“I’m Evan,” he said.
“I’m Grace.”
They watched the giant wheel turn against the purple sky.
“Do you think we’ll miss it when it’s gone?” he asked.
“I won’t.” Her nose crinkled. “The smell of them is horrible. I can’t get used to it.”
“You’re the first I’ve met since . . .”
She nodded. “Me too. Do you think it’s an accident?”
“No.”
“I wasn’t coming today, but this morning when I woke up, there was this little voice. Go. Did you hear it?”
He nodded. “Yes.”
“Good.” She sounded relieved. “For three years I’ve been wondering if I’m crazy.”
“You’re not.”
“You don’t wonder?”
“Not anymore.”
She smiled archly. “Do you want to go for a walk?”
They wandered over to the deserted show grounds and sat on the bleachers. The first stars appeared. The night was warm, the air moist. Grace wore a pair of shorts and a sleeveless white blouse with a lace collar. Sitting close to her, Evan could smell licorice.
“This is it,” he said, nodding at the empty corral with its mangled floor of sawdust and manure.
“What?”
“The future.”
She laughed as if he’d made a joke. “The world ends. The world ends and the world begins again. It’s always been that way.”
“You’re never afraid of what’s coming? Never?”
“Never.” Hugging the stuffed tiger in her lap. Her eyes seemed to take on the color of whatever she looked at. Now she was looking up at the darkening sky, and her eyes were a bottomless black.
They spoke for a few minutes in their native language, but it was difficult and they gave up quickly. Too many words were unpronounceable. He noticed that she was much calmer afterward, and he realized it wasn’t the future that frightened her; it was the past, the fact that she feared the entity inside her body was a figment of a young human girl’s shattered mind. Meeting Evan validated her existence.
“You’re not alone,” he told her. He looked down and discovered her hand in his. One hand for him, the other for the tiger.
“That’s been the worst part,” she agreed. “Feeling as if you’re the only person in the universe. That the whole thing is here,” touching her chest, “and nowhere else.”
Years later, he would read something quite similar in the diary of another sixteen-year-old girl, the one he found and lost, found, then lost again:
Sometimes I think I might be the last human on Earth.
24
THE CAR’S UNDERCARRIAGE against his back. The cold asphalt against his cheek. The useless rifle clutched in his hand. He was trapped.
Grace had several options. He had two.
No. If there was any hope of keeping his promise, he had just one:
Cassie’s choice.
She had made a promise, too. A hopeless, suicidal promise to the one person on Earth who still mattered to her—mattered to her more than her own life. She stood up that day to face the faceless hunter because her death was nothing compared to the death of that promise. If there was any hope left, it lay in love’s hopeless promises.