Chapter 79.
Hours later, the survivors are extracted from the city under darkness and noise and orders barked in languages none of them fully understand.
They are moved fast. Too fast to grieve properly.
Too fast to even breathe. The Host’s people—soldiers, guards, shadows—push them through a corridor of destruction to a waiting transport.
They are airlifted out that night to Brazil, then flown to Florence.
From there they will be transported by bus to another estate, this one in the hills of Tuscany.
There are now twelve left out of the original one thousand.
By the grace of God—or dumb luck, or both—Rupert Chadwick is still one of them.
Somehow, he survived the grenade blast.
He’s alive.
Because the blast happened right inside the hospital, the doctors had gotten him into surgery almost immediately. In the process they saved his right eye and repaired the severe damage to his spleen, and to a collapsed lung.
When the boy is out of surgery and awake, he’s pale as paper and shaking, his voice barely more than air. As soon as he’s allowed to have visitors, Alek and Hannah and Wyatt and Jack visit him in the private room The Host arranged for the boy, a rare example of generosity.
Maybe the only one they’ve seen so far.
The doctor has already informed Rupert how long his rehabilitation is going to take. Alek is the one to tell him that the next trip Rupert will be taking is home to England.
As lucky as the boy knows he is—as lucky as they all are to be alive—he is the last of them to cry.
“Hey,” Jack says, standing at the foot of the bed like he’s afraid to get too close, like he’s afraid the world will take the boy just for touching him.
Rupert’s eyes are glassy. One is bandaged.
He whispers, “Please . . . take me with you.”
They can see how painful it is for him to get out even a few words at a time.
Alek’s throat tightens. She takes his hand carefully, like it might break.
“We can’t,” she says. “Not this time.”
They know how tough this fourteen-year-old is by now. How much rope he has in him, as Jack likes to say.
Rupert’s jaw trembles. He hates crying in front of people. They all know that about him now.
“They say . . . months,” Alek adds softly. “You need real recovery. Real doctors. A real bed.”
Rupert stares at the ceiling like he’s bargaining with it.
“I can heal . . . at the next place,” he whispers. “Wherever you go. I can stay out of the way.”
Wyatt steps closer. His ribs still ache every time he breathes, but he doesn’t let it show. “You’re never in the way,” Wyatt says. “You’re family.”
Rupert looks at Hannah like he needs to hear it from her.
“And you will be a part of our family forever,” Hannah says. “I keep telling Alek that she’s the sister I never had. But you’ve become the little brother I never had.” She squeezes his hand. “And before you get mad—yeah. Little.”
Rupert loses the fight and a tear slips out.
“Promise me,” he whispers. “You’ll tell me you’re okay.”
Alek doesn’t hesitate.
“Promise,” she says.
“Don’t heal too quickly, dude,” Wyatt says. “I have a feeling that the tests we’re going to face down the road aren’t going to get any easier. You just need to go home and get better.”
He looks over at Jack. They see the same pleading in his eyes they’d seen in Hannah’s earlier when she realized that Conner had died saving her.
Jack clears his throat hard. His voice is rough.
“I’m the one who’s really going to suffer here,” Jack says from where he’s standing at the end of his bed. “I’m the one about to lose the best wingman I’ve ever had.”
“Even in the Army?” Rupert asks.
Jack nods once. “Even there.”
The doctor pokes his head in and says that Rupert needs to rest.
After the doctor has left, and more tears have been shed by everyone in the hospital room as their goodbyes are said, Alek and Hannah, Wyatt and Jack, head for the door. At the threshold, Rupert whispers one more thing:
“Don’t forget me.”
Alek and Hannah run back, both sides of his bed, and each one kisses his cheeks, turning his face the color of an apple.
“Never,” Alek says.
Several hours later, in her new cottage in Tuscany, Alek hears a ping from one of the cell phones they’ve all been given on their arrival at the Tuscan estate; these are phones The Host has told them can be used to call family and loved ones.
She goes into the living room, where she’d left the phone on the coffee table, and sees the incoming text.
Go outside.
She switches the phone to silent mode and walks out of the back door of the cottage, keeps going until she is deep into the wooded area behind it.
No one is sure exactly what The Host’s surveillance abilities are outdoors, or how closely he is even monitoring them at this point. She just knows she can’t stand under a camera.
Alek takes one last look around, making sure she’s not being watched. The phone buzzes. Incoming call. Alek answers.
Somehow, even after everything that has happened over the past twenty-four hours, she manages a smile when she hears his voice. The comfortable smile of hearing from an old friend.
“You never call, you never write,” she says.
She hears him laugh.
“Is it safe for me to even be talking on this phone?” she asks.
“I’m scrambling the call,” Jimmy says.
“You can do that . . . how?” Alek says.
“Later,” Jimmy says. Then his voice shifts, gentle but urgent. “Talk to me. Tell me what happened after I left.”