Rebirth

anticipation. Okay?”

Cass clung tightly to the frame of the door she couldn’t open until he told her it was time. She was at Dor’s mercy and she had put herself there on purpose, her and Ruthie. She had no choice but to listen to him, to hear the words that twisted inside her.

“Okay,” she whispered.

“You still want to believe you can come out of this whole. You want to believe you’re the same person you were the day the first missile hit. You’re not. You’re not. You can pretend every fucking second until you’re dead and you will have wasted all those seconds and all those days because there’s no God for you to demand a refund from. There’s nothing except this dried-up fucking husk of a planet and the poor bastards still left on it. You want me to be sorry, but I didn’t make the world this way and I’m not going to apologize for scratching out a life, any way I can.”

His anger and his bitterness felt like they might consume her. She knew he was hopped up on adrenaline and fury, but there was more to his rage, a fundamental belief that everything was lost except the next hardscrabble moment and the next. But he was wrong. Dor was wrong, wrong in his hate and his ferocity. Not everything was wasted, not everything was doomed.

Ruthie was proof. The birds. The clouds, too. But also the tiny kaysev seedlings-they were proof. She’d watered them one last time yesterday, in her little greenhouse, cupping a hand around them to keep the precious water drops from blowing adrift in the wind. They were the bright, pale, leaf-green of spring itself, and she imagined them thirsting for the sun, plunging their roots into the soil that Dor had given up on and finding sustenance deep down.

But Cass was no poster child for hope and Dor was right about that, at least; nearly all of it had been beaten out of her long ago. But not by the Siege. Not by the Beaters and the famine and the demolished earth and the endless river of death. No, Cass had already survived worse and that worse thing had marked her before she was even grown, and she’d reached adulthood stunted and damaged but like a tree that grows around a lightning scar, she had surrounded the hurt with the hardest part of herself and pressed on.

“No,” she whispered. “There’s more than you see. More than you know.”

That was all either of them said until Colima loomed in the distance, a medieval desert-shadow town whose flags and turrets drifted and swam in the dusty heat.

19

THERE WERE NO TURRETS AND THERE WERE NO flags, of course. Those were an illusion of the heat rising from the blacktop and of the sun slanting in her eyes. Colima was composed not of castles and moats, but of 1980s era concrete-and-glass architecture-but near the entrance was its one nod to traditional architecture, a graceful stone building with crenellations and towers, and it was that building that stood out against the sky. The Rebuilders were in the midst of encircling the campus with a brick wall. Along the unfinished side, workers pushed wheelbarrows and scaled platforms.

Cass handed Dor’s binoculars back to him, a lightweight matte-black pair that must have cost him dearly. They were crouched next to a billboard that had fallen from its supports and lay resting against the poles, propped up in a way that suggested someone had used it as a temporary shelter. With the Jeep parked behind it, the sign made an effective place to stop and rest unseen.

“There’s so many of them.”

Dor wiped the lenses of the binoculars with the hem of his shirt. “Recruiting’s probably a lot easier these days. Guy comes to your door and points a gun at you and tells you come with him and you’ll get fed and he’ll give you a safe place to sleep at night, you probably don’t mind the gun so much. Freedom’s a luxury most folks can’t afford anymore.”

What about the Box? Cass wanted to ask, but knew that what Dor offered wasn’t truly freedom. Once travelers traded away their goods for a high or a bender or sex, there was little in the way of value or sustenance to be had.

But at least they were free to leave, and Dor didn’t advertise by gunpoint.

“Want a look?” Dor said softly. Ruthie had left off playing with her little plastic figurines and crept silently next to him. The day had grown unusually warm and Cass had taken off Ruthie’s heavy coat. She reached for the glasses, but Dor picked her up and set her on his knee, then held the glasses carefully to her face.

“What do you see?” he asked, his face close to her ear. She didn’t answer, but her lips were parted eagerly, and she didn’t flinch when Dor gently fiddled with the focus.

“Oh!” Ruthie suddenly exclaimed when the far-off town came into view. She pointed, not taking her face away from the glasses-and Dor smiled, a broad, unselfconscious smile Cass had never seen before. He held the binoculars patiently for her; after a while she put her small hand over his and left it there. When she finally pushed away and scrambled off his knee, she was smiling, too.

She raised her hands to be picked up and Cass held her and spun her in a hip-swinging slow circle. “I love you, Babygirl,” she whispered.

“I think we should get going now,” Dor said uneasily. He was checking their packs, all traces of his momentary tenderness gone. “That’s another mile and a half, easy, and I want to get there in the afternoon. People get sloppy before dinner-maybe we can use that.”

“Use it how?”

“Think about it. Afternoons, back in the Box, Charles and them, they’re looking ahead to quitting time. Travelers come along and Faye’s more likely to give ’em a few extra chits just to get ’em through the door rather than haggling. Now we show up in Colima, we have a story that almost sounds likely…well, they’re less likely to ask a lot of questions we can’t answer.”

“We can answer anything they ask.” Cass felt her face go hot. “We just have to keep it simple. We’re together, the three of us.”

Dor narrowed his eyes. “That’s not much of a story. What if they ask for details? We don’t really know each other.” His voice grew even colder. “We’re strangers.”

“You didn’t ask for this.” Cass cut him off before he could say anything else. “I know. You don’t have to say it again.”

Dor handed her the smaller of the two packs. She slipped it on, feeling her muscles flex and respond to the extra weight. It had been a long time since she’d freewalked, but her work in the gardens kept her limber and strong. She dug rich dirt from the creek banks a few blocks from the Box; she turned her flower beds with a sturdy shovel Three-High had brought back; she carried creek water in heavy buckets. When she had settled her pack, she bent to pick up Ruthie.

But Ruthie skipped out of her way, smiling mischievously.

“Come on, Babygirl,” Cass said, trying to be patient as Ruthie ran to Dor and lifted her arms in the air.

Dor picked Ruthie up without hesitation and set her on his shoulders.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s no big deal. She doesn’t weigh anything.”

Ruthie grinned down at her triumphantly.

“Why don’t you wait,” she said. “Ruthie can walk for a while anyway. We can take turns-”

“It’s nothing,” he said.

They walked the straight road and though the late-afternoon breeze was sharp and chill, they quickly settled into a steady pace that warmed Cass. As they went, she thought about what Dor had said-that the burden of carrying her daughter was nothing-and about the way she’d taught herself to choose among the things she knew to be true, to keep only those that would allow her to go on and then banish the rest to a place of forgetting; to consider all the ways she could lie to herself, and choose among those as well; to cherish her carefully chosen lies, to nurture them so they could flourish in the arid landscape of her mind.

Dor carried Ruthie with a straight back and confident stride, but after a while there was perspiration at his brow. From time to time he hitched her up straight when she grew tired and flagged forward. Her little hands seized his hair, pulling hard, but he didn’t complain. Cass found herself falling back a few steps so she could watch them,