But no finish came. No silencing bullet, connecting Grace to him as if by a silver cord. He knew she was there. Knew she could see him standing crookedly in front of the car. And he realized there was no escaping the past, no dodging inevitable consequences: Cassie’s terror, her uncertainty and pain, they belonged to him now.
Overhead, the stars. Straight ahead, the road that shone in the stars’ light. The tight grip of the freezing air and the medicinal smell of the ointment Grace had spread over his burns. Your heart is beating very fast.
She’s not going to kill you, he told himself. Not the goal. If killing you was the goal, she wouldn’t have missed that shot.
There could be only one answer: Grace intended to follow him. He was a riddle to her and following him was the way to solve the riddle. He had escaped the trap only to sink deeper into the pit. Keeping his promise now was not being faithful; it was an act of betrayal.
He couldn’t outrun her, not with the bad ankle. He couldn’t reason with her—he could barely articulate his own reasons anymore. He could wait her out. Stay here, do nothing . . . and risk Cassie being discovered by soldiers of the 5th Wave or abandoning the hotel before his stalemate with Grace ended. He could force a confrontation, but he’d failed once and the odds were he would again. He was too weak, too hurt. He needed time to heal and there was no time.
He leaned against the hood of the car and looked up at the star-encrusted sky, undimmed by human lights, scrubbed clean of contaminants, and these the same stars that shone on the world before humankind walked upon it. For billions of years, these same stars, and what was time to them?
“Mayfly,” Evan whispered. “Mayfly.”
He shouldered the rifle and wormed his way through the pileup back to the backpack of supplies, which he threw over the other shoulder. Tucked the makeshift crutch beneath his arm. The going would be slow, painfully slow, but he would force Grace to choose between letting him go and following him, deserting her assigned territory at the moment when desertion could mean a serious setback in the carefully constructed timetable. He would swing north of the hotel—north toward the nearest base. North where the enemy had fled and retrenched and waited for spring to launch the final, finishing assault.
That’s where hope lay—where all hope had been from the beginning—on the shoulders of the brainwashed child-soldiers of the 5th Wave.
25
LATER THAT EVENING on the day they met, Evan and Grace walked along the midway beneath the lights that beat back the dark, weaving their way through the crowd, past the ring toss and balloon dart game and basketball free throw. Music blared from speakers mounted on the light poles, and bubbling beneath the music was the sound of a thousand conversations, like an undercurrent, and the flow of the crowd was like a river, too, eddying and swirling, swift here, languid there. Tall and lissome and striking in their good looks, Evan and Grace drew attention from the passersby, which made him uncomfortable. He never liked crowds, preferring the solitude of the woods and the fields of the family farm, an inclination that would serve him well when the time of cleansing arrived.
Time. Above them, the stars turned like the points of light on the Ferris wheel that loomed above the fairgrounds, though too slowly for the human eye to register, the hands of the universal clock that was winding down, that had been winding down from the beginning, and the faces that passed marking the time, like the stars themselves, prisoners to it. Evan and Grace were not. They had conquered the unconquerable, denied the undeniable. The last star would die, the universe itself would pass away, but they would go on and on.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
“‘My spirit will not contend with humans forever, for they are mortal.’”
“What?” She was smiling.
“It’s from the Bible.”
She shifted the stuffed tiger to her other hand so she could take his. “Don’t be morbid. It’s a beautiful night and we won’t see each other again until it’s over. Your problem is you don’t know how to live in the moment.”
She tugged him from the main concourse into the shadows between two tents, where she kissed him, pressing her body tightly against his, and something opened inside him. She entered into him and the terrible loneliness he’d felt since his awakening eased.
Grace pulled away. Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes burning with a pale fire. “I think about it sometimes. The first kill. What it will be like.”
He nodded. “I think about it, too. Mostly, though, I think about the last one.”