We are the lost ones, the solitary ones, the ones who did not board those buses chugging down the highways, the empty city streets, the lonely country roads. We dug in for the winter and watched the skies and trusted no stranger. Those of us who did not die from starvation or the bitter cold or simple infections that antibiotics we did not have could have relieved, we endured. We bent, but we did not break.
We are the lonely hunters designed by our makers to drive survivors onto the buses that scavenge the countryside and to kill those who refuse. We are special, we are apart, we are Other. We have been awakened into a lie so compelling that to not believe it would be madness. Now our work is done and we watch the skies, waiting for a deliverance that will never come.
We are the seven billion who were sacrificed, our bodies stripped down to our bones. We are the ones swept aside, the discarded ones, our names forgotten, our faces lost to wind and earth and sand. No one will remember us, our footprints erased, our legacies wiped out, our children and their children and their children’s children at war against one another unto the last generation, to the end of the world.
We are humanity. Our name is Cassiopeia.
In us the rage, in us the grief, in us the fear.
In us the faith, the hope, the love.
We are the vessel of ten thousand souls. We carry them; we hold them; we keep them. We bear their burden, and through us, their lives are redeemed.
They rest in us and we in them. Our heart contains all others. One heart, one life, on the advent of a mayfly’s final flight.
CASSIE
ALIENS ARE STUPID.
Ten thousand years to pick us apart, to know us down to the last electron, and they still don’t get it. They still don’t understand.
Dumbasses.
The pod rests on a raised platform three stairsteps off the floor. Egg-shaped, tortoiseshell-green, about the size of a big SUV, like a Suburban or an Escalade. The hatch is closed, but I’ve got the key. I press the pad of Vosch’s severed thumb against the round sensor beside the door and the hatch soundlessly slides open. Lights flicker on, bathing the interior in a wash of iridescent green. Inside, a single seat and another touchpad and that’s it. No instrument panel. No little monitors. Nothing but the chair, the pad, and a small window through which I guess you can wave good-bye.
Evan was wrong and he was right. He believed all their lies but he knew the only truth that matters. The one truth that mattered before they came, when they came, after they came.
They had no answer for love.
They thought they could crush it out of us, burn it from our brains, replace love with its opposite—not hate, indifference. They thought they could turn men into sharks.
But they couldn’t account for that one little thing. They had no answer for it because it wasn’t answerable. It wasn’t even a question.
The problem of that damned bear.
RINGER
AFTER CASSIE LEAVES, I drop the gun.
I don’t need it. I have Vosch’s gift in my pocket.
I am the child in the wheat.
The slap of boots on pavement, on polished concrete floors, on metal risers, from the airstrip to the command center, the sound of thousands of feet running like the scratch-scratch of the rats behind the walls of the old hotel.
I’m surrounded.
I’ll give her the only thing I can, I think, reaching for the green capsule in my pocket. The only thing I’ve got left.
My fingers dig into the jacket pocket.
The empty jacket pocket.
I pat my other pockets. No. Not my pockets. They’re Cassie’s pockets: I switched clothes with her in the supply shed before we entered the command center.
I don’t have the green capsule. Cassie does.
The slap of boots on pavement, on polished concrete floors, on metal risers. I push myself from the wall and crawl toward the door.
He isn’t far. Just across this room, through that door, a few feet down the hall. If I can get to him before they reach this level, I may still have a chance—they won’t, but I will.
Cassie will.
Door. I yank the handle down, swing it halfway open, then quickly slide into the space between to prop it open with my body. I can see him, the faceless murderer of seven billion who should have killed me when he had the chance—and he had several—but couldn’t. He couldn’t, because even he was confounded by love’s unpredictable trajectory.
Hall. He must still have the device. He carried it everywhere he went. Lightweight and no larger than a cell phone, it tracked every implanted recruit on the base. And with a swipe of the thumb, it can send a signal to the implants inside their necks, killing each one of them.
Vosch. Lying on my stomach, I reach for him, grab the back of his uniform, and roll him over. The bloody crater that was his face is turned to the sterile glow of the ceiling. I hear them on the stairs, boots on metal risers, growing louder. Where is it? Give it up, you son of a bitch.
Breast pocket. Right where he always kept it. The display screen swarms with green dots, a three-squad cluster’s worth heading straight toward me. I highlight all of them—every recruit on the base, over five thousand people, and the green button beneath my thumb flashes, and this is why I didn’t want to come back. I knew what would happen. I knew:
I’ll kill until I lose count. I’ll kill until counting doesn’t matter.
I’m staring at the screen lit up with five thousand tiny pulsing lights, each a hapless victim, each a human being.
Telling myself I don’t have a choice.
Telling myself I’m not his creation. I’m not what he has made me.
ZOMBIE
ON OUR SEVENTEENTH PASS around the perimeter—or maybe the eighteenth; I’ve lost count—the lights of the air base abruptly blaze back on, and across from me, Sergeant Sprinter barks into her headset, “Status?”