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.
He was not one of them. He was completely one of them. Wholly Other. Fully human.
He rolled onto his side. His back spasmed. Blood rushed into his mouth. He spat it out.
Onto his stomach. Then knees. Then hands. His elbows quivered, his wrists threatened to buckle under his own weight. Self-centered, stubborn, sentimental, childish, vain. I am humanity. Cynical, naïve, kind, cruel, soft as down, hard as tungsten steel.
I am humanity.
He crawled.
I am humanity.
He fell.
I am humanity.
He got up.
28
A LIFETIME LATER, from his hiding place beneath the highway overpass, Evan watched the dark-haired girl sprint across the hotel parking lot, cross the interstate access ramp, trot a few hundred yards north on Highway 68, then pause beside an SUV to look back at the building. He followed her gaze to a second-story window, where a shadow flitted for an instant, then was gone.
Mayfly.
The dark-haired girl vanished into the trees bordering the highway. Why she had left and where she was going were unknown. Perhaps the group was splitting up—it would increase the chance of survival a little—or perhaps she was scouting a more secure hiding place to ride out the winter. Whichever the case, he had the sense he’d found them just in time.
The dark-haired girl was one, leaving at least four inside, the ones he had seen manning the windows. He did not know if any of them had survived the explosion. He wasn’t even sure it had been Cassie’s shadow in the window.
Not that it mattered. He’d made a promise. He had to go in.
He couldn’t approach openly. The situation was complicated by too many unknowns. What if it wasn’t Cassie but a squad of 5th Wave soldiers cut off when the base blew—like the squad he’d left in Grace’s care? He’d be dead before he crossed a dozen feet. The risk was nearly as great even if it was Cassie and a group of survivors: They might drop him before they realized who he was.
Going in now, though, posed its own set of risks. He didn’t know how many there were inside. Didn’t know if he could manage two, much less four, heavily armed trigger-happy kids jacked up on adrenaline, ready to blow away anything that moved. The system that augmented his body had crashed. I’m fully human, he’d told Cassie. Now that was literally true.
He was still weighing the options when a tiny figure appeared in the parking lot. A child wearing 5th Wave fatigues. Not Sam—Sam had been dressed in the white jumpsuit of the underaged and newly processed—but young. Six or seven, he guessed. Following the same route as the dark-haired girl, even pausing by the same SUV to look back at the hotel. This time he saw no shadow in the window; whoever had been there was gone.
That made two. Were they abandoning the hotel one at a time? Tactically, it made some sense. Shouldn’t he simply wait, then, for Cassie to come out, rather than risk his life going in?
And the stars spun overhead, marking the time winding down.