She kicks against my legs, reaching with her free hand toward the teddy bear that spins lazily away from us. Oh Christ. That damned bear.
I look over my shoulder. Nugget, where are you? Then I see him at the shoreline, half in, half out, back arching as he coughs up a gallon of river water. The kid is truly indestructible.
“Okay, Megan. Climb aboard; I’ll get him.”
She hitches herself onto my back, wrapping her thin arms around my neck and her stick legs around my torso. I kick over to the bear. Gotcha. Then the long swim to shore, which isn’t that far, but the water’s freezing and Megan on my back bears me down. Bears me down. That’s a good one.
We collapse on the shore beside Nugget. Nobody speaks for a few minutes. Then Nugget goes, “Zombie?”
“Somebody hit the kill switch. Only thing that makes sense, Private.”
“Corporal,” he corrects me. Then he says, “Ringer?”
I nod. “Ringer.”
He processes for a second. Then, his voice shaking because he’s afraid to ask: “Cassie?”
CASSIE
THE HAND OF GOD slams down as the pod explodes up the launch shaft, a massive fist flattens my body into the chair, and then the fist closes around me, squeezing. Some wiseass has dropped a two-ton rock on my chest and I’m finding it very difficult to breathe. Also, somebody with no regard whatsoever for my comfort and safety has turned off all the lights—I can’t even see the eerie green glow that seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere. Either that or my eyes have been shoved to the back of my skull.
ZOMBIE
NO, NUGGET. She probably didn’t make it. Before I can say the words, Megan slaps my chest and points toward the base. A shining ball of green light shoots over the treetops into the rose-colored sky. The afterimage lingers in our eyes long after it’s lost in the atmosphere.
“It’s a shooting star!” she says.
I shake my head. “Wrong direction.”
I guess, in the end, I was wrong.
CASSIE
THE FEELING OF being slowly crushed to death in total darkness lasts for several minutes. In other words, forever. Okay, forever is one word.
A word we throw around like we can even grasp it, like forever is something the human mind can comprehend.
The straps across my chest loosen. The two-ton boulder dissolves. I take a huge, shuddering breath and open my eyes. The pod is dark—gone is the green light and good riddance; I always hated Other-green, not my shade at all. I look out the window and gasp.
Hello, Earth.
So this is how God sees you, sparkling blue against the dullest black. No wonder he made you. No wonder he made the sun and the stars so he could see you.
Beautiful is another word we tossed around too casually, slopping it over everything from cars to nail polish until the word collapsed under the weight of all the banality. But the world is beautiful. I hope they never forget that. The world is beautiful.
A water droplet bobs before my eyes. Floating free, the oddest tear I’ve ever brushed away.
Never forget, Sams. Love is forever. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be love. The world is beautiful. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be the world.
The wildest thing about holding my brother’s memories inside me? Seeing myself through his eyes, hearing myself with his ears, sailing the Cassiopeian sea in three dimensions, the way we experience practically everything except the one thing we’re supposed to understand the best: ourselves. To Sam, there is the bundle of colors and smells and sensations that make up Cassie, and that Cassie is not Ben’s Cassie or Marika’s Cassie or Evan’s Cassie or even Cassie’s Cassie; she belongs to Sam and to Sam alone.
The pod rolls, the shining blue gem slips from sight, and for the last time in my life I am afraid, as if I’ve fallen off the edge of the world—which I guess in a sense I have. Instinctively, I reach for the vanished Earth; my fingertips bump against the window.
Good-bye.
Oh, I am too far away. And too close. There I am, hearing a tiny voice scratching in the wilderness, Alone, alone, alone, Cassie, you’re alone. And there I am looking through Evan’s eyes at the girl with the indispensable teddy bear and the useless M16, huddled in her sleeping bag deep in the woods, thinking she’s the last person on Earth. I watch her night after night and go through her things while she’s away foraging. What a bastard I am, touching her stuff and reading her journals, why can’t I just kill her already?
That’s my name. Cassie for Cassiopeia. Alone as the stars and lonely as the stars.
Now I discover myself in him and I am not the person I expected to find. His Cassie sears the darkness with the brightness of a billion suns. He’s as baffled by this as I am, as humanity is, as the Others are. He can’t say why. There’s no reason, no neat explanation. It’s impossible to understand and impossibly irrelevant, like asking why anything exists in the first place.