diluted dreams for days, or months, or years, for all he knew. It seemed like he had been here forever. “Here” was a place of watery uncertainty, its outline flickering and disappearing, brief flashes that inevitably faded into the nothing, over and over and over again.
His senses were gone. He was content—well, perhaps content was not right, but aware of his lack of sensation and glad for it. At one time, in that vast unknowable that was Before, there had been pain, indescribable pain. But now there was just nothing, and he drifted around in the nothing and was aware of it and that was all.
Until the singing started, a whiffling, meandering tune as though someone was letting the air out of a bicycle tire.
The thing that was Smoke, this creation of mind and nothing, stumbled over this thought: Bicycle. Tire. Details came into focus: bicycle tire was black, matte to the touch and about the size of the round mirror that had hung above the mantel in his parents’ home in Valencia.
Mantel
Parents
Valencia
No, no, no—this was no good. New thoughts intruded, and Smoke’s consciousness shivered and contracted, like an amoeba under a slide. He did not want to think. He did not want to wake.
Mantel, parents, Valencia. In the trilevel house in Valencia where Smoke lived with his father, who sold…Acuras…and his mother, who dabbled in portrait photography—
Dad
Acura
Mom
portraits
—there were fires in the fireplace and trays of sandwiches and the game on Monday nights.
Also, he was not called Smoke.
Edward Allen Schaffer, that was his name, and he had grown up in Valencia and his parents were dead and now people called him Smoke and he’d loved a woman and he’d tried to make up for the terrible thing he had done but they’d found him first and that was all.
Wait—it wasn’t really singing, was it?
What Smoke had mistaken for singing wasn’t sound at all—it was light. It waited outside his eyelids but it was growing impatient with waiting, and when it became impatient it pressed harder against him and became like a sound, entering his brain and ricocheting from one corner to the other. It wanted him to come back. It insisted that he come back. Smoke did not want to, but now he understood that it was not his choice.
Painfully, inevitably, Smoke began to gather himself.
First step…somewhere, he’d had a body. Where he’d left it, he wasn’t really sure, but he would not be able to do much of anything without it, and so he cast his weary and reluctant mind out until it stumbled upon the form of the thing and he traced its shape with his memory. It made him laugh, or at least remember laughing, remember the feel of laughter if not the reason.
Toes! Toes were ridiculous, weren’t they? Something to laugh about? There were so many of them, and it took Smoke a long time to count each of them, two sets at the end of his two feet. These were attached to legs, which had apparently been there all along but damn if he hadn’t forgotten about them. Wonderingly, Smoke recalled his legs and that was enough for a while and he let go, exhausted, and floated back out into the nothing and rested some more.
Days passed. Nights passed.
The next time he came back, the toes, feet and legs were still there and now so were arms. Fingers—these he found interesting enough to dwell on for a while, especially since they felt…incomplete. Memories of touching things, grabbing them, holding them, breaking them. His stomach. His neck. So, it was mostly all there, then. He was all there, and apparently had been for some time. Again, that struck him as funny and he smiled or thought he smiled, though maybe he only imagined either event.
Wait…there was something. Something important. The woman. The woman and the girl. Cass and Ruthie. Those were their names. Hair like corn silk, eyes like green agate.
The memories and sensations coming back too sharp and too fast now, bringing with them pain. Smoke groaned, remembering a kiss—that would be Cass. She tasted like sun and iron and oranges, her skin was silk and velvet and he wanted it.
Wanted her.
He had been at a crossroads, had been choosing the forgetting place, except now he’d remembered Cass and there was no longer a choice, only Cass, only the Cass-shaped hole she’d left in him.
Once, he thought she came to him. He struggled to come up from the wavery not-here. He was willing to accept the pain of returning, willing to let go of the lovely forgetting, if only he could see her, touch her, and he tried, God how he tried. He called her name, but he had no voice because it, too, was still caught in the gone place.
The grief of this loss was as real as what he’d left behind. Whether she was a prisoner, too, or a spirit, he didn’t know—only that she’d been here. That was enough, that and the memories. They strengthened him and girded him for the pain.
The nothing was gone. The pain was waiting. He breathed in deep and pushed off from the edges and broke the surface, and with a mighty effort, he opened his eyes.
Chapter 4
WHEN DOR CAME around, the sounds of partying in the distance had mostly died down. Earlier, there had been the occasional shout, laughter carrying on the breeze, a couple of firecrackers—where they had come from, Cass had no idea, since nearly everything that could be ignited or exploded had been set off a year earlier when the Siege splintered weeks into riots and looting and people fighting in the streets.
Back then, Cass had trouble sleeping through the sounds of car crashes, screaming, gunshots, things being thrown and driven over and crashed into. By the time she finally left her trailer for the last time, joining those who were sheltering at the Silva library, the street in front of her house smelled of damp ash and rot, and smoke trailed lazily from half a dozen burned structures throughout the town while corpses rotted in cars and parlors and survivors learned that the Beaters weren’t so easy to kill.
Sleep had been hard then, because sobriety meant you had to let it all in, every sound, every thought, every memory. Doing A.A. the right way meant handing over your denial card; those who held on too tight never lasted long, and Cass had been in the program long enough to see people come and go. So when she lay awake in her hot, lonely trailer, tears leaking slowly down her face, she accepted the sounds as her due, just one more surcharge of sobriety.
Of course, none of that was a problem now.
Cass sat on the rough poured-concrete stoop behind the house, sipping and watching the bonfire burning down to embers in the middle of the big dirt yard in front of the community center a ways off. On warm days people played football and volleyball there. In the spring there would be picnics; if Cass managed to patch things up with Suzanne by then, they could take the girls there to make wreaths of dandelions and wild loosestrife.
The building’s doors had been thrown wide and people spilled out of the party room holding their cups and plastic bottles. Drinking wasn’t forbidden in New Eden, and it wasn’t even exactly frowned upon, but you didn’t see much of it except on nights like these. It had been hard to get used to, after the indulgent ethos of the Box—sometimes
