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“Style?”
“Hasn’t it ever struck you how personal it’s been—from the beginning? There’s something about killing us that gets them off.”
Ben looked at me with sick wonder. “Yeah. Well. I can see why you’d want to date one of them.” Not the thing to say. He realized it immediately and quickly backed off. “Who’re we kidding, Cassie? There’s nothing really to decide, except who’s going to do it. Maybe we should flip a coin.”
“Maybe it should be Dumbo. Didn’t you tell me he trained in field surgery at the camp?”
He frowned. “Surgery? Y
ou’re kidding, right?”
“Well, how else are we . . . ?” Then I understood. Couldn’t accept, but understood. I was wrong about Ben. He had dropped farther than me into that unthinkable place. He was five thousand fathoms down.
He read the look on my face and dropped his chin toward his chest. His face was flushed. Not embarrassed so much as angry, intensely angry, the anger that’s past all words.
“No, Ben. We can’t do that.”
He lifted his head. His eyes shone. His hands shook. “I can.”
“No, you can’t.” Ben Parish was drowning. He was so far under, I wasn’t sure I could reach him, wasn’t sure I had the strength to pull him back to the surface.
“I didn’t ask for this,” he said. “I didn’t ask for any of this!”
“Neither did she, Ben.”
He leaned close and I saw a different kind of fever burning in his eyes. “I’m not worried about her. An hour ago, she didn’t exist. Understand? She was nothing, literally nothing. I had you, and I had your little brother, and I had Poundcake and Dumbo. She was theirs. She belongs to them. I didn’t take her. I didn’t trick her into getting on a bus and tell her she was perfectly safe and then stuff a bomb down her throat. This isn’t my fault. It isn’t my responsibility. My job is to keep my ass and your ass alive for as long as possible, and if that means somebody else who is nothing to me dies, then I guess that’s what it means.”
I wasn’t holding up well. He was too deep, there was too much pressure, I couldn’t breathe.
“That’s it,” he said bitterly. “Cry, Cassie. Cry for her. Cry for all the children. They can’t hear you and they can’t see you and they can’t feel how really bad you feel, but cry for them. A tear for each of them, fill up the fucking ocean, cry.
“You know I’m right. You know I don’t have a choice. And you know Ringer was right. It’s about the risk. It’s always been about the risk. And if one little girl has to die so six people can live, then that’s the price. That’s the price.”
He pushed past me and limped down the hall to the broken door, and I couldn’t move, I couldn’t speak. I didn’t lift a finger or frame an argument to stop him. I’d reached the end of words, and gestures seemed pointless.
Stop him, Evan. Please, stop him, because I can’t.
In the safe room underground, their faces lifted up to me, and my silent prayer, my hopeless promise: Climb onto my shoulders, climb onto my shoulders, climb onto my shoulders.
He wouldn’t shoot her. Because of the risk. He’d smother her. Place a pillow over her face and press until he didn’t need to press anymore. He wouldn’t leave her body there: the risk. He would carry it outside, but he wouldn’t bury it or burn it: the risk. He would take it far into the woods and toss it on the frozen ground like so much trash for the buzzards and crows and insects. The risk.
I sank down the wall and drew my knees to my chest, ducked my head, and covered it up with my arms. I stopped my ears. I closed my eyes. And there was Vosch’s finger slamming down on the button, Ben’s hands holding the pillow, my finger on the trigger. Sam, Megan. The Crucifix Soldier. And Ringer’s voice, speaking out of the silent dark: Sometimes you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time and what happens is nobody’s fault.
And when Ben came out, all torn up and empty, I would get up and I would go to him and I would comfort him. I would take the hand that murdered a child and we would grieve for ourselves and the choices we made that weren’t choices at all.
Ben came out. He sat against the wall ten doors down. After a minute, I got up and went to him. He didn’t look up. He rested his forearms on his upraised knees and bowed his head. I sat next to him.
“You’re wrong,” I said. He twirled his hand: Whatever. “She did belong to us. They all belong to us.”
His head fell back against the wall. “Hear them? Those mother-effing rats.”
“Ben, I think you need to go. Now. Don’t wait till morning. Take Dumbo and Poundcake and get to the caverns as fast as you can.” Maybe Ringer could help him. He listened to her, always seemed a little intimidated by her, even awed.
He laughed from a spot deep in his gut. “I’m kind of busted up right now. Broke. I’m broke, Sullivan.” He looked at me. “And Walker is in no shape to do it.”
“No shape to do what?”
“Cut the damn thing out. You’re the only one here who has half a chance.”
