else in human history.”

He pushes my hand down and says through gritted teeth, “And if there had been something you could have done to protect your father, to save your mother, wouldn’t you have done it? If you knew a lie would save Sammy, wouldn’t you lie?”

You bet I would. I would even pretend to trust the enemy to save Sammy. I’m still trying to wrap my mind around Because I’m in love with you. Trying to come up with some other reason he betrayed his species.

Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter. Only one thing matters. A door slammed closed behind Sammy the day he got on that bus, a door with a thousand locks, and I realize sitting in front of me is the guy with the keys.

“You know what’s at Wright-Patterson, don’t you?” I say. “You know exactly what happened to Sam.”

He doesn’t answer. Doesn’t nod yes. Doesn’t shake his head no. What’s he thinking? That it’s one thing to spare a single measly random human but something seriously different to give away the master plan? Is this Evan Walker’s under-the-Buick moment, when you can’t run, can’t hide, and your only option is to turn and face?

“Is he alive?” I ask. I lean forward; the rough tree bark is cutting into my spine.

He hesitates for a half breath, then: “He probably is.”

“Why did they…why did you bring him there?”

“To prepare him.”

“To prepare him for what?”

Waits a full breath this time. Then: “The 5th Wave.”

I close my eyes. For the first time, looking at that beautiful face is too much to endure. God, I’m tired. So frigging tired, I could sleep for a thousand years. If I slept for a thousand years, maybe I’d wake up and the Others would be gone and there’d be happy children frolicking in these woods. I am Other and I am you. What the hell does that mean? I’m too tired to chase the thought.

I open my eyes and force myself to look at him. “You can get us in.”

He’s shaking his head.

“Why not?” I ask. “You’re one of them. You can say you captured me.”

“Wright-Patterson isn’t a prison camp, Cassie.”

“Then what is it?”

“For you?” Leaning toward me; his breath warms my face. “A death trap. You won’t last five seconds. Why do you think I’ve been trying everything I can think of to keep you from going there?”

“Everything? Really? How about telling me the truth? How about something like, ‘Hey, Cass, about this rescue thingy of yours. I’m an alien like the guys who took Sam, so I know what you’re doing is absolutely hopeless’?”

“Would it have made a difference if I had?”

“That isn’t the point.”

“No, the point is your brother is being held at the most important base we—I mean, the Others—have established since the purge began—”

“Since the what? What did you call it? The purge?”

“Or the cleansing.” He can’t meet my eyes. “Sometimes it’s called that.”

“Oh, that’s what you’re doing? Cleaning up the human mess?”

“That’s not my word for it, and purging or cleansing or whatever you want to call it wasn’t my decision,” he protests. “If it makes you feel any better, I never thought we should—”

“I don’t want to feel better! The hatred I’m feeling at this moment is all I need, Evan. All I need.” Okay, that was honest, but don’t go too far. He’s the guy with the keys. Keep him talking. “Never thought you should do what?”

He takes a long drink from the water flask, offers it to me. I shake my head. “Wright-Patterson isn’t just any base—it’s the base,” he says, weighing each word carefully. “And Vosch isn’t just any commander—he’s the commander, the leader of all field operations and the architect of the cleans—the one who designed the attacks.”

“Vosch murdered seven billion people.” The number sounds weirdly hollow in my ears. After the Arrival, one of Dad’s favorite themes was how advanced the Others must be, how high they must have climbed on the evolutionary ladder to reach the stage of intergalactic travel. And this is their solution to the human “problem”?

“There were some of us who didn’t think annihilation was the answer,” Evan says. “I was one of them, Cassie. My side lost the argument.”

“No, Evan, that would be my side that lost.”

It’s more than I can take. I stand up, expecting him to stand, too, but he stays where he is, looking up at me.

“He doesn’t see you as some of us do…as I do,” he says. “To him, you’re a disease that will kill its host unless it’s wiped out.”

“I’m a disease. That’s what I am to you.”

I can’t look at him anymore. If I look at Evan Walker for one more second, I’m going to be sick.

Behind me, his voice is soft, level, almost sad. “Cassie, you’re up against something that is way beyond your capacity to fight. Wright-Patterson isn’t just another cleansing camp. The complex underneath it is the central coordinating hub for every drone in this hemisphere. It’s Vosch’s eyes, Cassie; it’s how he sees you. Breaking in to rescue Sammy isn’t just risky—it’s suicidal. For both of us.”

“Both of us?” I glance at him out of the corner of my eye. He hasn’t moved.

“I can’t pretend to take you prisoner. My assignment isn’t to capture people—it’s to kill them. If I try to walk in with you as my prisoner, they’ll kill you. And then they’ll kill me for not killing you. And I can’t sneak you in. The base is patrolled by drones, protected by a twenty-foot-high electric fence, watchtowers, infrared cameras, motion detectors…and a hundred people just like me, and you know what I can do.”

“Then I sneak in without you.”

He nods. “It’s the only possible way—but just because something is possible doesn’t mean it isn’t suicidal. Everyone they bring in—I mean the people they don’t kill right away—is put through a screening program that maps their entire psyche, including their memories. They’ll know who you are and why you’re there…and then they’ll kill you.”

“There’s got to be a scenario that doesn’t end with them killing me,” I insist.

“There is,” he says. “The scenario where we find a safe spot to hide and wait for Sammy to come to us.”

My mouth drops open, and I think, Huh? Then I say it: “Huh?”

“It might take a couple of years. How old is he, five? The youngest allowed is seven.”

“The youngest allowed to do what?”

He looks away. “You saw.”

The little kid whose throat he cut at Camp Ashpit, wearing fatigues, toting a rifle almost as big as he was. Now I do want a drink. I walk over to him, and he gets very still while I bend over and pick up the flask. After four big swallows, my mouth is still dry.

“Sam is the 5th Wave,” I say. The words taste bad. I take another long drink.

Evan nods. “If he passed his screening, he’s alive and being…” He searches for the word. “Processed.”

“Brainwashed, you mean.”

“More like indoctrinated. In the idea that the aliens have been using human bodies, and we—I mean humans—have figured out a way to detect them. And if you can detect them, you can—”

“That isn’t fiction,” I interrupt. “You are using human bodies.”

He shakes his head. “Not the way Sammy thinks we are.”

“What does that mean? Either you are or you aren’t.”

“Sammy thinks we look like some kind of infestation attached to human brains, but—”

“Funny, that’s exactly the way I picture you, Evan. An infestation.” I can’t help myself.

His hand comes up. When I don’t slap it away or take off running into the woods, he slowly wraps his fingers around my wrist and gently pulls me to the ground beside him. I’m sweating slightly, though it’s bitingly cold. What now?

“There was a boy, a real human boy, named Evan Walker,” he says, looking deeply into my eyes. “Just like any kid, with a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters, completely human. Before he was born, I was inserted into him while his mother slept. While we both slept. For thirteen years I slept inside Evan Walker, while he learned to sit up, to eat solid food, to walk and talk and run and ride a bike, I was there, waiting to wake up. Like thousands of Others in thousands of other Evan Walkers around the world. Some of us were already awake, setting up our lives to be where we needed to be when the time came.”

I’m nodding, but why am I nodding? He came to a human body? What the hell does that mean?

“The 4th Wave,” he says, trying to be helpful. “Silencers. It’s a good name for us. We were silent, hiding inside human bodies, hiding inside human lives. We didn’t have to pretend to be you. We were you. Human and Other. Evan didn’t die when I awakened. He was…absorbed.”

Ever the noticer, Evan notices I’m totally creeped out by this. He reaches out to touch me and flinches when I pull away.

“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.