The Last Star

by Rick Yancey

  He stares at his big sister’s face for a long, silent moment. Memorize it, Sams. Study every bruised, scratched-up, scarred, crooked inch of it. So you don’t forget. So you never forget. Remember my face no matter what. No. Matter. What.

  “That’s crazy, Cassie,” he says, and for an instant—and only an instant—the little boy is back, and I see in his now-face his then-face, hysterical with wonder and laughter, chasing rainbows.

  60

  RINGER

  I HOP DOWN from the chopper. Zombie watches me sling the rucksack over my shoulder and says, “All done?”

  “Done.”

  “How many you got left?” Nodding at the bag.

  “Five.”

  He frowns. “Think it’ll be enough?”

  “It’ll have to be. So, yes.”

  “Time to go, then,” he says.

  “Time to go.”

  Our eyes meet. He knows what I’m thinking. “I won’t make that promise,” he says.

  “You can’t come after me, Zombie.”

  “I won’t make that promise,” he says again.

  “And you can’t stay here. After the mothership drops the bombs, head south. Use the trackers I gave you. They won’t mask you from IR or hide you from Silencers, but—”

  “Ringer.”

  “I’m not finished.”

  “I know what to do.”

  “Remember Dumbo. Remember what coming after me cost. Some things you have to let go, Zombie. Some things—”

  He grabs my face in both his hands and kisses me hard on the mouth.

  “One smile,” he whispers. “One smile and I’ll let you go.”

  My face in his hands and my hands on his hips. His forehead touching mine and the stars turning over us and the Earth beneath us, and time slipping, slipping.

  “It wouldn’t be real,” I tell him.

  “At this point, I don’t care.”

  I push him away. Gently. “I still do.”

  61

  THE BOMBS HAVE BEEN LOADED. Time to load Bob.

  “You think I’m not ready to die?” he asks me as I escort him to his seat.

  “I know you’re not.”

  I strap him in. Through the open hatch, I can see Sullivan with Zombie, and she’s trying very hard to stay composed. Cassie Sullivan is sentimental and immature and self-absorbed beyond belief, but even she knows we’re crossing a threshold that we can’t come back from.

  “No plan,” she whispers to Zombie. She doesn’t want me to hear her and I don’t really want to. Vosch’s gift is a curse, too. “Nothing fated.”

  “No meant-to-be,” Zombie says.

  No plan. Nothing fated. No meant-to-be. Like a catechism or an affirmation of faith—or faith’s opposite.

  She rises on her toes and kisses his cheek. “You know what I’m gonna say now.”

  Zombie smiles. “He’ll be fine, Cassie.” He grabs her hand and squeezes hard. “With my life.”

  Her response is immediate and fierce. “Not with your life, Parish. With your death.”

  She notices me over his shoulder and pulls her hand away.

  I nod. It’s time. I turn to our one-eyed pilot. “Boot her up, Bob.”

  62

  THE GROUND RECEDES. Zombie dwindles, becomes a black dot against gray earth. The road swivels to the right like the second hand of the terrestrial clock, marking the time that’s lost, the time that cannot be taken back. Turning north, climbing, the explosion of countless stars, and the burning center of the galaxy a backdrop for the mothership glowing phosphorescent green, its belly full of the bombs that will erase the last remaining footprint of civilization. How many cities in the world? Five thousand? Ten? I don’t know, but they do. In less than three hours, in the utter silence of the void, the bay doors will slide open and thousands of guided missiles carrying warheads no larger than a loaf of bread will vomit forth. A single orbit around the planet. After ten centuries, all we had built will be gone in a day.

  The debris will settle. Rains will bathe the scorched and barren ground. Rivers will revert to their natural course. Forests and meadows and marsh and grasslands will reclaim what was cut and razed, filled and leveled and buried beneath tons of asphalt and concrete. Animal populations will explode. Wolves will return from the north and herds of bison, thirty million strong, will again darken the plains. It will be as if we never were, paradise reborn, and there is something ancient inside me, buried deep in the memory of my genes, that rejoices.

  A savior? Vosch asked me. Is that what I am?

  Across the aisle, Sullivan is watching me. She looks so small in that oversized uniform, like a little kid playing dress-up. How odd we ended up together like this. She disliked me from the moment she laid eyes on me. About her, I just thought there wasn’t much there there. I’d known a lot of girls like Cassie Sullivan, shy but arrogant, timid but impulsive, naïve but serious, sensitive but flippant. Feelings matter to her more than facts, particularly the fact that her mission is a futile one.

  Mine is hopeless. Both are suicidal. And neither is avoidable.

  My headset crackles. It’s Bob. “We’ve got company.”

  “How many?”

  “Um. Six.”

  “I’m coming up.”

  Sullivan starts when I unbuckle. I pat her shoulder on my way to the copilot’s seat. It’s okay. We were expecting this.

  Up front, Bob points out the incoming choppers on his screen.

  “Orders, boss?” With only a hint of sarcasm. “Engage or evade, or you want me to set her down?”

  “Hold course. They’re going to hail—”

  “Wait. They’re hailing us.” He listens. I have a visual on them now, dead ahead, flying in attack formation. “Okay,” he says, turning to me. “Three guesses. First two don’t count.”

  “They’re ordering us to land.”

  “Now it’s my turn: ‘Up yours.’ Right?”

  I shake my head. “Say nothing. Keep flying.”

  “You do realize they’ll shoot us down, right?”

  “Just let me know when they’re in range.”

  “Oh, so that’s the plan. We’re shooting them down. All six of them.”

  “My bad, Bob. I meant let me know when we’re in range. What’s our speed?”

  “A hundred and forty knots. Why?”

  “Double it.”

  “I can’t double it. Max is one-ninety.”

  “Then max it. Same heading.” Right down your throats, here we come.

  We leap forward; a shiver ripples down the chopper’s skin; the engines howl; the wind screams in the hold. After a couple of minutes, even Bob’s unenhanced eye can see the lead chopper coming straight at us.

  “Ordering us down again,” Bob yells. “In range in thirty!”

  “What’s going on?” Sullivan’s head pokes between us. Her mouth drops open when she focuses on what’s bearing down.

  “Twenty!” Bob calls.

  “Twenty what?” she shouts.

  They’ll pull up, I’m sure of it. Pull up or break formation to let us pass. They won’t shoot us down, either. Because of the risk. The risk is the key, Vosch told me. By now he knows about the dead strike team and the commandeered chopper. Constance wouldn’t have done that and Walker’s been captured. That leaves just one person who could have pulled off something like this: his creation.

  “Ten seconds!”

  I close my eyes. The hub, my ever-faithful companion, shuts down my senses, plunging me into that space without sound, without light.

  I’m coming, you son of a bitch. You wanted to create a human without humanity. Now you’re going to get one.

  63

  EVAN WALKER

  THE ROOM into which they threw him was small, bare, and very cold. When they pulled off the hood coverin
g his head, the severity of the light blinded him. Instinctively, he covered his eyes.

  One of his captors demanded his clothes. He stripped down to his briefs. No, those too. He dropped the shorts and kicked them toward the doorway, where the two boys wearing camouflage stood. One of them—the younger one—giggled.

  They stepped out of the room. The door clanged shut. The cold and the silence and the blaring light were intense. He looked down and saw a large drain in the center of the tiled floor. He looked up, and as if looking up was the signal, water burst from the overhead sprayers.

  He staggered back against the wall and covered his head with his hands. The cold bored into him, through skin to muscle to bone to marrow, until his knees buckled and he sank to the floor, head balanced on his upraised knees, arms wrapped around his legs. A disembodied voice boomed in the tiny space. “STAND. UP.” He ignored it.

  Instantly, the water changed from freezing cold to scalding hot, and Evan leapt to his feet, mouth hanging open in shock and pain. The blazing light cut through the steaming mist and splintered into countless rainbows that bobbed and spun, radiant against the colorless tile. The spray turned cold again, then abruptly stopped.

  He leaned against the wall, gasping, and the voice boomed, “DON’T TOUCH THE WALL. STAND WITH YOUR FEET TOGETHER AND YOUR HANDS AT YOUR SIDES.”

  He pushed off from the wall. Never, not even on the bitterest winter day on the farm when the wind roared across the fields and tree branches broke under the weight of ice, never had he been this cold. This cold was a living thing, a beast with his body clamped between its jaws, and those jaws were slowly crushing him. Every instinct told him to move; physical exertion would increase his blood pressure, raise his heart rate, speed warmth to his extremities.

  “DON’T MOVE.”

  He couldn’t concentrate. His thoughts spun like the uncountable rainbows let loose by the spray. Closing his eyes might help.

  “DON’T CLOSE YOUR EYES.”

  The cold. He imagined the water on his naked body freezing solid, ice crystals forming in his hair. He will go into hypothermic shock. His heart will stop. His hands balled into fists and he dug his nails into his palms. The pain will focus his mind. Pain always does.

  “OPEN YOUR HANDS. OPEN YOUR EYES. DON’T MOVE.”

  He obeyed. If he did everything they said, followed every order, complied with every demand, they would have no excuse to use the one weapon for which he had no defense.

  He would bear any burden, endure any hardship, suffer any torment if that suffering added a single moment to her life.

  He had been willing to sacrifice an entire civilization for her sake. His own life was infinitely small and meaningless, the costless price. He always knew, from the day he found her half buried in the snow, what saving her meant. What loving her meant. The cell door slamming shut, the death sentence handed down.

  But they had not brought him to this room of cold and shattered light to kill him.

  That would come later.

  After they had broken his body and crushed his will and dissected his mind down to the last synapse.

  The undoing of Evan Walker had begun.

  64

  HOURS PASSED. His body grew numb. He seemed to float inside his own insensate skin. The white wall in front of him stretched to infinity; he was floating in an endless nothingness, and his thoughts became fragmented. His mind, starved for stimuli, flung out random images from his childhood, Christmases with his human family, sitting with his brothers on the front porch, squirming in the pew at church. And much older scenes, from a different life: the breathtaking sunsets of a failing star, skimming over mountain ranges three times the height of the Himalayas in silver fliers, cresting a hill and seeing beneath him a valley devoid of life, the crop destroyed by the ultraviolet poison of their dying sun.

  If he closed his eyes, the voice screamed at him to open them. If he swayed, the voice screamed for him to stand still.

  But it was only a matter of time before he collapsed.

  He didn’t remember falling. Or the voice screaming at him to get up. One moment he was upright, the next he was curled into a ball in a back corner of the white room. He had no idea how much time had passed—or if any had passed at all. Time did not exist in the white room.

  He opened his eyes. A man was standing in the doorway. Tall, athletic, with deep-set eyes of striking blue, wearing a colonel’s uniform. He knew this man, though they had never met. Knew his face and the face behind the face. Knew his given name and knew his human name. He had never seen him before; he had known him for ten thousand years.

  “Do you know why I’ve brought you here?” the man asked him.

  Evan’s mouth opened. His lips cracked and began to bleed. His tongue moved clumsily; he could not feel it.

  “Betrayed.”

  “Betrayed? Oh no, quite the opposite. If there is one word to describe you, it is devoted.” He stepped to one side and a woman wearing a white smock wheeled a gurney into the room. Two soldiers followed. They scooped him from the floor and dumped him onto the gurney. Above him, a single drop of water clung to a sprayer nozzle. He watched it quiver there, unable to look away. A cuff was wrapped around his arm; he didn’t feel it. A thermometer was run across his forehead; he didn’t feel it.

  A bright light was shone in his eyes. The woman probed his naked body, pressing on his stomach, massaging his neck and pelvis, and her hands were deliciously warm.

  “What is my name?” the colonel asked.

  “Vosch.”

  “No, Evan. What is my name?”

  He swallowed. He was very thirsty. “It can’t be pronounced.”

  “Try.”

  He shook his head. It was impossible. Their language had evolved as a result of a very different anatomy. Vosch might as well ask a chimpanzee to recite Shakespeare.

  The woman in the white smock with the warm hands slid a needle into his arm. His body relaxed. He wasn’t cold or thirsty anymore, and his mind was clear.

  “Where are you from?” Vosch asked.

  “Ohio.”

  “Before that.”

  “Can’t be pronounced—”

  “Never mind the name. Tell me where.”

  “In the constellation Lyra, the second planet from the dwarf star. The humans discovered it in 2014 and named it Kepler 438b.”

  Vosch smiled. “Of course. Kepler 438b. And of all places from which you could choose, why the Earth? Why did you come here?”

  Evan turned his head to look at the man. “You already know the answer. You know all the answers.”

  The colonel smiled. His eyes remained hard, though, and humorless. He turned to the woman. “Get him dressed. It’s time for Alice to take a trip down the rabbit hole.”

  65

  THEY BROUGHT HIM a blue jumpsuit and a pair of flimsy white shoes. He told the soldiers watching him, “It’s a lie. What he’s told you. He’s like me. He’s using you to murder your own kind.”

  The boys said nothing. They nervously caressed the triggers of their guns.

  “The war you’re about to wage isn’t real. You’ll be killing innocent people, survivors like you, until the last one falls and then we will kill you. You’re participating in your own genocide.”

  “Yeah, well, you’re a fucking piece of infested horseshit,” the younger boy blurted out. “And when the commander’s done with you, he’s giving you to us.”

  Evan sighed. There was no breaking through the lie because accepting the truth would break them.

  Vices are virtues now, and virtues vices.

  Out of the room, down a long corridor, then descending three flights of stairs to the lowest level. Another long corridor, turning right into a third that spanned the length of the base, passing door after unmarked door, walls of gray cinder block and the sterile glow of fluorescent bulbs. Here
night never fell; here the light was everlasting.

  They came to the last door at the end of the gray tunnel. The hundreds of doors he had passed had been white; this door was green. It swung open as they approached.

  Inside the room was a reclining chair with straps on the arms and the footrest. An array of monitors and a keyboard. A technician was waiting for him, blank-faced, standing at attention.

  And Vosch.

  “You know what this is,” he said.

  Evan nodded. “Wonderland.”

  “And what might I expect to find there?”

  “Very little that you don’t already know.”

  “If I knew what I needed to know, I wouldn’t have gone to so much trouble to bring you here.”

  The technician strapped him into the chair. Evan closed his eyes. He knew the uploading of his memories would be physically painless. He also knew it could be psychologically devastating. The human brain has a marvelous capacity to screen and sort experience, protecting itself against the unbearable. Wonderland laid bare experience without the brain’s interference, extracting life’s record with no interpretation of the data. Nothing in context, no cause and effect, life unfiltered, without the brain’s gift of rationalization, denial, and creating convenient gaps.

  We remember our lives. Wonderland forces us to relive them.

  It lasted two minutes. Two very long minutes.

  From the disaster of silence and light that followed, Vosch’s voice: “There is a flaw in you. You know this. Something has gone awry and it’s important that we understand the reason.”

  His legs ached. His wrists were worn raw from pulling against the straps. “You will never understand.”

  “You may be right. But it is my human imperative to try.”

  On the monitors columns of numbers flowed, his life organized into sequences of qubits, what he saw, felt, heard, said, tasted, and thought, and the most complex packets of information in the universe: human emotion.

  “It will take some time to run the diagnostics,” Vosch said. “Come with me. I want to show you something.”