Aftertime

blades. Cut a Beater deeply enough and it would bleed out like a citizen. But even if the wound didn’t kill it, spilling its blood would distract it enough so you could get away.

It worked for a while. It probably wouldn’t work anymore.

But Cass closed her fingers on the handle of the blade in her pocket anyway.

16

IN THE EVENING LYLE LIT CANDLES. THERE WAS canned soup and snack packs of Oreo cookies, the kind kids used to have in their school lunches. The soup was cold, but it tasted delicious. Afterward, Cass helped Lyle with the dishes. They were chipped stoneware with an ugly design of brown owls winking against an orange sun. These dishes had no doubt been purchased by one of the wives who’d come and gone.

Strange, to think about what people held on to. What brought them comfort.

That thought was still in Cass’s mind when she and Smoke set out again after nightfall. Lyle shook Smoke’s hand and gave her a hug, a crushing, lengthy one, and told them they were always welcome, and stood in his doorway watching them make their way down the street.

In Cass’s pocket was a crystal suncatcher that she’d stolen from Lyle’s house. It had been hanging in the window in what had once been the dining room. She was sure that if she’d asked, he would have given it to her with his blessing.

But Cass couldn’t ask. She had to steal. She didn’t know why, and wondering wouldn’t help.

It wasn’t all that hard to keep the image of the Beaters-swarming across the street, feasting on their dying comrade’s blood-out of her mind, Cass discovered.

Because now all she could think about was Ruthie.

Cass held her blade in her hand as Smoke held his. They walked side by side, down the center of the street. It was a cool night and a few leaves had fallen from the sycamores lining the asphalt. The sycamores had survived the bioattacks that had decimated so many of the trees of Before. Cass had never cared for them because despite their vigorous spring leafing, by late summer they grew dispirited and started to shed yellowed and drying leaves. They seemed, to Cass, to lack resolve.

Now, though, she felt a kinship for them. They, too, were survivors, and that meant something.

Cass traced their route in her mind. Three blocks down Arroyo and then a right and a straight shot down Second for a quarter mile or so before it dead-ended in the wide lawn in front of the library. A few years ago there had been a fund-raising campaign to remodel the place, for new carpet and shelves and furniture, new computers and an updated catalog and checkout system. To pay for it all, personalized bricks were sold and laid in a meandering walkway to the front door. Mim and Byrn had bought bricks. Two of them: one said “Gina and Byrn Orr,” the other “Ruthie Haverford.” It hurt Cass that her own name didn’t appear on the bricks, even though she wanted nothing from Byrn and she herself was responsible for the chasm between her and her mother. And it also hurt that they insisted on using Haverford for Ruthie’s last name, because Cass had changed her own last name to Dollar legally the day she turned eighteen, and so Ruthie’s real name was Ruthie Dollar.

Despite these hurts she knew exactly where the bricks were. Ruthie was only a baby when the walkway was put down, but Cass had brought her there in a stroller and showed her where hers was, near an oleander hedge. Later, Cass held her little fingers and traced the shapes of the letters in her name. She had been glad Ruthie had a brick, so that someday she could bring her friends and show them that she was someone.

Cass thought about telling Smoke about the brick. But she wasn’t sure what words would make him understand, and she just wanted to get to Ruthie. Her hands were hungry to touch her, her arms longed to hold her. Her entire body felt infused with the frantic energy of longing for her baby.

She was alert to the sounds of the night, listening for the wailing and snuffling that would signal that they had not been lucky enough. She stayed close by Smoke’s side, her fingers in her pocket brushing against Lyle’s crystal teardrop, and her thoughts chased each other in circles as she tried to focus on her breathing, the way that flight attendant in her meetings had constantly been harping about. The woman carried with her an air of wounded resentment that made it hard to pay attention as she described how you were supposed to inhale hope and possibility and exhale expectations and disappointment and fear.

But now Cass breathed with everything she had, and after they had walked in silence for what felt like a hundred miles, the library finally appeared ahead in the gloom.

“We need to go around to the side,” Cass said, trying to cover up the dizzy combination of relief and anticipation that flooded through her. “At least that’s where-”

“Okay,” Smoke said.

He matched her pace as she sped up, barely able to keep herself from breaking into a run. But then she stopped short, several yards from the door, apprehensive.

“You have to knock,” she whispered. “When they see me, they might think I’m…you know.”

Smoke put a gentle hand to her back. “Cass, you’re cleaned up. You look fine. And in the dark, your skin…”

Cass knew what he meant. The wounds along her arm were faded even in the daylight, but in the dark they would go unnoticed.

Smoke ran his hand gently down the side of her face, tilting her chin up so that she would have to look at him. “Are you all right?”

Cass nodded, but she didn’t trust her voice to speak. She led the way to the door, but as she was about to knock it opened.

The woman standing inside held a flashlight.

“Hurry,” she whispered. She stepped out of the way, holding the door open just wide enough for them to pass.

Cass and Smoke slipped inside and the door shut with a heavy thud.

Someone slid a heavy bolt into place. As her eyes adjusted to the flashlight’s glow, Cass saw that four people were gathered in the small vestibule.

One of the men held a gun loosely at his side.

But as she scanned the others she realized that she knew one of them, and her alarm lessened slightly.

“Elaine-it’s me, Cass.”

There was a moment of shocked silence and then a flash of recognition, Elaine’s eyes widening and her lips parting as though she was about to say Cass’s name.

And then she didn’t. Instead, her expression shuttered, but not before Cass thought she saw her shake her head, very slightly, as she raised her arms to cross them in front of her chest.

“Do I know you?” she said.

“Elaine? Don’t you…” Cass’s bewilderment grew into something more, confusion edged with cold fear. She took another look at the other people in the room, their tense posture, their hard expressions. “My name is Elaine,” she said. “Elaine White. Maybe you took one of my yoga classes?”

Her gaze was hard and intent, and Cass hesitated. “Uh…maybe.”

“I used to teach at the Third Street Gym. And I had one over in Terryville on Thursdays and Saturdays. Saturday was such a big class, I never knew everyone’s name. But you look kind of familiar.”

“Yeah,” Cass said, trying to gauge where Elaine was trying to lead her…and why. Elaine had been a yoga teacher, a fact that Cass learned during one of a dozen after-dinner conversations when the two of them had worked together washing and drying dishes and ordering the stores, tasks reserved for those without children. Parents told bedtime stories and tucked their little ones in, even Aftertime, leaving the others to fill the hours before sleep with stories of their past, never talk of the future. She knew that Elaine had recently broken up with her boyfriend, a man who’d left his wife for her, that she’d had to take out a restraining order against him, though he’d disappeared early on in the troubles. That she had to leave a room-sized loom behind when she came to the library, that she missed weaving her blankets and shawls and table runners more than anything from Before. “Saturdays. I took the…uh…”

“Sacred Thread. At ten-thirty.”

“Yes. That one.”

For a moment they regarded each other, Elaine’s mouth compressed in a thin line, Smoke standing close behind