She jammed a stale piece of gum into her mouth and chewed angrily as the dry shards crumbled. Minty breath. Whiskey breath. Scratch, scratch, tap, tap.

"Give it a chance," I begged her. "You'll love it. I promise."

She grabbed the corner of the towel. "Here's what I feel." I saw it coming, but still flinched when she flung the towel and the coins exploded into the air. A nickel popped her in the forehead and she didn't even blink.

"Ha!" Teacup shouted. "I guess that's checkmate, bitch!"

Reacting without thinking, I slapped her. "Don't ever call me that. Ever."

The cold made the slap more painful. Her bottom lip poked out, her eyes welled up, but she didn't cry.

"I hate you," she said.

"I don't care."

"No, I hate you, Ringer. I hate your fucking guts."

"Cussing doesn't make you grown-up, you know."

"Then I guess I'm a baby. Shit, shit, shit! Fuck, fuck, fuck!" She started to touch her cheek. She stopped herself. "I don't have to listen to you. You aren't my mother or my sister or anybody."

"Then why have you been latched on to me like a pilot fish since we left camp?"

Now a tear did fall, a single drop that trailed down her scarlet cheek. She was so pale and thin, her skin as luminescent as one of my father's chess pieces. I was surprised the slap hadn't shattered her into a thousand bits. I didn't know what to say or how to unsay what had been said, so I said nothing. Instead, I laid a hand on her knee. She pushed my hand away.

"I want my gun back," she said.

"Why do you want your gun back?"

"So I can shoot you."

"Then you're definitely not getting your gun back."

"Can I have it back to shoot all the rats?"

I sighed. "We don't have enough bullets."

"Then we poison them."

"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.

I waited for Sam to ask. That's the easiest way to break horrible news. Also the lowest. He didn't ask, though. He told me.

"Daddy's dead."

A tiny lump beneath a mound of covers, brown eyes big and round and blank like the teddy bear's pressed against his cheek. Teddy bears are for babies, he told me the first night at Hotel Hell. I'm a soldier now.

Burrowed in the bed next to his, another solemn, pint-sized soldier staring at me, the seven-year-old they call Teacup. The one with the adorable baby-doll face and haunted eyes who doesn't share a bed with a stuffed animal; she sleeps with a rifle.

Welcome to the post-human age.

"Oh, Sam." I left my post by the window and sat beside the cocoon of covers swaddling him. "Sammy, I didn't know how-"

He slugged me in the cheek with a balled-up, apple-sized fist. I never saw it coming, in both meanings of the phrase. Bright stars exploded in my vision. For a second I was afraid he'd detached my retina.

Okay. Rubbing my cheek. I deserved that.

"Why did you let him die?" he demanded. He didn't cry or scream. His voice was low and fierce, simmering with rage. "You were supposed to take care of him."

"I didn't let him die, Sams."

My father bleeding, crawling in the dirt-Where are you going, Dad?-and Vosch standing over him, watching my father crawl the way a sadistic kid might a fly that he's dewinged, grimly satisfied.

Teacup from her bed: "Hit her again."

Sam snarled at her, "You shut up."

"It wasn't my fault," I whispered, my arm wrapped around the bear.

"He was soft," Teacup said. "That's what happens when you go-"

Sam was on her in two seconds. Then it was all fists and knees and feet and dust flying from the blankets and Dear God, there's a rifle in that bed! and I shoved Teacup away, scooped Sam into my arms, and held him tightly against my chest while he swung his arms and kicked his legs, spitting and gnashing his teeth, and Teacup was shouting obscenities at him and promising she'd put him down like a dog if he ever touched her again. The door flew open and Ben burst into the room wearing that ridiculous yellow hoodie.

"It's cool!" I shouted over the screaming. "I've got this!"

"Cup! Nugget! Stand down!"

Like a switch being flipped, the minute Ben barked the order, both kids fell silent. Sam went limp. Teacup flopped against the headboard and folded her arms over her chest.

"She started it." Sam pouted.

"I was just thinking of painting a big red X on the roof," Ben said. He holstered his pistol. "Thanks, guys, for saving me the trouble." He grinned at me. "Maybe Teacup should bunk in my room until Ringer gets back."

"Good!" Teacup said. She jumped out of bed, marched to the door, turned on her heel, went back to the bed, grabbed the rifle, and yanked on Ben's wrist. "Let's go, Zombie."

"In a minute," he said gently. "Dumbo's on the watch. Take his bed."

"My bed now." She couldn't resist a parting shot: "A-holes."

"You're the a-hole!" Sammy shouted after her. The door slammed in that quick, violent way of hotel doors. "A-hole."

Ben looked at me, right eyebrow cocked. "What happened to your face?"

"Nothing."

"I hit her," Sammy said.

"You hit her?"

"For letting my daddy die."

Now Sam lost it. As in tears, not fists, and the next thing I knew, Ben was kneeling and my baby brother was crying in his arms, and Ben was saying, "Hey, it's okay, soldier. It's going to be okay." Stroking the crew cut I was still getting used to-Sammy just didn't seem like Sammy without the mop of hair-saying that dumb-ass camp name over and over. Nugget, Nugget. I knew it shouldn't, but it bothered me that everyone had a nom de guerre but me. I liked Defiance.

Ben picked him up and deposited him in the bed. Then he found Bear lying on the floor and placed him on the pillow. Sam knocked him away. Ben picked him up again.