“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.
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.
