Rebirth

Cass’s heart seized. The school, forty miles down mountain, had been the first shelter she’d come to after she was taken, after waking in a field in her own stink, crusted with healing sores, with no memory of how she got there. At the school she thought she would die; instead she met Smoke and she lived.

“Gone?” she echoed, the word thick on her lips.

“Throats slit to save the bullet, then burned inside the building. Cass…Nora stayed behind. She refused to go with them. And she died.”

The hole in Cass’s heart widened and cold seeped in.

Nora had been Smoke’s lover, once. Before Cass came. Nora’s dark hair brushed her shoulders, her gaunt cheeks were elegant. Nora had hated Cass on sight, had voted for her to be turned out to die because of the condition she was in when she’d arrived at the school. Now Nora was the dead one.

“They killed her…”

“She fought.” There-finally, there was the anger, flashing in his eyes. “She took one down with her, Dor said.”

Dor. Sammi-what about the girl? Dor’s daughter, only fourteen, whom Cass had felt a bond with even though their time together was brief.

“They say Sammi survived,” Smoke said, reading her thoughts. “At least, there’s a girl her age, her description, who made it through. But not her mother. It happened two days ago-they’ve probably taken her down to Colima by now.”

“The survivors-they’re all prisoners?”

“That’s what Dor said,” Smoke said flatly. “That’s what he told me. Rebuilders sent a message here. Their man came today. That’s what…what we’ve been talking about.”

The school was gone. The little community of shelterers crushed, splintered, burned, and the survivors led away like stolen cattle. The men… Cass shuddered to think of their bodies stacked and immolated.

She had only been at the school for one day, just long enough for them to judge, yet release her, long enough for Smoke to decide to throw in with her quest to reclaim Ruthie. He’d intended to go back, back to Nora, but that hadn’t happened. Instead he’d come here, and somehow they’d become…what they were. Lovers. A couple, perhaps. More, certainly, than Cass had ever dared to hope for. She had slept in Smoke’s arms nearly every night and been glad of it.

And on some of those nights Cass had thought of Nora and wished she didn’t exist. Such a wish didn’t feel like the same sort of sin as it might have been Before. Aftertime, the odds of living to the next day were stunted; you learned not to count on the future. You said goodbye knowing it might be the last time…and then, eventually, you simply stopped saying goodbye. Encounters meant both more and less when you knew you might not ever see someone again. The old world had ended, and new morals were needed to survive.

Deep in the night Cass would think of Nora and wish her to simply not be. She didn’t want her to fall to the fever, didn’t want the Beaters to find her, didn’t want illness or infection or a burst appendix to take her. She just wished she could erase Nora from Smoke’s past, rub her away so completely that not even a shadow remained, so she and Smoke could truly start anew together. Cass and Smoke and Ruthie, and that wish had been enough, and Cass had caught herself wondering a few times recently if a kind of happiness might actually be possible someday.

But the emotions on Smoke’s face did not leave a place for her. There was fury in the hard set of his mouth, determination in the line between his eyebrows. In his chambray eyes, the flint-sparks of something Cass knew far too well: vengeance. She’d carried the thirst for vengeance with her long enough to know that it was consuming and heavy and left little room for any other burden. Sometimes it left no room for the breath in your chest, your dreams at night-it stole everything.

But still she waited. She had not spoken Nora’s name aloud since they first came to the Box. If she didn’t speak it now, maybe her memory would let him go. Maybe, in death, she’d release him. Cass didn’t know if she believed in an afterlife, was still trying to decide if she believed in anything at all-but in this moment she begged a wish from Nora, dead Nora, ghost-or-angel Nora:

Let me have him. He’s no good to you now…just let me have him.

Smoke brought his hands together, clasping hers tightly and raising them to his lips. He kissed them so softly it was like the brush of a feather, and his lips were as warm as his hands were cold.

And Cass knew she would not have her wish.

“I have to go.”

04

LAST NIGHT, SHE HAD GONE TO SLEEP HOLDING a stone, but when she woke up it was gone.

The thing that had interrupted Sammi’s dream was a sound, a wordless shout but not a voice she knew, and then something breaking. But when she woke it was quiet and she tried to hold on to her dream, which had been about Jed. Everything was about Jed now-even the things that really weren’t.

The sky had been orangey-pale through the windows high on the wall. A few feet away her mother slept with her arms wrapped tight around her pillow. She’d been doing that ever since Dad left, holding her pillow tight to her chest as though it might protect her from something. Her mother never moved when she slept, she lay still and elegant with her dark hair fanning the bed. Her mom was still hot for forty, especially for Aftertime-’cause face it, take away the BOTOX and the thermal reconditioning hair treatments and the eyelash extensions, and a lot of the moms at her old school probably didn’t look all that great anymore.

Getting away from that stupid school had been the one good thing to come out of the last year. Not that it made up for everything else, of course, but the Grosbeck Academy had been a forty-five-minute drive and it was a shitty little third-rate girls’ school anyway, but it was the only one her mom could find where she could spend twenty thousand bucks a year for the privilege, which she only did to screw over Sammi’s dad anyway. And so they were up at five-thirty every morning and half the time they blew a fuse running all their blow-dryers at the same time, and wasn’t that fucked-up considering they lived in the most expensive “cabin” on their side of the Sierras, six bedrooms and five custom bathrooms, three of which nobody ever used.

At least she’d had lots of friends at Grosbeck, but looking back she didn’t miss any of them. She hoped nothing bad had happened to them, of course, though she knew it probably had, but she couldn’t spend her time thinking about all the ways they might have died or she’d go crazy. “Just think about today,” Jed always said when she started to feel the bad stuff coming on. Jed was always saying stuff like that-maybe it was because he had two older brothers and parents who were both therapists. Maybe it was because he still had his whole family-he was one of the rare lucky ones who hadn’t lost anyone close yet. They had a room down the hall that used to be a conference room, and his mom was always walking around the courtyard, talking with people, holding their hands. Probably telling them to feel their feelings or something like that. Jed made fun of her, but you could tell he loved her.

And he loved Sammi. He had told her so, when he gave her the stone. It fit just right in her hand, and buried in its smooth gray surface was a vein of quartz in the shape of a heart. He’d found it near the creek, and he’d given her other things-books, a necklace, a thing of peanut M &M’s-but the stone was her favorite.

But where was it?

Sammi had sat up in the pale light of dawn and rooted through her covers, warm from sleep, keeping quiet so she wouldn’t wake her mom. Maybe she’d dreamed the shout, the sound of breaking glass. She ought to go back to sleep, wake up when it was really morning, help her mom in the kitchen before she went over to the child care room. Braid her hair before she saw Jed.

There-the stone had rolled off her mattress onto the carpet. Sammi cupped it in her hand and was pulling her covers back up over her shoulders when she realized that the light coming through the windows wasn’t dawn at all.

It was fire.