It should have been easy.

He rubbed his slick palms against his thighs. It was cool in the trees, but he was dripping with sweat. He scrubbed his sleeve across his eyes. The wind on the highway: a lonely sound. A squirrel scampered down the tree next to him, unconcerned by his presence. Below him, the highway disappeared over the horizon in both directions, and nothing moved except the trash and the grass bowing in the lonely wind. The buzzards had found the three bodies lying in the median; three fat birds waddled in for a closer look while the rest of the flock circled in the updrafts high overhead. The buzzards and other scavengers were enjoying a population explosion. Buzzards, crows, feral cats, packs of hungry dogs. He’d stumbled upon more than one desiccated corpse that had clearly been someone’s dinner.

Buzzards. Crows. Aunt Millie’s tabby. Uncle Herman’s Chihuahua. Blowflies and other insects. Worms. Time and the elements clean up the rest. If she didn’t come out, Cassie would die beneath the car. Within minutes of her last breath, the first fly would arrive to lay eggs in her.

He pushed the distasteful image away. It was a human thought. It had been only four years since his Awakening, and he still fought against seeing the world through human eyes. On the day of his Awakening, when he saw the face of his human mother for the first time, he burst into tears: He had never seen anything so beautiful—or so ugly.

It had been a painful integration for him. Not seamless or quick, like some Awakenings he’d heard of. He supposed his had been more difficult than others because the childhood of his host body had been a happy one. A well-adjusted, healthy human psyche was the hardest to absorb. It had been—still was—a daily struggle. His host body wasn’t something apart from him that he manipulated like a puppet on a string. It was him. The eyes he used to see the world, they were his eyes. This brain he used to interpret, analyze, sense, and remember the world, it was his brain, wired by thousands of years of evolution. Human evolution. He wasn’t trapped inside it and didn’t ride about in it, guiding it like a jockey on a horse. He was this human body, and it was him. And if something should happen to it—if, for example, it died—he would perish with it.

It was the price of survival. The cost of his people’s last, desperate gamble:

To rid his new home of humanity, he had to become human.

And being human, he had to overcome his humanity.

He stood up. He didn’t know what he was waiting for. Cassie for Cassiopeia was doomed, a breathing corpse. She was badly injured. Run or stay, there was no hope. She had no way to treat her wound and no one for miles who could help her. She had a small tube of antibiotic cream in her backpack, but no suture kit and no bandages. In a few days, the wound would become infected, gangrene would set in, and she would die, assuming another finisher didn’t come along in the interim.

He was wasting time.

So the hunter in the woods stood up, startling the squirrel. It rocketed up the tree with an angry hiss. He swung his rifle to his shoulder and brought the Buick into the sight, swinging the red crosshairs back and forth and up and down its body. What if he blew out the tires? The car would collapse onto its rims, perhaps pinning her beneath its two-thousand-pound frame. There’d be no running then.

The Silencer lowered his rifle and turned his back on the highway.

The buzzards feeding in the median heaved their cumbersome bodies into the air.

The lonely wind died.

And then his hunter’s instinct whispered, Turn around.

A bloody hand emerged from the undercarriage. An arm followed. Then a leg.

He swung his rifle into position. Sighted her in the crosshairs. Holding his breath, sweat coursing down his face, stinging his eyes. She was going to do it. She was going to run. He was relieved and anxious at the same time.

He couldn’t miss with this fourth shot. He spread his legs wide and squared his shoulders and waited for her to make her move. The direction wouldn’t matter. Once she was out in the open, there was nowhere to hide. Still, part of him hoped she would run in the opposite direction, so he wouldn’t have to place the bullet in her face.

Cassie hauled herself upright, collapsed for a moment against the car, then righted herself, balancing precariously on her wounded leg, clutching the handgun. He placed the red cross in the middle of her forehead. His finger tightened on the trigger.

Now, Cassie. Run.

She pushed away from the car. Brought up the handgun. Pointed it at a spot fifty yards to his right. Swung it ninety degrees, swung it back. Her voice came to him shrill and small in the deadened air.

“Here I am! Come and get me, you son of a bitch!”

I’m coming, he thought, for the rifle and the bullet were a part of him, and when the round wed bone, he would be there, too, inside her, the instant she died.

Not yet. Not yet, he told himself. Wait till she runs.

But Cassie Sullivan didn’t run. Her face, speckled with dirt and grease and blood from the cut on her cheek, seemed just inches away through the scope, so close he could count the freckles on her nose. He could see the familiar look of fear in her eyes, a look he had seen a hundred times, the look we give back to death when death looks at us.

But there was something else in her eyes, too. Something that warred with her fear, strove against it, shouted it down, kept her still and the gun moving. Not hiding, not running, but facing.

Her face blurred in the crosshairs: Sweat was dripping into his eyes.

Run, Cassie. Please run.

A moment comes in war when the last line must be crossed. The line that separates what you hold dear from what total war demands. If he couldn’t cross that line, the battle was over, and he was lost.

His heart, the war.

Her face, the battlefield.

With a cry only he could hear, the hunter turned.

And ran.

32

AS WAYS TO DIE GO, freezing to death isn’t such a bad one.

That’s what I’m thinking as I freeze to death.

You feel warm all over. There’s no pain, none at all. You’re all floaty, like you just chugged a whole bottle of cough syrup. The white world wraps its white arms around you and carries you downward into a frosty white sea.

And the silence so—shit—silent, that the beating of your heart is the only sound in the universe. So quiet, your thoughts make a whispery noise in the dull, freezing air.

Waist-deep in a drift, under a cloudless sky, the snowpack holding you upright because your legs can’t anymore.

And you’re going, I’m alive, I’m dead, I’m alive, I’m dead.

And there’s that damn bear with its big, brown, blank, creepy eyes staring at you from its perch in the backpack, going, You lousy shit, you promised.

So cold your tears freeze against your cheeks.

“It’s not my fault,” I told Bear. “I don’t make the weather. You got a beef, take it up with God.”

That’s what I’ve been doing a lot lately: taking it up with God.

Like: God, WTF?

Spared from the Eye so I could kill the Crucifix Soldier. Saved from the Silencer so my leg could get infected, making every step a journey over hell’s highway. Kept me going until the blizzard came in for two solid days, trapping me in this waist-high drift so I could die of hypothermia under a gloriously blue sky.

Thanks, God.

Spared, saved, kept, the bear says. Thanks, God.