“With what?”
She threw up her hands. “Okay, so we set the hotel on fire and burn them all up!”
“That’s a great idea, only we happen to be living here, too.”
“Then they’re gonna win. Against us. A bunch of rats.”
I shook my head. I didn’t follow her. “Win—how?”
Her eyes widened in disbelief. Ringer the moron. “Listen to them! They’re eating it. And pretty soon we won’t be living here because there won’t be any here to live in!”
“That’s not winning,” I pointed out. “They wouldn’t have a home, either.”
“They’re rats, Ringer. They can’t think that far ahead.”
Not just the rats, I thought that night after she finally fell asleep next to me. I listened to them inside the walls, chewing, scratching, screeching. Eventually, with the help of weather, insects, and time, the old hotel would collapse. In another hundred years, only the foundation would remain. In a thousand, nothing at all. Here or anywhere. It would be as if we had never existed. Who needs the kind of bombs used at Camp Haven when they can turn the elements themselves against us?
Teacup was pressed tight against me. Even under mounds of covers, the cold squeezed hard. Winter: a wave they didn’t have to engineer. The cold would kill off thousands more.
Nothing that happens is insignificant, Marika, my father told me during one of my chess lessons. Every move matters. Mastery is in understanding how much each time, every time.
It nagged at me. The problem of rats. Not Teacup’s problem. Not the problem with rats. The problem of rats.
9
I SEE THE CHOPPERS closing in through the leafless branches clothed in white, three black dots against the gray. I have seconds.
Options:
Finish Teacup and take my chances against three Black Hawks equipped with Hellfire missiles.
Leave Teacup to be finished by them—or worse, saved.
One last option: Finish both of us. A bullet for her. A bullet for me.
I don’t know if Zombie is okay. I don’t know what—if anything—drove Teacup from the hotel. What I do know is our deaths may be his only chance to live.
I will myself to squeeze the trigger. If I can fire the first round, the second will be much easier. I tell myself it’s too late—too late for her and too late for me. There’s no avoiding death, anyway. Isn’t that the lesson they’ve been hammering into our heads for months? No hiding from it, no running from it. Put it off for a day, and death will surely find you tomorrow.
She looks so beautiful, not even real, nestled in a bower of snow, her dark hair shimmering like onyx, her expression in sleep the indescribable serenity of an ancient statue.
I know that killing both of us is the only option with the least risk to the most people. And I think of rats again and how sometimes, to pass the interminable hours, Teacup and I would plot our campaign against the vermin, stratagems and tactics, waves of attack, each more ridiculous than the last, until she dissolved into hysterical laughter, and I gave her the same speech I gave Zombie on the firing range, the same lesson that now comes home to me, the fear that binds killer to prey and the bullet connecting both as if by a silver cord. Now I am the killer and the prey, a circle of a completely different kind, and my mouth has gone dry as the sterile air, my heart as cold: The temperature of true rage is absolute zero, and mine is deeper than the ocean, wider than the universe.
So it isn’t hope that makes me slip the sidearm back into its holster. It isn’t faith and it sure isn’t love.
It’s rage.
Rage, and the fact that I have a dead recruit’s implant still lodged between my cheek and gums.
10
I LIFT HER UP. Her head falls against my shoulder. We take off through the trees. A Black Hawk thunders overhead. The other two choppers have split off, one to the east, one to the west, cutting off any escape. The high, thin branches bend. Snow whips sideways into my face. Teacup weighs nothing; I could be carrying a wad of discarded clothes.
We come out of the trees as a Black Hawk roars in from the north. The blast of air whips my hair with cyclonic fury. The chopper hovers above us and now we are motionless, standing in the middle of the road. No more running. No more.
I lower Teacup to the blacktop. The helicopter is so close, I can see the black visor of the pilot and the open door to the hold and the cluster of bodies inside, and I know I’m in the middle of a half dozen sights, me and the little girl at my feet. And every second that passes means I’ve survived that second and, with each second, the increased probability I’ll survive the next. It might not be too late, not for me, not for her, not yet.
I do not glow in their eyepieces. I am one of them. I must be, right?
I sling the rifle from my shoulder and slip my finger through the trigger guard.
11
FROM THE TIME I could barely walk, my father would ask me, Cassie, do you want to fly? And my arms would shoot over my head. Are you kidding me, old man? Damn straight I want to fly!
And he would grab my waist and toss me into the air. My head would snap back and I would hurtle like a rocket toward the sky. For an instant that lasted a thousand years, it felt as if I’d keep flying until I reached the stars. I would scream with joy, that fierce roller-coaster-ride fear, my fingers clutching at clouds.
Fly, Cassie, fly!
My brother knew that feeling, too. Better than me, because the memory was fresher. Even after the Arrival, Dad was launching him into orbit. I saw him do it at Camp Ashpit a few days before Vosch showed up and murdered him in the dirt.
Sam, m’boy, do you want to fly? Lowering his voice from baritone to bass like an old-time carny hustler, though the ride he was selling was free—and priceless. Dad the launching pad. Dad the landing zone. Dad the tether that kept Sams—and me—from hurtling into the nullity of deep space, a nullity himself now.