Aftertime

She brushed her teeth and spat on the drainage hole, and combed her hair with her fingers. She folded the toiletries up into the damp towel and left them in a plastic basket on a teak bench, and when she emerged from the shower the woman was leaning against the enclosure’s cinder block wall, arms folded across her chest.

But when she stood straight and pushed back her hood, Cass stopped abruptly in her tracks.

It was Elaine. She was wearing the same clothes as the other woman, but her face was unmistakable in the bright light of the new day.

“What-”

“Hush,” Elaine whispered and pulled the hood forward, covering her face. “Walk with me and keep your voice down.”

Cass stared straight ahead and concentrated on keeping her expression neutral as they walked back through the still-quiet building. Elaine pushed open the door to the courtyard and they walked into the sunlight, the smell of kaysev and wild onion drifting on the morning breeze. A paper cup skittered and rolled across the concrete, but otherwise nothing moved.

On an ordinary day, when Cass lived here, there were people in the courtyard all the time. Children chasing each other, adults drying clothes washed in the earliest light of dawn in the creek, or preparing kaysev, or scrubbing dishes in the tubs of water they carried back. Or simply sitting in chairs dragged into the sun, talking. But now the residents rose and slept and bathed and ate on a schedule set by the Rebuilders.

The courtyard’s layout was different, too, arranged for greatest efficiency. Tables had been organized in neat rows with plastic chairs. Plates and bowls and cutlery were stacked on shelves; a tarp had been rigged to cover them, but today, in the good weather, the tarps were rolled up and tied. The fire pit had undergone the biggest transformation of all: it was now a sturdy brick-and-mortar structure that rose a man’s height off the ground, with a chimney twice that tall, and a series of racks and hooks to hold food and pots above the flames.

“We have five minutes,” Elaine said in a low voice, biting off the words. “Exercise time. Walk with me, but don’t look at me. Look at the ground. Keep a steady pace and keep your voice down.”

She led the way along the edge of the courtyard, striding ahead with her hands clenched into fists at her sides, nothing like the easygoing yoga teacher Cass had known before.

“Tell me everything you can about Ruthie. Please, Elaine,” Cass pleaded as she caught up. “I have to know. I have to go get her.”

Elaine glanced at her; Cass saw only the shadow of her features concealed under the hood. “They’re sending you to Colima tomorrow, Cass,” she sighed. “Don’t you understand? And you need to count yourself lucky. Where they’re sending Smoke is way worse.”

“I’ll find a way,” Cass said. “I’ll get away from them-I’ll run-I’ll-”

“That’s suicide,” Elaine interrupted. “Don’t even talk that way.”

“I’ve been on my own for weeks out there. I can do it again. Besides, if I don’t have Ruthie, I don’t have anything.” Cass swallowed down the lump forming in her throat. “I might as well be dead.”

“I said don’t talk that way,” Elaine said angrily. “I’m put ting my ass on the line for you here. Because we were friends. Because-because I thought you were strong. Strong enough. If you’re going to give up there’s no reason for me to be here.”

“Okay, okay,” Cass said hastily. “I’m sorry. Look, just tell me where Ruthie is and I’ll-I’ll be careful. I won’t do anything to get you in trouble. Or any of the others. I promise.”

Elaine walked silently for a few moments before speaking. When she did, her voice was softer, almost tentative. “All right. I’ll tell you what I know. But you have to understand, there’s no guarantee that-there’s just no guarantees.” Cass thought Ruthie-small hand in hers, dimpled knees and cheek so soft she could kiss it a hundred times, a thousand-and pushed the panic away. Pushed it with all her might. “Fine.”

“When we found out the Rebuilders were coming-a scout came first, so we knew-we sent all the girls-every female under sixteen-to the Convent.”

The Convent… Cass remembered the words in Elaine’s hasty scrawl in the bathroom. “What is it-like a church?”

Elaine laughed without humor. “Not like any church you’ve ever seen. Like a cult, I guess. I don’t really know. No one’s been in it. Once you go in, you don’t come out. No one I know about, anyway.”

“Where is it?”

“It’s up in San Pedro,” Elaine said.

San Pedro: not too far from Sykes, where Sammi’s dad was. Maybe fifteen miles to the south. The girl’s heart- shaped face, her wide gold eyes, flashed through Cass’s mind-a promise she should never have made-but she didn’t have time to dwell on the girl now.

“That’s forty miles from here.”

Elaine nodded. “It’s in the old Miners stadium. They’ve taken over the whole damn thing, apparently.”

“Who?”

“These…women. They’re like, I don’t know, fundamentalists, I guess. Sort of Christian…but they have a lot of their own beliefs. Kind of whacked-out is what I hear, into some strange rituals and shit like that.”

“And you sent the children there?” Cass tried and failed to keep the accusation from her voice. “You sent Ruthie?”

“Yes, we did,” Elaine said, turning to face Cass head-on, and in a trick of the light, a bright beam from the sun that had just crested the roof of the library, her face was fully illuminated, and Cass saw the network of fine lines around her eyes, the deep groove between her eyebrows. The evidence of the toll the weeks had taken on this woman who had once been her friend. “And you would have, too. Because no matter what they’re doing with the girls at the Convent, what the Rebuilders do is far worse.”

21

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN-” CASS ASKED, THE WORLD falling away from her, the air sucked from her throat. “What were they going to do?”

– to my baby, my darling, the person I’d die for-

“No one knows, Cass. Don’t lose your shit here, no one really knows.” Elaine stared straight ahead, sped up her pace, swung her arms as though she was racing against herself. “But there were rumors.”

“What rumors?”

“Quiet,” Elaine snapped, reaching for Cass’s arm. She dug her sharp fingernails into the soft flesh of her wrist, kept digging until tears sprang to Cass’s eyes and she finally, reluctantly, nodded. “Look, you can’t put too much stock in this. We don’t really know what’s going down in Colima. They keep us in the dark. You know, they have their propaganda…”

“Just tell me.”

“All right. The vaccine they were talking about? You know, against the fever? No one really thinks they can do that. But what they are trying to do is develop a test. To see if you’re immune or not. And people say they’re close.”

“But what does that have to do with the children?”

“They say they’re taking the kids and testing them first. The outliers are going to be raised together down there. Kind of a superresistant colony, get it? They’re going to get the best of everything-food, medicine, whatever it takes. They’re being raised drinking the Rebuilder Kool-Aid.”

“But what happens to the ones who aren’t?”

“No one knows. But it can’t be good, right?”

Cass felt her blood go cold. “What do you mean…”

“Look, Cass, they’re zealots. They use everything, twist everything for their purpose. I think some of them are even glad Before is gone, gives them a chance to reshape the world in their image. I mean, they’re not going to waste an opportunity just because it goes against what regular people think of as unacceptable.”

“What, Elaine? Just say it-”

“The rumor is they’re putting the rest of the kids to work. The ones who are old enough. They’re sending them out on raiding parties, into the buildings first, places an adult can’t or won’t go. They probably have them washing