The 5th Wave: The Infinite Sea

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The riveting follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The 5th Wave , hailed by Justin Cronin as "wildly entertaining."

How do you rid the Earth of seven billion humans? Rid the humans of their humanity.

Surviving the first four waves was nearly impossible. Now Cassie Sullivan finds herself in a new world, a world in which the fundamental trust that binds us together is gone. As the 5th Wave rolls across the landscape, Cassie, Ben, and Ringer are forced to confront the Others' ultimate goal: the extermination of the human race.

Cassie and her friends haven't seen the depths to which the Others will sink, nor have the Others seen the heights to which humanity will rise, in the ultimate battle between life and death, hope and despair, love and hate.


Praise for The Infinite Sea

"Heart-pounding pacing, lyrical prose and mind-bending twists . . ."-- The New York Times Book Review

"Impressively improves on the excellent beginning of the trilogy."-- USA Today

"An epic sci-fi novel with all the romance, action, and suspense you could ever want."--Seventeen.com

*"This gut-wrenching sequel to The 5th Wave careens on a violent course of nonstop action."-- Publishers Weekly , starred review

*"A breathless, grueling survival story . . . . Yancey's prose remains unimpeachable--every paragraph is laden with setting, theme, and emotion."-- Booklist , starred review

"A roller-coaster ride of a sequel."-- Kirkus Reviews

"It doesn't just move the story forward, but even opens up new possibilities in the previous book." --Geekdad.com

Excerpt provided by Syndetics

1. THE WORLD IS a clock winding down. I hear it in the wind's icy fingers scratching against the window. I smell it in the mildewed carpeting and the rotting wallpaper of the old hotel. And I feel it in Teacup's chest as she sleeps. The hammering of her heart, the rhythm of her breath, warm in the freezing air, the clock winding down. Across the room, Cassie Sullivan keeps watch by the window. Moonlight seeps through the tiny crack in the curtains behind her, lighting up the plumes of frozen breath exploding from her mouth. Her little brother sleeps in the bed closest to her, a tiny lump beneath the mounded covers. Window, bed, back again, her head turns like a pendulum swinging. The turning of her head, the rhythm of her breath, like Nugget's, like Teacup's, like mine, marking the time of the clock winding down. I ease out of bed. Teacup moans in her sleep and burrows deeper under the covers. The cold clamps down, squeezing my chest, though I'm fully dressed except for my boots and the parka, which I grab from the foot of the bed. Sullivan watches as I pull on the boots, then when I go to the closet for my rucksack and rifle. I join her by the window. I feel like I should say something before I leave. We might not see each other again. "So this is it," she says. Her fair skin glows in the milky light. The spray of freckles seems to float above her nose and cheeks. I adjust the rifle on my shoulder. "This is it." "You know, Dumbo I get. The big ears. And Nugget, because Sam is so small. Teacup, too. Zombie I don't get so much--Ben won't say--and I'm guessing Poundcake has something to do with his roly-poly-ness. But why Ringer?" I sense where this is going. Besides Zombie and her brother, she isn't sure of anyone anymore. The name Ringer gives her paranoia a nudge. "I'm human." "Yeah." She looks through the crack in the curtains to the parking lot two stories below, shimmering with ice. "Someone else told me that, too. And, like a dummy, I believed him." "Not so dumb, given the circumstances." "Don't pretend, Ringer," she snaps. "I know you don't believe me about Evan." "I believe you. It's his story that doesn't make sense." I head for the door before she tears into me. You don't push Cassie Sullivan on the Evan Walker question. I don't hold it against her. Evan is the little branch growing out of the cliff that she clings to, and the fact that he's gone makes her hang on even tighter. Teacup doesn't make a sound, but I feel her eyes on me; I know she's awake. I go back to the bed. "Take me with you," she whispers. I shake my head. We've been through this a hundred times. "I won't be gone long. A couple days." "Promise?" No way, Teacup. Promises are the only currency left. They must be spent wisely. Her bottom lip quivers; her eyes mist. "Hey," I say softly. "What did I tell you about that, soldier?" I resist the impulse to touch her. "What's the first priority?" "No bad thoughts," she answers dutifully. "Because bad thoughts do what?" "Make us soft." "And what happens if we go soft?" "We die." "And do we want to die?" She shakes her head. "Not yet." I touch her face. Cold cheek, warm tears. Not yet. With no time left on the human clock, this little girl has probably reached middle age. Sullivan and me, we're old. And Zombie? The ancient of days. He's waiting for me in the lobby, wearing a ski jacket over a bright yellow hoodie, both scavenged from the remains inside the hotel: Zombie escaped from Camp Haven wearing only a flimsy pair of scrubs. Beneath his scruffy beard, his face is the telltale scarlet of fever. The bullet wound I gave him, ripped open in his escape from Camp Haven and patched up by our twelve-year-old medic, must be infected. He leans against the counter, pressing his hand against his side and trying to look like everything's cool. "I was starting to think you changed your mind," Zombie says, dark eyes sparkling as if he's teasing, though that could be the fever. I shake my head. "Teacup." "She'll be okay." To reassure me, he releases his killer smile from its cage. Zombie doesn't fully appreciate the pricelessness of promises or he wouldn't toss them out so casually. "It's not Teacup I'm worried about. You look like shit, Zombie." "It's this weather. Wreaks havoc on my complexion." A second smile leaps out at the punch line. He leans forward, willing me to answer with my own. "One day, Private Ringer, you're going to smile at something I say and the world will break in half." "I'm not prepared to take on that responsibility." He laughs and maybe I hear a rattle deep in his chest. "Here." He offers me another brochure of the caverns. "I have one," I tell him. "Take this one, too, in case you lose it." "I won't lose it, Zombie." "I'm sending Poundcake with you," he says. "No, you're not." "I'm in charge. So I am." "You need Poundcake here more than I need him out there." He nods. He knew I would say no, but he couldn't resist one last try. "Maybe we should abort," he says. "I mean, it isn't that bad here. About a thousand bedbugs, a few hundred rats, and a couple dozen dead bodies, but the view is fantastic. . ." Still joking, still trying to make me smile. He's looking at the brochure in his hand. Seventy-four degrees year 'round! "Until we get snowed in or the temperature drops again. The situation is unsustainable, Zombie. We've stayed too long already." I don't get it. We've talked this to death and now he wants to keep beating the corpse. I wonder about Zombie sometimes. "We have to chance it, and you know we can't go in blind," I go on. "The odds are there're other survivors hiding in those caves and they may not be ready to throw out the welcome mat, especially if they've met any of Sullivan's Silencers." "Or recruits like us," he adds. "So I'll scope it out and be back in a couple of days." "I'm holding you to that promise." "It wasn't a promise." There's nothing left to say. There're a million things left to say. This might be the last time we see each other, and he's thinking it, too, because he says, "Thank you for saving my life." "I put a bullet in your side and now you might die." He shakes his head. His eyes sparkle with fever. His lips are gray. Why did they have to name him Zombie? It's like an omen. The first time I saw him, he was doing knuckle push-ups in the exercise yard, face contorted with anger and pain, blood pooling on the asphalt beneath his fists. Who is that guy? I asked. His name is Zombie. He fought the plague and won, they told me, and I didn't believe them. Nobody beats the plague. The plague is a death sentence. And Reznik the drill sergeant bending over him, screaming at the top of his lungs, and Zombie in the baggy blue jumpsuit, pushing himself past the point where one more push is impossible. I don't know why I was surprised when he ordered me to shoot him so he could keep his unkeepable promise to Nugget. When you look death in the eye and death blinks first, nothing seems impossible. Even mind reading. "I know what you're thinking," he says. "No. You don't." "You're wondering if you should kiss me good-bye." "Why do you do that?" I ask. "Flirt with me." He shrugs. His grin is crooked, like his body leaning against the counter. "It's normal. Don't you miss normal?" he asks. Eyes digging deep into mine, always looking for something, I'm never sure what. "You know, drive-thrus and movies on a Saturday night and ice cream sandwiches and checking your Twitter feed?" I shake my head. "I didn't Twitter." "Facebook?" I'm getting a little pissed. Sometimes it's hard for me to imagine how Zombie made it this far. Pining for things we lost is the same as hoping for things that can never be. Both roads dead-end in despair. "It's not important," I say. "None of that matters." Zombie's laugh comes from deep in his gut. It bubbles to the surface like the superheated air of a hot spring, and I'm not pissed anymore. I know he's putting on the charm, and somehow knowing what he's doing does nothing to blunt the effect. Another reason Zombie's a little unnerving. "It's funny," he says. "How much we thought all of it did. You know what really matters?" He waits for my answer. I feel as if I'm being set up for a joke, so I don't say anything. "The tardy bell." Now he's forced me into a corner. I know there's manipulation going on here, but I feel helpless to stop it. "Tardy bell?" "Most ordinary sound in the world. And when all of this is done, there'll be tardy bells again." He presses the point. Maybe he's worried I don't get it. "Think about it! When a tardy bell rings again, normal is back. Kids rushing to class, sitting around bored, waiting for the final bell, and thinking about what they'll do that night, that weekend, that next fifty years. They'll be learning like we did about natural disasters and disease and world wars. You know: 'When the aliens came, seven billion people died,' and then the bell will ring and everybody will go to lunch and complain about the soggy Tater Tots. Like, 'Whoa, seven billion people, that's a lot. That's sad. Are you going to eat all those Tots?' That's normal. That's what matters." So it wasn't a joke. "Soggy Tater Tots?" "Okay, fine. None of that makes sense. I'm a moron." He smiles. His teeth seem very white surrounded by the scruffy beard, and now, because he suggested it, I think about kissing him and if the stubble on his upper lip would tickle. I push the thought away. Promises are priceless, and a kiss is a kind of promise, too. Excerpted from The Infinite Sea by Rick Yancey All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

School Library Journal Review

Gr 9 Up-The majority of the first-person narration in this second book in "The 5th Wave" series (Putnam) shifts between Ringer, a beautiful teen with deadly aim, and tough-but-tender Cassie, who thought she was the lone surviving human. A third-person viewpoint is used for Evan, an alien who has shifted his allegiance in the face of true love and Ben (Zombie), badly injured but still in command of the ragtag paramilitary group of creatively nicknamed children and teens. The action springs back and forth in place and time as readers learn why Poundcake no longer speaks, how Evan is related to super-strong Grace, and why chess is important to Ringer. The "infinite sea" can be made of snow, of tears, of the floaty feeling of semi-consciousness, and, more than once, it is a sea of blood. Yancey keeps the pressure on, as Cassie and Ben seek to protect the younger humans and outsmart the devious Silencers. Ringer struggles to maintain her humanity in the face of nanotechnology and Evan struggles with turning his back on what his species has been working toward for thousands of years. Yancey's writing can be melodramatic ("The world will be consumed by the crushing dark"; "The Others didn't invent death; they just perfected it"), but will keep action-craving readers enthralled. With a 5th Wave movie in the works, and alien questions left unanswered, expect readers to be interested in this series for the foreseeable future.-Maggie Knapp, Trinity Valley School, Fort Worth, TX (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Booklist Review

*Starred Review* While The 5th Wave (2013) was a sprawling apocalyptic vision of an Earth stomped to near submission by aliens, this sequel goes small, condensing its time frame to focus on a small band of despairing heroes. The result is an even better book a breathless, grueling survival story kicked off by a gut-wrenching concept: the Others using human children as IEDs to take out nests of survivors. Perspective shifts between Cassie, Zombie, Poundcake, Evan, and Ringer, with each character taking a turn in the spotlight, but the basic problem is communal: anyone who ventures outside their hideout disappears or worse. Evan's deadly relationship with fellow alien-human hybrid Grace takes early center stage, and Yancey's ability to generate sympathy for a species that wants to destroy us, with maximum cruelty, is a wonder. Later, it's Ringer who dominates the narrative when she faces off with Commander Vosch and becomes a guinea pig for the 12th System. Yancey's prose remains unimpeachable every paragraph is laden with setting, theme, and emotion and he uses it toward a series of horrifying set pieces, including a surgery scene that will have your pages sopping with sweat. The end, while confusing, seems to flip the script. Is there some Childhood's End-type purpose to this? Or is it all sound and fury? Waiting a year for answers, now that's torture. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Promotion of The 5th Wave was stratospheric, and with the film adaptation coming, expect blanket awareness of this sequel.--Kraus, Daniel Copyright 2014 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

When aliens attack: the end of the world as we know it. Book 1 of Yancey's series saw 95 percent of the human population wiped out in a brutal alien attack that coordinated tsunamis, a horrific plague and teen soldiers bent on murdering any survivors. Just when readers might think it couldn't get worse, it does: The extraterrestrials bent on taking over Earth are now implanting carbon-dioxide-triggered bombs inside the throats of young children in order to wipe out any survivors. The first are easily extinguished in the prologue in an ominous tableau that no doubt is meant to foreshadow what will befall Cassie, Ben and the teen survivors from The 5th Wave (2013). What follows is a terse, streamlined volume packed with action and violence that will keep readers on the edges of their seats. At first it's hard to distinguish which character is narrating each sequence, particularly since Ringer, a secondary character in the first installment, takes over much of the page count in this installment. Her nickname says it all: She's tough, fearless, an expert marksman and a survivorand the bad guys particularly have it in for her. Everything culminates in a 180-degree reversal that turns the series' cosmos on its end and will no doubt have readers impatiently screaming for the third. A roller-coaster ride of a sequel. (Science fiction. 14-18) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.