“That isn’t fiction,” I interrupt. “You are using human bodies.”
He shakes his head. “Not the way Sammy thinks we are.”
“What does that mean? Either you are or you aren’t.”
“Sammy thinks we look like some kind of infestation attached to human brains, but—”
“Funny, that’s exactly the way I picture you, Evan. An infestation.” I can’t help myself.
His hand comes up. When I don’t slap it away or take off running into the woods, he slowly wraps his fingers around my wrist and gently pulls me to the ground beside him. I’m sweating slightly, though it’s bitingly cold. What now?
“There was a boy, a real human boy, named Evan Walker,” he says, looking deeply into my eyes. “Just like any kid, with a mom and a dad and brothers and sisters, completely human. Before he was born, I was inserted into him while his mother slept. While we both slept. For thirteen years I slept inside Evan Walker, while he learned to sit up, to eat solid food, to walk and talk and run and ride a bike, I was there, waiting to wake up. Like thousands of Others in thousands of other Evan Walkers around the world. Some of us were already awake, setting up our lives to be where we needed to be when the time came.”
I’m nodding, but why am I nodding? He came to a human body? What the hell does that mean?
“The 4th Wave,” he says, trying to be helpful. “Silencers. It’s a good name for us. We were silent, hiding inside human bodies, hiding inside human lives. We didn’t have to pretend to be you. We were you. Human and Other. Evan didn’t die when I awakened. He was…absorbed.”
Ever the noticer, Evan notices I’m totally creeped out by this. He reaches out to touch me and flinches when I pull away.
“So what are you, Evan?” I whisper. “Where are you? You said you were…what did you say?” My mind’s racing a gazillion miles an hour. “Inserted. Inserted where?”
“Maybe inserted isn’t the best word. I guess the concept that comes closest is downloaded. I was downloaded into Evan when his brain was still developing.”
I shake my head. For a being centuries more advanced than I am, he sure has a hard time answering a simple question.
“But what are you? What do you look like?”
He frowns. “You know what I look like.”
“No! Oh God, sometimes you can be so…” Careful, Cassie, don’t go there. Remember what matters. “Before you became Evan, before you came here, when you were on your way to Earth from wherever it is you came from, what did you look like?”
“Nothing. We haven’t had bodies in tens of thousands of years. We had to give them up when we left our home.”
“You’re lying again. What, you look like a toad or a warthog or a slug or something? Every living thing looks like something.”
“We are pure consciousness. Pure being. Abandoning our bodies and downloading our psyches into the mothership’s mainframe was the only way we could make the journey.” He takes my hand and curls my fingers into a fist. “This is me,” he says softly. He covers my fist with his hands, enfolding it. “This is Evan. It’s not a perfect analogy, because there’s no place where I end and he begins.” He smiles shyly. “I’m not doing very well, am I? Do you want me to show you who I am?”
Holy crap! “No. Yes. What do you mean?” I picture him peeling off his face like a creature from a horror movie.
His voice shakes a little. “I can show you what I am.”
“It doesn’t involve any kind of insertion, does it?”
He laughs softly. “I guess it does. In a way. I’ll show you, Cassie, if you want to see.”
Of course I want to see. And of course I don’t want to see. It’s clear he wants to show me—will showing me get me one step closer to Sams? But this isn’t totally about Sammy. Maybe if Evan shows me, I’ll understand why he saved me when he should have killed me. Why he held me in the dark night after night to keep me safe—and to keep me sane.
He’s still smiling at me, probably delighted that I’m not clawing his eyes out or laughing him off, which might hurt worse. My hand is lost in his, gently bound, like the tender heart of a rose within the bud, waiting for the rain.
“What do I have to do?” I whisper.
He lets go of my hand. Reaches toward my face. I flinch. “I would never hurt you, Cassie.” I breathe. Nod. Breathe some more. “Close your eyes.” He touches my eyelids gently, so gently, a butterfly’s wings.
“Relax. Breathe deep. Empty your mind. If you don’t, I can’t come in. Do you want me to come in, Cassie?”
Yes. No. Dear God, how far do I have to go to keep my promise?
I whisper, “Yes.”
It doesn’t begin inside my head like I expected. Instead a delicious warmth spreads through my body, expanding from my heart outward, and my bones and muscles and skin dissolve in the warmth that spreads out from me, until the warmth overcomes the Earth and the boundaries of the universe. The warmth is everywhere and everything. My body and everything outside my body belongs to it. Then I feel him; he is in the warmth, too, and there’s no separation between us, no spot where I end and he begins, and I open up like a flower to the rain, achingly slow and dizzyingly fast, dissolving in the warmth, dissolving in him and there’s nothing to see, that’s just the convenient word he used because there is no word to describe him, he just is.
And I open to him, a flower to the rain.
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