Rebirth

of new growth. The pale green shaded to pure white at the base of the stems, and in the center of the mound was the beginning of a cluster of tiny flowers. Each fragile white blossom was encased in the thinnest possible corona of leaves, and as Cass wove her fingers into the stems, loving the way they felt against her fingers-dewy and full of potential-they trembled and quivered. Cass gently twisted and braided the shoots, thinking that the plant would grow that way, its stems twined and inseparable as they grew tall and strong, and everyone who passed by would wonder how they came to be that way.

Cass remembered exactly how the plant had felt in her hands all those years ago, even if she didn’t know where the memory had been hidden or why she’d kept it for so long. But this was what she thought of in the second that the strings of her heart were gathered and knotted and tied so the lifeblood would no longer flow through them, when she betrayed the only man to ever take her heart.

The day after the rains, Cass had come home from school with a plan to make a circle of pretty, smooth stones around the plant, to protect it from neighborhood pets and kids on bikes-and found it mown down by the gardener, who’d blown the leaves and the topsoil out and left the flower bed shorn and empty and that was how it stayed all the long season until all that remained was the dead and dried skeletons of a few abandoned plants and the weeds that nothing would stop.

“Oh,” she said, faking sudden realization. “Do you mean Smoke? That guy who came to the library with me? That’s him? We didn’t exactly get to know each other very well…”

“I see,” Mary said, as the door shut behind them with a solid click. “Well, Evangeline wanted to be sure you had the chance to see him. See if there was any, you know, unfinished business between the two of you.”

“Unfinished or otherwise-there never was anything to begin with.”

As they walked across the campus that had once been home to tens of thousands of students with bright futures and now housed only schemers and the desperate, Cass wondered if she’d settled her debts, now that she’d betrayed the man who’d betrayed her first.

27

SAMMI LAY IN THE NARROW BED AND WONDERED if she hated Jed’s killer enough to give her a reason to live. She had never killed anyone, not even a rabbit, but she thought she could kill the man who drove the truck. She imagined her blade slicing through his flesh. She thought about how his blood would spurt and how she would feel when the blood finally slowed and the man was dead.

She glanced across the gulf between the two beds. Roan had stayed up late with her, whispering and whispering. They brought Sammi and one other here last night after it was dark.

Sammi had finally fallen into a dreamless sleep and when she woke up the sky was pink and orange and the truck was parked behind a big, ugly concrete building that smelled like garbage, and the guards were yelling at everyone to get up.

She knew where they were: Colima, which used to be the university but now was where the Rebuilders built their new town. All the adults in the school hated the Rebuilders, but Sammi hadn’t given them much thought until last night. They weren’t real until they set the school on fire. Until they started killing everyone. Now as they yelled and pushed, Sammi felt like she herself was only halfway real, like part of her was somewhere else entirely. Not with her mother, and not with Jed, though she would have liked to be; she wished she was dead with them but instead she was here, and as she stood shivering with her back against the truck, having to pee, her hair stuck to her face with snot, she felt the first tiny pocket of rage split open in her gut, because the Rebuilders had kept her alive after they took the only people she cared about.

Sammi was nearly fifteen, and in her life she’d been angry and she’d been pissed off and she’d been irritated, bored and upset and every variation on mad-and scared, definitely scared-but she had never felt quite like this. She wrapped her arms around herself as the guards took her and the others-only eleven of them now, since Jed’s parents had been taken somewhere else when his mother wouldn’t stop screaming-for a walk through campus, noticing the way this new kind of fury was the color red and blinding, which was interesting because she couldn’t really see it. It started with that one little pocket but then it turned out there was more of it, way, way more stored up inside her and as they walked it sort of expanded and reached its hot tiny bursts out into the rest of her body, up into her chest and her throat, out along her arms to her fingertips, which she flexed and clenched experimentally. They were still her hands, her fingers…but they were the hands of someone different now, too. Someone who had no one, who was alone in the world.

The guards took them to some sort of medical building where they had checkups. Nurses, or doctors, Sammi didn’t know, combed through her hair and her pubic hair and examined her all over and drew her blood. A rude woman with an accent gave her an exam-on the inside-and told Sammi that she wasn’t pregnant and Sammi barely listened. She was taken to an outdoor shower and the water was freezing cold and the soap was handmade and scratchy. She was given new clothes-the old ones were filthy, covered with ash and the dirt of the truck and the journey-and they were soft and worn in and because they weren’t the khaki and camo that everyone else seemed to be wearing, Sammi supposed she was not yet a Rebuilder.

Kathy and Mr. Jayaraman from the library tried to talk to her. A few of the others tried, too. But Sammi didn’t answer and after a while they stopped and then everyone was quiet. In this way the day passed by, the library shelterers being taken away one by one and returning with their new clothes. Sammi dozed, lying on the carpeted floor. It did not occur to her to wonder what sort of building they were in until the room grew dark with the approach of night. Then she looked around at the others, some crying, some staring, and realized that none of them cared.

It was almost dark when a tall, thick-limbed older woman and a young man in soldier clothes came for her. Sammi had followed them out of the room, down stairs she didn’t remember climbing, into a parking lot before she realized she hadn’t said goodbye to anyone. Something told her she was not going to see them again and she wondered why she didn’t feel worse about that. But then the soldier opened the passenger door of a compact car and Sammi got in the backseat, and the soldier and the woman got in the front seat, and it was the cleanest car Sammi had seen since everything happened Before, it even smelled kind of new-and that was something she didn’t expect to ever smell again-and the soldier drove slowly out of the parking lot and onto a road that wound through campus, the headlights illuminating pavement ahead that was free of wrecks and skeletons and downed trees. It looked seriously like Before, which was kind of interesting-it was almost like watching a movie, like none of this was happening to her-when she realized there was someone else in the backseat with her.

“Uh,” she said, surprised, and instantly regretted it, because she didn’t feel like making conversation, not even with this girl who looked like she was only a couple years older than Sammi. In the library-as happy as she was to have Jed, as nice as his older brothers were to her, as cool as it was to be in charge of the child care-she had often wished there was a girl near her age. Just to hang out, just to talk about the things that you didn’t talk to your boyfriend about, and you really didn’t talk to your mom about. But that was then. And this was now.

“Do you know where they’re taking us?” the girl whispered. In the dim light inside the car, she looked pale, with a long face and small features. Badly cut hair ended just below her earlobes. She smelled like mothballs and medicine and sweat. “No one will tell me.”

“No.” Sammi knew she should say more, but couldn’t think of anything worth the effort.

“How long have you been here?”

Sammi sighed, and on the exhale said, “I got here this morning.” She hoped there would be no more questions.

“I’ve been here four days. They treated us-me and my uncle-for scabies. I didn’t have scabies, I kept telling them that. I don’t know…maybe mosquitoes. Or probably a spider bite. I don’t know where they took my uncle.”

Sammi felt mildly disgusted and moved farther away from the girl, jamming herself into the car door. She didn’t know what scabies were, but they sounded nasty. Maybe they were an STD. Probably.

“I didn’t eat dinner,” the girl continued. “I haven’t been eating much lately. We were living over in Brill-do you know Brill?-it used to be a resort.” She didn’t wait for Sammi to answer. It was like she was just talking to hear a voice. Sammi thought that if she could just get back into herself she would feel sorry for the girl, but she felt