The Last Star (5 page)

9

HE TRAILS AFTER
me into the family room.

“Ben, you haven’t thought this through,” Walker says. He’s where I left him, standing by the front door.

I ignore him. “They’re either at the caverns or they’re not,” I tell Sullivan, who’s hugging herself beside the fireplace. “If they are, we’ll bring them back. If they aren’t, we won’t.”

“We’ve been holed up here for six weeks,” Walker points out. “Under any other circumstance, we’d be dead. The only reason we aren’t dead is because we neutralized the agent who patrolled this sector.”

“Grace,” Cassie translates for me. “To get to the caverns, you’ll have to cross through three—”

“Two,” Walker corrects her.

She rolls her eyes. What
ever.
“Two territories patrolled by
Silencers just like him.” She glances at Walker. “Or not
just
like him. Not
good
Silencers. Really bad Silencers who are really good at silencing.”

“You might get lucky and slip past one,” Walker says. “Not two.”

“But if you wait, there won’t be any Silencers to slip past.” Cassie is beside me now, touching my arm, pleading. “All of them will be back on the mothership. Then Evan does his thing and then you can . . .” Her voice trails off. She’s run out of the breath necessary to blow smoke up my ass.

I’m not looking at her. I’m looking at Walker. I know what he’s going to say next. I know because I’d say the same thing: If there’s no way Dumbo and I can make it to the caverns, there’s no way Ringer and Teacup could, either. “You don’t know Ringer,” I tell him. “If anybody could have made it, she could.”

Walker nods. But he’s agreeing with the first statement, not the second. “After our awakening, we were enhanced with a technology that makes us nearly indestructible. We turned ourselves into killing machines, Ben.” And then he takes a deep breath and finally spits it out, the obtuse bastard. “There’s no way they could have survived this long, not against us. Your friends are dead.”

I left anyway. Fuck it. Fuck him. Fuck everything. I’ve sat around long enough waiting for the world to end.

Ringer hasn’t kept her promise, so I’m keeping it for her.

10

RINGER

SENTRIES ARE WAITING
for me at the gates. I’m escorted immediately to the watchtower overlooking the landing field, another circle completed, where Vosch waits for me—as if he hasn’t moved from the spot in the last forty days.

“Zombie is alive,” I said. I looked down and saw I was standing on the bloodstain that marked where Razor fell. A few feet away, beside the console, that’s where Razor’s bullet cut Teacup down.
Teacup.

Vosch shrugged. “Unknown.”

“Okay, maybe not Zombie, but someone who knows me is still alive.” He didn’t answer.
It’s probably Sullivan,
I thought.
That would be just my luck.
“You know I can’t get close to Walker without someone he trusts to vouch for me.”

He folded his long, powerful arms across his chest and peered down his nose at me, bright birdlike eyes glittering. “You never answered my question,” he said. “Am I human?”

I didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”

He smiled. “And do you still believe that means there is no hope?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I am the hope of the world. The fate of humankind rests upon me.”

“What a terrible burden that must be,” I said.

“You are being facetious.”

“They needed people like you. Organizers and managers who knew why they came and what they wanted.”

He was nodding. His face glowed. He was pleased with me—and pleased with himself for choosing me. “They had no choice, Marika. Which means, of course, that
we
had no choice. Under every likely scenario, we were doomed to destroy ourselves and our home. The only solution was radical intervention. Destroy the human village in order to save it.”

“And it wasn’t enough to kill seven billion of us,” I said.

“Of course not. Otherwise, they would have thrown the big rock. No, the best solution is the child in the wheat.”

My stomach rolled at the memory. The toddler bursting through the dead grain. The little band of survivors taking him in. The last remnant of trust blown apart in a flash of hellish green light.

On the day I met him, I got the speech. Every recruit did.
The last battle of Earth will not happen on any plain or desert or mountaintop . . .
I touched my chest. “This is the battlefield.”

“Yes. Otherwise the cycle would merely repeat itself.”

“And that’s why Walker’s important.”

“The program embedded in him has fundamentally failed. We must understand why, for reasons that should be obvious to you. And there is only one way to accomplish that.”

He pressed a button on the console next to him. Behind me, a door opened and a middle-aged woman wearing lieutenant’s bars on her collar stepped into the room. She was smiling. Her teeth were perfectly even and very large. Her eyes were gray. Her hair was sandy blond and pulled back into a tight bun. I immediately disliked her. It was a visceral response.

“Lieutenant, escort Private Ringer to the infirmary for her predeployment checkup. I will see you in Briefing Room Bravo at oh four hundred.”

He turned away. He was done with me—for now.

In the elevator, the sandy-haired woman asked, “How are you feeling?”

“Fuck off.”

Her smile persisted as if I’d answered,
Fine, and you?
“My name’s Lieutenant Pierce. But call me Constance.”

The bell dinged. The doors slid open. She slammed her fist into my neck. My vision went black; my knees buckled.

“That’s for Claire,” she said. “You remember her.”

I came up, driving the heel of my hand into her chin. The back of her head hit the wall with a satisfying
crack.
Then I punched her in the gut with all the force my enhanced muscles could muster. She collapsed at my feet.

“That’s for the seven billion. You remember them.”

11

IN THE INFIRMARY
I was given a thorough physical. Diagnostics were run on the 12th System to ensure it was fully operational. Then an orderly brought in a tray groaning with food. I tore into it. I hadn’t had a decent meal in over a month. When the plate was empty, the orderly came back carrying another. I knocked that off, too.

They brought my old uniform. I stripped. I washed up the best I could in the sink. I could smell the stench of forty unwashed days hovering around me, and for some reason I felt embarrassed. There was no toothbrush, so I rubbed my finger over my teeth.
I wondered if the 12th System protected my enamel. I pulled on the clothes, laced the boots tight. I felt better. More like the old Ringer, the blissfully ignorant, naïve, unenhanced Ringer who left Zombie that night with the unspoken promise:
I will come back. If I can, I will.

The door swung open. Constance. She’d changed out of her lieutenant’s uniform and into a pair of mom jeans and a tattered hoodie.

“I feel like we started off on the wrong foot,” she said.

“Fuck off.”

“We’re partners now,” she said sweetly. “Buddies. We should get along.”

I followed her down three flights of stairs into the underground bunker, a snarl of gray-walled passageways pocked with unmarked doors, under fluorescent lights that bled a constant, sterile glow, reminding me of the hours with Razor while my body fought its losing battle against the 12th System. Playing chaseball and creating secret codes and plotting the phony escape that would lead me back beneath this ghastly light, another circle bound by uncertainty and fear.

Constance was a half step in front of me. Our footfalls echoed in the empty space. I could hear her breathe.
It would be so easy to kill you right now,
I thought idly, then pushed the thought away. That time would come, I hoped, but it wasn’t now.

She pushed open a door identical to the fifty or so other unmarked doors we’d passed, and I followed her into the conference room. A projection screen against one wall. A long table in front of the screen. A small metal box on the center of the table.

Vosch was sitting behind the table. He stood up as we came in. The lights dimmed and the screen lit up with an aerial shot
looking straight down at a two-lane road that cut through empty, rolling fields. In the center of the frame, the rectangular rooftop of a house. A solitary, shimmering dot on the left edge of the rectangle—the heat signature of someone on the watch. A cluster of glowing smudges inside the house. I counted them first, then gave them names: Dumbo, Poundcake, Sullivan, Nugget, Walker, and one more makes Zombie.

Hello, Zombie.

“From a reconnaissance flight six weeks ago,” Vosch said. “Approximately fifteen miles southeast of Urbana.” The video feed went black for an instant, then popped back on: same thin black ribbon of the road, same dark rectangle of the house, but fewer glowing smudges inside it. Two were missing.

“This is from last night.”

The camera zoomed out. Woods, fields, more clusters of black rectangles, dark blotches against gray landscape, the world emptied, abandoned, lifeless. The thin black ribbon of road slid out of the shot. Then I saw them: two glowing dots far to the northwest. Someone was on the move.

“Where are they going?” I asked, but I was pretty sure I knew the answer already.

Vosch shrugged. “Impossible to know for certain, but the most likely destination is here.” The image froze. He pointed to a spot at the top of the screen and gave me a knowing look.

I closed my eyes. I saw Zombie wearing that ugly yellow hoodie, leaning against the counter in the lobby of the old hotel, that stupid brochure clutched in his hands, and me saying,
I’ll scope it out and be back in a couple of days.

“They’re going to the caverns,” I said. “To look for me.”

“Yes, I think so,” Vosch agreed. “And that’s exactly who they’ll
find.” The lights came up. “You’ll be dropped in tonight, well ahead of their arrival. Lieutenant Pierce is tasked with target acquisition. Your only responsibility is getting her within striking distance. At the completion of the mission, Lieutenant Pierce and Walker will be extracted and returned to base.”

“Then what?” I asked.

He blinked slowly. He expected me to know. “And then you and your companions are free to go.”

“Go where?”

A small smile. “Wherever the wind might take you. But I suggest you keep to open country. Urban areas won’t be safe.”

He nodded to Constance, who brushed past me on her way to the door. “Take it, cupcake. You’ll want it.”

I watched her leave.
Take it? Take what?

“Marika.” Vosch crooked his finger at me.
Come here.

I didn’t move. “Why are you sending her with me?” Then I answered my own question: “You’re not letting us go. Once you have Walker, you’re going to kill us.”

His eyebrow rose toward his crew cut. “Why would I kill you? The world would be a much less interesting place without you in it.” He looked away quickly, biting his lower lip, as if he’d said too much.

He gestured toward the box sitting on the table. “We will not see each other again,” he said gruffly. “I thought this was appropriate.”

“What?”

“A parting gift.”

“I don’t want anything from you.” Not my first thought. My first thought was
Stick it up your ass.

He slid the box toward me. He was smiling.

I lifted the lid. I wasn’t sure what to expect. Maybe a travel-sized chess set—a reminder of all the good times we had together. Inside the box, nestled in a foam cushion, was a green capsule encased in clear plastic.

“The world is a clock,” he said softly. “And the time is coming when the choice between life and death will not be a difficult one, Marika.”

“What is it?”

“The child in the wheat carried a modified version of this inside his throat, except this model is six times as powerful—everything within a five-mile radius is instantaneously vaporized. Place the capsule in your mouth, bite down to break the seal, and all you have to do is breathe.”

I shook my head. “I don’t want it.”

He nodded. His eyes sparkled. He’d expected me to refuse. “In four days, our benefactors will release bombs from the mothership that will destroy every remaining city on Earth. Do you understand, Marika? The human footprint is about to be wiped clean. What we built over ten millennia will be gone in a day. Then the soldiers of the 5th Wave will be unleashed upon the survivors, and the war will begin. The last war, Marika. The endless war. The war that will go on and on until the final bullet is spent, and then it will be fought with sticks and rocks.”

My puzzled expression must have tried his patience; his voice went hard. “What is the lesson of the child in the wheat?”

“No outsider can be trusted,” I answered, staring at the green capsule in its bed of foam. “Not even a child.”

“And what happens when no one can be trusted? What becomes of us when every stranger could be an ‘other’?”

“Without trust there’s no cooperation. And without cooperation there’s no progress. History stops.”

“Yes!” He beamed with pride. “I knew you would understand. The answer to the human problem is the death of what makes us human.”

His arm came up, his hand toward me, as if he was going to touch me, and then he stopped himself. For the first time since I met him, he seemed troubled by something. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have guessed he was afraid.

But that would be ridiculous.

He dropped his hand to his side and turned away.