“What?” Val asked.
He shook his head. Nothing. He took a deep breath and glanced toward the trailer again. The tall blond girl was gone.
Inside the tent, behind a steel mesh fence, the white tiger panted in the heat. Small children crowded in front. Behind them, cameras and smartphones clicked. The tiger remained regally indifferent to the attention.
“Beautiful,” a husky voice murmured in Evan’s ear. He did not turn. He knew, without looking, it was the girl with the long blond hair and lips that glistened with watermelon juice. The exhibit was packed; her bare arm brushed against his.
“And sad,” Evan said.
“No,” Grace said. “He could tear through that fence in two seconds. Rip off a kid’s face in three. He’s choosing to be there. That’s the beautiful thing.”
He looked at her. Her eyes were even more startling up close. They bored into his, and in a knee-weakening instant, he knew the entity hiding inside Grace’s body.
“We should talk,” Grace whispered.
23
AT DUSK, the lights of the Ferris wheel were switched on and the tinny music was turned up and the crowd swelled along the midway, cutoff shorts and flip-flops and the smell of coconut-scented sunscreen and the waddle of big-bellied men in John Deere caps with deeply callused hands and wallets attached to belt loops bulging in back pockets. He handed Val off to their mother, then headed for the Ferris wheel to wait nervously for Grace. She materialized out of the crowd, holding a large stuffed animal: a white Bengal tiger, plastic bright blue eyes only slightly darker than hers.
“I’m Evan,” he said.
“I’m Grace.”
They watched the giant wheel turn against the purple sky.
“Do you think we’ll miss it when it’s gone?” he asked.
“I won’t.” Her nose crinkled. “The smell of them is horrible. I can’t get used to it.”
“You’re the first I’ve met since . . .”
She nodded. “Me too. Do you think it’s an accident?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t coming today, but this morning when I woke up, there was this little voice. Go. Did you hear it?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Good.” She sounded relieved. “For three years I’ve been wondering if I’m crazy.”
“You’re not.”
“You don’t wonder?”
“Not anymore.”
She smiled archly. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
They wandered over to the deserted show grounds and sat on the bleachers. The first stars appeared. The night was warm, the air moist. Grace wore a pair of shorts and a sleeveless white blouse with a lace collar. Sitting close to her, Evan could smell licorice.
“This is it,” he said, nodding at the empty corral with its mangled floor of sawdust and manure.
“What?”
“The future.”
She laughed as if he’d made a joke. “The world ends. The world ends and the world begins again. It’s always been that way.”
“You’re never afraid of what’s coming? Never?”
“Never.” Hugging the stuffed tiger in her lap. Her eyes seemed to take on the color of whatever she looked at. Now she was looking up at the darkening sky, and her eyes were a bottomless black.
They spoke for a few minutes in their native language, but it was difficult and they gave up quickly. Too many words were unpronounceable. He noticed that she was much calmer afterward, and he realized it wasn’t the future that frightened her; it was the past, the fact that she feared the entity inside her body was a figment of a young human girl’s shattered mind. Meeting Evan validated her existence.
“You’re not alone,” he told her. He looked down and discovered her hand in his. One hand for him, the other for the tiger.
“That’s been the worst part,” she agreed. “Feeling as if you’re the only person in the universe. That the whole thing is here,” touching her chest, “and nowhere else.”
Years later, he would read something quite similar in the diary of another sixteen-year-old girl, the one he found and lost, found, then lost again:
Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.
24
THE CAR’S UNDERCARRIAGE against his back. The cold asphalt against his cheek. The useless rifle clutched in his hand. He was trapped.
Grace had several options. He had two.
No. If there was any hope of keeping his promise, he had just one:
Cassie’s choice.
She had made a promise, too. A hopeless, suicidal promise to the one person on Earth who still mattered to her—mattered to her more than her own life. She stood up that day to face the faceless hunter because her death was nothing compared to the death of that promise. If there was any hope left, it lay in love’s hopeless promises.
He crawled forward, past the front bumper, into the open air, and then, like Cassie Sullivan, Evan Walker stood up.
He tensed, waiting for the finishing round. When Cassie stood up that cloudless autumn afternoon, her Silencer had run. He did not think Grace would run. Grace would finish what she began.
But no finish came. No silencing bullet, connecting Grace to him as if by a silver cord. He knew she was there. Knew she could see him standing crookedly in front of the car. And he realized there was no escaping the past, no dodging inevitable consequences: Cassie’s terror, her uncertainty and pain, they belonged to him now.
Overhead, the stars. Straight ahead, the road that shone in the stars’ light. The tight grip of the freezing air and the medicinal smell of the ointment Grace had spread over his burns. Your heart is beating very fast.