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“Cassie! Are you listening? At the equinox, the mothership will send a pod to extract Grace from the safe house . . .”
“Sullivan! Now!” Ben bellowed.
“If you can figure out a way to rig it . . .” He was pressing something into my stomach, but my hands were full. I watched wide-eyed as my little brother snatched the plastic baggie holding the bomb from Evan’s hand.
Then Evan Walker cupped my face in his hands and kissed me hard on the mouth.
“You can end it, Cassie. You. And that’s the way it should be. It should be you. You.”
Kissing me again, and my blood marking his face, his tears marking mine.
“I can’t make any promises this time,” he hurried on. “But you can. Promise me, Cassie. Promise me you’ll end it.”
I nodded. “I’ll end it.” And the promise a sentence handed down, a cell door slamming shut, a stone around my neck to carry me down to the bottom of an infinite sea.
48
I PAUSED FOR a half second at the stairway door, knowing I might be seeing him for the last time or, more accurately, for the second last time. Then the plunge into pitch dark, not unlike the first last time, and whispering to Megan to watch out for rat guts, and then into the lobby, where the boys who brought me to this party hung by the front doors, their bodies silhouetted in the dusky orange glow of the burning chopper. Fleeing through the main entrance was a brilliantly counterintuitive move, I thought. Grace probably assumed we were barricaded in a room upstairs and would Matrix-hop her way up a wall to the busted-out window on the other side of the building.
“Cassie,” Sam said in my ear. “Your nose is really big.”
“That’s because it’s broken.” Like my heart, kid. It’s a set.
Poundcake was no longer leaning against Ben with his arm around his neck. His whole big body was draped over Ben’s in a fireman’s carry. And Ben did not look like he was enjoying it.
“That isn’t going to work, you know,” I informed him. “You won’t get a hundred yards.”
Ben ignored me. “Bo, you’ve got Megan duty. Sam, you’re gonna have to climb down; your sister’s taking the point. I’ve got the rear.”
“I need a gun!” Sammy said.
Ben ignored him, too. “Stages. Stage One: the overpass. Stage Two: the trees on the other side of the overpass. Stage Three—”
“East,” I said. I set Sammy on the ground and pulled the crumpled map from my pocket. Ben was looking at me like I’d lost my mind. “We’re going here.” Pointing at the tiny square representing Grace’s safe house.
“Noooo, Sullivan. We’re going to the caverns to meet up with Ringer and Teacup.”
“I don’t care where we go, as long as it’s not Dubuque!” Dumbo cried.
Ben shook his head. “You’re killing it, Dumbo. Just killing it. Okay, here we go.”
We went. A light snow was falling, the tiny crystals ignited in the orange light spinning, and you could smell the oily stench of the fuel burning and feel the heat pressing down on your head, and I took the lead as Ben suggested—well, ordered—Sammy hanging on to a belt loop and Dumbo right behind with Megan, who hadn’t spoken a word, and who could blame her? She was in shock, probably. Halfway across the parking lot, nearing the strip of dirt that separated it from the interstate on-ramp, I glanced behind me in time to see Ben go down under the weight of his burden. I slung Sammy toward Dumbo and skidded across the slick pavement to Ben. On the roof of the hotel, I could see the mangled metal remains of the Black Hawk.
“I told you this wouldn’t work!” I whisper-yelled at him.
“I’m not leaving him . . .” Ben was on all fours, gasping, retching. His lips shone crimson in the firelight; he was coughing up blood.
Then Dumbo was standing beside me. “Sarge. Hey, Sarge . . . ?”
Something in Dumbo’s voice grabbed his attention. He looked up at Dumbo, who shook his head slowly: He’s not going to make it.
And Ben Parish slammed his open hand onto the frozen ground, arching his back and yelling incoherently, and I’m thinking, Oh God, oh God, not the time for an existential crisis. We’re done if he loses it. We are so done.
I knelt beside Ben. His face was contorted by pain and fear and rage, the anger rooted in the unchangeable, ever-present past, where his sister cried for him and he still abandoned her to death. He abandoned her but she would not abandon him. She would always be with him. She would be with him until he took his last breath. She was with him now, bleeding out a foot away, and there was nothing he could do to save her.
“Ben,” I said, running my fingers over the back of his head. His hair shimmered, dotted in crystalline snow. “It’s over.”
A shadow flitted past us, racing toward the hotel. I jumped up and took off after it, because the shadow was attached to my baby brother and he was hauling ass toward the front doors. I caught him and yanked him off the ground, and he commenced kicking and squirming and generally going berserk, and I was sure Dumbo was going to pop next, and three lunatics were too many for any person to manage.
