IN THE AUTUMN WOODS there was a tent, and in that tent there was a girl who slept with a rifle in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. And while she slept, a hunter kept vigil over her, an unseen companion who retreated when she woke. He had come to end her life; she was there to save his.
And the endless arguments with himself, the vanity of his own reason posing the unanswerable question, Why must one live while the world itself perished? The more he reached for that answer, the farther the answer retreated from his grasp.
He was a finisher who could not finish. His was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.
In her journal she had written I am humanity, and something in those three words splintered him in two.
She was the mayfly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.
Erase the human.
In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded, and the world went black.
Evan Walker had been undone.
70
CASSIE
NOT TEN MINUTES into it and I’m starting to think this whole mission-impossible, killing-Vosch-and-rescuing-Evan thingy was a very bad idea.
Bob the one-eyed pilot shouts, “Ten seconds!” Ringer closes her eyes, and in an awful, sickening instant, I’m convinced we’ve been set up. This has been her plan all along. Leave Ben and the kids defenseless, then get the two of us killed kamikaze style at five thousand feet, because who gives a shit? There’s a copy of her that lives in Wonderland. She’ll just be downloaded into a new body once we’re all dead.
Now’s your chance, Cass. Take out your knife and cut out her treacherous heart . . . if you can find it. If she has one.
“They’re breaking formation!” Bob announces.
Ringer’s eyes snap open. My chance slips away. “Hold our course, Bob,” she says evenly.
The choppers bear down on us, spreading out so everybody gets a fair shot, so no one feels left out or cheated of the chance to blow us into a gazillion pieces.
Bob holds our course but hedges our bets, locking a missile on the lead copter. His thumb hovers over the button. The thing that blows my mind about Bob is how quickly he switched sides. When he opened his eyes this morning, both of them, he was pretty certain which team he was batting for. Then, in the batting of an eye (ha! sorry, Bob), he’s locked and loaded, ready to annihilate his fellow brothers and sisters-in-arms.
So there you go. You can love the good in us and hate the bad, but the bad is in us, too. Without it, we wouldn’t be us.
All I want to do in this moment is give Bob a big hug.
“They’re going to ram us!” Bob screams. “We gotta dive, we gotta dive!”
“No,” Ringer says. “Trust me, Bob.”
Bob laughs hysterically. We barrel toward the lead chopper as it barrels toward us, both at full throttle. “Oh, sure! Why wouldn’t I trust you?” White-knuckled on the stick, thumb caressing the button, in a few seconds it won’t matter what Ringer tells him, he’s going to fire. Ultimately, Bob is on nobody’s side but Bob’s.
“Break,” Ringer whispers at the big black fist rocketing toward our face. “Break now.”
Too late. Bob jams the button, the Black Hawk shudders like some gigantic foot kicked it, and a Hellfire missile explodes from its mount. The cockpit lights up like the noonday sun. Somebody screams (I think it might be me). A maelstrom of fire engulfs us for half a second—debris popping and smacking against our hull—and then we burst through the fireball to the other side.
“Hoooooooolyyyyy Mother of God!” Bob yells.
Ringer doesn’t say anything at first. She’s looking at his scope and the five remaining white dots. Four break off, two right and two left, and the third continues on, edging toward the bottom of the screen. Oh no. Where is he going?
“Hail them,” Ringer tells Bob. “Tell them we’re surrendering.”
“We are?” Bob and I say at the same time.
“Then hold course. They’re not going to force us down or fire on us.”
“How do you know?” Bob asks.
“Because if they were, they would have done it by now.”
“What about the other one?” I demand. “It’s gone. It’s not following us.”
Ringer gives me a look. “Where do you think it’s going?” Then she turns away. “It’ll be all right, Sullivan. Zombie will know what to do.”
Like I said, a very bad idea.
71
I SINK BACK into my seat and fight to get air into my lungs. I think I forgot to breathe back there. My mouth is bone-dry. I sip some water, but just enough to wet my mouth, because I’m a little concerned about having to pee during the operation. Ringer’s described the base to me in some detail, including the location of the Wonderland room, but I never asked where the bathrooms were.