Rebirth

“She’d only been with them a couple of weeks. She’d lost track of the days so I don’t know how long, really, but she still looked reasonably healthy, physically. Cass, I left her plenty of food and medicine and a gun and bullets.”

“You could have brought her. We could have taken her with us.”

Dor was already shaking his head angrily. “Damn it, Cass, I knew you’d say that. I knew that’s straight where you would go. What would we do with her? She’d slow us down. She wasn’t right in the head-not anymore. There’s no way we could bring her to the Rebuilders. They wouldn’t want her. They’d be suspicious. That house is sealed tight and she’s armed and she has provisions for months, if she’s careful. Most people have a lot less. A hell of a lot less.”

Cass knew he was right. Knew it was the only way. And she had a chance. If she was careful, like Dor said, she had a chance.

Anyone who had survived this far had already proved they were tough. The weak died, it was as simple as that; if they didn’t starve or catch the fever, they simply lost the will to keep trying, and grew careless. They killed themselves and took ridiculous chances and went out of their minds entirely, until everyone who was left was crafty and wily and determined to live.

Of course they couldn’t take her along. Cass could only guess what shape the woman was in, and it was inconceivable that she would force Ruthie to look upon her brokenness. Cass knew firsthand that another person’s suffering could seep into the vulnerable places in you, and Ruthie had suffered too recently and too much. She still didn’t know exactly what had gone on in the Convent, and while she believed most of it was simply brainwashing and rigorous “educating” in the children’s dorm, the deacons had forbidden the children to speak. Whatever the consequences of disobeying, they were stark enough or painful enough that the lesson had stuck, even now. There had been no marks on Ruthie when Cass rescued her, no injuries; she did not flinch the way Cass suspected a beaten child would. But she was just so silent, and without words how could she tell her mother what she was feeling? Until she was better, until she was all the way back, Cass would take no risks nor bring any more unnecessary fear into her life.

“All right,” she finally said. “You’re right. What else aren’t you telling me?”

Dor blinked and Cass knew he had held something back. She knew it anyway, knew it from the way he refused to meet her gaze. And she had to know. Not because she needed the full catalog of horrors that had been committed in the plain cabin, but so that she could keep Dor from thinking of her as weak, so that she could keep him from wanting to protect her. She had to keep their relationship clean; she couldn’t give in to the urge to let him take up even the smallest part of her burden. She had made that mistake with Smoke and she would not make it again with anyone. Smoke had protected her and she had counted on that protection and then he had left and there was nothing she could do to stop him, and because she’d given herself to him, he had taken a part of her with him and left her weaker, unwhole.

She would not allow that to happen again.

“You tell me everything,” she whispered fiercely. Her hands had closed around his wrists without her realizing she’d moved, and she was squeezing hard. “Everything. I’ll decide when the telling is done.”

“It doesn’t need to be this way,” Dor protested. “I’m not trying to keep you in the dark or, you know, prove I’m in charge or whatever. Any kind of power I had, I left it back in the Box. Here we’re equals and you don’t have to fight me to prove it. Okay?”

“Don’t you think I know that?” Cass could feel her face flaming with fury and embarrassment as she let go. “I could shoot you in your sleep or grab the wheel and run us off the road.”

The old chorus rushed from its hidden place with greedy excitement, provoked by her momentarily loss of control: I could fuck you or hate you or make you want me or make you despise me…but Cass resisted. She would not give in, could not give in. Today was hard but she was strong. The future was hard but she would be stronger.

“What do you want, Cass?” Dor asked gently, surprising her. Tenderness was the one thing she had not expected of him. “I get the feeling there’s nothing I could give you, nothing I could do for you that would mean anything to you. If you’d just stayed in the Box, I could have made it someone’s full-time job to keep you and Ruthie safe for as long as possible. Why are you with me? Really?”

But Cass knew that danger well. The way they asked questions and got inside you and made you start to care. And she would have none of it. “Just tell me the rest.”

Silence stretched between them, but Cass did not look away. A branch scratched against the kitchen window, and somewhere in the house was a sound Cass had not heard in a very long time, the tick of a battery-operated clock. She was warm under the afghan, and she could feel Dor’s heat, even greater than her own, and smell the soap on his skin. The candle had burned down to the last few inches and it sputtered and flickered, light dancing around the wood-paneled walls.

When Dor finally spoke, there was no emotion in his voice. “They pile the dead fifty yards beyond the house. They don’t even dig trenches. The birds showed up a month ago. They can pick a corpse clean in a matter of minutes. Sometimes there’s as many as half a dozen of them and she’s seen them flying from the south-she thinks that might be where they nest.”

“The girl told you that.”

“Yes. She would stare at the mound at night.”

Cass’s heart felt sick, but she couldn’t stop until it was all out. “And?”

“There’s a pottery bowl on the kitchen table, with a separation down the middle, like you might serve two different dips in it or something. One half, they use as an ashtray. In the other half are all the wedding rings they took off people.”

Cass’s vision swam. “Is there anything else?”

“Yes. The girl’s name is Anna. She said when they took her there was already a girl in the room, one who’d been there a few months. One of her arms was broken and she had an infection and she smelled like she was rotting from the inside. She started screaming when she saw Anna and she didn’t stop until they took her out into the backyard and shot her. Then they locked Anna up to the same bed.”

15

MONTHS AGO, WHEN THE CITIES WERE BURNING and bodies lay bloated in trenches, Cass had thought she’d seen the worst. She remembered saying those words to herself: at least now I have seen the worst. But every time some other horror came along, something she had not imagined or prepared herself for, and she would think she could not survive it. And then she did. And Dor’s story was the worst yet.

Cass suspected that this was what determined, more than anything else, who survived and who did not. The ability to live through the moment when you found out you had been wrong once again-that things really could get worse, that suffering came in yet more designs, that survivors’ capacity for ruthlessness or Beaters’ hunger and cunning exceeded what you thought you knew. You could still be surprised, and you could take it.

People died a thousand different ways-suicide, attacks, poisoning, riots, dehydration, starvation-but Cass came to believe that the real cause of most deaths was giving up. Lose your will and you were likely to leave a shelter door open, or forget to check for blueleaf, or cross paths with marauders-even carelessly cut yourself and die an ignominious death of infection or tetanus. Your body would bloat and rot like any other, and you would never have a gravestone or even a cross to mark the place you fell, but your silent requiem would be a song of despair, of wretchedness.

What made some people keep fighting while others succumbed? Cass didn’t know. At first, she’d fought for Ruthie. But when she woke in a haze so profound that she barely remembered who she was, there was some other source of determination so fundamental that it might as well have been her very bones, her DNA. She was a fighter and she would not stop being a fighter, even if the one she’d fought hardest against most of her life was herself.

If anything could make her give up, it would have been losing Smoke-because she had slowly invested him with