time to go back,” she said.
Dor scanned the distant hills, the streets to the right and left. They both listened; there were no moans, no faint cries, no snuffling or snorting. Only the wind, dispirited and damp, made its way down the street, identified by the signpost at the corner of the sidewalk as Oleander Lane. The sign still stood, all that was left of the oleanders that had died the first time a missile containing a biological agent microencapsulated on a warhead built on specs stolen from at least three separate countries came hurtling into the airspace above California at thirteen hundred miles per hour and struck a patch of earth in the central valley, taking out every edible crop for hundreds of miles and quite a few more that were good for nothing but looking pretty.
Even though Dor had warned her that Smoke was leaving, the stillness of the tent reached into Cass’s throat and stole her breath so that she had to grab the edge of the dresser to keep from collapsing. The evidence of Smoke’s absence was subtle but, for one who knew this small space as well as she did, unmistakable. His pack was missing from the bedpost there. His coat—there. He kept his shoes, both the boots and the lightweight hikers, lined up under the foot of the bed, but only the hikers remained.
The photograph of the three of them—the Polaroid Smoke had bought with four cans of chili—was missing from its frame. Cass stared at the frame, an ornate gilt one from a raid—it now held only the stock image of two random dark-haired little girls, laughing as they went down a slide.
Smoke hadn’t even bothered to take the old picture out. The little girls who were long gone now, dead from fever or starvation. Or perhaps they had been victims of the Beaters, their flesh flensed from their bones, left to rot in some garden or forgotten back room. Or the evil of humanity in cold times reached up and took them. Suddenly she was so angry she had to hurt something, had to break something, if only to release a little of the fury from her body. Smoke had left Cass a picture of loss, a reminder of the anonymous grief all around. She picked up the frame—heavy, expensive—and threw it on the ground. But it bounced on the soft rug and didn’t break, so she seized the heavy pewter cup from the table and slammed it into the frame’s glass, splintering and breaking and crushing, sending the shards flying. Cass brought the cup down again and again until she’d smashed dents in the wood and bloodied her fingers, and then she lay down with her face in the carpet and sobbed. She didn’t bother to muffle the sound; people cried here every day. Crying was nothing to anyone who might hear. Her pain was nothing to them. She cried until her throat was raw and her eyes swollen and then she lay still, and when she lifted her head the tent was nearly dark and she lit a candle and spent a long time picking bits of glass from the rug before she left to collect Ruthie from Coral Anne, to fetch her baby because it was going to be just the two of them again in the world, alone for always.
But the morning awoke in her a new resolve. Without Smoke, she had to focus on Ruthie, on creating the best possible world for her daughter from the ruins she’d been given to work with. With Smoke beside her, Cass had been able to make a home of the Box, a family from its battered and motley residents. But now that he was gone, the place’s shortcomings were stark and untenable. The atmosphere of desperation, the leering old men and twitchy hopped-up scavengers. The fact that the only other child here was a shadow-boy, a damaged, elusive little hustler. How much longer would they be welcome here?
Ruthie stirred against her, dream-restless. Cass lay still, reluctant to disturb Ruthie as her resolve took shape. There was no joy to it; her purpose was doleful and raw, but it was better than being empty.
She waited for Ruthie to wake up, considering her new intention, watching the sun color the sky pale blue through the tent’s open window. Yesterday’s bone-deep chill was a memory, practically an impossibility. She was warm under blankets, Ruthie even warmer, her sweet face pressed against the soft cotton of Cass’s sleep shirt. She thought about her plan and it took shape and grew until it seemed to Cass impossible that any other would do.
Ruthie woke and smiled when she discovered that she was in her mama’s bed. She had not spoken again since yesterday’s dream, and Cass wondered if she might have imagined it. But no: Ruthie had said bird. Cass doubted she meant the sparrows that pecked for bits in the dining area. The little brown birds were unremarkable, but other species were coming back. Maybe Ruthie had spotted a redbird or a hawk—something more noteworthy, anyway, than the flock of tiny scavengers.
“Good morning, sugar-sweet,” Cass whispered and covered Ruthie’s forehead and nose with kisses while her daughter laughed without making a sound, her shoulders shaking.
Then it was a matter of choosing their warmest, sturdiest clothes before the two of them went to find Dor to tell him they were going with him.
08
“I MEAN TO GO ALONE,” HE SAID. CASS HAD FOUND him in his trailer, sitting at his desk with a steaming travel mug of coffee, morning sunlight slanting off the tidy surfaces of the cramped space, staring at a spreadsheet on the monitor that was nearly always on. Dor powered his computer with the compact generator that hummed beneath the trailer, and Smoke said he kept digital inventories, as well as some sort of forecasting software and other programs Smoke could only guess at.
Dor had offered her a chair, and Cass had taken it, grateful to be off her feet, Ruthie heavy and dozing in her arms. He’d been pro forma friendly until she’d stated her intentions.
“I can help you. I can give you a reason to be there, in the Rebuilder settlement. One they won’t question.”
“And what’s that?” Dor didn’t bother to mask his skepticism.
“I’m an outlier,” Cass said, pulling up her sleeves to reveal the faint scars still on her forearms. “I was bitten and taken by the Beaters. And I recovered. And the Rebuilders know it. They want me for my immunity.”
After staring at her with a preternatural calm for what felt like forever, Dor spoke softly, like a man who’d just had confirmation that his lover was stepping out on him. “It was your green eyes…yours and Ruthie’s. I’ve never seen eyes like that, so deep and bright.”
Deeply pigmented irises: a distinctive mark of the recovered. In her time in the compound, Cass had caught Dor staring at her a few times, and felt her skin burn at his scrutiny, though he always looked away so quickly that she wondered if she might have imagined it.
Cass often found herself doubting so many of her own perceptions. So much was lost to her damaged memory. And the rest of her that did remember certainly didn’t want to. But now she filled Dor in on the details, leaving out only the existence of Nora.
Almost four months ago, Cass had woken, disoriented and badly scarred from a Beater attack she could not remember, in a field far from any shelter. She had wandered for weeks, walking at night to avoid the cannibals, hiding during the day, her confusion slowly dissipating, until a young girl had attacked her, thinking she was a Beater. But Cass got her blade away and used her as a hostage to gain entry to the school where the girl and her mother sheltered.
The young girl was Sammi. Long before Cass ever glimpsed Dor’s tall brooding form, his inky, depthless eyes, she had made a promise she never expected to have to keep: to find Sammi’s father and tell him his daughter was safe. She had done at least that, and she counted on him to remember that favor now, when she needed him.
Smoke had been at the school, and he had volunteered to escort Cass to the Silva public library several miles away, the last place Cass had lived before the attack. At the time, she didn’t understand how she had recovered, but her only focus was finding her daughter. Discovering that Ruthie had been sent away from the library to the Convent in San Pedro had devastated
