I know the water is cold, but like I told Zombie, I’m protected by Vosch’s gift. I feel nothing but wetness. The water bears away the blood and dirt.
I run my hands over my stomach. He sacrificed his life for me. The boy in the doorway lit up by a funeral pyre, carving letters into his arm.
I touch my shoulder. The skin is smooth and soft. The 12th System repaired the damage minutes after I inflicted it. I am like the water that runs over me, immune to permanence, recycling endlessly. I am water; I am life. The form may change, but the substance stays the same. Strike me down and I will rise again. Vincit qui patitur.
I close my eyes and see his. Sharp, glittering, brilliant blue, eyes that knife deeper than your bones. You created me, and now your creation is coming back for you. Like rain to parched earth, I come back.
And water bears away the blood and dirt.
59
CASSIE
HERE’S SOMETHING to chew on. Here’s the charming truth about the world the Others are creating:
My little brother has forgotten the alphabet, but he knows how to make bombs.
A year ago it was crayons and coloring books, construction paper and Elmer’s glue. Now it’s fuses and blasting caps, wires and black powder.
Who wants to read a book when you can blow something up?
Beside me, Megan watches him the way she watches everything else: silently. She clutches Bear to her chest, another silent witness to the evolution of Samuel J. Sullivan.
He’s working with Ringer, the two of them kneeling next to each other, a two-person assembly line. I guess they took the same IED class at camp. Ringer’s damp hair shines like a blacksnake’s skin in the lamplight. Her ivory skin gleams. A couple of hours ago, I smashed my forehead into her nose and broke it, but there’s no swelling, no sign I inflicted any damage at all. Unlike my nose, which will be crooked till the day I die. Life is not fair.
“How’d you get on that chopper?” I ask her. It’s been bugging me.
“Same way you did,” she answers. “I jumped.”
“The plan was for me to jump.”
“Which you did. You were hanging on by a fingernail,” she said. “I didn’t think I had a choice at that point.”
In other words, I saved your worthless, freckly, crooked-nosed ass. What are you bitching about?
Not that my nose has an ass. I really should stop putting thoughts into other people’s heads.
She tucks a strand of her silky locks behind her ear. There’s something so effortlessly and inexplicably graceful about the gesture that it borders on creepy. What the hell happened to you, Ringer?
Of course, I know what happened to her. The gift, Evan called it. All human potential times a hundred. I have the heart to do what I have to do, Evan told me once. He neglected to say at the time he meant that both literally and figuratively. He neglected to say a lot of things, the bastard who doesn’t even deserve rescuing.
What the hell am I thinking? Looking at Ringer’s delicate fingers dance in the complicated ballet of constructing a bomb, I realize the scariest thing about her isn’t what Vosch has done to her body; it’s what that amped-up body has done to her mind. When you tear down our physical limitations, what happens to our moral ones? I’m pretty certain the pre-enhanced Ringer couldn’t have single-handedly massacred five heavily armed, well-trained recruits. I also suspect pre-enhanced Ringer couldn’t have shoved her thumb into another human being’s eyeball. That required a leap in evolution of an entirely different kind.
Speaking of Bob.
“You people are wacked,” he goes. He’s been watching, too, with his good eye.
“No, Bob,” Ringer says without looking up from her task. “The world is wacked. We just happen to be occupying it.”
“Not for long! You won’t get within a hundred miles of the base.” His panicky voice fills the little chamber, which smells of chemicals and old blood. “They know where you are—there’s a fucking GPS on that chopper—and they’re coming after you with everything they’ve got.”
Ringer looks up at him. A flip of the bangs. A flash of the dark eyes. “That’s what I’m counting on.”
“How much longer?” I ask her. Everything depends on our reaching the base before sunrise.
“A couple more and we’ll be ready.”
“Yeah!” Bob shouts. “Get ready! Say your prayers, because it’s goin’ down, Dorothy!”
“She’s not a Dorothy!” Sam shouts at him. “You’re a Dorothy!”
“You shut the fuck up!” Bob yells back.
“Hey, Bob,” I call over to him. “Leave my brother alone.”
Bob’s all balled up in the corner, quivering, sweating, the buttload of morphine apparently not enough. He couldn’t be older than twenty-five. Young by pre-Arrival standards. Middle-aged by the new ones.
“What’s gonna stop me from crashing us into a fucking cornfield, huh?” he demands. “Whatcha gonna do—punch out my other eye?” Then he laughs.
Ringer ignores him, which throws gas on Bob’s fire.
“Not that it matters. Not that you have a chance in hell. They’ll cut you down the minute we land. They’ll carve you up like fucking Halloween pumpkins. So make your little bombs and hatch your little plots; you’re all dead meat.”
“You’re right, Bob,” I tell him. “That pretty much sums it up.”
I’m not being snarky (for once). I mean every word. Assuming he doesn’t crash us into a cornfield, assuming we aren’t shot down by the armada that’s surely on its way, assuming we aren’t captured or killed inside the camp by the thousands of soldiers who will be expecting us, assuming by some miracle Evan is still alive and by some bigger miracle I find him, and assuming Ringer kills Vosch, the closest thing our species has to the indestructible cockroach, we still have no exit strategy. We’re buying a one-way ticket to oblivion.