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 Cass, but a more immediate problem was that the library had become a Rebuilder stronghold. Its leader, Evangeline, had learned that Cass was an outlier. She said there were a few other outliers like herself, but that they didn’t have enough research subjects yet; the Rebuilders were working on a vaccine and they needed Cass for research and study.
Cass suspected there was more to the story. Evangeline had planned to send Smoke to their detention center in Colima as punishment for his part in the rock slide battle. She didn’t bother to mask her hatred for Smoke, and she barely bothered to conceal her antipathy for Cass despite promising her safety. When one of the men in the shelter helped Cass and Smoke escape, Cass was sure she’d escaped imprisonment in the Rebuilder headquarters, and possibly worse.
“So you know, even if no one there recognizes you from the Box, you’ll be at a disadvantage,” Cass argued, searching Dor’s grim expression for any sign he might acquiesce. “You’ll be just another recruit, with hardly any more status than the people they convert by force from the shelters. I might be able to get more privileges. More access.”
For another long moment Dor said nothing. He didn’t look away, and Cass felt like he was calculating odds and dangers she could only guess at, as though he ran spreadsheets through his mind even when he wasn’t staring at his screens, always focusing on a bottom line that even the end of the world could not erase for him.
“It would be better if we knew exactly what your immunity is worth to them,” Dor finally said, and Cass allowed herself a tiny sigh of relief. It had worked-she had given him something he could understand, a problem presented in the language he was most comfortable with: she could be bartered.
“Yes.”
“And Ruthie…”
“She’s an outlier, too.” Cass didn’t think she could bear to tell him that story-the one before the Convent-of Ruthie being bitten, of the kindness of the woman who nursed her back to health during Cass’s lost months and fever days. “But Evangeline doesn’t know. She doesn’t know about her at all. No one told her, even when Smoke and I were locked up in the library.”
“So how are you going to explain showing up in Colima with her?”
Cass had prepared an answer for that, but she found that it was harder than she anticipated to get the words out. She took a deep breath and rushed through the rest. “We have to say Ruthie’s yours. That she’s your daughter. We have to say that you and I are…you know. Together. All of us. That we met on the road after I left the library, and we’ve been together ever since.”
Dor’s expression barely changed. There was a darkening of his eyes, perhaps, a slight downward pull at the corners of his mouth.
“And why would you be willing to do all of this for me? The risk goes up with every lie you tell.”
“You have it all wrong,” Cass said quietly. “I’m not doing any of this for you. You’re just our ticket to leave San Pedro. I’m not coming with you so much as leaving here. Because there’s nothing left for us here. Ruthie needs to live where there are other children, other…families. And the Box is dying-I can see that.”
Dor nodded as though her answer made perfect sense. “As long as your expectations are realistic. I mean, there is going to be less for everyone, everywhere, and no matter how hard you try, you’re not going to be able to outrun that fact. You’re stuck here, in what’s left of the West. Those lunatics trying to hold the Rockies-they shoot on sight, so that’s not an option.”
“I never said I wanted to go East.” The blueleaf fever that spawned Beaters after the Siege had been limited to California at first, the only state to have spread the mutant seed along with the kaysev that was meant as manna to save and nourish survivors. In a panic that the Beaters would spread across the continent, an increasingly organized army had claimed a boundary along the Rockies, and no traveler who ventured there returned to tell about it. Perhaps because of the barrier, the East had come to symbolize salvation for some.
Cass was not tempted. She would take her chances here, in the ragged remains of California. Somewhere, there had to be a place for her and Ruthie.
“You sound like you’ve lost hope,” she accused.
He narrowed his eyes. “I’m not without hope. I’m just limiting it to me and mine. There will be enough for me and for the people I care about in this lifetime, if I’m strategic about it. It’s not my job to worry about everyone else or any other time.”
“And who exactly do you care about?” Cass tried and failed to mask her anger. She was uncomfortably conscious of her hypocrisy, but she didn’t admit that she had had the very same sort of thoughts herself:
“Sammi. I care about Sammi. And I care about my people. When I’m with them, anyway.” He looked away, his gaze troubled and unreadable.
“What do you mean?” Cass waited, but she could sense Dor pulling away, following the spiral of his thoughts to a bitter place. She couldn’t let him. She had to keep him here, feeling what she was feeling, if there was any chance for her to convince him to take her and Ruthie with him. “Tell me…please.”
For a moment Dor said nothing, straightening the stack of papers on the desk until it was perfectly uniform.
“As long as I’m with them I care, but I don’t know how I’ll feel when I’m away. Faye, Joe, Three-High, Feo-all of them, they…mean something to me.” He glanced at her and then quickly away. “Even Gloria. You may not believe me, but I was really sorry when she died. But three years ago I had an assistant-her name was Melissa. She kept my calendar, brought me coffee. Slept with me sometimes. I know that sounds bad, and I’m not asking for your approval-but Melissa and I were good for each other. I think I might have been closer to her than I was to my wife, at the time.”
Cass murmured encouragement. She was always surprised when people assumed that she’d judge them. Cass
