Water dribbled down his chin. She wiped it for him.
“The base was compromised,” he said.
She seemed surprised. “How?”
He shook his head. “Not sure.”
“Why were you there? That’s the curious thing.”
“I followed someone in.” This was not going well. For a person whose entire life had been a lie, lying did not come easily to him. He knew Grace would not hesitate to terminate his current body if she suspected that the “compromise” extended to him. They all understood the risk in donning the human mantle. Sharing a body with a human psyche carried with it the danger of adopting human vices—as well as human virtues. And far more dangerous than greed or lust or envy or any of those things—or anything—was love.
“You . . . followed someone? A human?”
“I didn’t have a choice.” That much was true at least.
“The base was compromised. By a human.” She shook her head with wonder. “And you abandoned your patrol to stop it.”
He closed his eyes. Perhaps she’d think he passed out. The smell of the stew made his stomach roll.
“Very curious,” Grace said. “There was always risk of a compromise, but from within the processing center. How could a human in your sector know anything about the cleansing?”
Playing possum wasn’t going to work. He opened his eyes. The crow had not moved. The bird stared at him, and he remembered the owl on the sill and the little boy in the bed and the fear. “I’m not sure she did.”
“She?”
“Yes. It was a . . . a female.”
“Cassiopeia.”
He looked sharply at her, couldn’t help it. “How do you . . . ?”
“I’ve heard it a lot over the past three days.”
“Three days?”
His heart quickened. He had to ask. But how could he? Asking might make her more suspicious than she already was. It would be foolish to ask. So he said, “I think she might have escaped.”
Grace smiled. “Well, if she did, I’m sure we’ll find her.”
He let his breath out slowly. Grace would have no reason to lie. If she had found Cassie, she would have killed her and had no reservations in telling him. Though Grace not finding her was no proof of life: Cassie still may not have survived.
Grace reached into her rucksack again and took out a bottle of cream. “For the burns,” she explained. Gingerly, she pulled the blanket down, exposing his naked body to the freezing air. Above them, the crow cocked its polished black head and watched.
The cream was cold. Her hands were warm. Grace had brought him out of fire; he had brought Cassie out of ice. He’d carried her through the undulating sea of white to the old farmhouse, where he removed her clothes and plunged her freezing body into warm water. As Grace’s hands, slick with salve, roamed his body, his fingers had worked through the ice encrusted in Cassie’s thick hair. Removing the bullet as she floated in the water stained pink by her blood. The bullet meant for her heart. His bullet. And, after he pulled her from the water and bandaged the wound, carrying her to his sister’s bed, averting his eyes as he dressed her in his sister’s gown; Cassie would have been mortified when she realized he’d seen her unclothed.
Grace’s eyes fixed on him. His eyes fixed on the teddy bear on the pillow. He pulled the covers to Cassie’s chin. Grace pulled the blanket to his.
You’re going to live, he told Cassie. More of a prayer than a promise.
“You’re going to live,” Grace told him.
You have to live, he said to Cassie. “I have to,” he said to Grace.
The way she cocked her head as she looked at him, like the crow in the tree, the owl on the sill.
“We all have to,” Grace said, nodding slowly. “It’s why we came.”
She leaned forward and kissed him gently on the cheek. Warm breath, cool lips, and the faint odor of wood smoke. Her lips slid from his cheek toward his mouth. He turned his head.
“How did you know her name?” she whispered in his ear. “Cassiopeia. How did you know Cassiopeia?”
“I found her camp. Abandoned. She kept a journal . . .”
“Ah. And that’s how you knew she planned to storm the base.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it all makes perfect sense, then. Did she say in her journal why she was storming the base?”
“Her brother . . . taken from a refugee camp to Wright-Patterson . . . she escaped . . .”
“That’s remarkable. Then she overcomes our defenses and destroys the entire command center. That’s even more remarkable. It borders on the unbelievable.”
She picked up the pan, slung the contents into the brush, and rose to her feet. She towered over him, a six-foot blond colossus. Her cheeks were flushed, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the kiss.
“Rest,” she said. “You’re well enough to travel now. We’re leaving tonight.”
“Where’re we going?” Evan Walker asked.
She smiled. “My place.”
AT SUNSET, Grace killed the fire, slipped the backpack and rifle over her shoulder, and scooped Evan from the ground for the sixteen-mile hike to her station house on the southern outskirts of Urbana. She would keep to the highway to make better time. There was little risk in it at this stage of the game: She hadn’t seen a human being in weeks. Those she hadn’t killed had been taken by the buses or had taken refuge against the onslaught of winter. This was the in-between time. In another year, perhaps two, though no more than five, there would be no need for stealth, because there would be no more prey to stalk.
The temperature plunged with the sun. Ragged clouds raced across the indigo sky, driven by a north wind that toyed with her bangs and playfully flipped the collar of her jacket. The first stars appeared, the moon rose, and the road shone ahead, a silver ribbon twisting across the black backdrop of dead fields and empty lots and the gutted shells of houses long abandoned.
She stopped once to rest and drink and spread more salve over Evan’s burns.
“There’s something different about you,” she mused. “I can’t put my finger on it.” Putting her fingers all over him.
“I didn’t have an easy awakening,” he said. “You know that.”
She grunted softly. “You’re a brooder, Evan, and a very sore loser.” She wrapped him back up in the blanket. Ran her long fingers through his hair. Looked deeply into his eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
He said nothing.
“I felt it,” she said. “The first night, when I hauled you out of the wreckage. There’s a . . .” She searched for the right words. “A hidden room that wasn’t there before.”
His voice sounded hollow to him, empty as the wind. “Nothing is hidden.”
Grace laughed. “You should never have been integrated, Evan Walker. You feel far too much for them to be one of them.”
She picked him up as easily as a mother her newborn child. She lifted her face to the night sky and gasped. “I see her! Cassiopeia, the queen of the night.” She pressed her cheek against the top of his head. “Our hunt is over, Evan.”
GRACE’S STATION WAS an old, one-story wooden frame house on Highway 68, located at the exact center of her assigned six-square-mile patrol sector. Aside from boarding up the broken windows and repairing the exterior doors, she’d left the house as she found it. Family portraits on the walls, heirlooms and mementos too large to carry easily, smashed furniture and open drawers and the thousand pieces of the occupants’ lives deemed worthless by looters were scattered in every room. Grace did not bother to clean up the mess. When spring arrived and the 5th Wave rolled out, she would be gone.