The Last Star (27 page)

67

THOUGH HE REMAINED UPRIGHT,
he had the sensation of falling from a great height. The room spun, the walls faded in and out of focus. Across the chamber, a figure stood in the doorway, a visual anchor that steadied him. He took a hesitant step forward and stopped.

“What do you remember?” Vosch called from the threshold. “Was I standing right beside you? Did I place my hand upon your shoulder? What are our memories but the ultimate proof that we exist? What if I were to tell you that everything you remember since we stepped into this room,
all of it,
is a lie, a false memory transmitted into your brain by that ‘owl’ behind you?”

“I know it’s a lie,” Evan answered. “I know who I am.” He was shaking. He was colder than he’d been in the white room beneath the icy spray.

“Oh, what you ‘heard’ was the truth. It’s the memory that’s false.” Vosch sighed. “You are a stubborn one, aren’t you?”

“Why should I believe you?” Evan cried. “Who are
you
that I should believe?”

“Because I am one of the chosen. I have been entrusted with the greatest mission in human history: the salvation of our species. Like you, I’ve known since I was a boy what was coming. Unlike you, I knew the truth.”

Vosch’s eyes strayed to the pod. His tone shifted from stern to wistful. “It’s impossible to express how lonely I have been. Only a handful of us know the truth. In a blind world, only we had eyes to see. We were not given a choice—you must understand—
there was no choice.
I am not responsible. I am a victim as much as they are, as much as you!” His voice rose in fury. “This is the cost! This is the price! And I have paid. I have done everything that was demanded of me. I have fulfilled my promise, and now my work is done.”

He held out his hand.

“Come with me. Allow me to grant you one last gift. Come with me, Evan Walker, and lay down your burden.”

68

HE FOLLOWED VOSCH—
what choice did he have?—back down the long corridor to the green door. The technician rose when they entered and said, “I’ve run the test three times, Commander, and I still can’t find any anomalies in the program. Do you want me to run it again?”

“Yes,” Vosch answered. “But not now.” He turned to Evan. “Please sit.”

He nodded to the tech, who strapped Evan back into the reclining chair. The hydraulics whined; he rotated back, his face toward the featureless white ceiling. He heard the door open. The same woman who had examined him in the white room entered, wheeling before her a gleaming stainless-steel cart. On it, laid out in a neat row, were thirteen syringes filled with an amber-colored fluid.

“You know what this is,” Vosch said.

Evan nodded. The 12th System.
The gift.
But why return it?

“Because I’m an optimist, an incurable romantic, like you,” Vosch said, as if he had read Evan’s mind. “I believe where there is life, there is hope.” He smiled. “But mostly because five young men are dead, which means she may still be alive. And if she lives, there is only one option left for her.”

“Ringer?”

Vosch nodded. “She is what I have made her; and she is coming to demand that I answer for what I’ve done.”

He leaned over Evan’s face, and his eyes burned with iridescent fire, and the blue flames seared him down to his bones.

“You
will be my answer.
”

He turned to the tech, who flinched under the intensity of his glare. “She may be right: Love may be the singularity, the inexplicable, ungovernable, ineffable mystery, impossible to predict or control, the virus that crashed a program designed by beings next to which we are no more evolved than a cockroach.” Then back to Evan: “So I will do my duty; I will burn down the village in order to save it.”

He stepped back. “Download him again. Then erase it.”

“Erase it, sir?”

“Erase the human. Leave the rest.” The commander’s voice filled the tiny room. “We cannot love what we do not remember.”

69

IN THE AUTUMN WOODS
there was a tent, and in that tent there was a girl who slept with a rifle in one hand and a teddy bear in the other. And while she slept, a hunter kept vigil over her, an unseen companion who retreated when she woke. He had come to end her life; she was there to save his.

And the endless arguments with himself, the vanity of his own reason posing the unanswerable question,
Why must one live while the world itself perished?
The more he reached for that answer, the farther the answer retreated from his grasp.

He was a finisher who could not finish. His was the heart of a hunter who lacked the heart to kill.

In her journal she had written
I am humanity,
and something in those three words splintered him in two.

She was the mayfly, here for a day, then gone. She was the last star, burning bright in a sea of limitless black.

Erase the human.

In a burst of blinding light, the star Cassiopeia exploded, and the world went black.

Evan Walker had been undone.

70

CASSIE

NOT TEN MINUTES
into it and I’m starting to think this whole mission-impossible, killing-Vosch-and-rescuing-Evan thingy was a very bad idea.

Bob the one-eyed pilot shouts, “
Ten seconds!
” Ringer closes her eyes, and in an awful, sickening instant, I’m convinced we’ve been set up. This has been her plan all along. Leave Ben and the kids defenseless, then get the two of us killed kamikaze style at five thousand feet, because who gives a shit? There’s a copy of her that lives in Wonderland. She’ll just be downloaded into a new body once we’re all dead.

Now’s your chance, Cass. Take out your knife and cut out her treacherous heart . . . if you can find it. If she has one.

“They’re breaking formation!” Bob announces.

Ringer’s eyes snap open. My chance slips away. “Hold our course, Bob,” she says evenly.

The choppers bear down on us, spreading out so everybody gets a fair shot, so no one feels left out or cheated of the chance to blow us into a gazillion pieces.

Bob holds our course but hedges our bets, locking a missile on the lead copter. His thumb hovers over the button. The thing that blows my mind about Bob is how quickly he switched sides. When he opened his eyes this morning, both of them, he was pretty certain which team he was batting for. Then, in the batting of an eye
(ha! sorry, Bob), he’s locked and loaded, ready to annihilate his fellow brothers and sisters-in-arms.

So there you go. You can love the good in us and hate the bad, but the bad is in us, too. Without it, we wouldn’t be
us.

All I want to do in this moment is give Bob a big hug.

“They’re going to ram us!” Bob screams. “We gotta dive, we gotta dive!”

“No,” Ringer says. “Trust me, Bob.”

Bob laughs hysterically. We barrel toward the lead chopper as it barrels toward us, both at full throttle. “Oh, sure! Why wouldn’t I trust
you
?” White-knuckled on the stick, thumb caressing the button, in a few seconds it won’t matter what Ringer tells him, he’s going to fire. Ultimately, Bob is on nobody’s side but Bob’s.

“Break,” Ringer whispers at the big black fist rocketing toward our face. “Break
now.
”

Too late. Bob jams the button, the Black Hawk shudders like some gigantic foot kicked it, and a Hellfire missile explodes from its mount. The cockpit lights up like the noonday sun. Somebody screams (I think it might be me). A maelstrom of fire engulfs us for half a second—debris popping and smacking against our hull—and then we burst through the fireball to the other side.

“Hoooooooolyyyyy Mother of
God
!” Bob yells.

Ringer doesn’t say anything at first. She’s looking at his scope and the five remaining white dots. Four break off, two right and two left, and the third continues on, edging toward the bottom of the screen.
Oh no. Where is
he
going?

“Hail them,” Ringer tells Bob. “Tell them we’re surrendering.”

“We are?” Bob and I say at the same time.

“Then hold course. They’re not going to force us down or fire on us.”

“How do you know?” Bob asks.

“Because if they were, they would have done it by now.”

“What about the other one?” I demand. “It’s gone. It’s not following us.”

Ringer gives me a look. “Where do you think it’s going?” Then she turns away. “It’ll be all right, Sullivan. Zombie will know what to do.”

Like I said, a very bad idea.