He saw her at midafternoon on the second day, a shadow among shadows, as he gathered more wood for the fire. Fifty yards into the trees, holding a high-powered sniper’s rifle, a bloody bandage wrapped around her hand, another around her neck. In the subzero air, her voice seemed to carry into the infinite.
“Why didn’t you finish me, Evan?”
He didn’t answer at first. He continued gathering kindling for the beacon. Then he said, “I thought I did.”
“No. You couldn’t have thought that.”
“Maybe I’m sick of murder.”
“What does that mean?”
He shook his head. “You wouldn’t understand.”
“Who is Cassiopeia?”
He rose to his full height. The light was weak in the trees beneath a sheet of iron-gray clouds. Even so, he could see the cynical set of her lips and the pale blue fire of her eyes.
“The one who stood up when anyone else would have stayed down,” Evan said. “The one I couldn’t stop thinking about before I even knew her. The last one, Grace. The last human being on Earth.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time. He remained. She remained.
“You’re in love with a human.” Her voice was full of wonder. And then the obvious: “That’s not possible.”
“We used to think the same about immortality.”
“It would be like one of them falling in love with a sea slug.” Smiling now. “You’re mad. You’ve gone insane.”
“Yes.”
He turned his back to her, inviting the bullet. He was mad, after all, and madness came with its own armor.
“It can’t be that!” she shouted after him. “Why won’t you tell me what’s really going on?”
He stopped. The kindling clattered to the frozen ground. The crutch toppled from his side. He turned his head but did not turn around.
“Take cover, Grace,” he said softly.
Her finger twitched on the trigger. Normal human eyes might have missed it. Evan’s did not. “Or—what?” she demanded. “You’ll attack me again?”
He shook his head. “I’m not going to attack you, Grace. They are.”
She cocked her head at him, like the bird in the tree when he awakened in her camp.
“They’re here,” Evan said.
The first bullet struck her upper thigh. She rocked backward but remained upright. The next round punched into her left shoulder and the rifle slipped from her hand. The third round, most likely from a second shooter, exploded in the tree directly beside him, missing his head by millimeters.
Grace dove to the ground.
Evan ran.
27
RAN WAS AN EXAGGERATION. More like a frantic hop, swinging his bad leg wide to keep most of his weight on the good one, and each time his heel hit the ground, pinwheels of bright light exploded in his vision. Past the smoldering campfire, the beacon that had burned for two days, the sign he’d hung in the woods, Here we are! Snatching the rifle from the ground in stride; he had no intention of standing his ground. Grace would draw their fire—a patrol of at least two recruits, perhaps more. He hoped more. More would keep Grace busy for a while.
How far? Ten miles? Twenty? He wouldn’t be able to maintain this pace, but as long as he kept moving, he should be close to the hotel by dawn the next day.
He could hear the firefight behind him. Sporadic pops, not continuous fire, which meant that Grace was being methodical. The soldiers would be wearing the eyepieces, evening the playing field a bit. Not much, but a bit.
He abandoned any attempt at stealth and hit the highway, loping down the center of the road, a solitary figure under the immensity of a leaden sky. A murder of crows a thousand strong whipped and wheeled over him, heading north. He kept moving, grunting with pain, every stride a lesson, every jolting footfall a reminder. His temperature soared, his lungs burned, his heart slammed in his chest. The friction from the clothes tore open the delicate scabs and soon he was bleeding. Blood plastered his shirt to his back, soaked through the jeans. He was pushing it, he knew. The system installed to maintain his life past all human endurance could crash.
He collapsed when the sun did beneath the dome of the sky, a slow-motion stumbling kind of fall, hitting shoulder first and rolling to the edge of the road, where he came to rest flat on his back, arms spread wide, numb from the waist down, shaking uncontrollably, burning hot in the bitter air. Darkness rolled over the face of the Earth, and Evan Walker tumbled down to the lightless bottom, to a hidden room that danced in light and her face the source of that light, and he had no explanation for it, how her face illumed the lightless place inside. You’re mad. You’ve gone insane. He’d thought so, too. He fought to keep her alive while every night he left her to kill the rest. Why should one live though the world itself will perish? She illumined the lightless—her life the lamp, the last star in a dying universe.
I am humanity, she had written. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.
He must get up. If he can’t, the light will go out. The world will be consumed by the crushing dark. But the totality of the atmosphere pushed him down and held him under, five quadrillion tons of bone-breaking force.
The system had crashed. Taxed past its limits, the alien technology installed inside his human body when he was thirteen had shut down. There was nothing to sustain or protect him now. Burned and broken, his human body was no different from his former prey’s. Fragile. Delicate. Vulnerable. Alone.