The Last Star (The 5th Wave, #3)(26)

“I checked on the kids,” he said, as if I’d asked if he’d checked on the kids.

“And?”

“They’re okay. Sleeping.”

“Who’s on the watch?”

He stared at me for a couple of uncomfortable seconds. Then he looked down at his hands. I looked, too. He was so perfectly put together when we met that I thought I’d lucked into the most narcissistic person left on the planet. It makes me feel more human, he told me, meaning grooming. Later, when I found out he wasn’t quite human, I thought I understood what he was getting at. Even later—and by even later I mean now—I realized cleanliness isn’t necessarily next to godliness, but it is damn near indistinguishable from humanness.

“It’ll be okay,” he said softly.

“No, it won’t,” I shot back. “Ben and Dumbo are going to die. You’re going to die.”

“I’m not going to die.” Leaving out Ben and Dumbo.

“How are you getting out of the mothership once you set the bombs?”

“The same way I got in.”

“The last time you took a ride in one of your little pods, you broke several bones and nearly died.”

“It’s a hobby,” he said with a crooked smile. “Nearly dying.”

I looked away from his hands. The hands that lifted me when I fell, held me when I was cold, fed me when I was hungry, healed me when I was hurt, washed me when I was covered in forest filth and blood. You’re going to destroy your entire civilization, and for what? For a girl. You would think a sacrifice like that would make me feel just a little bit special. It didn’t. It felt weird. Like one of us was batshit crazy and that person wasn’t me.

I couldn’t see a single romantic element in genocide, but maybe that’s just my lack of insight into the nature of love, having never been in love. Would I wipe out humanity to save Evan? Not likely.

Of course, there’s more than one kind of love. Would I kill everyone in the world to save Sam? That’s not an easy question to answer.

“Those times you nearly died, you were sort of protected, though, right?” I asked. “The technology that made you superhuman—which you said crashed on the way to the hotel. You won’t have that this time.”

He shrugged. There’s the aw-shucks thing I thought I missed. Seeing it again reminded me how far we’d traveled from the farmhouse, and I fought the urge to slap it off his face.

“What you’re going to do—it isn’t for me, or . . . it isn’t just for me, you get that, right?”

“There’s no other way to stop it, Cassie,” he said. Slingshotting back to his tormented-poet look.

“What about the way you mentioned right before the last time you almost died? Remember? Rigging Megan’s throat-bomb to blow it up.”

“Hard to do without the bomb,” he said.

“Grace didn’t have a stash hidden in the house somewhere?” Instead, she kept the place well-stocked with men’s aftershave. Postapocalyptic priorities.

“Grace’s assignment wasn’t to blow things up. It was to kill people.”

“And have sex with them.” I didn’t mean for that to come out—but I don’t mean to say about 80 percent of what I say.

Really, though, who cares if they had sex? It’s a silly thing to worry about when the fate of the planet hangs in the balance. Trivial. Unimportant. The hands that held me holding Grace. The body that warmed me warming hers. The lips that touched mine touching hers. It doesn’t matter, I don’t care, Grace is dead. I plucked at the sheets and wished I hadn’t said it.

“Grace lied. We never—”

“I don’t care, Evan,” I told him. “It’s not important. Anyway, Grace was a fantastically good-looking homicidal killing machine. Who could say no?”

He placed a hand over mine to still my plucking fingers. “I would tell you if we had.”

What a liar. I could fill the Grand Canyon with all the things he’s refused to tell me. I pulled my hand away and looked right into those chocolate-fondue-fountain eyes. “You’re a liar,” I said.

He surprised me by nodding. “I am. But not about that.”

I am? “What have you lied about?”

He shook his head. Silly human girl! “About who I really was.”

“And who is that exactly? You’ve told me what you were, but you’ve never said who you are. Who are you, Evan Walker? Where do you come from? What did you look like before you looked like nothing? What was your planet like? Did it look like ours? Were there plants and trees and rocks and did you live in cities and what did you do for fun and was there music? Music is universal like mathematics. Can you sing me a song? Sing me an alien song, Evan. Tell me what it was like growing up. Did you go to school or was knowledge just downloaded into your brain? What were your parents like? Did they have jobs like human parents? Brothers and sisters? Sports. Start anywhere.”

“We had sports.” With a tiny, indulgent smile.

“I don’t like sports. Start with music.”

“We had music, too.”

“I’m listening.” I folded my arms over my chest and waited.

His mouth opened. His mouth closed. I couldn’t tell if he was about to laugh or cry. “It isn’t that simple, Cassie.”