The Last Star (The 5th Wave, #3)(27)

“I’m not expecting performance quality. I can’t carry a tune, either, but that never kept me from lighting up a little Beyoncé.”

“Who?”

“Oh, come on. You gotta know who she was.”

He shook his head. Maybe he didn’t grow up on a farm but under a rock. Then I thought it would be a little odd for a ten-thousand-year-old superbeing to have his finger on the pulse of pop culture. Still, we’re talking about Beyoncé!

He’s even weirder than I thought.

“Everything is different. Structurally, I mean.” He pointed at his mouth, stuck out his tongue. “I can’t even pronounce my own name.” For a moment, the pathos was so thick, it almost snuffed out the lamp.

“Then hum something. Or whistle. Could you whistle or didn’t you have lips?”

“None of that matters anymore, Cassie.”

“You’re wrong. It matters a lot. Your past is what you are, Evan.”

Tears welled in his eyes. It was like watching chocolate melt. “God, Cassie, I hope not.” He lifted his freshly scrubbed hands, with their trimmed and buffed nails, toward me. The hands that held the gun that slaughtered innocent people before he almost murdered me. “If the past is what we are . . .”

I might have pointed out that we’ve all done things we aren’t proud of, but that was too flippant. Even for me.

Damn it, Cassie. Why were you forcing him to think about that? I was so obsessed with the past I didn’t know about that I forgot the one I did: To save the ones he had come to destroy, Evan Walker the Silencer was planning to silence an entire civilization—his civilization—forever.

No, Ben Parish, I thought. Not for a girl. For the past he can’t escape. For the seven billion. Your little sister, too.

Before I knew what was happening or even how it happened, I was holding him with hands that had never comforted him, never lifted him up, never found him when he was lost. I was the taker, the recipient, always; from the moment he pulled me from that snowbank, I have been his charge, his mission, his cross. Cassie’s pain, Cassie’s fear, Cassie’s anger, Cassie’s despair. These have been the nails that impaled him.

I stroked his damp hair. I rubbed his arched back. I pressed his smooth, sweet-smelling face into my neck, and his tears were warm against my skin. He whispered something that sounded like Mayfly.

Heartless bitch would have been more accurate.

“I’m sorry, Evan,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

I bowed my head; he raised his. I kissed his wet cheek. Your pain, your fear, your anger, your despair. Give them to me, Evan. I’ll carry them for a while.

He reached up and ran his fingertips lightly over my lips, moist with his tears.

“‘The last person on Earth,’” he murmured. “Do you remember when you wrote that?”

I nodded. “Stupid.”

He shook his head. “I think that’s what did it. When I read that. ‘The last person on Earth’—because I felt the same way.”

My hands were mauling that old OSU shirt. It was very maulable. That’s a good word, maulable. It applies to so many things.

“You’re not coming back,” I said, because he couldn’t say it.

His fingers combed through my hair. I shivered. Don’t do that, you bastard. Don’t touch me like you’ll never touch me again. Don’t look at me like you’ll never see me again. I shut my eyes. Our lips touched.

The last person on Earth. With my eyes closed, I could see her walking down a wooded path in Vermont, a place she has never been and will never go, and the leaves that embrace the trail sing arias of bright red and gold. And there is a big dog named Pericles running ahead of her in that self-important way of dogs, and she has everything she ever wanted, this girl—no, this woman—nothing left behind, nothing left undone. She traveled the world and wrote books and took lovers and broke hearts. She didn’t allow life just to happen to her. She punched and pummeled and beat the living shit out of it. She mauled it.

His breath hot in my ear. I’m clawing at his chest, digging my nails into his skin, the hungry lioness with her catch. Resistance is futile, Walker. I’ll never take that path in the golden woods or own a dog named Pericles or travel the world. There’ll be no recognition of a life well-lived, no street named after me, no difference in the world because I once occupied it. My life is a catalog of the undone and the never-will-be-done. The Others stole all of my unmade memories, but I won’t let them steal this one.

My hands roamed his body, an undiscovered country, which henceforth I shall call Evanland. Hills and valleys, desert plains and forest glens, the landscape pockmarked with the scars of battle, crisscrossed by fault lines and unexpected vistas. And I am Cassie the Conquistador: The more territory I conquer, the more I want.

His chest heaved: a subterranean quake that rose to the surface like a tsunamic wave. His eyes were wide and wet and filled with something that closely resembled fear.

“Cassie . . .”

“Shut up.” My mouth surveying the valley beneath his rolling chest.

His fingers entangled now in my hair. “We shouldn’t.”

I almost laughed. Well, the shouldn’t list is awfully long, Evan. I scored my teeth across his stomach. The land beneath my tongue quivered, shock and aftershock.