“Marika’s going back to the place where that picture was taken,” I tell her, turning off the smile. Nugget’s eyes grow wide: Zombie! No! “Once she gets there, she’s going to find the asshole who fucked us over—her, you, me, and everybody else in this hemisphere—and when she finds him, she will kill him. Then she’s probably going to kill every brainwashed recruit on that base. And when you go back—if you make it back before that big green motherfucker up there starts shitting green bricks of death—she’ll kill you, too.”
I switch the smile back on. Dazzling. Brilliant. Irresistible. Well, at least that’s what people told me back in the day. “Now put down that gun, Sergeant Sprinter, and let’s get the fuck out of here.”
86
I’M YANKED to my feet and shoved into the house with Nugget, Megan, and two offensive-lineman-sized guys who’ve removed their jackets just to show how tough they are. They have identical tattoos on their ripped biceps: VQP. We hang in the front parlor, Megan on the sofa holding the teddy bear, Nugget glued to my side, though he isn’t happy with me right now.
“You told,” he accuses me.
I shrug. “Bullet’s left the chamber, Nugget. Not much they can do about it now.”
He shakes his head. The metaphor’s lost on him. I lean over and whisper in his ear: “At least I didn’t tell them about Cassie, right?”
The mention of his sister’s name nearly sends him over the edge. His bottom lip juts out; his eyes fill up.
“Hey, okay now, what’s this? Huh? Private, your actions tonight have shown extraordinary courage above and beyond the call of duty. You know what a field promotion is?”
Nugget shakes his head solemnly. “No.”
“Well, you just got one, Corporal Nugget.”
I place the edge of my hand to my forehead. His chest pops out, his chin comes up, his eyes burn with the ol’ Sullivan fire. He returns the salute smartly.
On the porch, the sarge is having a heated debate with her second-in-command. The topic’s no mystery; you can hear them clearly through the open door. They’ve completed the mission, the 2IC argues, time to off these bastards and return to base. Capture and contain, the sarge shoots back. My orders don’t say nothing about offing anybody. She’s wavering, though; you can hear it in her voice. Her 2IC comes back with my point about the bomb-shitting beast in high orbit: Whatever she decides about the Dorothys, they have to return to base before dawn or enjoy a front-row seat to Armageddon.
The screen door bangs open and she charges right up to my face, close enough for me to catch a whiff of perfume. It’s been so long since I smelled any that my headache disappears in a single, wondrous instant.
“How’s she gonna do all this?” she shouts. “How can one person . . . ?”
“It only takes one.” My quiet answer in counterpoint to her loud question. “Just one, and the world changes. It’s not unheard-of, Sergeant.”
She stares at me with those dark, flinty eyes filled with a hundred daggers of light. “Corporal,” she snaps to her 2IC without looking away from my face, “we’re bugging out. Escort the prisoners to the chopper. They’re gonna take a little trip down the rabbit hole.” Then to me: “You remember Wonderland.”
I nod. “I sure do.”
87
BLACK BIRD RISING, the Earth falling away—from the air, the caverns are invisible. The farmhouse and the fields shine silver, and the blast of cold wind is like the voice of the world screaming. The last time I rode in a chopper, I was heading back to a different camp, on a mission to save the kid who sits beside me now, whose once-round face is now lean and stern and full of grim purpose. One day he’ll ask his grandkids, Ever tell you about the time I was promoted to corporal at the age of six?
His grandkids. According to Ringer, they’ll be fighting the same war he is. So will their grandkids and their grandkids’ grandkids. The war that can’t end while the enemy’s ship sails serenely over our heads. How could it end when all our descendants have to do is look up?
Like Sergeant Sprinter watching me from across the narrow aisle of the hold. The perfectly scary and scarily perfect thing about their plan is it doesn’t matter that she knows I’m Ted-free. Whoever’s not with us is against us. That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This time it has.
I look away from her face to the screaming world outside the chopper. I can’t see the ground. Just the thin black line of the horizon, the congregation of a million stars, and the green eye-shaped orb that hangs just above the line separating heaven from Earth.