Fantasy versus Reality
"How baffling it is that we imagined cities incinerated by alien bombs and death rays when all they needed was Mother Nature and time." (9)
This is ironic because humans imagined giant orchestrated catastrophes conjured by sophisticated aliens. In reality, the only thing anyone needed to destroy humans was good old-fashioned Mother Nature. As is later revealed in the book, this didn't even require aliens; other humans wreaked this havoc on their species.
Evan in Cassie's Position
"Wounded, trapped beneath a car, unable to run, unable to rise, at the mercy of a faceless, merciless hunter, a Silencer engineered to snuff out human noise." (86)
It is ironic that Evan now finds himself in the same situation as Cassie when he met her. Grace has taken his place as the Silencer, and Evan is now like Cassie, cowering under a car. He even takes a page out of Cassie's book and gets up from under the car and walks away, without running. He realizes that Grace won't be able to shoot him, not because she loves him, but because she is curious who else is out there and will use Evan to find them.
The Tiger Chooses to Be There
"He could tear through that fence in two seconds. Rip off a kid's face in three. He's choosing to be there. That's the beautiful thing." (87)
Grace says this to Evan as they watch a tiger in a cage. The tiger is indifferent to the attention of a kid nearby. Evan thinks that the tiger being in a cage is sad, but Grace thinks it's beautiful because of how such a powerful creature has been subdued. At any moment, the tiger could leap out. In this way, Grace sees herself and the Others in the tiger. They have been lying dormant in their human shells, waiting for the right moment to leap out and kill.
The Real Evil
"'You've seen one before,' Vosch says, a thousand miles away. 'In the testing room, on the day you arrived at Camp Haven. We told you it was an infestation of an alien life-form attached to the human brain. That was a lie.'" (216)
It is ironic that the infestation shown to the recruits was not an alien infestation but a human creation made to enhance humans, to induce them to the next level of evolution. It is ironic because everything everyone has been fighting against all this time hasn't been the Others, but simply other humans like themselves. The enemy is the same as it always has been - other humans with certain ideas that they believe are superior to those of other humans, whom must be killed if they disagree.
