“Evan’s gone,” she says in a dead voice.
“I know,” I tell her. “He’s the one who did this to me.”
Her eyes slide from Vosch to me. “Did what?”
“Broke my back. I can’t move my legs, Cassie.”
She shakes her head. Evan. Vosch. Me. Too much to process.
“What happened?” I ask.
She glances down the hallway. “The electrical room. I knew exactly where it was. And the code to the door, I knew that, too.” She turns back to me. “I know practically everything about this base.”
Her eyes are dry but she’s about to break; I can hear it in her voice, filled with sick wonder. “I killed him, Ringer. I killed Evan Walker.”
“No, Cassie. Whatever attacked me wasn’t human. I think Vosch erased his memory—his human memory and—”
“I know that,” she snaps. “It’s the last thing he heard before they took it from him: ‘Erase the human.’” She catches her breath. His experiences are hers now. She shares the horror of that moment, the last moment of Evan Walker’s life.
“And you’re sure he’s dead?” I ask.
She waves her hand helplessly in the air. “Pretty damn sure.” She frowns. “You left me tied to that fucking chair.”
“I thought I had time . . .”
“Well, you didn’t.”
The overhead speakers pop. “GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW RESCINDED. ALL ACTIVE-DUTY PERSONNEL TO REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO BATTLE STATIONS . . .”
I can hear the squads exiting their bunkers around the base. Any moment the thunder of boots and the glint of steel and the rain of bullets. Cassie cocks her head as if she, too, can hear them with her unenhanced ears. But she has been enhanced in another, more profound way, a way I can only pretend to understand.
“I have to go,” she says. She isn’t looking at me. It’s like she isn’t even speaking to me. I can only watch as she yanks the knife from the sheath strapped to my thigh, steps over to Vosch, flattens his hand against the floor, and, with two hard whacks, chops off his right thumb.
She drops the bloody digit into the pocket of her fatigues. “It wouldn’t be right to leave you here, Marika.”
She slides her hands beneath my shoulders and drags me to the nearest door.
“No, forget about me, Cassie. I’m done.”
“Oh, be quiet,” she mutters. She punches the code into the keypad and pulls me into the room. “Am I hurting you?”
“No. Nothing hurts.”
She props me up against the far wall facing the door and presses the gun into my hand. I shake my head. Hiding in this room, having the gun, it only delays the inevitable.
There is another way, though: I carry it in my breast pocket.
When the time comes—and the time will come—you’ll wish that you had it.
“Get out of here,” I tell her. My time has come, but not hers. “If you can make it out of the building, you might be able to reach the perimeter . . .”
She shakes her head impatiently. “That’s not the way, Marika.” Her eyes lose focus again. “It isn’t far. Five minutes from here?” She nods as if someone has answered her question. “Yeah. At the end of the hall. About five minutes.”
“The end of the hall?”
“Area 51.”
She stands up. Steady on her feet now and her mouth firmly set.
“He’s not going to understand. He’s going to be pissed as hell, and you’re going to explain it to him. You’re going to tell him what happened and why, and you’re going to take care of him, understand? You’re going to keep him safe and make sure he bathes and brushes his teeth and trims his nails and wears clean underwear and learns to read. Teach him to be patient and to be kind and to trust everyone. Even strangers. Especially strangers.”
She pauses. “There was something else. Oh yeah. Make him understand it isn’t random. That there’s no way seven billion billion atoms could accidentally coalesce into a person called Samuel Jackson Sullivan. What else? Oh! Nobody is allowed to call him Nugget ever again for the rest of his life. I mean, really. So stupid.
“Promise me, Marika. Promise me.”
98
THE SEVEN BILLION BILLION
WE ARE HUMANITY.
We are one.
We are the girl with the broken back sprawled in an empty room, waiting for the end to come.
We are the man who’s fallen a half mile away, and the only thing still living in us is not alive, but an alien device that directs every resource at its disposal to saving our body lying on the cold stone, to shock our heart back to life. There is no difference between us and the system. The 12th System is us and we are the 12th System. If one should fail, the other will die.
We are the prisoners aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that circles the base while its fuel runs low, swinging over a broad river, its waters black and swift, and our voices are quelled by the wind that roars through the open hold, and our hands are clasped; we are bound to one another in an unbroken chain.
We are the recruits hustling to our battle stations, the rescued ones, the winnowed ones, the harvest gathered into buses and separated into groups in which our bodies were hardened and our souls emptied only to be filled with hate and hope, and we know as we break from our bunkers that dawn approaches and with it the war, and this is what we’ve longed for and dreaded, the end of winter, the end of us. We remember Razor and the price he paid; we carved the initials VQP into our bodies in his honor. We remember the dead but we can’t remember our own names.