before Cass with her arms bare and her hair in home-job pin curls.
Her smile was as splendid as ever—that kind of dental work probably came with an apocalypse-proof guarantee—and her kindness was genuine, only kindness felt like a blade to Cass’s heart and forced her to turn away, pretending to cough.
“Oh, precious, you haven’t got that bug that’s going around, have you?” There was a faint note of the South in Collette’s voice, a hint of the Miss Georgia crown she’d worn four decades ago. The early eighties would have been the perfect era for her—big hair, big parties, big spending. Austerity never seemed like a greater affront than it did where Collette was concerned.
“No, ma’am, just—dust, maybe.”
Collette nodded. “Tildy and Karen have been up on ladders all afternoon, probably knocked some loose. I should have had them take rags up there with them! But, honey, come with me now, let me show you what I need....”
Collette dragged her through the milling little crowd of Edenites who held drinks in plastic cups and chatted over the sounds of Luddy Barkava and his friends warming up in the corner. On long tables at the back wall of the public building, where the wealthy entrepreneur had once installed a pair of four-thousand-dollar dishwashers, were the makings of the centerpieces, such as they were: four mismatched vases and bowls and piles of plants that Cass had cut from the winter-blooming garden near the island’s shore. There were coral fronds of grevillea, creamy pink-tinged helleborus already dropping petals, tight clusters of tiny skimmia berries. Cass sighed. These were the only flowering plants she’d been able to grow this winter. The helleborus seed had been raided from a garden shed; the others plants were returners, species that had disappeared during the biological attacks and the Siege, and only now were starting to show up again.
These plants were never meant for floral arrangements; they were merely the hardiest, the sturdiest, the first to come back Aftertime, fodder for birds and insects, early drafts in the earth’s bid for return. They were not especially lovely, and it would take skill to make them appear so.
And Cass was no florist.
She touched a cluster of glossy oval skimmia leaves. “I don’t know—”
“Trust me, anything you do will be an improvement. June found you some stuff. Ribbon and…I don’t know, it’s all right there. Gotta run. You’ll do a marvelous job!”
Collette was off to organize the volunteer bartenders, to untangle paper hearts whose strings had gotten twisted, to admonish Luddy and his little band to play only cheerful songs. Luddy had been in a thrashcore band of local renown on the San Francisco scene; now he spent his days building elaborate skateboard ramps along the island’s only paved stretch of road. It was a testament to Collette’s charisma that in her wake the band started in on a jittery minor-key version of “Wonderful Tonight.”
And Cass got to her task, as well, starting with the berry stalks in the center of the vases and bowls and filling in with the more delicate flowers and leaves. She was winding lengths of wired organza ribbon through the stems—where June found such a luxury, Cass had no idea, but you never knew what the raiders would bring back from the mainland—when she sensed him behind her and she closed her eyes and let it come, the fading of the other sounds in the room, the heating of the air between them.
“Collette put you to work, too, huh?” His voice, low and gravelly, traced its familiar liquid path along her nerves. He was standing too close. But Dor was always too close. Cass pushed a hand through her hair, grown in the past few months well past her shoulders and released, for the occasion, from her usual ponytail, before turning to face him.
His expression was faintly mocking. In the sunset glow diffusing through the tall windows of the public building, his face was tawny and sun-browned from his work outside, just like her own. The scar that bisected one eyebrow had faded considerably since she first met Dor six months earlier, but a new one puckered a crease along his skull that disappeared into his silver-flecked black hair. Cass had been there when the bullet barely missed killing him. Here in New Eden, under the ministrations of Zihna and Sun-hi, it had taken him only a few days to recover enough to insist on leaving his sickbed.
Of course, he had other reasons to want to leave the little hospital, reasons neither of them forgot for even a day.
Watching her watching him, Dor leaned even closer, inclining his head so that his too-long hair fell across the top scar, obscuring it. Cass doubted he was even aware of this habit, which had nothing to do with vanity. Like so many men Aftertime, Dor didn’t like to talk about himself, about who he had been and where he came from. Though insisting its way to the surface, the scar was in the past.
She was in the past, as well, for that matter.
Except neither of them could quite seem to remember that.
“Where’s Valerie?” Cass asked, ignoring his question. She would have expected the woman to be here already, with her embroidery scissors and pins in her mouth, doing last-minute repairs for all the women who’d managed to pull together something special for the party. Most days, she did mending and alterations in her small apartment—just two rooms, the back half of a flat-bottom pleasure boat grounded and rebuilt by the two gay men who shared the front—but for the parties given by the social committee, she came early and sewed on loose buttons and took in seams and tacked up hems. Valerie loved to help, to feel needed. She had a pretty spilled-glass voice and a ready smile.
She was a very nice woman.
Dor grimaced. “She’s not feeling well.”
Again. Cass nodded carefully. Valerie’s stomach pains came and went, the sort of thing one managed Before with medication and special diets, but that one just endured nowadays.
Truly, it would have been so much easier, so much less complicated if she was here right now, in one of her old-fashioned A-line skirts and Pendleton jacket, a velvet headband smoothing back her glossy dark hair. Sammi said Valerie looked like a geek, and Cass supposed it was true, but she was pretty in a fragile way and if she were here she would be with Dor and there would be no danger from the thing that loomed between them.
“I’m sorry,” Cass muttered, meaning it. “What have you been doing all day?”
Dor shrugged in the general direction of the back of the building. “There’s some rotted siding along the back—Earl and Steve brought back some lumber and we’ve been replacing it. Trying to get finished before it rains.”
“Lumber?”
“Figure of speech—they took down an old house along Vaux Road. We’ve been cannibalizing it for parts.”
“You smell like you’ve worked two days straight.”
“I was going to take a shower…before this thing starts.”
“I think it’s already starting.” Luddy’s band, rehearsing their party sets, had segued into “Lola” and the conversation swelled as people finished their first round and went back for refills. Cass wouldn’t be joining them.
“You gonna be here later?”
Cass shrugged, staring into Dor’s eyes. They were a shade of navy blue that could easily be mistaken for brown. When he was angry they turned nearly black. Very occasionally, they were luminous colors of the sea. “I don’t know…I’m tired. Ingrid’s had Ruthie all day. I need to go check on her. I
