Sometimes Cass missed the edge-walkers. The despair-dwellers. The ones who routinely lost their battles with themselves.
Her people.
And sometimes she wondered if people like that were just another species doomed to extinction. Aftertime was not hospitable to weakness. It offered too many outs, too many reasons to quit.
Cass couldn’t quit, though, because she had Ruthie. So when she fell off the wagon, she fell with excruciating care. She did not actually enjoy a single drop of her cheap kaysev wine as she slowly sipped it down. She wanted to gulp, to drown in it; instead she parceled out not quite enough, every night—and never before Ruthie went to sleep—enough to get just a little bit out of herself. Cass thirsted for complete oblivion; instead she medicated herself to a painful place in the shadows cast by what she couldn’t escape.
A footstep on gravel, a figure cutting moonlight—Cass nearly missed him, focused as she was on the orange glow of the remains of the bonfire. But it could only be one person, the one man who knew her habit of sitting out here late into the night while the community slept, the sentries at the bridge the only other souls awake in the small hours.
“Thought you were going to turn in early,” Dor said, lowering his tall, sinewy body next to hers.
Cass shrugged. “You knew I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
For a while they sat in silence. Dor drank the dregs of homegrown wine. When he got to the bottom, he held up his plastic cup—the flimsy kind that college kids used to serve at keggers—and stared at it from several angles in the light of the bonfire a hundred yards away.
Then he crushed it in his hand as though it was nothing. Cass raised her eyebrows in the dark.
“Better not let Dana see you do that.”
Dana was the compliance leader, tasked with making sure everyone reused and recycled and composted—and the most vocal member of the New Eden council. The council operated on principles of concordance and had sworn off hierarchy, which only seemed to make Dana that much more dogged about getting his way whenever an issue was brought before it. He also seemed to delight in taking rule-breakers to task, though there was no formal punishment structure, only admonishments to do better. You got the feeling Dana would have welcomed more authority as long as he was the one wielding it.
Dor flashed a bitter grin that quickly disappeared. “Dana can go fuck himself. I’ve just spent eight hours up to my ass in rotting siding and I have the splinters to prove it. If I want to stomp one cup under my boot for old times’ sake, I’d guess I’ve earned the right.”
But rather than tossing the cup on the ground, he took the twisted, torn mess and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. No one littered in New Eden, not even Dor—the three islands were all they had.
“Ruthie sleeping?” he asked after a while, and when his words were followed by his warm, rough fingertips on the strip of skin at the small of her back between sweater and jeans, Cass swallowed hard, because he could take her to the other place that fast.
“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely as his fingers traced circles, drifting slowly lower. This went on for a while, moments, hours, who knew…it was always like this, him barely touching her, both of them going white-hot in seconds. They never talked about it. Sometimes he would keep talking—about the things he was fixing, about nails and shingles and broken asphalt; about a bird he’d seen lighting on a fence post, or a book the raiders had found somewhere; about his daughter’s latest project, a mural she was painting on the wall of their building or a jean jacket she was embellishing with Valerie’s help. He would talk, and Cass would murmur in the appropriate places, the lulls and silences in their conversation, and if someone had been listening to the two of them, unable to see where his hands were going, they would never know there was anything going on except conversation. Dull conversation.
“I might take a ride out with Nathan tomorrow,” Dor went on, without inflection. “Go out toward Oakton, see what we can find.”
Cass nodded. Nathan siphoned gas from wrecked vehicles, using a system he’d rigged from a pump, a length of hose and some custom couplings—along with a sledgehammer and crowbar for dealing with tank locking devices. He drove out in his tiny hybrid in the mornings and came back with his cans and jugs full. Cass suspected Nathan did it more for sport than anything else—and that Dor went with him for the same reason.
“Be careful,” she said unnecessarily. Beaters had been showing up more often lately along the shore, five or six times a week, where they could easily be picked off while they screamed in frustration, unable to swim. There was a certain fascination in watching Glynnis and John, the best shots on the island, taking the skiff out and shooting them at almost point-blank range, dropping them with a single shot to the head or spine, the only sure way to kill them quickly. Cass never let Ruthie watch, but she’d joined the other spectators half a dozen times, borrowing Jasmine’s binoculars so the burst of blood filled her vision through the lenses.
But meeting them on land was another story entirely. Especially since Nathan and Dor had to get out of the car to siphon.
“I will,” Dor growled as he pulled Cass toward him, his big hand wrapped around her arm, his warmth seeping into her skin even through her jacket.
She went wordlessly, straddling him in the dark, and her mouth met his with a hoarse cry deep in her throat. Her knees ground against the hard, cold concrete as she levered herself more forcefully against him. She could feel his hardness between her legs, and his hands slid down her back, against her ass, pulling her against him. Her teeth knocked against his, and his mouth was hot and hungry on hers. She plunged her hands into his hair—long enough to snarl in her fingers—and felt the bristle of his beard against her thumbs.
It was like this with Dor, this hunger, this need to consume him and be consumed. There was nothing tender about it. Every time, she had bruises. Sometimes one of them would break skin with their teeth, their nails. But every time, this feeling.
“Where is she?” Cass gasped, wrenching herself away from the kiss. She could feel Dor scowl, his jaw tightening under her hands.
“Can’t be sure,” he said, kissing the soft skin under her chin, scraping against it. He knew she meant Sammi, not the woman. Twice—only when both Valerie and Sammi were safely on the sparsely populated northern island for the day—Dor and Cass had fucked in his room, the luxury of a bed intoxicatingly heady but almost distracting, because they were so accustomed to sheds, abandoned boathouses and, most often, the cold ground at night. They’d rutted in between the rows of plants in Cass’s garden on moonlit nights and on the rocky, muddy shore on moonless ones, and Dor had taken her standing up in a narrow space between trucks in the auto shed. Many times, working in the thin winter sun by herself, Cass thought about what they did and wondered if it was the shame of it, the degradation of hiding, that made it that much more intense.
She tasted the liquor on his mouth and licked it greedily. She could not get enough of the taste of him. So it would be another time in the open, another morning when she would wake in filthy clothes, dirt ground into her knees, her elbows, twigs and pebbles in her hair.
Well, so be it.
Dor stood, half carrying her until she wriggled from his grip and found her footing. Dor, who had been an investor Before, who had spent his days under fluorescent lights working at a computer, had been hardened Aftertime. Until they came to New Eden, he’d run the Box, a fenced-in pleasure mart,
