Horizon (03) (11 page)

Smoke fell.

Cass ran.

Chapter 16

HOW COULD SHE have given up on him?

The minute she looked into Smoke’s eyes, saw him trying to say her name as Steve’s strong hands helped him sit up, she knew what a terrible mistake she’d made, leaving him alone in that place, untended, all because of fear.

She hadn’t been strong enough for him.

“Are you…” He was struggling to speak, his vocal cords rusty from a lack of use. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Are you all right, Cass?”

“Me? I’m fine, oh, sweetheart, I’m perfectly fine. But you—I’m so sorry I haven’t been coming—”

“Have they…hurt you?” He pushed weakly against Steve, trying to break free of his grasp.

“No, no, no, no,” she said, realization dawning on her. No one had told him where he was, no one had explained. “Smoke, these are good people. Free people. This isn’t Colima. These aren’t the Rebuilders. This place is called New Eden, and you’ve been recovering here, healing here.”

Smoke’s eyelids fluttered and he started to say something else, but the words were garbled and almost unintelligible as he slumped against Steve.

“Smoke, no—” Cass pressed her hands to his face, his neck, feeling for his pulse.

A sharp exclamation above her—Sun-hi, out of breath, clutching her jacket front closed. She cursed in Korean before crouching down and switching to English.

“Smoke is awake?”

He mumbled something, his chin slumped to his chest. Sun-hi reached for his wrist, Cass getting out of the way for her. She used her thumb to pull up one of his eyelids and shone her flashlight at his face. That got her a groan of protest.

“This is amazing,” Sun-hi said. “He walked here by himself?”

“I think so.”

“I don’t know how he could—well, it does not matter now. He picked a bad moment for waking up. I have to get all patients ready for evacuation. Steve, you bring him now.”

Steve and a raider named Brandt crouched down to pick the prone form up in a fireman’s hold, linking arms to support him. Smoke’s head lolled the other way.

“Is he going to be okay?” Cass asked. “Is he going to wake up again?”

“I don’t know how this is happening,” Sun-hi said. “I am very amazed. But right now I must figure out cars, pack supplies. You come with me, Steve. We will get ready together.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Steve said.

“We will take him back to the hospital, Cass,” Sun-hi promised. “Take very good care of him. Now you go get ready too.”

Cass put her hand gently on Smoke’s face, his beard soft under her hand. Someone had kept it neatly trimmed. It should have been her.

Smoke was silent as they carried him away, Sun-hi striding purposefully ahead of them toward the hospital. Smoke owed Sun-hi his life, Cass had no doubt. And Cass owed Sun-hi too. And Zihna. And all the volunteers who’d fed and bathed him, held his hand and read to him, talked to him despite the fact that he’d been trapped in his mind as his body mended.

This should be her happiest day, the one she’d longed for, dreamed of and finally despaired of. And instead of holding him, whispering the thousand things she’d saved up to tell him, she and everyone else had to try to survive a horror that lay waiting to overrun them come the morning.

Aftertime had taken so much from her, and now it threatened to take this miracle, as well.

As Sun-hi’s little group disappeared around the back of the building, Cass headed for the doors of the community center, now thrown wide open with dozens of people milling about inside. She would get Ruthie, pack their things, get back to the hospital, make sure Smoke had a place in one of the cars, and then—once everything was in order—she would finally return to keeping the vigil she had forsaken.

She wouldn’t let the world take this one from her.

Sammi had organized the little kids to play a version of Duck, Duck, Goose. Twyla and Ruthie and Dane ran in a circle around Sammi and Dirk, who sat scowling at the floor, old enough to know that something was terribly wrong, but not old enough to understand what.

When Sammi looked up and saw Cass, there was a moment when her resentment and anger didn’t have time to catch up, a second where she looked like a little girl again herself, frightened and vulnerable. Then the mask came down; she narrowed her eyes and got to her feet.

“Sammi!” Ruthie giggled and smacked her. “Goose! Goose!”

Ruthie hadn’t noticed Cass yet. Her skin was rosy from the exertion of the game, and she threw herself at Sammi and grabbed her hands, wanting to play some more. She looked so happy. In recent weeks she had come out of her shell—laughed louder, chattered more excitedly, played more creatively. She was doing so well here—and now she would be uprooted again.

It couldn’t be helped; it was the only way to save them all. Of course, not all of them would make it on the road to…wherever better. How many would die tomorrow? How many the day after that? How many of them would be alive in a week, a month…a year?

Cass forced herself to stay focused. It never helped to think about the future like that—she knew better; everyone knew better.

“Babygirl,” she said, and Ruthie spun around and ran to her, laughing, arms lifted to be picked up. Cass swept her up in her arms and spun with the momentum, her little girl’s legs sailing through the air.

“So, can I go now?” Sammi’s voice dripped with sarcasm, her face curled into a sneer.

“Sammi…”

“
What?
Don’t you have to, like, figure out which guy you’re gonna hook up with later?”

“Sammi, this is serious. All I want for you—all
anyone
wants for you—is to keep you safe. Your dad—”

“Dad’s already been here. I told him to fuck off.”

Only the faintest quiver of Sammi’s lower lip gave her away. It broke Cass’s heart to see how hard she was working to preserve her anger.

“At least let’s figure out what you should bring—”

“I’ve got that covered. I’m with Kyra and Sage, we’re gonna share.”

Cass sighed. If she pressed any further, she risked alienating Sammi entirely, or drawing her focus away from the important tasks at hand. “Okay. I know you girls are smart. You’ve got packs? How about that jogger stroller, can you pack some things in that?”

Sammi rolled her eyes and picked up Dane, who’d fallen at her feet in a fit of giggles. “Tell you what, Cass, why don’t you let me focus on my life and you can go back to screwing up your own, okay?”

Chapter 17

IT HAD ALL started so well and gone so wrong.

The other women in the Mothers’ House were welcoming at first. They gave Cass jars of wildflowers, cakes decorated with thin kaysev-syrup icing, books and toys and blankets and stuffed animals and good cheer. They made her tea and sat with her, clucking over the scrapes and bruises she’d sustained in the Rebuilder battle just before she got there. All of them had jobs. Ingrid and Suzanne both worked in the laundry, Jasmine—at that time already six months pregnant—was in the storehouse, assisting Dana with disbursement. They were happy to have another person to work into the child care rotation. In the evenings, coming back from meals, there was laughter and sometimes singing and when the little ones were asleep they gathered in the living room and talked by the light of a single candle.

And then, one day, one bad day that Cass wished she could do over, she rose in the morning and began down the stairs only to overhear a conversation between Ingrid and Jasmine.

“All I’m saying is, a child doesn’t get that way by herself,” Jasmine said, in her faint East Coast accent.

“Wait until your own child starts sassing you and then see what you think,” Suzanne—unflappable Suzanne, always willing to give everyone the benefit of the doubt—said mildly.

“But I mean, it’s like Ruthie’s
afraid
half the time. Twyla talks, like,
four times
as much as she does.”

“Some kids are just quieter than others, Jazzy,” Suzanne said patiently. “And Cass and she have been through a lot. Even kids need time to process things.”

“But look at Dirk and Dane. I mean, they lost their dad, like, one day he was there and the next day he was facedown in the front yard, shot by the neighbor, for heaven’s sake. That’s traumatic, right? Right?”

There was a pause, a small silence in which the coil of anxiety inside Cass pulled taut. The silence meant that Suzanne—sweet Suzanne, humming-without-knowing-she-was-doing-it Suzanne—had doubts.

“I don’t mean she’s a
bad
mother,” Jasmine said. “Only, you know, she’s so protective. Overprotective. She never lets that child out of her sight. She even drags her along to go see that poor man in the hospital. I mean, tell me that’s not traumatizing, right? I heard his eyes were gouged out.”

“Oh, Christ, Jazzy, that’s not true,” Suzanne protested. “Go see him yourself, if you want. I was over there getting some cream for Twyla’s rash, I saw him, he’s not that bad.”

Cass backed up the stairs at that point, her face burning.

Was she overprotective?

Yes, probably; but how could she help it, after everything they had experienced and seen?

And yes, Ruthie was quiet…but a few months ago she didn’t talk at all. Cass had been happy that she was simply talking again. But these few words from Jasmine threw a pall over her progress.

The doubts magnified and escalated all that day. It wasn’t the first time her parenting had been called into question; it was far from the worst time. So why did it hurt so much now? As Cass sat with Smoke late that afternoon, holding his hand, smoothing the hair out of his face, adjusting his covers, her mind reviewed every interaction she’d had with the others. The way they instinctively knew how to fill the gaps in the conversation that always left her tongue-tied…had they been thinking she was awkward all along? The way Ingrid always brought a new book for Ruthie from the library—was it because she didn’t think Cass would do it on her own? The games Dane invited Ruthie to play—had Ingrid put him up to it, out of pity for her awkward daughter and her inadequate mothering?

By dinnertime, she had a stomachache and her face felt tight. As she carried their tray of food and walked with Ruthie across the lawn, headed for the table she usually shared with the other women, she saw Dor sitting alone at another. His meal was finished, his cutlery laid across his plate and half a cup of water in his hand. He was watching Sammi, who was talking to a group of teens over at the volleyball net.

In a split-second decision she went and sat with Dor instead.

Sliding her tray on the table across from him, she gave him the best smile she could muster.

“Okay if I sit here?” she said.

Dor looked surprised. “Hell yeah. I thought you were avoiding me.” Then, as if sensing he’d made a mistake, his face softened. “If you hadn’t come to me, I would have hunted you down, Cass.”

“I don’t belong here.” The words, stark and frightened, were out of her mouth before she could stop herself. Worse yet, her eyes stung with unshed tears. Cass covered her mouth and looked down at the table. Someone had covered it with a flowered cloth—someone, no doubt, who had no trouble making and keeping friends, someone who was comfortable in the social milieu here in New Eden.

Dor smiled ruefully and held up his hands for Cass to see the cuts and scrapes that covered his forearms. He’d spent the day helping to remove barbed-wire fencing from a section of the lower island; they’d been using it to cultivate kaysev, but as Cass had already seen for herself on a walk with Ruthie, they had barely cleared the land since New Eden had been settled.

Pulling the barbed wire, like hauling trash or tilling the earth, was a job for the brawny, but not one that was prized. Such jobs were never given to council members. Despite New Eden’s insistence on a cooperative society, it was clear that some job assignments were more coveted than others and distributed according to the council’s whims. And Dor had started at the bottom. He didn’t have the same reputation in New Eden as he had in the Box.

“Ahhh…hell.” Dor’s hands sought hers and drew them together, holding them tightly. “Come on, girl, don’t go soft on me now.”

Blinking, Cass took a chance and peeked at him. His dark, scarred face was shadowed with concern. His brows were lowered. He’d cut his silver-tinged black hair since coming to this settlement, and it now cleared the collar of his work shirt, though the front still fell in his eyes. The thin wire loops in his ears and the tattoos that wound up both arms—things that had never looked out of place in the Box—seemed a little too edgy here, a little provocative. Maybe that was why he sat alone, a fact Cass hadn’t bothered to consider until just this minute.

Neither one of them fit in here.

“Sammi’s making friends,” Cass said lamely, after Dor finally relaxed his grip on her hands.

“Ruthie too.”

Just like that, they acknowledged what neither had said aloud: New Eden was a good place for children. And that had to be enough.

“I just…I don’t know. Maybe it’s just that the others all knew each other already. I mean, Ingrid and Suzanne and Jasmine and all. They’re nice to me, but sometimes…”

“Don’t let them get to you,” Dor said. “They’re jealous. I mean,
look
at you.”

Cass looked up in surprise, found Dor’s eyes intent on her. They were the near-ebony that always signaled intensity, the shade of Dor’s strong emotion, and he stared without blinking into her eyes, and then let his gaze travel down to her mouth, and it was almost a physical sensation, as though he were touching her instead of just watching her, and Cass felt the stirring that she thought had not followed her to this place, the hunger for touch that had been driven from her by the terror of almost losing Smoke.

And thinking of Dor touching her lips led to memories of him kissing her. They’d made love twice on the journey that took them from the Box to Colima. No. That wasn’t right—they’d
fucked
twice. They’d seized on each other out of desperation, terror, need, hopelessness, anger, slammed their bodies into each other as death threatened and the world yawed crazily on its axis. They’d kept each other going, no more and no less, and wasn’t that over when it was over? Wasn’t that the nature of the deal they’d never discussed out loud—to get each other through, and then leave it, then never speak of it again?

“You’re beautiful, Cass,” Dor said, and only then did Cass realize that he’d only loosened his grip on her hands, not released them, and he laced his fingers through hers and caressed her palms with his thumbs. The sensation went straight to her core, searing, ignited from a spark to a roaring flame with no slow build. “Every woman, every man, that’s the first thing they think when they see you.”

His words were a buzz in her ear, confirmation of things she didn’t want to hear. These were things she didn’t want to know. They were a crushing rejection of the fragile hope she’d nurtured, that she could be just another mom in just another town, raising a nice girl and having nice friends.

Dor must have seen her expression slip, because his hands went still, he stopped touching her, pulled away. “What did I say?” he asked urgently, not unkindly.

Nothing, only don’t stop touching me. Nothing, only—please—make me forget again.

“Tonight—” Cass swallowed, nearly lost her nerve. “Tonight, after Ruthie goes down…”

“What? What do you need?”

“Take me somewhere,” Cass said miserably. “Alone.”

And he did.