The 5th Wave

Cassie and Evan pack supplies and prepare to go to Wright-Patterson. Evan makes a comment about first meeting her in the woods, but she wasn’t in the woods when he found her. Cassie cuts her hair short to make herself look younger. Evan burns down the farmhouse.

The next day, Cassie and Evan arrive at the remnants of Camp Ashpit. Cassie describes where everything was for Evan, and they stop to eat. Evan hears something and pushes Cassie down. A flare comes into the ravine. They see movement and begin shooting. Evan runs off, and Cassie can hear him shooting in the distance. When he returns, he is wounded.

Cassie is suspicious of Evan’s skill with the gun. She asks him if he is a Silencer. He falls, and she decides to help him with his wounds. After Cassie has Evan cleaned up, she questions him some more, but the pain pill she gave him kicks in and he falls asleep.

The next morning, Cassie removes the buckshot from Evan’s wound. As she works, she asks more questions. Eventually, Evan admits he is a Silencer and that he did shoot her. He says he’s as human as she is but doesn’t explain how he’s also an Other. He tells her that he never wanted for any of this to happen but was “outvoted.” Cassie leaves.

When Cassie returns, Evan is gone. She has decided to trust him because she needs him to save Sammy, but now that he’s gone, she decides to continue anyway. She struggles with Evan’s confession and her loneliness as she walks. Evan catches up to her, but she tells him to leave.

Evan forces Cassie to listen to him. He says they cannot go into the base together because the Others will kill them both—her for being human, and him for not killing her. He says she cannot go into the base alone because it’s too dangerous. They argue, and Evan eventually agrees to stay back and allow Cassie to go alone. He then explains what he is, telling her that he was “downloaded” into the real Evan Walker.

Evan tells Cassie that he wanted his people to be downloaded into humans to coexist without them ever knowing—but the Others as a whole didn’t want this. Again, he agrees to support her in sneaking onto the base.

Cassie and Evan prepare. He continues to warn her of the dangers, but she continues to insist.

As Cassie walks down the highway at night, she hears the approach of a diesel engine: It’s a school bus like the one that picked up Sammy. She is spotted, and the bus stops. Parker, the soldier who picked up Sammy, comes out to ask her questions and invites her on the bus. Cassie is told the same things Sammy was, given a color, and taken to a large hangar. Her examination begins.

Cassie is complacent until she is taken to the room where Wonderland is. She knocks out Dr. Pam. She removes her implant and shoves it up Dr. Pam’s nose. Cassie turns to the computer to search for Sammy but doesn’t know his number. Instead, she switches to Plan B and goes into another room to put on a white jumpsuit. Back in the Wonderland room, Dr. Pam is awake. Evan told Cassie that the doctor would have a handheld device she could use to find Sammy; Dr. Pam is holding it.

Dr. Pam accidentally kills herself when she pushes the kill switch on Cassie’s implant. Cassie finds her way out of the building and heads for the barracks, the most likely place she’ll find Sammy. As she runs, she runs into a familiar face: Vosch.

Vosch doesn’t recognize Cassie. She tells him that a man killed Dr. Pam, but she is shoved into an execution chamber. She uses a chair to break the two-way mirror and escapes through the second room. Cassie returns to the first room to shove a chair under the door and falls. The fall allows her to see the ventilation system above.

Cassie climbs into the vents and begins to work her way through them. She overhears a conversation about some soldiers who have been killed. She believes this means that Evan is on the base. Cassie also sees soldiers preparing a bomb like the one that took out Camp Ashpit.