“They know we’d look there,” he said impatiently. “Search her. Every inch, Sullivan. Sam, you come with me.”
“Why can’t I stay?” Sam whined. After all, he’d just reunited with a long-lost friend.
“You want to see a naked girl?” Ben made a face. “Gross.”
Ben pushed Sam out the door and backed out of the room. I dug my knuckles into my eyes. Damn it. Goddamn it. I pulled the covers to the foot of the bed, exposing her wasted body to the dying light of a midwinter’s evening. Covered in scabs and bruises and open sores and layers of dirt and grime, whittled down to her bones by the horrible cruelty of indifference and the brutal indifference of cruelty, she was one of us and she was all of us. She was the Others’ masterwork, their magnum opus, humanity’s past and its future, what they had done and what they promised to do, and I cried. I cried for Megan and I cried for me and I cried for my brother and I cried for all the ones too stupid or unlucky to be dead already.
Suck it up, Sullivan. We’re here, then we’re gone, and that was true before they came. That’s always been true. The Others didn’t invent death; they just perfected it. Gave death a face to put back in our face, because they knew that was the only way to crush us. It won’t end on any continent or ocean, no mountain or plain, jungle or desert. It will end where it began, where it had been from the beginning, on the battlefield of the last beating human heart.
I stripped her of the filthy, threadbare summer clothes. I spread her arms and legs like the Da Vinci drawing of the naked dude inside the box, contained within the circle. I forced myself to go slowly, methodically, starting with her head and moving down her body. I whispered to her, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” pressing, kneading, probing.
I wasn’t sad anymore. I thought of Vosch’s finger slamming down on the button that would fry my five-year-old brother’s brains, and I wanted to taste his blood so badly, my mouth began to water.
You say you know how we think? Then you know what I’m going to do. I’ll rip your face off with a pair of tweezers. I’ll tear your heart out with a sewing needle. I’ll bleed you out with seven billion tiny cuts, one for each one of us.
That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.
In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker.
37
I CALLED BEN into the room.
“Nothing,” I told him. “And I checked . . . everywhere.”
“What about her throat?” Ben said quietly. He could hear the residual rage in my voice. He got that he was talking to a crazy person and had to tread lightly. “Right before she fainted, she said her throat hurt.”
I nodded. “I looked. There’s no pellet in her, Ben.”
“Are you positive? ‘My throat hurts’ is a very weird thing for a freezing, malnourished kid to say the minute she shows up.”
He sidled over to the bed, I don’t know, maybe because he was concerned I might jump him in a moment of misplaced fury. Not that that’s ever happened. He gingerly pressed one hand to her forehead while prying her mouth open with the other. Stuck his eye close. “Hard to see anything,” he muttered.
“That’s why I used this,” I said, handing him Sam’s camp-issued penlight.
He shone the light down her throat. “It’s pretty red,” he observed.
“Right. Which is why she said it hurt.”
Ben scratched his stubble, worrying over the problem. “Not ‘help me’ or ‘I’m cold’ or even ‘resistance is futile.’ Just ‘my throat hurts.’”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “‘Resistance is futile’? Really?”
Sam was hovering in the doorway. Big brown saucer eyes. “Is she okay, Cassie?” he asked.
“She’s alive,” I said.
“She swallowed it!” Ben said. The Idea Man. “You didn’t find it because it’s in her stomach!”
“Those tracking devices are the size of a grain of rice,” I reminded him. “Why would swallowing one hurt her throat?”
“I’m not saying the device hurt her throat. Her throat has nothing to do with it.”
“Then why are you so worried about it being sore?”
“Here’s what I’m worried about, Sullivan.” He was trying very hard to stay calm, because clearly somebody had to be. “Her showing up out of the blue like this could mean a lot of things, but none of those things could be a good thing. In fact, it can only be a bad thing. A very bad thing made even badder by the fact that we don’t know the reason she was sent here.”
“Badder?”
“Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can’t talk the Queen’s English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.”
I sighed. The rage was leaching out of me, leaving me a hollow, bloodless, human-shaped lump.
Ben looked at Megan for a long moment. “We have to wake her up,” he decided.