“I found her camp. Abandoned. She kept a journal . . .”
“Ah. And that’s how you knew she planned to storm the base.”
“Yes.”
“Well, it all makes perfect sense, then. Did she say in her journal why she was storming the base?”
“Her brother . . . taken from a refugee camp to Wright-Patterson . . . she escaped . . .”
“That’s remarkable. Then she overcomes our defenses and destroys the entire command center. That’s even more remarkable. It borders on the unbelievable.”
She picked up the pan, slung the contents into the brush, and rose to her feet. She towered over him, a six-foot blond colossus. Her cheeks were flushed, perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the kiss.
“Rest,” she said. “You’re well enough to travel now. We’re leaving tonight.”
“Where’re we going?” Evan Walker asked.
She smiled. “My place.”
17
AT SUNSET, Grace killed the fire, slipped the backpack and rifle over her shoulder, and scooped Evan from the ground for the sixteen-mile hike to her station house on the southern outskirts of Urbana. She would keep to the highway to make better time. There was little risk in it at this stage of the game: She hadn’t seen a human being in weeks. Those she hadn’t killed had been taken by the buses or had taken refuge against the onslaught of winter. This was the in-between time. In another year, perhaps two, though no more than five, there would be no need for stealth, because there would be no more prey to stalk.
The temperature plunged with the sun. Ragged clouds raced across the indigo sky, driven by a north wind that toyed with her bangs and playfully flipped the collar of her jacket. The first stars appeared, the moon rose, and the road shone ahead, a silver ribbon twisting across the black backdrop of dead fields and empty lots and the gutted shells of houses long abandoned.
She stopped once to rest and drink and spread more salve over Evan’s burns.
“There’s something different about you,” she mused. “I can’t put my finger on it.” Putting her fingers all over him.
“I didn’t have an easy awakening,” he said. “You know that.”
She grunted softly. “You’re a brooder, Evan, and a very sore loser.” She wrapped him back up in the blanket. Ran her long fingers through his hair. Looked deeply into his eyes. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”
He said nothing.
“I felt it,” she said. “The first night, when I hauled you out of the wreckage. There’s a . . .” She searched for the right words. “A hidden room that wasn’t there before.”
His voice sounded hollow to him, empty as the wind. “Nothing is hidden.”
Grace laughed. “You should never have been integrated, Evan Walker. You feel far too much for them to be one of them.”
She picked him up as easily as a mother her newborn child. She lifted her face to the night sky and gasped. “I see her! Cassiopeia, the queen of the night.” She pressed her cheek against the top of his head. “Our hunt is over, Evan.”
18
GRACE’S STATION WAS an old, one-story wooden frame house on Highway 68, located at the exact center of her assigned six-square-mile patrol sector. Aside from boarding up the broken windows and repairing the exterior doors, she’d left the house as she found it. Family portraits on the walls, heirlooms and mementos too large to carry easily, smashed furniture and open drawers and the thousand pieces of the occupants’ lives deemed worthless by looters were scattered in every room. Grace did not bother to clean up the mess. When spring arrived and the 5th Wave rolled out, she would be gone.