Suck it up, Sullivan. We’re here, then we’re gone, and that was true before they came. That’s always been true. The Others didn’t invent death; they just perfected it. Gave death a face to put back in our face, because they knew that was the only way to crush us. It won’t end on any continent or ocean, no mountain or plain, jungle or desert. It will end where it began, where it had been from the beginning, on the battlefield of the last beating human heart.
I stripped her of the filthy, threadbare summer clothes. I spread her arms and legs like the Da Vinci drawing of the naked dude inside the box, contained within the circle. I forced myself to go slowly, methodically, starting with her head and moving down her body. I whispered to her, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” pressing, kneading, probing.
I wasn’t sad anymore. I thought of Vosch’s finger slamming down on the button that would fry my five-year-old brother’s brains, and I wanted to taste his blood so badly, my mouth began to water.
You say you know how we think? Then you know what I’m going to do. I’ll rip your face off with a pair of tweezers. I’ll tear your heart out with a sewing needle. I’ll bleed you out with seven billion tiny cuts, one for each one of us.
That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.
In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker.
I CALLED BEN into the room.
“Nothing,” I told him. “And I checked . . . everywhere.”
“What about her throat?” Ben said quietly. He could hear the residual rage in my voice. He got that he was talking to a crazy person and had to tread lightly. “Right before she fainted, she said her throat hurt.”
I nodded. “I looked. There’s no pellet in her, Ben.”
“Are you positive? ‘My throat hurts’ is a very weird thing for a freezing, malnourished kid to say the minute she shows up.”
He sidled over to the bed, I don’t know, maybe because he was concerned I might jump him in a moment of misplaced fury. Not that that’s ever happened. He gingerly pressed one hand to her forehead while prying her mouth open with the other. Stuck his eye close. “Hard to see anything,” he muttered.
“That’s why I used this,” I said, handing him Sam’s camp-issued penlight.
He shone the light down her throat. “It’s pretty red,” he observed.
“Right. Which is why she said it hurt.”
Ben scratched his stubble, worrying over the problem. “Not ‘help me’ or ‘I’m cold’ or even ‘resistance is futile.’ Just ‘my throat hurts.’”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “‘Resistance is futile’? Really?”
Sam was hovering in the doorway. Big brown saucer eyes. “Is she okay, Cassie?” he asked.
“She’s alive,” I said.
“She swallowed it!” Ben said. The Idea Man. “You didn’t find it because it’s in her stomach!”
“Those tracking devices are the size of a grain of rice,” I reminded him. “Why would swallowing one hurt her throat?”
“I’m not saying the device hurt her throat. Her throat has nothing to do with it.”
“Then why are you so worried about it being sore?”
“Here’s what I’m worried about, Sullivan.” He was trying very hard to stay calm, because clearly somebody had to be. “Her showing up out of the blue like this could mean a lot of things, but none of those things could be a good thing. In fact, it can only be a bad thing. A very bad thing made even badder by the fact that we don’t know the reason she was sent here.”
“Badder?”
“Ha-ha. The dumb jock who can’t talk the Queen’s English. I swear to God, the next person who corrects my grammar gets punched in the face.”
I sighed. The rage was leaching out of me, leaving me a hollow, bloodless, human-shaped lump.
Ben looked at Megan for a long moment. “We have to wake her up,” he decided.
Then Dumbo and Poundcake crowded into the room. “Don’t tell me,” Ben said to Poundcake, who of course wouldn’t. “You didn’t find nothing.”
“Anything,” Dumbo corrected him.
Ben didn’t punch him in the face. But he did hold out his hand. “Give me your canteen.” He unscrewed the cap and held the container over Megan’s forehead. A drop of water hung quivering on the lip for an eternity.
Before eternity ended, a croaky voice spoke up behind us. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
Evan Walker was awake.
EVERYBODY FROZE. Even the drop of water, swelling at the edge of the canteen’s mouth, held still. From his bed, Evan watched us with red, fever-bright eyes, waiting for someone to ask the obvious question, which Ben finally did: “Why?”
“Waking her like that could make her take a very deep breath, and that would be bad.”
Ben turned to face him. The water dribbled onto the carpet. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Evan swallowed, grimacing from the effort. His face was as white as the pillowcase beneath it. “She is implanted—but not with a tracking device.”
Ben’s lips tightened into a hard, white line. He got it before the rest of us. He whipped on Dumbo and Poundcake. “Out. Sullivan, you and Sam, too.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I told him.
“You should,” Evan said. “I don’t know how finely it’s been calibrated.”
“How finely what’s been calibrated to what?” I demanded.
“The incendiary device to CO2.” His eyes cut away. The next words were hard for him. “Our breath, Cassie.”
Everybody understood by that point. But there’s a difference between understanding and accepting. The idea was unacceptable. After all we had experienced, there were still places our minds simply refused to go.
“Get downstairs now, all of you,” Ben snarled.
Evan shook his head. “Not far enough. You should leave the building.”
Ben grabbed Dumbo’s arm with one hand and Poundcake’s with the other and slung them toward the door. Sam had backed into the bathroom entrance, tiny fist pressed against his mouth.
“Also, somebody should open that window,” Evan gasped.
I pushed Sam into the hall, trotted over to the window, and pushed hard against the frame, but it wouldn’t budge, probably frozen shut. Ben pushed me out of the way and smashed out the glass with the butt of his rifle. Freezing air rushed into the room. Ben strode back to Evan’s bed and considered him for a second before grabbing a handful of his hair and yanking him forward.
“You son of a bitch . . .”
“Ben!” I put my hand on his arm. “Let him go. He didn’t—”
“Oh, right. I forgot. He’s a good evil alien.” He let go. Evan fell back; he didn’t have the strength to stay up. Then Ben suggested he do something to himself that was anatomically impossible.
Evan’s eyes cut over to me. “In her throat. Suspended directly above the epiglottis.”
“She’s a bomb,” Ben said, his voice quavering with rage and disbelief. “They took a child and turned her into an IED.”
“Can we remove it?” I asked.
Evan shook his head. “How?”
“That’s what she’s asking you, dipshit,” Ben barked.
“The explosive is connected to a CO2 detector imbedded in her throat. If the connection’s lost, it detonates.”