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First published in the USA by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC 2016
Published simultaneously in Great Britain by Penguin Books 2016
Copyright © Rick Yancey, 2016
Design by Ryan Thomann
Cassiopeia photo copyright © iStockphoto.com/Manfred_Konrad
Cover design by Allied Integrated Marketing
The moral right of the author has been asserted
ISBN: 978-0-141-34593-2
The Girl Who Could Fly
Chapter 1: “I Will Sit with You”
Chapter 2
Chapter 3: Ringer
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
I: THE FIRST DAY
Chapter 6: Cassie
Chapter 7
Chapter 8: Zombie
Chapter 9
Chapter 10: Ringer
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13: Sam
II: THE SECOND DAY
Chapter 14: Zombie
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21: Cassie
Chapter 22
Chapter 23: Ringer
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26: Zombie
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29: Ringer
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
III: THE THIRD DAY
Chapter 35: Zombie
Chapter 36
Chapter 37: Sam
Chapter 38
Chapter 39: Ringer
Chapter 40: Evan Walker
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44: Squad One-Nine
Chapter 45: Ringer
Chapter 46: Cassie
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52: Zombie
Chapter 53
Chapter 54: Cassie
Chapter 55
Chapter 56: Ringer
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59: Cassie
Chapter 60: Ringer
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
IV: THE LAST DAY
Chapter 63: Evan Walker
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Chapter 67
Chapter 68
Chapter 69
Chapter 70: Cassie
Chapter 71
Chapter 72: Zombie
Chapter 73
Chapter 74
Chapter 75
Chapter 76
Chapter 77
Chapter 78
Chapter 79
Chapter 80: Cassie
Chapter 81
Chapter 82
Chapter 83
Chapter 84: Silencer
Chapter 85: Zombie
Chapter 86
Chapter 87
Chapter 88: Ringer
Chapter 89
Chapter 90
Chapter 91
Chapter 92
Chapter 93
Chapter 94
Chapter 95: Silencer
Chapter 96: Ringer
Chapter 97
Chapter 98: The Seven Billion Billion
Cassie
Ringer
Zombie
Cassie
Ringer
Zombie
Cassie
Zombie
Cassie
Zombie
Cassie
Zombie
Cassiopeia
Zombie
MARBLE FALLS
Ben
Marika
Evan Walker
Sam
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Praise for the 5th Wave trilogy
‘Remarkable … Just read it’ Entertainment Weekly
‘High adventure with mystery and heart’ Sunday Times
‘A modern sci-fi masterpiece … Should do for aliens what Twilight did for vampires’ USA Today
‘Wildly entertaining’ The New York Times Book Review
‘A cut above anything else in the genre’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Chilling … This apocalyptic, taut, alien invasion tale makes War of the Worlds look like a town-twinning visit from the burghers of Bremen’ Sun
‘Nothing short of amazing’ Kirkus Reviews
‘Utterly gripping’ Metro
‘The pace is relentless’ Heat
‘Packs real power’ SFX
‘ACTION-PACKED’ MTV.com
‘By turns heart-pounding and contemplative … The 5th Wave will thrill you, chill you, and challenge you to keep the pages turning fast enough’ Hypable
‘An epic sci-fi adventure about a terrifying alien invasion. You’ll read it in one sitting’ Bookseller
‘Borrow this one from your teen’s nightstand while they’re at school’ People Magazine
‘Yancey’s heartfelt, violent, paranoid epic, filled with big heroics and bigger surprises, is part War of the Worlds, part Starship Troopers, part Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and part The Stand … a sure thing for reviewers and readers alike’ Booklist (starred)
‘A twisty survival story’ Wall Street Journal
‘An electrifying page turner’ Kathy Reichs, The New York Times bestselling author
Books by Rick Yancey
THE 5TH WAVE
THE INFINITE SEA
THE LAST STAR
For Sandy
“The world ends. The world begins again.”
Let no one despair,
even though in the darkest night
the last star of hope may disappear.
—Friedrich Schiller
Many years ago, when he was ten, her father had ridden a big yellow bus to the planetarium.
There the ceiling above him exploded into a million glimmering shards of light. His mouth dropped open. His small fingers clamped down on the edge of the wooden bench upon which he sat. Over his head, pinpricks of white fire spun, pure as the day the Earth emerged as a blackened, pockmarked rock, an average planet orbiting an average star at the edge of an average galaxy in a limitless universe.
The Big Dipper. Orion. Ursa Major. The droning monotone of the astronomer’s voice. The children’s faces lifted up, open mouths, unblinking eyes. And the boy feeling infinitesimally small beneath the immensity of that artificial sky.
He would not forget that day.
Years later, when his daughter was very young, she would run to him, pudgy toddler legs wobbling, solid little arms lifted up, eyes burning with anticipation and joy, crying, Daddy, Daddy, stubby fingers spread wide, reaching for him, reaching for the sky.
And she would leap, a fearless launch into empty space, because he wasn’t just her father—he was Daddy. He would catch her; he would not let her fall.
Crying: Fly, Daddy, fly!
And up she would go, rocketing toward the immensity of the unbounded sky, arms open to embrace the infinite, her head thrown back, rushing to that place where terror and wonder meet, her squeals the distilled hilarity of being weightless and free, of being safe in his arms, of being alive.
Cassiopeia.
From that day at the planetarium, when her life lay fifteen years in the future, there was no doubt what name he would give her.
This is my body.
In the cave’s lowermost chamber, the priest raises the last wafer—his supply has been exhausted—toward the formations that remind him of a dragon’s mouth frozen in mid-roar, the growths like teeth glistening red and yellow in the lamplight.
The catastrophe of the divine sacrifice by his hands.
Take this, all of you, and eat of it …
Then the chalice containing the final drops of wine.
Take this, all of you, and drink from it …
Midnight in late November. In the caves below, the small band of survivors will remain warm and hidden with enough supplies to last until spring. No one has died of the plague in months. The worst appears to be over. They are safe here, perfectly safe.
With faith in your love and mercy, I eat your body and drink your blood …
His whispers echo in the deep. They clamber up the slick walls, skitter along the narrow passage toward the upper chambers, where his fellow refugees have fallen into a restless sleep.
Let it not bring me condemnation, but health in mind and body.
There is no more bread, no more wine. This is his final Communion.
May the body of Christ bring me to everlasting life.
The stale fragment of bread that softens on his tongue.
May the blood of Christ bring me to everlasting life.
The drops of soured wine that burn his throat.
God in his mouth. God in his empty stomach.
The priest weeps.
He pours a few drops of water into the chalice. His hand shakes. He drinks the precious blood commingled with water, then wipes clean the chalice with the purificator.
It is finished. The everlasting sacrifice is over. He dabs his cheeks on the same cloth he used to clean the chalice. The tears of man and the blood of God inseparable. Nothing new in that.
He wipes clean the paten with the cloth, then stuffs the purificator into the chalice and sets it aside. He pulls the green stole from his neck, folds it carefully, kisses it. He loved everything about being a priest. Loved the Mass most of all.
His collar is damp with sweat and tears and loose about his neck: He’s lost fifteen pounds since the plague struck, and abandoned his parish to make the hundred-mile journey to the caverns north of Urbana. Along the way he gained many followers—over fifty in all, though thirty-two died from the infection before reaching safety. As their deaths approached, he spoke the rite, Catholic, Protestant, or Jew, it didn’t matter: May the Lord in his love and mercy help you … Tracing a cross on their hot foreheads with his thumb. May the Lord who frees you from sin save you …
The blood that seeped from their eyes mixed with the oil he rubbed on their lids. And smoke rolled across open fields and hunkered in woods and capped over roads like ice over languid rivers in deep winter. Fires in Columbus. Fires in Springfield and Dayton. In Huber Heights and London and Fairborn. In Franklin and Middletown and Xenia. In the evenings the light from a thousand fires turned the smoke a dusky orange, and the sky sank to an inch above their heads. The priest shuffled through the smoldering landscape with one hand outstretched, pressing a rag over his nose and mouth with the other while tears of protest streamed down his face. Blood crusted beneath his broken nails, blood caked in the lines of his hands and in the soles of his shoes. Not much farther, he encouraged his companions. Keep moving. Along the way, someone nicknamed him Father Moses, for he was leading his people out of the obscurity of smoke and fire to the Promised Land of “Ohio’s Most Colorful Caverns!”
People were there, of course, to greet them when they arrived. The priest expected it. A cave does not burn. It is impervious to weather. Best of all, it’s easy to defend. After military bases and government buildings, caves were the most popular destinations in the aftermath of the Arrival.
Supplies had been gathered, water and nonperishables, blankets and bandages and medicines. And weapons, naturally, rifles and pistols and shotguns and many knives. The sick were quarantined in the welcome center aboveground, lying in cots arranged between the display shelves of the gift shop, and every day the priest visited them, spoke with them, prayed with them, heard their confessions, delivered Communion, whispered the things they wanted to hear: Per sacrosancta humanae reparationis mysteria … By the sacred mysteries of man’s redemption …
Hundreds would die before the dying was over. They dug a pit ten feet wide and thirty feet deep to the south of the welcome center to burn them. The fire smoldered day and night, and the smell of burning flesh had become so commonplace, they hardly noticed.
Now it’s November, and in the lowermost chamber the priest rises. He is not tall; still, he must stoop to avoid smacking his head into the ceiling or against the stone teeth that bristle from the roof of the dragon’s mouth.
The Mass is ended, go in peace.
He leaves behind the chalice and the purificator, the paten and his stole. They are relics now, artifacts from an age receding into the past at the speed of light. We began as cave dwellers, the priest thinks as he makes his way toward the surface, and to caves we have returned.
Even the longest journey is a circle, and history will always cycle back to the place where it began. From the missal: “Remember you are dust and unto dust you shall return.”
And the priest rises like a diver kicking toward the dome of the sky sparkling above the water.
Along the narrow passageway that winds gently upward between walls of weeping stone, the floor is as smooth as the lanes of a bowling alley. Only a few months before, schoolchildren on field trips marched in single file, trailing their fingers along the rock face, their eyes searching for monsters in the shadows that pooled in the crevices. They were still young enough to believe in monsters.
And the priest rising like a leviathan from the lightless deep.
The trail to the surface runs past the Caveman’s Couch and the Crystal King, into the Big Room, the main living area for the refugees, and finally into the Palace of the Gods, his favorite part of the caverns, where crystalline formations shine like frozen shards of moonlight and the ceiling sensually undulates like waves rolling in to shore. Here, close to the surface, the air thins, becomes drier, tinged with the smoke of the fires that still feed upon the world they left behind.
Lord, bless these ashes by which we show that we are dust.
Snatches of prayer run through his mind. Fragments of song. Litanies and blessings and the words of absolution, May God give you pardon and peace, and I absolve you from your sins … And from the Bible: “I went down to the roots of the mountains; to the land whose bars closed behind me forever.”
Incense burning in the censer. Soft spring sunlight shattered by stained glass. The creaking of the pews on Sunday like the hull of an ancient vessel far at sea. The stately measure of the seasons, the calendar that governed his life from the time he was an infant, Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter. He knows he loved the wrong things, the rituals and traditions, the pomp and foppery for which outsiders faulted the Church. He adored the form, not the substance; the bread, not the body.
It didn’t make him a bad priest. He was quiet and humble and faithful to his calling. He enjoyed helping people. These weeks in the cave had been some of the most fulfilling of his life. Suffering brings God to his natural home, the manger of terror and confusion, pain and loss, where he was born. Turn over the currency of suffering, the priest thinks, and you will see his face.
A watchman sits just inside the opening above the Palace of the Gods, his burly frame silhouetted against the spray of stars beyond him. The sky has been scrubbed clean by a stiff north wind auguring winter. The man wears a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead, and a worn leather jacket. He’s holding a pair of binoculars. A rifle rests in his lap.
The man nods a hello to the priest. “Where’s your coat, Father? It’s a cold one tonight.”
The priest smiles wanly. “I lent it to Agatha, I’m afraid.”
The man grunts his understanding. Agatha is the complainer of the group. Always cold. Always hungry. Always something. He lifts the binoculars to his eyes and scans the sky.
“Have you seen any more of them?” the priest asks. They spotted the first grayish-silver, cigar-shaped object a week before, hanging motionlessly above the caverns for several minutes before silently shooting straight up, dwindling to a pinprick scar in the vast blue. Another—or the same one—appeared two days later, gliding soundlessly over them until it dropped beneath the horizon. There was no question about the origin of these strange craft—the cave dwellers knew they weren’t terrestrial—it was the mystery of their purpose that frightened them.
The man lowers the binoculars and rubs his eyes. “What’s the matter, Father? Can’t sleep?”
“Oh, I don’t sleep much these days,” the priest says. Then he adds, “So much to do.” He doesn’t want the man to think he’s complaining.
“No atheists in foxholes.” The cliché hangs in the air like a rancid smell.
“Or in caves,” the priest says. Since they met, he has strained to know this man better, but he is a closed room, the door securely dead-bolted by anger and grief and the hopeless dread of the doomed living on borrowed time. For months there’s been no turning from it or hiding from it. For some, death is the midwife to faith. For others, it is faith’s executioner.
The man pulls a pack of gum from his breast pocket, carefully unwraps a piece, and folds it into his mouth. He counts the remaining sticks before slipping the pack back into his pocket. He does not offer any to the priest.
“My last pack,” the man says in explanation. He shifts his weight on the cold stone.
“I understand,” the priest says.
“Do you?” The man’s jaw moves with a hypnotic rhythm as he chews. “Do you really?”
The dry bread, the soured wine: The taste lingers on his tongue. The bread could have been broken; the wine could have been divided. He did not have to celebrate the Mass alone. “I believe that I do,” the little priest answers.
“I don’t,” the man says slowly and deliberately. “I don’t believe in a goddamned thing.”
The priest blushes. His soft, embarrassed laughter is like the patter of children’s feet up a long staircase. He touches his collar nervously.
“When the power died, I believed it would come back on,” the man with the rifle says. “Everybody did. The power goes out—the power comes back on. That’s faith, right?” He gnawed the gum, left side, right side, pushing the green knob back and forth with his tongue. “Then the news trickles in from the coasts that there are no coasts anymore. Now Reno is prime oceanfront property. Big deal; so what? There’ve been earthquakes before. There’ve been tsunamis. Who needs New York? What’s so special about California? We’ll bounce back. We always bounce back. I believed that.”
The watchman is nodding, staring at the night sky, at the cold, blazing stars. Eyes high, voice low. “Then people got sick. Antibiotics. Quarantines. Disinfectants. We put on masks and washed our hands until our skin peeled off. Most of us died anyway.”
And the man with the rifle watches the stars as if waiting for them to shake loose from the black and tumble to the Earth. Why shouldn’t they?
“My neighbors. My friends. My wife and kids. I knew that all of them wouldn’t die. How could all of them die? Some people will get sick, but most people won’t, and the rest will get better, right? That’s faith. That’s what we believed.”
The man pulls a large hunting knife from his boot and begins to clean the dirt from beneath his nails with its tip.
“This is faith: You grow up; you go to school. Find a job. Get married. Start a family.” Finishing the job on one hand, a nail for each rite of passage, then beginning on the other. “Your kids grow up. They go to school. They find a job. They get married. They start a family.” Scrape, scrape. Scrape, scrape, scrape. He pushes his hat back with the heel of the hand that wields the knife. “I was never what you’d call a religious person. Haven’t seen the inside of a church in twenty years. But I know what faith is, Father. I know what it is to believe in something. The lights go out, they come back on. The floodwaters roll in, they roll out again. Folks get sick, they get better. Life goes on. That’s true faith, isn’t it? Your mumbo-jumbo about heaven and hell, sin and salvation, throw it all out and you’re still left with that. Even your biggest church-bashing atheist has faith in that. Life will go on.”
“Yes,” the priest says. “Life will go on.”
The watchman bares his teeth. He jabs the knife toward the priest’s chest and snarls, “You haven’t heard a damn word I’ve said. See, this is why I can’t stand your kind. You light your candles and mumble your Latin spells and pray to a god who isn’t there, doesn’t care, or is just plain crazy or cruel or both. The world burns and you praise the asshole who either set it or let it.”
The little priest has raised his hands, the same hands that consecrated the bread and wine, as if to show the man that they are empty, that he means no harm.
“I don’t pretend to know the mind of God,” the priest begins, lowering his hands. Eyeing the knife, he quotes from the book of Job: “‘Therefore I have declared that which I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.’”
The man stares at him for a very long, very uncomfortable moment, absolutely still except for his jaw working the already tasteless knob of gum.
“I’m going to be honest with you, Father,” he says matter-of-factly. “I feel like killing you right now.”
The priest nods somberly. “I’m afraid that may happen. When the truth hits home.”
He eases the knife from the man’s shaking hand. The priest touches the man’s shoulder.
The man flinches but doesn’t pull away. “What is the truth?” the man whispers.
“This,” the little priest answers, and drives the knife deep into the man’s chest.
The blade is very sharp—it slides through the man’s shirt easily, gliding between the ribs before sinking three inches into the heart.
The priest pulls the man to his chest and kisses the top of his head. May God give you pardon and peace.
It is over quickly. The gum drops from the man’s slackened lips, and the priest picks it up and tosses it through the cave’s mouth. He eases the man onto the cold stone floor and stands up. The wet knife glimmers in his hand. The blood of the new and everlasting covenant …
The priest studies the dead man’s face, and his heart burns with rage and revulsion. The human face is hideous, unendurably grotesque. No need to hide his disgust anymore.
The little priest returns to the Big Room, following a well-worn path into the main chamber, where the others twitch and turn in restless sleep. All except Agatha, who leans against the back wall of the chamber, a small woman lost in the fur-lined jacket the little priest had lent her, her frizz of unwashed hair a cyclone of gray and black. Grime nestles in the deep crevices of her withered face, around a mouth bereft of dentures long since lost and eyes buried in folds of sagging skin.
This is humanity, the priest thinks. This is its face.
“Father, is that you?” Her voice is barely audible, a mouse’s squeak, a rat’s high-pitched cry.
And this, humanity’s voice.
“Yes, Agatha. It’s me.”
She squints into the human mask he has worn since infancy, obscured in shadow. “I can’t sleep, Father. Will you sit with me awhile?”
“Yes, Agatha. I will sit with you.”
He carries the remains of his victims to the surface two at a time, one under each arm, and throws them into the pit, dropping them down without ceremony before descending for another load. After Agatha, he killed the rest as they slept. No one woke. The priest worked quietly, quickly, with sure, steady hands, and the only noise was the whisper of cloth tearing as the blade sank home into the hearts of all forty-six, until his was the only heart left beating.
At dawn it begins to snow. He stands outside for a moment and lifts his face to a sky that is blank and gray. Snow settles on his pale cheeks. His last winter for a very long time: At the equinox, the pod will descend to return him to the mothership, where he’ll wait out the final cleansing of the human infestation by the ones they have trained for the task. Once on board the vessel, from the serenity of the void, he will watch as they launch the bombs that will obliterate every city on Earth, wiping clean the vestiges of human civilization. The apocalypse dreamed of by humankind since the dawn of its consciousness will finally be delivered—not by an angry god, but indifferently, as cold as the little priest when he plunged the knife into his victims’ hearts.
The snow melts on his upturned face. Four months until winter’s end. One hundred and twenty days until the bombs fall, then the unleashing of the 5th Wave, the human pawns they have conditioned to kill their own kind. Until then, the priest will remain to slaughter any survivors who wander into his territory.
Almost over. Almost there.
The little priest descends into the Palace of the Gods and breaks his fast.
Beside me, Razor whispered, “Run.”
His sidearm exploded beside my ear. His target was the smallest thing that is the sum of all things, his bullet the sword that severed the chain that bound me to her.
Teacup.
As Razor died, he lifted his soft, soulful eyes to mine and whispered, “You’re free. Run.”
I ran.
I smash through the watchtower window, the ground rushing up to meet me.
When I land on the tarmac, not a single bone will break. I will feel no pain. I have been enhanced by the enemy to withstand greater falls than this. My last fall began at five thousand feet. This one is cake.
I land, roll to my feet, and sprint around the tower, then down the runway toward the concrete barrier and the fence topped in razor wire. The wind screams in my ears. I am faster now than the fastest animal on Earth. The cheetah is a tortoise compared to me.
The sentries on the perimeter must see me, and the man in the watchtower, too, but no shots are fired, no order is given to take me down. I barrel toward the end of the runway like a bullet singing down the muzzle of a gun.
They can’t catch you. How can they ever catch you?
The processor embedded in my brain made the calculations before I even hit the ground, and has already relayed the information to the thousands of microscopic drones assigned to my muscular system; I don’t have to think about speed or timing or point of attack. The hub does it for me.
End of the runway: I leap. The ball of my foot lands on top of the concrete barrier for an instant, then pushes off to launch me toward the fence. The razor wire rushes toward my face. My fingers slip into the two-inch-wide gap between the coils and the top bar to execute a backward roll over the top. I fly over it feetfirst, back arched, arms outstretched.
I stick the landing and accelerate again to full speed, covering the hundred yards of open ground between the fence and the woods in less than four seconds. No bullets chase me. No chopper revs to life to follow me. The trees close behind me like a curtain being drawn, and my footing is sure on the slick, uneven ground. I reach the river, its water swift and black. My feet seem to barely break the surface as I cross.
On the other side, the woods give way to open tundra, unmarred miles stretching toward the northern horizon, a boundless wilderness in which I’ll be lost, undetected, unmolested.
Free.
I run for hours. The 12th System sustains me. It reinforces my joints and bones. It bolsters my muscles, gives me strength, endurance, nullifies my pain. All I have to do is surrender. All I have to do is trust, and I will endure.
VQP. By the light of a hundred bodies burning, Razor carved those three letters into his arm. VQP. He conquers who endures.
Some things, he told me the night before he died, down to the smallest of things, are worth the sum of all things.
Razor understood that I would never leave Teacup to suffer while I escaped. I should have known he was going to save me by betraying me: He’d been doing it from the beginning. He killed Teacup so I could live.
The featureless landscape extends in every direction. The sun falls toward the edge of the cloudless sky. In the bitter wind biting my face, my tears freeze as they fall. The 12th System can protect you from the pain that afflicts your body, but it’s helpless against the pain that crushes your soul.
Hours later, I’m still running as the last light leeches from the sky and the first stars appear. And there is the mothership hovering on the horizon, like a lidless green eye staring down. No running from it. No hiding. It is unreachable, unassailable. Long after the last human being crumbles to a handful of dust, it will be there, implacable, impenetrable, unknowable: God has been dethroned.
And I run on. Through a primordial landscape unscarred by any human thing, the world as it was before trust and cooperation unleashed the beast of progress. The world is circling back now to what it was before we knew it. Paradise lost. Paradise returned. I remember Vosch’s smile, sad and bitter. A savior. Is that what I am?
Running toward nothing, running away from nothing, running across an empty landscape of flawless white beneath the immensity of the indifferent sky, I see it now. I think I understand.
Reduce the human population to a sustainable number, then crush the humanity out of it, since trust and cooperation are the real threats to the delicate balance of nature, the unacceptable sins that drove the world to the edge of a cliff. The Others concluded that the only way to save the world was to annihilate civilization. Not from without, but from within. The only way to annihilate human civilization was to change human nature.
I continued running into the wilderness. There was still no pursuit. As the days passed, I worried less about choppers swooping in and strike teams dropping down and more about staying warm and finding the fresh water and protein I needed to sustain the fragile host of the 12th System. I dug holes to hide in, built lean-tos to sleep under. I honed tree branches into spears and hunted rabbit and moose and ate their meat raw. I didn’t dare make a fire, even though I knew how; at Camp Haven the enemy had taught me. The enemy had taught me everything I needed to know about survival in the wilderness, then gave me alien technology that helped my body adapt to it. He taught me how to kill and how to avoid being killed. He taught me what human beings had forgotten after ten centuries of cooperation and trust. He taught me about fear.
Life is a circle bound by fear. The fear of the predator. The fear of the prey. Without fear, life would not exist. I tried to explain that to Zombie once, but I don’t think he understood.
I lasted forty days in the wilderness. And, no, the symbolism wasn’t lost on me.
I could have lasted longer. The 12th System would have sustained me well past a hundred years. Queen Marika, the lone, ancient huntress, a soulless husk gnawing on the dried bones of dead animals, uncontested sovereign of a meaningless domain, until the system finally collapsed and her body fell apart or was devoured by scavengers, her bones scattered like unread runes in an abandoned landscape.
I went back. By that point, I realized why they weren’t coming.
Vosch was two moves ahead of me; he always had been. Teacup was dead now, but I was still bound to a promise I never made to a person who was probably dead, too. But probability had become meaningless.
He knew I couldn’t abandon Zombie, not when there was a chance I could save him.
And there was only one way to save him; Vosch knew that, too.
I had to kill Evan Walker.
