Sam scampered down the hall to his bedroom. I guessed he couldn’t take the wailing anymore. I was wrong. He returned with something behind his back.
“I was going to wait till tomorrow, but . . .” He shrugged.
That bear had seen better days. Missing an ear, fur that had gone from brown to a splotchy gray, patched and repatched and patched again, more sutures than Frankenstein’s monster. Messed up, beaten up, but still hanging around. Still here.
Ben took the bear from him and made it dance for Cassie. Stubby bear arms flapped. Uneven bear legs—one was shorter than the other—twisted and twirled. The baby cried for a couple more minutes, clinging to the rage and discomfort until they slipped through her fingers, as insubstantial as the wind. She reached for the toy. Gimme, gimme, I wanna, I wanna.
“Well, what do you know?” Ben said. He looked over at me, and his smile was so genuine—no calculation, no vanity, desiring nothing but expressing everything—that I couldn’t help myself and really didn’t want to.
I smiled.
EVAN WALKER
EACH NIGHT from dusk to dawn he kept watch from the porch that overlooked the river. On the half hour, he left the porch to patrol the block. Then back to the porch to watch while the others slept. His sleep was rare, usually an hour or two in the afternoons, and afterward always jerking awake, disoriented, panicky, like a drowning man breaking the surface of the water that would bear him down, the remorseless medium that would kill him.
If he had dreams, he could not remember them.
Alone in the darkness, awake while everyone else slept, he felt the most at peace. He supposed it was in his nature, passed down from his father and his father’s father, farmers who tended the land and cared for their livestock. Nurturers, guardians, watchmen for the harvest. That was to be Evan Walker’s inheritance. Instead, he became the opposite. The silent hunter in the woods. The deadly assassin stalking human prey. How many did he kill before he found her hiding in the woods that autumn afternoon? He couldn’t remember. He felt no absolution in knowing he’d been used, no redemption in understanding he was as much a victim as the people he killed—from a distance, always from a distance. Forgiveness is not born out of innocence or ignorance. Forgiveness is born of love.
At dawn, he left the porch and went inside to his room. The time had come. He’d lingered here too long already. He was stuffing an extra jacket into the duffel bag—the bowling jacket he’d taken from Grace’s house that Cassie had hated so much—when Ben appeared in the doorway, shirtless, bleary-eyed, scruffy-chinned.
“You’re leaving,” he said.
“I’m leaving.”
“Marika said you would. I didn’t believe her.”
“Why not?”
Ben shrugged. “She isn’t always right. One half of one percent of the time, she’s only half right.” He rubbed his eyes and yawned. “And you’re not coming back,” Ben went on. “Ever. Is she right about that, too?”
Evan nodded. “Yes.”
“Well.” Ben looked away, scratching his shoulder slowly. “Where are you going?”
“To look for lights in the dark.”
“Lights,” Ben echoed. “Like, literal lights, or . . . ?”
“I mean bases. Military compounds. The closest one is about a hundred miles away. I’ll start there.”
“And do what?”
“What I’ve been gifted to do.”
“You’re going to blow up every military base in North America?”
“South America, too, if I live that long.”
“That’s ambitious.”
“I don’t think I’ll be working alone.”
Ben took a moment to think. “The Silencers.”
“Where else would they go? They know where their enemies are. They know each base has an arsenal of alien ordnance like Camp Haven’s. They believe there’s no choice now that the mothership’s gone but to blow up the 5th Wave bases. Well, I believe that’s what they believe. It’s what I would believe if I still believed. We’ll see.”
He shouldered the duffel bag and walked to the door. Ben blocked the way. His face was flushed with anger.
“You’re talking about murdering thousands of innocent people.”
“What do you suggest I do, Ben?”
“Stay here. Help us. We—” He took a deep breath. This was hard for him to say. “We need you.”
“For what? You can take the night watch and tend the garden and pick up my slack on the hunts.”
“Goddamn it, Walker, what’s this about, huh?” Ben exploded in fury. “What’s this really about? Is it about ending a war or taking revenge? You can blow up half the world and it won’t make it right, it won’t bring her back.”
Evan remained calm. He’d heard all the arguments, many times. He’d fought these battles for months, alone, in the quiet tumult of his heart. “Two will be saved for each one I kill. That’s the math. What’s the alternative? Stay here until staying here is too dangerous, then move to another place, then another, and another, hiding, running, using the gifts they gave me to keep myself alive—for what? Cassie didn’t die so I could live. She died for something much bigger than that.”
Ben was shaking his head. “Right, so how about I kill you now and save tens of thousands of lives? How’s that math work for you?”
“You have a point.” Evan smiled. “The problem is you’re no killer, Ben. You never were.”