96.

RINGER.

I'VE BEEN HERE BEFORE, lying helplessly beneath the constant sterile glow.

Razor would come to me while my body fought the losing battle against the forty thousand invaders the enemy injected into it. Razor would come to me, and his coming would sustain me, the hope he offered the tether that kept me from hurtling endlessly through the void.

He died to save me, and now his child will die with me.

The stairway door slams. Boots echo on the stone floor. I know the sound. I recognize the rhythm of his stride.

That's why the Silencer didn't kill you. It was saving you for him.

"Marika."

Vosch towers over me. He is ten thousand feet tall, fashioned from solid rock, an impregnable battlement that cannot be broken, that cannot fall. His azure eyes shine as he looks down on me from unscalable heights.

"You've forgotten something," he tells me. "And now it's too late. What have you forgotten, Marika?"

A child bursts through the brittle stalks of winter-killed wheat, carrying a capsule-sized bomb within its mouth. Human breath enfolds the child and everything is engulfed in green fire, and afterward nothing remains.

The pill. His parting gift in the breast pocket of my jacket. I will my hand to rise and my hand won't move.

"I knew you would come back," Vosch says. "Who else would have the final answer but the one who created you?"

The words die on my lips. I can still speak, but what's the point? He already knows what I want to ask. It's the only question I have left.

"Yes, I have been inside their ship. And it's as remarkable as you've imagined. I have seen them-our saviors-and, yes, they are also as remarkable as you've imagined. They aren't physically there, of course, but you've already guessed that. They are not here, Marika. They never were."

His eyes glow with the transcendental joy of a prophet who has seen heaven.

"They are carbon-based like us, and that is where all similarities end. It took them a very long time to understand us, to accept what was happening here and devise the only viable solution to the problem. Likewise, it took me a very long time to understand and accept their solution. It's difficult to ignore your own humanity, to step outside yourself and see through the eyes of a wholly other species. That's been your particular problem from the beginning, Marika. I had hopes that one day you would conquer it. You are the closest I've ever come to seeing myself in another human being."

He notices something about my face and kneels beside me. His finger presses against my cheek, and my tear rolls over his knuckle.

"I am going away, Marika. You must have guessed that. My consciousness will be preserved for all time aboard the mothership, eternally free, eternally safe from whatever may happen here. That was my price. And they agreed to pay it." He smiles. The smile is kind, a father to his beloved child. "Are you satisfied now? Have I answered all your questions?"

"No," I whisper. "You haven't told me why."

He doesn't scold about having just told me why. He knows I'm not asking about his motivation.

"Because the universe has no limits, but life does. Life is rare, Marika, and therefore precious; it must be preserved. If they may be said to have anything resembling human faith, it is that. All life is worthy of existence. The Earth is not the first planet they have saved."

He cups my cheek in his hand. "I don't want to lose you," he says. "Virtues have become vices, and you've said it yourself: This particular vice follows no rules, even its own. I have committed a mortal sin, Marika, and only you can absolve me."

He slips his hand beneath my head and lifts it gently from the floor. He kneels beside me, creator, father, cradling my head in his hands.

"We found it, Marika. The anomaly in Walker's programming. The flaw in the system is that there isn't one.

"Do you understand? It's important that you understand. The singularity beyond space and time, the undefinable constant that transcends all understanding-they had no answer for it, so they gave none. How could they? How could love be contained in any algorithm?"

His eyes still sparkle, though now with tears. "Come with me, Marika. Let us go together, to a place where there is no more pain, no more sorrow. All of this will be gone in an instant." He waves his hand to indicate the base, the planet, the past. "They'll take away any memory that troubles you. You will be immortal, forever young, forever free. They will give me that. Grant me the grace to give you that."

I whisper, "Too late."

"No! This broken body, it's nothing. Worthless. It's not too late."

"It is for you," I tell him.

Behind him, Cassie Sullivan takes the cue. She presses the gun to the back of my creator's head and pulls the trigger.

97.

THE GUN FALLS from her hand. She sways on her feet, staring down at Vosch's body and the semicircle of blood that slowly expands beneath his head, creating an obscene mockery of a halo. She's found herself in a moment she's dreamed of for a very long time, but she doesn't feel what she thought she would feel. It isn't the moment of triumph and revenge she thought it would be. What she feels, I can't tell; her face is expressionless, her gaze turned inward.

"Evan's gone," she says in a dead voice.

"I know," I tell her. "He's the one who did this to me."

Her eyes slide from Vosch to me. "Did what?"

"Broke my back. I can't move my legs, Cassie."

She shakes her head. Evan. Vosch. Me. Too much to process.

"What happened?" I ask.

She glances down the hallway. "The electrical room. I knew exactly where it was. And the code to the door, I knew that, too." She turns back to me. "I know practically everything about this base."

Her eyes are dry but she's about to break; I can hear it in her voice, filled with sick wonder. "I killed him, Ringer. I killed Evan Walker."

"No, Cassie. Whatever attacked me wasn't human. I think Vosch erased his memory-his human memory and-"

"I know that," she snaps. "It's the last thing he heard before they took it from him: 'Erase the human.'" She catches her breath. His experiences are hers now. She shares the horror of that moment, the last moment of Evan Walker's life.

"And you're sure he's dead?" I ask.

She waves her hand helplessly in the air. "Pretty damn sure." She frowns. "You left me tied to that fucking chair."

"I thought I had time . . ."

"Well, you didn't."

The overhead speakers pop. "GENERAL ORDER FOUR IS NOW RESCINDED. ALL ACTIVE-DUTY PERSONNEL TO REPORT IMMEDIATELY TO BATTLE STATIONS . . ."

I can hear the squads exiting their bunkers around the base. Any moment the thunder of boots and the glint of steel and the rain of bullets. Cassie cocks her head as if she, too, can hear them with her unenhanced ears. But she has been enhanced in another, more profound way, a way I can only pretend to understand.

"I have to go," she says. She isn't looking at me. It's like she isn't even speaking to me. I can only watch as she yanks the knife from the sheath strapped to my thigh, steps over to Vosch, flattens his hand against the floor, and, with two hard whacks, chops off his right thumb.

She drops the bloody digit into the pocket of her fatigues. "It wouldn't be right to leave you here, Marika."

She slides her hands beneath my shoulders and drags me to the nearest door.

"No, forget about me, Cassie. I'm done."

"Oh, be quiet," she mutters. She punches the code into the keypad and pulls me into the room. "Am I hurting you?"

"No. Nothing hurts."

She props me up against the far wall facing the door and presses the gun into my hand. I shake my head. Hiding in this room, having the gun, it only delays the inevitable.

There is another way, though: I carry it in my breast pocket.

When the time comes-and the time will come-you'll wish that you had it.

"Get out of here," I tell her. My time has come, but not hers. "If you can make it out of the building, you might be able to reach the perimeter . . ."

She shakes her head impatiently. "That's not the way, Marika." Her eyes lose focus again. "It isn't far. Five minutes from here?" She nods as if someone has answered her question. "Yeah. At the end of the hall. About five minutes."

"The end of the hall?"

"Area 51."

She stands up. Steady on her feet now and her mouth firmly set.

"He's not going to understand. He's going to be pissed as hell, and you're going to explain it to him. You're going to tell him what happened and why, and you're going to take care of him, understand? You're going to keep him safe and make sure he bathes and brushes his teeth and trims his nails and wears clean underwear and learns to read. Teach him to be patient and to be kind and to trust everyone. Even strangers. Especially strangers."

She pauses. "There was something else. Oh yeah. Make him understand it isn't random. That there's no way seven billion billion atoms could accidentally coalesce into a person called Samuel Jackson Sullivan. What else? Oh! Nobody is allowed to call him Nugget ever again for the rest of his life. I mean, really. So stupid.

"Promise me, Marika. Promise me."

98.

THE SEVEN BILLION BILLION.

WE ARE HUMANITY.

We are one.

We are the girl with the broken back sprawled in an empty room, waiting for the end to come.

We are the man who's fallen a half mile away, and the only thing still living in us is not alive, but an alien device that directs every resource at its disposal to saving our body lying on the cold stone, to shock our heart back to life. There is no difference between us and the system. The 12th System is us and we are the 12th System. If one should fail, the other will die.

We are the prisoners aboard the Black Hawk helicopter that circles the base while its fuel runs low, swinging over a broad river, its waters black and swift, and our voices are quelled by the wind that roars through the open hold, and our hands are clasped; we are bound to one another in an unbroken chain.

We are the recruits hustling to our battle stations, the rescued ones, the winnowed ones, the harvest gathered into buses and separated into groups in which our bodies were hardened and our souls emptied only to be filled with hate and hope, and we know as we break from our bunkers that dawn approaches and with it the war, and this is what we've longed for and dreaded, the end of winter, the end of us. We remember Razor and the price he paid; we carved the initials VQP into our bodies in his honor. We remember the dead but we can't remember our own names.

We are the lost ones, the solitary ones, the ones who did not board those buses chugging down the highways, the empty city streets, the lonely country roads. We dug in for the winter and watched the skies and trusted no stranger. Those of us who did not die from starvation or the bitter cold or simple infections that antibiotics we did not have could have relieved, we endured. We bent, but we did not break.

We are the lonely hunters designed by our makers to drive survivors onto the buses that scavenge the countryside and to kill those who refuse. We are special, we are apart, we are Other. We have been awakened into a lie so compelling that to not believe it would be madness. Now our work is done and we watch the skies, waiting for a deliverance that will never come.

We are the seven billion who were sacrificed, our bodies stripped down to our bones. We are the ones swept aside, the discarded ones, our names forgotten, our faces lost to wind and earth and sand. No one will remember us, our footprints erased, our legacies wiped out, our children and their children and their children's children at war against one another unto the last generation, to the end of the world.

We are humanity. Our name is Cassiopeia.

In us the rage, in us the grief, in us the fear.

In us the faith, the hope, the love.

We are the vessel of ten thousand souls. We carry them; we hold them; we keep them. We bear their burden, and through us, their lives are redeemed.

They rest in us and we in them. Our heart contains all others. One heart, one life, on the advent of a mayfly's final flight.

CASSIE.

ALIENS ARE STUPID.

Ten thousand years to pick us apart, to know us down to the last electron, and they still don't get it. They still don't understand.

Dumbasses.

The pod rests on a raised platform three stairsteps off the floor. Egg-shaped, tortoiseshell-green, about the size of a big SUV, like a Suburban or an Escalade. The hatch is closed, but I've got the key. I press the pad of Vosch's severed thumb against the round sensor beside the door and the hatch soundlessly slides open. Lights flicker on, bathing the interior in a wash of iridescent green. Inside, a single seat and another touchpad and that's it. No instrument panel. No little monitors. Nothing but the chair, the pad, and a small window through which I guess you can wave good-bye.

Evan was wrong and he was right. He believed all their lies but he knew the only truth that matters. The one truth that mattered before they came, when they came, after they came.