Summary
The Price is told from the point of view of Cassie as she worries whether she has killed Evan by shooting him in the leg. She tries to defend his actions, saying that he couldn't have been sure that they, the squad, wouldn't have shot and killed him given half a chance. This excuse sounds hollow to everyone and calls Evan's loyalty into question again.
Dumbo, the 12-year-old medic, is unsure if Evan will survive and doesn't want to commit himself to a diagnosis. Poundcake and Teacup are still missing. Evan finally wakes up and Cassie is ecstatic and lovesick again. Evan mentions Grace's name before passing out again and Cassie mistakes it for the word "grace," instead of a name. She is puzzled.
She is jealous and worries that they will never be as close as they once were. Cassie and the squad continue to monitor Evan with little change when suddenly a young girl appears in the hotel with them. The squad is very confused but Sammy recognizes her as his friend Megan from the school bus.
She was also at Camp Haven when Sammy was taken there, but she was marked as green and moved to a different part of the camp, away from Sammy. Everyone is confused by her presence and uncertain, but they decide to take her in. Megan mentions that her throat hurts.
The squad takes her in and checks her for any bombs or tampering, but find nothing. Cassie is about to examine her throat when Evan finally wakes up for good and tells her not to. The squad worries about how to treat Megan, finally deciding that Evan and Cassie will perform surgery on Megan in order to remove the pellet bomb.
Cassie and Evan are successful, although Megan starts to wake up and they almost fail. However, Cassie manages to cut the wire and they store the bomb in a plastic bag for safe keeping. The squad begins to wonder why Megan was sent in and they realize that it is because of Evan. The Others are testing to see whether he is with them, since just bombing the hotel outright could erase all trace of him. This way, they know whether or not he has betrayed them.
In light of this new information, the squad realizes that they have to leave immediately. As they are leaving, Evan gives Cassie a map to Grace's house, a place they can hide where he doesn't think she will look. Grace then appears in the doorway as they attempt to escape. The squad becomes engaged in a fight as an attack helicopter also swoops in. As they run out, Sammy, entrusted with the bomb, tells Cassie that he dropped it by accident back in the hotel. As he finishes saying that, the hotel goes up in flames and explodes.
In the chapter The Trigger, we learn how the bomb exploded. Grace cornered Poundcake and almost shot him dead, but with his last breath, he made sure that he would take Grace with him by triggering the bomb.
Analysis
Cassie tends to Evan's wounds, like he tended to hers in his house back in the first book, creating parallelism. Evan is still very ill and fighting off a fever that threatens his life. Cassie is very nervous and stressed, a situation exacerbated by the fact that her little brother now acts more like Ben's little brother.
Megan, a girl who Sammy knows, brings an eerie feeling into the story. She mentions that her throat hurts, and the second the reader sees this, we have a sense of foreboding. We have knowledge that the characters in the story do not.
We know, from the first chapter in the book, The Wheat, that the boy whose throat hurt later exploded when someone breathed too close to him, setting off a bomb in his throat. This creates a lot of suspense for the reader as we wonder whether our heroes are about to unwittingly die.
Evan wakes up just in time to tell Cassie not to breathe into Megan's throat, because she has a bomb there that will be set off by CO2. This is yet another instance in which Evan acts as a very convenient plot device that saves all of our heroes at once. He tells the squad that the children are part of another wave, designed to prey on humanity's weakness for the young and willingness to care for them.
When the bomb doesn't explode, the Others realize that Evan is a traitor. Poundcake sacrifices himself to save the squad. His death has a lot of emotional resonance since the reader got to know him and his backstory so well throughout the course of this book. Poundcake's last thoughts are of the little brother he lost when the Others arrived.
