The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(115)

There is a chair, a Silencer standing beside it, and strapped to the chair is my brother, Sammy, thick wires attached to his head.

“This is the future,” Vosch whispers. “The human animal bound, its death at our fingertips. And when you have finished the work that we’ve given you, we will press the execute button and your deplorable stewardship of this planet will come to an end.”

“You don’t have to do this!” I shout. The Silencer behind me puts a hand on my shoulder and squeezes hard. But not hard enough to keep me from jumping out of the chair. “All you have to do is implant us and download us into Wonderland. Won’t that tell you everything you want to know? You don’t have to kill him…”

“Cassie,” Ben says softly. “He’s going to kill him anyway.”

“You shouldn’t listen to him, young lady,” Vosch says. “He’s weak. He’s always been weak. You’ve shown more pluck and determination in a few hours than he has in his miserable lifetime.”

He nods to the Silencer, who yanks me back into the chair.

“I am going to ‘download’ you,” Vosch tells me. “And I am going to kill Sergeant Parish. But you can save the child. If you tell me who helped you infiltrate this base.”

“Won’t downloading me tell you that?” I ask. While I’m thinking, Evan is alive! And then I think, No, maybe he isn’t. He could have been killed in the bombing, vaporized like everything else on the surface. It could be that Vosch, like me, doesn’t know whether Evan’s alive or dead.

“Because someone helped you,” Vosch says, ignoring my question. “And I suspect that someone is not someone like Mr. Parish here. He—or they—would be someone more like…well, me. Someone who would know how to defeat the Wonderland program by hiding your true memories, the same method we have used for centuries to hide ourselves from you.”

I’m shaking my head. I have no idea what he’s talking about. True memories?

“Birds are the most common,” Vosch says. He’s absently running his finger over the button marked EXECUTE. “Owls. During the initial phase, when we were inserting ourselves into you, we often used the screen memory of an owl to hide the fact from the expectant mother.”

“I hate birds,” I whisper.

Vosch smiles. “The most useful of this planet’s indigenous fauna. Diverse. Considered benign, for the most part. So ubiquitous they’re practically invisible. Did you know they’re descended from the dinosaurs? There’s a very satisfying irony in that. The dinosaurs made way for you, and now, with the help of their descendants, you will make way for us.”

“No one helped me!” I screech, cutting off the lecture. “I did it all myself!”

“Really? Then how is it, at the precise moment you were killing Dr. Pam in Hangar One, two of our sentries were shot, another eviscerated, and a fourth hurled a hundred feet down from his post on the south watchtower?”

“I don’t know anything about that. I just came to find my brother.”

His face darkens. “There really is no hope, you know. All your daydreams and childish fantasies about defeating us—useless.”

I open my mouth and the words come out. They just come out.

“Fuck you.”

And his finger comes down hard on the button, like he hates it, like the button has a face and its face is a human face, the face of the sentient cockroach, and his finger the boot, stomping down.

86

I DON’T KNOW what I did first. I think I screamed. I know I also ripped free from the Silencer’s grip and lunged at Vosch with the intention of tearing his eyeballs out. But I don’t remember which came first, the scream or the lunge. Ben throwing his arms around me to hold me back, I know that came after the scream and the lunge. He threw his arms around me and pulled me back because I was focused on Vosch, on my hate. I didn’t even look through the mirror at my brother, but Ben had been looking at the monitor and the word that popped up when Vosch hit the execute button:

OOPS.

I whip around to the mirror. Sammy is still alive—crying buckets, but alive. Beside me, Vosch stands up so fast, the chair flies across the room and smacks against the wall.

“He’s hacked into the mainframe and overwritten the program,” he snarls at the Silencer. “He’ll cut the power next. Hold them here.” He yells at the man standing beside Sammy. “Secure that door! No one leaves until I get back.”

He slams out of the room. The lock clicks. No way out now. Or there is a way, the way I took the first time I was trapped in this room. I glance up at the grating. Forget it, Cassie. It’s you and Ben against two Silencers, and Ben’s hurt. Don’t even think about it.

No. It’s me and Ben and Evan against the Silencers. Evan is alive. And if Evan’s alive, we haven’t reached the end—the bottom of the human cup. The boot hasn’t crushed the roach. Not yet.

And that’s when I see it drop between the slats and tumble onto the floor, the body of a real cockroach, freshly squashed. I watch it fall in slow motion, so slow I can see the tiny bounce when it hits the floor.

You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie?

My eyes fly back to the grate, where a shadow flickers, like the flurry of a mayfly’s wings.

And I whisper to Ben Parish, “The one with Sammy—he’s mine.”