Jane gives me a look like she’s sighing, but then her face jumps with fear and her eyes go cold, and just as that’s happening I feel Stan start beside me.
“Shit,” he says. I turn from burning Iceling corpses, whose bodies smell more like burning leaves than meat, and I see the soldiers clearing a path, saying, “Come with us, we’ll get you home.”
Home? To our parents who lied to us? Who let this kind of slaughter happen? Home with the people who just killed—or tried to kill—the kids we spent our whole lives as brothers and sisters to?
“We’re not going, Stan,” I say.
“Not even a little bit,” says Emily.
And then my body jerks, wrestling between the idea of running and falling to my knees, because before me I see Callie, the one thing that could ever make me think I had any business being a survivor at the end of the world, felled and fallen on the ground. Oh God, please let her be breathing, oh God oh God oh God, and then Ted leaps over and crouches down in front of her. And then I wind up and start to run right over to her, but Stan holds me back and then Emily helps him, and I’m caught in a net of their arms as I watch Ted stand up and break into a full run at a soldier with his weapon ready. Bobby’s yelling at the solider, telling him not to shoot, and now Stan’s no longer holding me back, because Stan is the one who is running. I’m about to bolt from Emily’s grasp when a round goes off, and my heart flutters everywhere, and I cower and crouch down with Emily. I look up and see Stan and Ted, both of them on the ground. Stan is holding his head, covering it with his arms. Bobby’s yelling.
“WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU?” he shouts again and again while standing over a soldier he has just thrown to the ground. “DO I NEED TO SHOOT YOU TOO? YOU HAD ORDERS! You had orders. Observe and contain. Contain doesn’t mean shoot, it doesn’t mean burn, it doesn’t mean kill. It means restrain. You opened fire on American citizens, buddy.” He kicks him. “Do you understand how much shit you’re in? Surrender your weapon and get back to the jeep. Now, soldier.”
And he does.
And I’m walking toward Bobby with what feels like death in my eyes.
TWENTY-THREE
“THIS IS NOT how this was supposed to go down,” says Bobby.
We look out at the decimated field. Callie’s safe. The soldiers are backing away, escorting whoever’s willing to go back to the jeeps, all of them with that look on their faces like they know they’re about to be punished. It’s so obvious that they weren’t ready for this, for whatever they saw here, just like us. But not Bobby. Not Jane. They were ready.
I look up at the sky, and it’s gone. The hole where the sun was—closed up and gone.
The clouds are darker now. They’re shifting shape and moving around the sky quickly. They seem to move like the island moves, like when there’s trouble below there’s trouble above too.
Bobby’s trying to move us and our Icelings over to that shaded wooded valley where we were when we first saw Jane. Callie is still on the ground, but she is breathing, and I’m with her now, with her head in my lap and my hand stroking her hair. She was trying to save the pods, and seeing them all dead and burnt up like that just about killed her, I think. I’m staring daggers at Bobby. Tara won’t leave Callie’s side either, so Emily sits next to her right across from us. Stan and Ted are back on their feet, though Stan has to hold Ted back from jumping on Bobby and removing his head from his body. Greta’s here and holding her Other’s hand. The hand that is all that’s left of her Other.
“Nobody was supposed to get hurt,” Bobby says. “Nobody was supposed to blow anything up.”
“No? Were they also not supposed to shoot at our brothers and sisters?” spits out Stan. “At any living thing that might have been about to come out of those pods?”
“Look, you can give me shit,” Bobby says, his sternness from the battlefield coming back into his voice, “or you can listen while I try to help save you. Take your pick.”
“I think you’re a little late for that, buddy,” says Stan. “Coulda used your help a long time ago, like when we were still on our way up here? Coulda given us a heads-up.”