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I roll my eyes. I’ve heard this shit before—from Evan Walker himself, when he realized I was bulling my way into a death camp to find my baby brother. Why must I always be the isle of crazy alone in an ocean of sensibility? The should to everybody else’s shouldn’t? The I-will to their better-nots?
“Staying here is suicide, too,” I argue. “So is running to nowhere. Anything we do now is suicide. We’re at the point in the story where we have to choose, Ringer—a meaningful death, or a senseless one. Besides,” I add, “he’d do it for us.”
“No,” Ben says quietly. “He would do it for you.”
“The base they’re taking him to is over a hundred miles away,” Ringer says. “Even if you reached it, you won’t reach it in time. Vosch will be finished with him and Evan will be dead.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that.”
“No, you say you know that, but you don’t really know that, just like you don’t know everything else you say you know, but we’re just supposed to believe it because, hell, you’re just brilliant little you.”
And Ben goes, “Huh?”
“Whatever we do,” Ringer says coolly to Ben, as if nothing I just said wasn’t a major-league smackdown, “staying is not an option. As soon as that chopper delivers its cargo, it’s coming back.”
“Cargo?” Ben asks.
“She means Evan,” I translate.
“Why would it . . . ?” Then he gets it. Ringer’s victims buried down the road. The chopper’s coming back to extract the strike team. “Oh.” He wipes the back of his hand across his mouth. “Crap.”
And I’m thinking, Hey. Chopper! and Ringer is watching me and thinking she knows what I’m thinking, which she does, but that doesn’t prove she’s always right.
“Forget it, Sullivan.”
“Forget what?” And right away I acknowledge my coyness: “You did it. Or at least you said you did it.”
“Did what?” Ben asks.
“That was different,” Ringer says.
“Different how?”
“Different in that the pilot was in on it. My ‘escape’ from Vosch wasn’t an escape; it was a test of the 12th System.”
“Well, we can pretend this is a test, too, if that helps.”
“Pretend what is a test?” Ben’s voice rises an octave in his frustration. “What the hell are you two talking about?”
Ringer sighs. “She wants to hijack the Black Hawk.”
Ben’s mouth drops open. I don’t know what or why it is, but when he’s around Ringer, the smart drains out of him like spaghetti water through a colander.
“What about him?” Ringer nods toward Sams. “He’s coming, too?”
“That’s your business?” I ask.
“Well, I’m not babysitting while you go all Don Quixote on this.”
“You know, making obscure literary references doesn’t impress me. And yes, I happen to know who Don Quixote is.”
“Okay, wait a minute,” Ben says. “He’s from The Godfather, right?” Straight-faced, so I’m not sure if he’s joking. Back in the day, there was serious talk about Ben becoming a Rhodes Scholar. No lie. “You’re gonna make Vosch an offer he can’t refuse?”
“Ben can stay with the kids,” I inform Ringer, as if I’ve thought it all out, as if the plan for rescuing Evan has been in the works for months. “We go, just you and me.”
She’s shaking her head. “Why would I do that?”
