He kisses me hard on the mouth, and then the stairwell goes all Evanless. I can feel Ben’s breath on my neck, hot in the cool air.
“I don’t understand what’s happening here,” Ben says. “Who is that guy? He’s a…What is he? Where’d he come from? And where’s he going now?”
“I’m not sure, but I think he’s found the armory.”
Somebody was up there ahead of me and left a blood trail.
Oh God, Evan. No wonder you didn’t tell me.
“He’s going to blow this whole place to hell.”
IT’S NOT A RACE up the stairs to freedom. We practically crawl up, hanging on to one another as we climb, me in the lead, Ben at the rear, and Sammy between us. The closed space is choked with fine particles of dust, and soon we’re all coughing and wheezing loud enough, it seems to me, to be heard by every Silencer in a two-mile radius. I move with one hand extended in front of me in the blackness and call out our progress softly.
“First landing!”
A hundred years later we reach the second landing. Almost halfway to the top, but we haven’t hit the debris Evan warned us about.
I have to choose.
Now that he’s gone and it’s too late, I’ve come up with about a dozen good arguments for why he shouldn’t leave us. My best argument is this:
You won’t have time.
The Eye takes—what?—about a minute or two from activation to detonation. Barely enough time to get to the armory doors. Okay, so you’re going to go all noble and sacrifice yourself to save us, but then don’t say things like I’ll find you, which implies there’ll be an I to find me after you unleash the green fireball from hell.
Unless…Maybe the Eyes can be detonated remotely. Maybe that little silver thing he’s carrying around…
No. If that was a possibility, he would have come with us and set them off once we were a safe distance away.
Damn it. Every time I think I’m starting to understand Evan Walker, he slips away. It’s like I’m blind from birth, trying to visualize a rainbow. If what I think is about to happen actually happens, will I feel his passing like he felt Lauren’s, like a punch in the heart?
We’re halfway to the third landing when my hand smacks into stone. I turn to Ben and whisper, “I’m going to see if I can climb it—there might be room to squeeze through at the top.”
I hand my rifle to him and get a good grip with both hands. I’ve never done much rock climbing—okay, my experience is zero—but how hard could it be, really?
I’m maybe three feet up when a rock slips beneath my foot and I come back down, smacking my chin hard on the way.
“I’ll try,” Ben says.
“Don’t be stupid. You’re hurt.”
“I’d have to try if you made it, Cassie,” he points out.
He’s right, of course. I hold on to Sammy while Ben scales the mass of broken concrete and shattered reinforcement rods. I can hear him grunting every time he reaches up for the next handhold. Something wet drops onto my nose. Blood.
“Are you okay?” I call up to him.
“Um. Define okay.”
“Okay means you’re not bleeding to death.”
“I’m okay.”
He’s weak, Vosch said. I remember the way Ben used to stroll down the hallways at school, his broad shoulders rolling, zapping people with his death-ray smile, the master of his universe. I never would have called him weak then. But the Ben Parish I knew then is very different from the Ben Parish who now pulls himself up a jagged wall of broken stone and twisted metal. The new Ben Parish has the eyes of a wounded animal. I don’t know everything that’s happened to him between that day in the gym and now, but I do know the Others have succeeded in winnowing the weak from the strong.
The weak have been swept away.
That’s the flaw in Vosch’s master plan: If you don’t kill all of us all at once, those who remain will not be the weak.
It’s the strong who remain, the bent but unbroken, like the iron rods that used to give this concrete its strength.
Floods, fires, earthquakes, disease, starvation, betrayal, isolation, murder.
What doesn’t kill us sharpens us. Hardens us. Schools us.
You’re beating plowshares into swords, Vosch. You are remaking us.
We are the clay, and you are Michelangelo.
And we will be your masterpiece.
“WELL?” I SAY after several minutes pass and Ben doesn’t come down—the slow way or the fast way.
“Just…enough…room. I think.” His voice sounds tiny. “It goes back pretty far. But I can see light up ahead.”
“Light?”
“Bright light. Like floodlights. And…”
“And? And what?”
“And it’s not very stable. I can feel it slipping underneath me.”
I squat down in front of Sammy, tell him to climb aboard, and wrap his arms around my neck.
“Hold on tight, Sam.” He puts me in a choke hold. “Ahhh,” I gasp. “Not that tight.”
“Don’t let me fall, Cassie,” he whispers into my ear as I start up.
“I won’t let you fall, Sam.”
He presses his face against my back, completely trusting I won’t let him fall. He’s been through four alien attacks, suffered God knows what in Vosch’s death factory, and my brother still trusts that somehow everything will be okay.
There really is no hope, you know, Vosch said. I’ve heard those words before, in another voice, my voice, in the tent in the woods, under the car on the highway. Hopeless. Useless. Pointless.
What Vosch spoke, I believed.
In the safe room I saw an infinite sea of upturned faces. If they had asked, would I have told them there was no hope, that it was pointless? Or would I have told them, Climb onto my shoulders, I will not let you fall?
Reach. Grab. Pull. Step. Rest.
Reach. Grab. Pull. Step. Rest.
Climb onto my shoulders. I will not let you fall.
BEN GRABS MY WRISTS when I near the top of the debris, but I gasp for him to pull Sammy up first. I’ve got nothing left for that final foot. I just hang there, waiting for Ben to grab me again. He heaves me into the narrow gap, a sliver of space between the ceiling and the top of the slide. The darkness up here is not as dense, and I can see his gaunt face dusted in concrete, bleeding from fresh scratches.
“Straight ahead,” he whispers. “Maybe a hundred feet.” No room to stand or sit up: We’re lying on our stomachs nearly nose to nose. “Cassie, there’s…nothing. The entire camp’s gone. Just…gone.”
I nod. I’ve seen what the Eyes can do up close and personal. “Have to rest,” I pant, and for some reason I’m worried about the quality of my breath. When was the last time I brushed my teeth? “Sams, you okay?”
“Yes.”
“Are you?” Ben asks.
“Define okay.”
“That’s a definition that keeps changing,” he says. “They’ve lit the place up out there.”
“The plane?”
“It’s there. Big, one of those huge cargo planes.”
“There’s a lot of kids.”
We crawl toward the bar of light seeping through the crack between the ruins and the surface. It’s hard going. Sammy starts to whimper. His hands are scraped raw, his body bruised from the rough stone. We squeeze through spots so narrow, our backs scrape against the ceiling. Once I get stuck and it takes Ben several minutes to work me free. The light pushes back the dark, grows bright, so bright I can see individual particles of dust spinning against the inky backdrop.