“This what we asked for?” the first guard demanded as she hefted a small, paper-wrapped package that she’d taken from Faye’s pack.
“Yes. Plus a little extra insurance.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” Faye nodded. “Check it out after I leave, make sure it gets where it’s going. The rest is for you, but I couldn’t get the menthols. Just the Light 120’s. Maybe next week.”
The guard nodded and slipped the package into her skirt pocket. “I appreciate it.”
“Likewise.”
But no-there would be no cigarettes for Cass, nothing that would build a taste for her addictions. Nothing that would remind her of those feelings, of wanting more and more until wanting became needing. In the past, she’d let her addiction become the thing that mattered most, and she’d lost Ruthie as a result. No more. Even if she had only hours left to live, she didn’t intend to spend any of them enslaved to anyone or anything.
She had made it this far. This much closer to finding Ruthie. And she wouldn’t do anything to jeopardize their future together.
“Thank you for bringing me,” she said to Faye, as sweetly as she could manage. “And God bless you.”
The look the Order guards exchanged was laced with cynicism, but they said nothing.
Cass was pretending to look for answers. And they were pretending they had answers to give her.
Good. So far, everyone was playing their part.
33
BEYOND THE ANTEROOM WAS A BANK OF elevators that no longer worked-and a stairwell that led up five flights to a hallway that opened onto the skyboxes on one side, and offices on the other. Cass was taken to an office with a view out over the parking lot scattered with wrecked and abandoned cars. The door clicked shut behind her and the room was silent as a stone-soundproofed, she guessed, so some pencil pusher could attend to the details of running the place without distractions. There were bookshelves, a couple of chairs, a corkboard that took up most of one wall-a drab little room like in any anonymous office building. The room where business was consolidated from the sport spectacle of the rest of the stadium.
When Cass had come here as a girl, she’d been high on the thrill of a stolen day with her dad. An adventure, just the two of them-the first of many, he promised. She wasn’t about to believe
But at least there was this one perfect day: the snap of the tickets tearing, the shouts of the vendors cooking up sweetsmelling sausages. The heart-pounding first glimpse of the players in their tight white pants and red-and- silver shirts as they ran onto the field. Sitting close to your dad, his arm heavy around your shoulders, his high-five slap stinging your palm when Hugo Hawkins stole second. Wishing the game would never end.
Two lives later, Cass knew that baseball was a business just like everything else. Behind the handsome players and the green-green field and the cheering crowds were managers, bosses, arrangers of deliveries and collectors of profits, people who hired and fired and balanced budgets and greased palms and traded influence. Someone like that had worked in this office, and, because of that, the magic of that long-ago day never seemed more distant than it did now.
Finally the door opened and a woman in a pink skirt and blouse entered. She looked like she was somewhere in her thirties, with straight dark hair tucked primly behind her ears, but her wide smile was welcoming and generous. She extended both her hands and Cass let her enfold her own in a tight grasp.
“I’m Deacon Lily,” she said softly. She had the kind of voice you leaned in to hear. “Welcome to the Order. You and I are going to have a nice chat and get to know each other, and then together we will decide if you are suited for life here among the Order. If the answer is yes, you will join the other neophytes. You will stay among them until we determine that you are ready to progress to acolyte status. That may take weeks, or perhaps months. It depends on how quickly you learn and adjust to our ways.”
“What if I’m…not suited?” Cass asked.
“Oh, let’s not worry about that right now. Besides, you’ve already gotten Sister Lorrie’s recommendation. She can be quite discerning, and generally when she sees potential in a seeker, there is a good reason.”
Cass searched Lily’s face for sarcasm but found none. “She was very…all-business,” she said carefully.
Lily waved her hand, brushing the thought away. “The ones who interface with the outside, they have a hard job. Mother Cora says they have to steel themselves against the lure of the godless while keeping their hearts open to the possibility of grace, which is a very difficult calling. That is why only a few are called to be guards. Don’t let her attitude put you off, because she is only protecting our sanctum from those who would seek to weaken us. Now you are inside, with us, and very soon you will start to see the beautiful truths that guide us.”
Cass nodded and smiled as though Lily’s words made sense, wondering if she really believed what she was saying.
Cass was intimately familiar with the many faces of denial, from the first whispers that allow you to shade the truth a complexion that suited you, to the most desperate and fantastic depths in which you traded your sanity for a version of reality that allowed you to continue to exist another day.
But contentment, even serenity, was not a state she associated with any place on the spectrum.
“Now, why don’t you tell me what you’ve heard about the Order,” Lily prompted, sitting in the chair behind the desk and taking a yellow pad and pen from a drawer.
“I heard this was a good place when you think you can’t go on anymore,” Cass said tremulously. Then she told the rest of her careful lie, one she had built from pieces of the truth. “I lived with my mother, when I was growing up. And…my stepfather.”
Just saying the hated word caused a bit of the anguish that simmered deep inside to break off and lodge in her heart. She felt her face color with shame and grief, and blinked hard so she wouldn’t cry.
This was why Cass had chosen this story; she knew she couldn’t tell it without the pain coming to the surface. She wouldn’t have to fool anyone-her desolation was real. And
“Yes?” Lily said softly.
“My stepfather was not a good man,” Cass continued, her voice quavering. “He was also…inappropriate. With me.”
“I’m very, very sorry to hear that.”
“Yes. He-” Cass broke off and Lily reached into the desk, coming up with a box of tissues-a practically new box of real tissues, which she slid across the desk. Cass gratefully took one and dabbed at her eyes. “I suppose you can guess. Anyway, I was estranged from them, but they lived in the same town as I did. After the Siege, I heard through friends that my mother had the fever.”
“Oh, Cassandra…again, I am so sorry,” Lily said, and for a moment Cass was drawn into her sympathy, tempted to tell her all about Mim, about her birdlike hands and diet of coffee and melba toast, her vanity about her size-six figure and the high heels she wore until the very end, even if she was just going to get the mail. About the padded bras she gave Cass for her eleventh birthday; about the way the bedroom door sounded when she slammed it shut the night Cass tried to tell her about what Byrn had done to her.
Instead she told the lies she had prepared.
“I loved my mother so much. When she was dying…and she was so hot, it was as though she was on fire from the inside. She couldn’t bear to have anything touching her skin and so she lay on the floor, on the tile, and when I tried to give her water she just-she couldn’t keep it down. And she was muttering all the time…she never slept, and I couldn’t, I couldn’t tell what she was saying and…”
Cass peeked out from her lowered lashes to see how her story was going over. In truth, she had taken the
