The Infinite Sea (The Fifth Wave #2)(79)

The shadow raised its arms high in the air and I knew—knew before I heard my name—that he’d found me again, keeper of the promise he couldn’t make, the one I had marked with my blood and who had marked me with his tears, a Silencer all right, my Silencer, stumbling toward me in the impossibly pure light of a late winter’s sunrise promising spring.

I handed my rifle to Dumbo. I left him. The golden light and the dark trees glistening with ice and the way the air smells on cold mornings. The things we leave behind and the things that never leave us. The world ended once. It will end again. The world ends, then the world comes back. The world always comes back.

I stopped a few steps from him. He stopped, too, and we regarded each other across an expanse wider than the universe, within a space thinner than a razor’s edge.

“My nose is broken,” I said. Damn that Dumbo. Made me self-conscious.

“My ankle’s broken,” he said.

“Then I’ll come to you.”