“Don’t pretend,” I snapped. “I know you don’t believe me about Evan.”
“I believe you. It’s his story that doesn’t make sense.”
Then she walked out of the room. Just like that. Right in the middle, before anything was resolved. Who, besides every male person ever born, does that?
A virtual existence doesn’t require a physical planet . . .
Who was Evan Walker? Shifting my eyes from the highway to my baby brother and back again. Who were you, Evan Walker?
I was an idiot for trusting him, but I was hurt and alone (alone as in thinking I was the last human being in the freaking universe) and majorly mind screwed because I had already killed one innocent person, and this person, this Evan Walker, didn’t end my life when he could have; he saved it. So when the bells went off, I ignored them. Plus it didn’t hurt (help?) that he was impossibly gorgeous and equally impossibly obsessed with making me feel like I mattered more to him than he did to himself, from bathing me to feeding me to teaching me how to kill to telling me I was the one thing he had left worth dying for to proving it all by dying for me.
He began as Evan, woke up thirteen years later to find out he wasn’t, then woke again, he told me, when he saw himself through my eyes. He found himself in me, and then I found him in me and I was in him and there was no space between us. He began by telling me everything I wanted to hear and ended telling me the things I needed to: The principal weapon to eradicate the human hangers-on were the humans themselves. And when the last of the “infested” were dead, Vosch and company would pull the plug on the 5th Wave. Purge over. House clean and ready to move in.
When I told Ben and Ringer all this—minus the part about Evan being inside me, a bit too nuanced for Parish—there was a lot of dubious staring and significant looks from which I was painfully excluded.
“One of them was in love with you?” Ringer asked when I finished. “Wouldn’t that be like us falling in love with a cockroach?”
“Or a mayfly,” I shot back. “Maybe they have a thing for insects.”
We were meeting in Ben’s room. Our first night at the Walker Hotel, as Ringer dubbed it, mostly, I think, to get under my skin.
“What else did he tell you?” Ben asked. He was sprawled on the bed. Four miles from Camp Haven to the hotel, and he looked like he’d just sprinted a marathon. The kid who patched me and Sam up, Dumbo, wouldn’t commit when I asked him about Ben. Wouldn’t say if he’d get better. Wouldn’t say if he’d get worse. Of course, Dumbo was only twelve. “Capabilities? Weaknesses?”
“They have no bodies anymore,” I said. “Evan told me that it was the only way they could make the journey. Some were downloaded—him, Vosch, the other Silencers—some are still on the mothership, waiting for us to be gone.”
Ben rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “The camps were set up to winnow out the best candidates for brainwashing . . .”
“And to dispose of the ones who weren’t,” I finished. “Once the 5th Wave was rolled out, all they had to do was sit back and let the stupid humans do their dirty work.”
Ringer was sitting by the window, silent as a shadow.
“But why use us at all?” Ben wondered. “Why not download enough of their troops into human bodies to finish us off?”
“Not enough of them, maybe,” I guessed. “Or setting up the 5th Wave posed the least risk.”
“What risk?” Shadow-Ringer said, breaking her silence.
I decided to ignore her. For a lot of reasons, the main one being you engaged with Ringer at your own peril. She could humiliate you with a single word.
“You were there,” I reminded Ben. “You heard Vosch. They’d been watching us for centuries. But Evan proved that, even with thousands of years to plan, something can still go wrong. I don’t think it ever occurred to them that by becoming us, they might actually become us.”
“Right,” Ben said. “So how can we use that?”
“We can’t,” Ringer answered. “There’s nothing Sullivan’s told us that will help, unless this Evan person somehow survived the blast and can fill in the blanks.”
Ben was shaking his head. “Nothing could have survived that.”
“There were escape pods,” I said, grasping at the same straw I’d been reaching for since he said good-bye.
“Really?” Ringer didn’t sound like she believed me. “Then why didn’t he put you in one?”
I told her, “Look, I probably shouldn’t tell someone holding a high-powered semiautomatic rifle this, but you’re really starting to get on my nerves.”
She acted surprised. “Why?”
“We’ve got to get a handle on this,” Ben said sharply, cutting off my answer, which was a good thing: Ringer was holding an M16 and Ben had told me she was the best shot in the camp. “What’s the plan? Wait for Evan to show up or run? And if we run, where to?” Cheeks flaming with fever, eyes shining. It’s fourth and long with four seconds left. “Is there anything else Evan told you that might help? What are they going to do with the cities?”
“They’re not going to blow them up,” Ringer said. She didn’t wait for me to answer. Then she didn’t wait for me to ask how the hell she would know that. “If that was the plan, they would’ve blown them up first. Over half the world’s population lived in urban areas.”
“So they plan to use them,” Ben said. “Because they’re using human bodies?”