“Poundcake,” Ben said softly. “Check the stairs. Dumbo, take the windows. Then sweep the first floor, both of you. There’s no way she’s alone.”
She spoke, and her voice came out in a high-pitched, scratchy whine that reminded me of fingernails scraping across a blackboard.
“My throat hurts.”
Her big eyes rolled back in her head. Her knees buckled. Sam raced toward her, but he was too late: She went down hard, smacking the thin carpeting with her forehead a second before Sam could reach her. Ben and I rushed over, and he bent down to pick her up. I pushed him away.
“You shouldn’t be lifting anything,” I scolded him.
“She doesn’t weigh anything,” he protested.
I picked her up. He was nearly right. Megan weighed little more than a sack of flour; bones and skin and hair and teeth and that’s about it. I carried her into Evan’s room, put her in the empty bed, and piled six layers of blankets over her quaking little body. I told Sam to fetch my rifle from the hall.
“Sullivan,” Ben said from the doorway. “This doesn’t fit.”
I nodded. Worse than the odds of her lucking into this hotel at random were the odds of her surviving this weather in her summer outfit. Ben and I were thinking the same thing: Twenty minutes after our hearing the chopper, Li’l Miss Megan appeared on our doorstep.
She didn’t wander in here on her own. She was delivered.
“They know we’re here,” I said.
“But instead of firebombing the building, they drop her in. Why?”
Sam came back with my rifle. He said, “That’s Megan. We met on the bus on the way to Camp Haven, Cassie.”
“Small world, huh?” I pushed him away from the bed, toward Ben. “Thoughts?”
He rubbed his chin. I rubbed my neck. Too many thoughts skittering around both our heads. I stared at him rubbing his chin and he stared at me rubbing my neck, and that’s when he said, “Tracker. They’ve implanted her with a pellet.”
Of course. That must be why Ben’s in charge. He’s the Idea Man. I massaged the back of Megan’s pencil-thin neck, probing for the telltale lump. Nothing. I looked at Ben and shook my head.
“They know we’d look there,” he said impatiently. “Search her. Every inch, Sullivan. Sam, you come with me.”
“Why can’t I stay?” Sam whined. After all, he’d just reunited with a long-lost friend.
“You want to see a na**d girl?” Ben made a face. “Gross.”
Ben pushed Sam out the door and backed out of the room. I dug my knuckles into my eyes. Damn it. Goddamn it. I pulled the covers to the foot of the bed, exposing her wasted body to the dying light of a midwinter’s evening. Covered in scabs and bruises and open sores and layers of dirt and grime, whittled down to her bones by the horrible cruelty of indifference and the brutal indifference of cruelty, she was one of us and she was all of us. She was the Others’ masterwork, their magnum opus, humanity’s past and its future, what they had done and what they promised to do, and I cried. I cried for Megan and I cried for me and I cried for my brother and I cried for all the ones too stupid or unlucky to be dead already.
Suck it up, Sullivan. We’re here, then we’re gone, and that was true before they came. That’s always been true. The Others didn’t invent death; they just perfected it. Gave death a face to put back in our face, because they knew that was the only way to crush us. It won’t end on any continent or ocean, no mountain or plain, jungle or desert. It will end where it began, where it had been from the beginning, on the battlefield of the last beating human heart.
I stripped her of the filthy, threadbare summer clothes. I spread her arms and legs like the Da Vinci drawing of the na**d dude inside the box, contained within the circle. I forced myself to go slowly, methodically, starting with her head and moving down her body. I whispered to her, “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” pressing, kneading, probing.
I wasn’t sad anymore. I thought of Vosch’s finger slamming down on the button that would fry my five-year-old brother’s brains, and I wanted to taste his blood so badly, my mouth began to water.
You say you know how we think? Then you know what I’m going to do. I’ll rip your face off with a pair of tweezers. I’ll tear your heart out with a sewing needle. I’ll bleed you out with seven billion tiny cuts, one for each one of us.
That’s the cost. That’s the price. Get ready, because when you crush the humanity out of humans, you’re left with humans with no humanity.
In other words, you get what you pay for, motherfucker.
37
I CALLED BEN into the room.
“Nothing,” I told him. “And I checked . . . everywhere.”
“What about her throat?” Ben said quietly. He could hear the residual rage in my voice. He got that he was talking to a crazy person and had to tread lightly. “Right before she fainted, she said her throat hurt.”
I nodded. “I looked. There’s no pellet in her, Ben.”
“Are you positive? ‘My throat hurts’ is a very weird thing for a freezing, malnourished kid to say the minute she shows up.”
He sidled over to the bed, I don’t know, maybe because he was concerned I might jump him in a moment of misplaced fury. Not that that’s ever happened. He gingerly pressed one hand to her forehead while prying her mouth open with the other. Stuck his eye close. “Hard to see anything,” he muttered.
“That’s why I used this,” I said, handing him Sam’s camp-issued penlight.