He said nothing.
“I felt it,” she said. “The first night, when I hauled you out of the wreckage. There’s a . . .” She searched for the right words. “A hidden room that wasn’t there before.”
His voice sounded hollow to him, empty as the wind. “Nothing is hidden.”
Grace laughed. “You should never have been integrated, Evan Walker. You feel far too much for them to be one of them.”
She picked him up as easily as a mother her newborn child. She lifted her face to the night sky and gasped. “I see her! Cassiopeia, the queen of the night.” She pressed her cheek against the top of his head. “Our hunt is over, Evan.”
18
GRACE’S STATION WAS an old, one-story wooden frame house on Highway 68, located at the exact center of her assigned six-square-mile patrol sector. Aside from boarding up the broken windows and repairing the exterior doors, she’d left the house as she found it. Family portraits on the walls, heirlooms and mementos too large to carry easily, smashed furniture and open drawers and the thousand pieces of the occupants’ lives deemed worthless by looters were scattered in every room. Grace did not bother to clean up the mess. When spring arrived and the 5th Wave rolled out, she would be gone.
She carried Evan to the second bedroom at the rear of the house, the kids’ room, with bright blue wallpaper and toys littering the floor and a mobile of the solar system hanging dejectedly from the ceiling. She laid him in one of the twin beds. A child had scratched his initials into the headboard: K.M. Kevin? Kyle? The tiny room smelled like the plague. There wasn’t much light—Grace had boarded the window in here, too—but his eyesight was much more acute than an ordinary human’s, and Evan could see the dark splotches of blood that had been flung on the blue walls during someone’s death throes.
She left the room, returning after a few minutes with more salve and a roll of bandages. She worked quickly wrapping the burns, as if she had pressing business elsewhere. Neither spoke until she had covered him again.
“What do you need?” Grace asked. “Something to eat? Bathroom?”
“Clothes.”
She shook her head. “Not a good idea. A week on the burns. Two, maybe three on the ankle.”
I don’t have three weeks. Three days is too long.
For the first time, he thought it might be necessary to neutralize Grace.
She touched his cheek. “Call if you need anything. Stay off that ankle. I have to get some supplies; I wasn’t expecting company.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“No more than a couple hours. Try to sleep.”
“I’ll need a weapon.”
“Evan, there isn’t anyone within a hundred miles.” She smiled. “Oh. You’re worried about the saboteur.”
He nodded. “I am.”
She pressed her pistol into his hand. “Don’t shoot me.”
He wrapped his fingers around the grip. “I won’t.”
“I’ll knock first.”
He nodded again. “That would be a good idea.”
She paused by the door. “We lost the drones when the base fell.”
“I know.”
“Which means we’re both off the grid. If something should happen to one of us—or any of us . . .”
“Does it matter now? It’s almost over.”
Grace nodded thoughtfully. “Do you think we’ll miss them?”
“The humans?” He wondered if she was making a joke. He’d never heard her try before; joking wasn’t in her character.
“Not the ones out there.” She gestured beyond the walls, at the wider world. “The ones in here.” Hand to her chest.
“You can’t miss what you don’t remember,” he said.
“Oh, I think I’ll keep her memories,” Grace said. “She was a happy little girl.”
“Then there’ll be nothing to miss, will there?”
She folded her arms over her chest. She was leaving and now she wasn’t. Why didn’t she leave?
“I won’t keep all of them,” she said, meaning the memories. “Only the good ones.”
“That’s been my worry from the beginning, Grace: The longer we play at being human, the more human we become.”
She looked at him quizzically and said nothing for a very long, very uncomfortable moment.
“Who’s playing at being human?” she asked.
19
HE WAITED UNTIL her footfalls faded. Wind whistled in the cracks between the plywood and the window frame; otherwise, he heard nothing. Like his eyesight, his hearing was exquisitely acute. If Grace was sitting on the porch combing her hair, he would hear it.