She stopped once to rest and drink and spread more salve over Evan’s burns.
“There’s something different about you,” she mused. “I can’t put my finger on it.” Putting her fingers all over him.
“I didn’t have an easy awakening,” he said. “You know that.”
She grunted softly. “You’re a brooder, Evan, and a very sore loser.” She wrapped him back up in the blanket. Ran her long fingers through his hair. Looked deeply into his eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
He said nothing.
“I felt it,” she said. “The first night, when I hauled you out of the wreckage. There’s a . . .” She searched for the right words. “A hidden room that wasn’t there before.”
His voice sounded hollow to him, empty as the wind. “Nothing is hidden.”
Grace laughed. “You should never have been integrated, Evan Walker. You feel far too much for them to be one of them.”
She picked him up as easily as a mother her newborn child. She lifted her face to the night sky and gasped. “I see her! Cassiopeia, the queen of the night.” She pressed her cheek against the top of his head. “Our hunt is over, Evan.”
GRACE’S STATION WAS an old, one-story wooden frame house on Highway 68, located at the exact center of her assigned six-square-mile patrol sector. Aside from boarding up the broken windows and repairing the exterior doors, she’d left the house as she found it. Family portraits on the walls, heirlooms and mementos too large to carry easily, smashed furniture and open drawers and the thousand pieces of the occupants’ lives deemed worthless by looters were scattered in every room. Grace did not bother to clean up the mess. When spring arrived and the 5th Wave rolled out, she would be gone.
She carried Evan to the second bedroom at the rear of the house, the kids’ room, with bright blue wallpaper and toys littering the floor and a mobile of the solar system hanging dejectedly from the ceiling. She laid him in one of the twin beds. A child had scratched his initials into the headboard: K.M. Kevin? Kyle? The tiny room smelled like the plague. There wasn’t much light—Grace had boarded the window in here, too—but his eyesight was much more acute than an ordinary human’s, and Evan could see the dark splotches of blood that had been flung on the blue walls during someone’s death throes.
She left the room, returning after a few minutes with more salve and a roll of bandages. She worked quickly wrapping the burns, as if she had pressing business elsewhere. Neither spoke until she had covered him again.
“What do you need?” Grace asked. “Something to eat? Bathroom?”
“Clothes.”
She shook her head. “Not a good idea. A week on the burns. Two, maybe three on the ankle.”
I don’t have three weeks. Three days is too long.
For the first time, he thought it might be necessary to neutralize Grace.
She touched his cheek. “Call if you need anything. Stay off that ankle. I have to get some supplies; I wasn’t expecting company.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“No more than a couple hours. Try to sleep.”
“I’ll need a weapon.”
“Evan, there isn’t anyone within a hundred miles.” She smiled. “Oh. You’re worried about the saboteur.”
He nodded. “I am.”
She pressed her pistol into his hand. “Don’t shoot me.”
He wrapped his fingers around the grip. “I won’t.”
“I’ll knock first.”
He nodded again. “That would be a good idea.”
She paused by the door. “We lost the drones when the base fell.”
“I know.”
“Which means we’re both off the grid. If something should happen to one of us—or any of us . . .”
“Does it matter now? It’s almost over.”
Grace nodded thoughtfully. “Do you think we’ll miss them?”
“The humans?” He wondered if she was making a joke. He’d never heard her try before; joking wasn’t in her character.
“Not the ones out there.” She gestured beyond the walls, at the wider world. “The ones in here.” Hand to her chest.
“You can’t miss what you don’t remember,” he said.
“Oh, I think I’ll keep her memories,” Grace said. “She was a happy little girl.”
“Then there’ll be nothing to miss, will there?”
She folded her arms over her chest. She was leaving and now she wasn’t. Why didn’t she leave?
“I won’t keep all of them,” she said, meaning the memories. “Only the good ones.”
“That’s been my worry from the beginning, Grace: The longer we play at being human, the more human we become.”
She looked at him quizzically and said nothing for a very long, very uncomfortable moment.
“Who’s playing at being human?” she asked.
HE WAITED UNTIL her footfalls faded. Wind whistled in the cracks between the plywood and the window frame; otherwise, he heard nothing. Like his eyesight, his hearing was exquisitely acute. If Grace was sitting on the porch combing her hair, he would hear it.
First the gun. He pulled the magazine from the frame. Just as he suspected: no bullets. He thought the gun had been too light. Evan allowed himself a quiet laugh. The irony was too much. Their primary mission had not been to kill, but to sow mistrust among the survivors and drive them like frightened sheep to slaughterhouses like Wright-Patterson. What happens when the sowers of mistrust become its reapers? Reapers. He fought back a hysterical giggle.
He took a deep breath. This was going to hurt. He sat up. The room spun. He closed his eyes. No. That made it worse. He opened his eyes and willed himself to remain upright. His body had been augmented in preparation for his awakening. That was the truth the dream of the owl disguised. The secret that the screen memory kept him from seeing and therefore from remembering: While he and Grace and tens of thousands of children like them had slept, gifts had been delivered in the night. Gifts they would need in the years to come. Gifts that would turn their bodies into finely tuned weapons, for the designers of the invasion had understood a simple, though counterintuitive, truth: Where the body went, the mind followed.
Give someone the power of the gods and he will become as indifferent as the gods.
The pain subsided. The dizziness eased. He slid his legs off the edge of the bed. He needed to test the ankle. The ankle was the key. The other injuries were serious but inconsequential; he could manage those. Gently, he applied pressure to the ball of his foot, and a lightning bolt of agony rocketed up his leg. He fell onto his back, gasping. Overhead, dusty planets were frozen in orbit around a dented sun.
He sat up and waited for his head to clear. He wasn’t going to find a way around the pain. He would have to find a way through it.
He eased himself onto the floor, using the side of the bed to support his weight. Then he forced himself to rest. No need to rush. If Grace returned, he could explain that he fell out of bed. Slowly, by inches, he scooted his butt along the carpet until he was flat on his back, seeing the solar system behind a shower of white-hot meteors that cascaded across his field of vision. The room was freezing, but he was sweating profusely. Out of breath. Heart racing. Skin on fire. He focused on the mobile, the faded blue of the Earth, the dusky red of Mars. The pain came in waves; he floated now in a different kind of sea.
The slats beneath the bed were nailed into place and weighed down by the heavy frame and mattress. No matter. He wiggled into the tight space beneath, the bodies of decayed insects crunching under his weight, and there was a toy car on its back and the twisted limbs of a plastic action figure from the time when heroes populated children’s daydreams. He broke the board free with three hard whacks of the heel of his hand, scooched back the way he came, and broke the other end free. Dust settled into his mouth. He coughed, sending another tsunami of pain across his chest, down his side, to curl anaconda-like around his stomach.