The 5th Wave (The Fifth Wave #1)(49)

Now I’m really confused. “It had nothing to do with Sammy.”

He looks up at me. “Sammy took the soldier’s hand. Sammy got on that bus. Sammy trusted. And now, even though I saved you, you won’t let yourself trust me.”

He grabs my hand. Squeezes it hard. “I’m not the Crucifix Soldier, Cassie. And I’m not Vosch. I’m just like you. I’m scared and I’m angry and I’m confused and I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do, but I do know you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say you’re human in one breath and a cockroach in the next. You don’t believe you’re a cockroach. If you believed that, you wouldn’t have turned to face the sniper on the highway.”

“Oh my God,” I whisper. “It was just a metaphor.”

“You want to compare yourself to an insect, Cassie? If you’re an insect, then you’re a mayfly. Here for a day and then gone. That doesn’t have anything to do with the Others. It’s always been that way. We’re here, and then we’re gone, and it’s not about the time we’re here, but what we do with the time.”

“What you’re saying makes absolutely no sense, you know that?” I feel myself leaning toward him, all the fight draining out of me. I can’t decide if he’s holding me back or holding me up.

“You’re the mayfly,” he murmurs.

And then Evan Walker kisses me.

Holding my hand against his chest, his other hand sliding across my neck, his touch feathery soft, sending a shiver that travels down my spine into my legs, which are having a hard time keeping me upright. I can feel his heart slamming against my palm and I can smell his breath and feel the stubble on his upper lip, a sandpapery contrast to the softness of his lips, and Evan is looking at me and I’m looking back at him.

I pull back just enough to speak. “Don’t kiss me.”

He lifts me into his arms. I seem to float upward forever, like when I was a little girl and Daddy flung me into the air, feeling as if I’d just keep going up until I reached the edge of the galaxy.

He lays me on the bed. I say, right before he kisses me again, “If you kiss me again, I’m going to knee you in the balls.”

His hands are incredibly soft, like a cloud touching me.

“I won’t let you just…” He searches for the right word. “…fly away from me, Cassie Sullivan.”

He blows out the candle beside the bed.

I feel his kiss more intensely now, in the darkness of the room where his sister died. In the quiet of the house where his family died. In the stillness of the world where the life we knew before the Arrival died. He tastes my tears before I can feel them. Where there would be tears, his kiss.

“I didn’t save you,” he whispers, lips tickling my eyelashes. “You saved me.”

He repeats it over and over, until we fall asleep pressed against each other, his voice in my ear, my tears in his mouth.

“You saved me.”

37

CASSIE, through the smudged window, shrinking.

Cassie, on the road, holding Bear.

Lifting his arm to help him wave good-bye.

Good-bye, Sammy.

Good-bye, Bear.

The road dust boiling up from the big black wheels of the bus, and Cassie shrinking into the brown swirl.

Good-bye, Cassie.

Cassie and Bear getting smaller and smaller, and the hardness of the glass beneath his fingers.

Good-bye, Cassie. Good-bye, Bear.

Until the dust swallows them, and he’s alone on the crowded bus, no Mommy no Daddy no Cassie, and maybe he shouldn’t have left Bear, because Bear had been with him since before he could remember anything. There had always been Bear. But there had always been Mommy, too. Mommy and Nan-Nan and Grandpa and the rest of his family. And the kids from Ms. Neyman’s class and Ms. Neyman and the Majewskis and the nice checkout lady at Kroger who kept the strawberry suckers beneath her counter. They had always been there, too, like Bear, since before he could remember, and now they weren’t. Who had always been there wasn’t anymore, and Cassie said they weren’t coming back.

Not ever.

The glass remembers it when he takes his hand away. It holds the memory of his hand. Not like a picture, more like a fuzzy shadow, the way his mother’s face is fuzzy when he tries to remember it.

Except Daddy’s and Cassie’s, all the faces he’s known since he knew what faces were are fading. Every face is new now, every face a stranger’s face.

A soldier walks down the aisle toward him. He’s taken off his black mask. His face is round, his nose small and dotted with freckles. He doesn’t look much older than Cassie. He’s passing out bags of gummy fruit snacks and juice boxes. Dirty fingers claw for the treats. Some of the children haven’t had a meal in days. For some, the soldiers are the first adults they’ve seen since their parents died. Some kids, the quietest ones, were found along the outskirts of town, wandering among the piles of blackened, half-burned bodies, and they stare at everything and everyone as if everything and everyone were something they’ve never seen before. Others, like Sammy, were rescued from refugee camps or small bands of survivors in search of rescue, and their clothes aren’t quite as ragged and their faces not quite as thin and their eyes not quite as vacant as the quiet ones’, the ones found wandering among the piles of the dead.