The Last Star (21 page)

50

THERE ARE PREPARATIONS
to make. Details to work out.

First, I’ll need a uniform. Ben sits with the kids while Ringer and I dig up the bodies. There’s the smallest recruit, whose uniform seems like the right size, but there’s a bullet hole in the back of the jacket. Might be hard to explain. Ringer hauls out the next body, whose duds are dirty but unmarred by bullet holes and nearly blood-free. She explains that she crushed his skull with a twenty-inch steel rim. He didn’t feel it, she assures me. Didn’t see it coming. It’s okay. I feel my gorge rise.
It’s okay.
I change right there by the side of the road under the naked sky. Ha.
Naked sky.
And there is Cassiopeia above me, chained to her chair, watching her namesake bare herself and the dead boy, too. I catch Ringer looking at him, and her face is even paler than usual. I follow her gaze to the kid’s arm, where cruddy-looking scabs glisten in the starlight. What are those? Letters?

“What is that?” I ask while rolling up the pant legs; they’re a good four inches too long.

“It’s Latin,” she answers. “It means ‘he conquers who endures.’”

“Why is it cut into his arm like that?”

She shakes her head. Her hand wanders to her own shoulder. She thinks I don’t notice.

“You have one, too, don’t you?”

“No.” She kneels beside the boy, his combat knife in her hand. She slices along the tiny scar on the back of his neck and gingerly digs the tracking device from the cut.

“Here. Put this in your mouth.”

“Like fuck.”

She cups it in the palm of her hand and spits on it. Rolls the rice-sized pellet around in her spit to clean off the blood.

“Better?”

“In what way could that possibly be
better
?”

She grabs my hand and deposits the gooey pellet into my palm. “You clean it, then.”

I lace up the boots as she cuts into another kid’s neck, dips out the tracker with the tip of the knife, then slides the blade between her lips. There is something matter-of-factly savage about it, and her words echo in my head:
I am what he made me.

51

PREPARATIONS. DETAILS.

I’ll need gear, but only what I can fit into the pockets and pouches of the uniform. Extra magazines for the rifle and sidearm, a knife, a penlight, a couple of grenades, two bottles of water, and three power bars, at Ben’s insistence. Parish has this weird, superstitious faith in power bars, which is totally bogus, unlike my belief in the talismanic force of teddy bears.

“What if you’re wrong?” I ask Ringer. “What if nobody comes looking for the strike team?”

She shrugs. “Then we’re screwed.”

So bright and cheerful. Such a ray of sunshine. I wake Sam and Megan and make them eat while Ben and Ringer prep for the assault outside. Something’s up between those two. Something
they’re keeping from me. Kind of makes me wish I had Evan’s old mind-mining abilities. I’d plunge into Ben Parish’s head and hack my way to the truth. I thought I busted Ringer with that part of her Silencers-are-ordinary-people-like-us-only-more-so theory. How did Evan’s spirit enter and mix with mine if he’s human? Her answer required advanced degrees in robotics, bionics, and electromagnetic physics to understand. The CPU attached to his brain interpreting my physiological biofeedback, creating an informational loop in which my data commingled with his, blah, blah, blah. Really, science is wonderful, but why does it tend to suck all the joyous mystery from the world? Love may be nothing more than a complex interaction of hormones, conditioned behavior, and positive reinforcement, but try writing a poem or song about
that.

Preparations. Details.

I brief Sam and Megs on the plan. Sam’s all in. Although infiltrating the base would be his top choice, at least he’ll have some quality time with his beloved Zombie. Megan doesn’t say a word and I’m worried she might balk at the critical moment. Can’t blame her, though. The last time she trusted grown-ups, they stuffed a bomb down her throat.

I hand Bear to Sam for safekeeping, Sam’s as much as the bear’s. He hands it over to Megan. Oh Jesus. Too big for Bear now; they grow up so fast.

Blankets, I tell them. Everybody except Ringer gets a blanket.

Then there’s nothing left to do but climb the stairs one last time.

I take Sammy’s hand, Sammy takes Megan’s, Megan takes Bear’s, and together we rise toward the surface. The stairs jiggle and moan. They may collapse.

We won’t.

52

ZOMBIE

I WATCH AS
Ringer carries the last two bodies into the bay of the old garage, one under each arm. I understand how that’s possible; still, it’s a little freaky to watch. I wait by the empty grave for her to come out. It doesn’t happen.
Oh, boy. Now what?

Inside the garage the smell of gasoline and grease brings home the past. Before there was Zombie, there was this kid named Ben Parish who worked on cars with his old man on Saturday afternoons, the last being a cherry-red ’69 Corvette, his seventeenth birthday present from his dad, a guy who really couldn’t afford it and pretended it was for his only son, but they both knew the truth. Ben’s birthday was an excuse to buy the car, and the car was an excuse to spend time with his son as the clock wound down to graduation and then college and then grandkids and then the retirement home and then the grave. The grave leapt unexpectedly to the front of the line, not before the car, though; at least for a few Saturday afternoons, they had that car.

She’d laid her victims side by side in the center of the bay, crossing each one’s arms across their chest. Ringer herself is nowhere in sight. For a second, I panic. Every time I expect a zig, there’s a zag. I shift my weight to my good leg and drop the rifle from my shoulder into my hands.

From the deep shadows in the back, a low-pitched whine punctuated by a snuffling. I limp past rows of toolboxes and a cluster
of oil drums, behind which I find her, sitting against the cinder-block wall, hugging her knees to her chest.

I can’t stay upright; the pain’s too much. I sit beside her. She wipes her cheeks. It’s the first time I’ve seen Ringer cry. I’ve never seen her smile and probably never will, but now I’ve seen her cry. That’s messed up.

“You didn’t have a choice,” I tell her. Digging up those bodies must have gotten to her. “And, anyway, they don’t know the difference, right?”

She shakes her head. “Oh, Zombie.”

“It isn’t too late, Ringer. We can call it off. Sullivan can’t do this without you.”

“She’d have nothing to do if you hadn’t stepped in front of Walker like that.”

“Maybe I wouldn’t have if you’d trusted me with the truth.”

“The truth,” she echoes.

“The important word here is
trusted.
”

“I trust you, Zombie.”

“Funny way of showing it.”

She shakes her head.
That dumb Zombie, wrong again.
“I know you won’t tell.”

She stretches out her legs, and a plastic container flops from her chest onto her thighs. The bright green liquid inside it sloshes. It’s a jug of antifreeze.

“A capful should be enough,” she says, so softly I don’t think the words are directed at me. “The 12th System—it’ll protect me. Protect
me . . .
”

I grab the jug from her lap. “Goddamn it, Ringer, you didn’t already drink this, did you?”

“Give that back, Zombie.”

I let out my breath. I’ll take that as a no. “You told me what happened but you didn’t tell me how.”

“Well. You know.” She twirls a hand in the air. “The usual way.”

Okay. I deserved that.

“His name was Razor.” She frowns. “No. His name was Alex.”

“The recruit who shot Teacup.”

“For me. So I could escape.”

“The one who helped Vosch set you up.”

“Yes.”

“And then Vosch kind of set the two of you up.”

She gives me the patented impassive Ringer stare. “What does that mean?”

“Vosch left him with you that night. He must have known Razor had . . . that leaving the two of you alone might lead to . . .”

“That’s crazy, Zombie. If Vosch thought that for a second, he never would have left Alex to guard me.”

“How come?”

“Because love is the most dangerous weapon in the world. It’s more unstable than uranium.”

I swallow. My throat is dry. “Love.”

“Yes, love. Can I have that back now?”

“No.”

“I could take it from you.” She’s staring at me across a space no thicker than a fist with eyes only slightly lighter than the dark around them.

“I know you could.”

I tense. I have a feeling she could knock me out with a flick of her little finger.

“You want to know if I loved him. You want to ask me that,” she says.

“It’s none of my business.”

“I don’t love anyone, Zombie.”

“Well, that’s okay. You’re still young.”

“Stop that. Stop trying to make me smile. It’s cruel.”

There’s a knife twisting in my gut. The pain makes the bullet wound feel like a mosquito bite. For whatever reason, whenever I’m around this girl, pain follows, and not just the physical variety. Being intimately acquainted with both kinds, I’d rather be shot a dozen times than have my heart torn in half.

“You’re a prick,” she informs me. She pulls the jug from my hands. “I always thought so.” She unscrews the cap and fills it halfway to the lip. The liquid shimmers a neon green.
Their
color.

“This is what they’ve done, Zombie. This is the world they’ve made, where giving life is crueler than taking it. I am being kind. I am being wise.”

She raises the cup toward her lips. Her hand shakes; the bright green fluid sloshes over the edge and runs over her fingers. And in her eyes the same darkness that floods my core.

She doesn’t pull away when I wrap my fingers around her wrist. She doesn’t unleash her enhancement upon me and tear my head off my shoulders. She offers hardly any resistance when I force her hand down.

“I’m lost, Zombie.”

“I’ll find you.”

“I can’t move.”

“I’ll carry you.”

She topples sideways into me. I wrap my arms around her. I cup her face; I run my fingers through her hair.

The darkness slips; it cannot hold.