Rebirth

Other mothers would never leave their children’s side. But Cass was not other mothers. She was the one who had traded her baby for a bottle of jack, a jug of pinot grigio, a whiskey and Diet Coke in a plastic cup. She had left her daughter crying in her crib while a stranger tore off her sweater in the next room. The very night that Ruthie had been taken from her, she had sobbed motherly anguish with her face in the carpet only until she found the strength to crawl to the refrigerator and drink every beer she had left.

The shame and regret reached up from the depths and grabbed greedily, ready to call Cass a bad mother, undeserving. But Cass resisted. She had atoned and would keep atoning. Ruthie had spoken Smoke’s name. Ruthie said she must go.

And Ruthie would be safe here. In the other bed was a man who had raised his own daughter, a man who was good with children. You could see it in the way he was with Ruthie-anyone would know that Dor was a natural. When he touched Ruthie she beamed. When he teased her she sparkled with mirth; when he complimented her she swelled with pride.

Cass knew that Dor would lay down his life for Ruthie, likely would for any child. If Cass were to die, Ruthie would learn to love others. She would grow up protected and cherished and if any sane person had to choose between Cass and someone like Dor, the decision would be easy. Nothing personal. Nothing against Cass, who had tried.

So far, trying had not been good enough. Cass had failed the people she loved over and over. But she was about to try harder.

Cass bent to her daughter’s cheek and kissed the damp skin, her lips trembling-but she would not cry.

She gave Dor a long, hard look in the dim light and slipped out of the room.

She heard voices the minute she opened the door of the stairwell, men’s voices, low and punctuated with laughter. Her heart was already pounding, and she paused in the hallway, guiding the door gently shut so that it would make no sound.

Two men sat at a small table, the kind that might have held a drink next to a sofa, back when living rooms were full of things like cocktail parties and hors d’oeuvres and casual conversation and flirting. They had dragged the improbable table between them and set some sort of small, high-tech tripod light on top, illuminating a wooden tray filled with tiny glass pebbles, a game Cass had never seen before.

She slid the heavy overcoat she was wearing off her shoulders, revealing the scoop neckline of her thin nightgown. Her nipples hard from the cold, she had to resist the urge to cover her breasts. Instead she faked a yawn and allowed the coat to slide farther until it covered little more than her forearms and rested, drooping around her waist.

In the past she would never have gone out like this. The nightgown, though snug, wasn’t truly sexy; it squeezed all of her flesh, flattening her roundness, doing nothing for her curves. Also, she was wearing heavy socks and her boots, leaving only the pale flesh of her shins exposed beneath the gown.

Still, this was enough to pass for provocation now. She’d seen it in the library, how small glimpses of flesh-less than graced the naughty stereographs of the 1940s, even-could make a man stutter and swallow hard. If a woman emerged from the bathroom stalls wiping her bare damp forearms on her pants, eyebrows would rise. A woman who brushed her hair in the conference room at night, revealing a triangle of her neck in the light of a candle, this could stop a man.

Cass stood in the circle of light cast by the lamp and pretended to scratch an itch on the top of her thigh. “Excuse me,” she said in a bored voice.

Cass felt that chameleon self coming on. She’d studied hard, and the stakes had been high; life was harder before she learned to interpret and predict the interplay of emotions between her mother and her many lovers, especially once Byrn had taken up residence. She’d built a nearly encyclopedic understanding of what a man’s moods could signal-and from there it had been a simple enough step to copy them herself.

“I’m new,” she continued. “And I’m sorry to bother y’all but I get headaches? And they said something about maybe I could have something for it. Just a Tylenol, one’s all I need.”

She waited, knowing the timing was important; the men glanced at each other skeptically but were barely able to tear their eyes from her body. One of the men was tall and stocky, red-haired with a sharp cleft to his chin, his face all harsh planes. The other had a thick, gray-peppered moustache and a ring of longish hair around his bald spot. While Cass watched, he shoved his hand through his hair in a vain attempt to force the hair across his head, and Cass felt a wave of revulsion. Mim once had a boyfriend who spent fifteen minutes at the mirror every morning arranging and spraying his thin strands of hair on top of his head. He was an unusually strong perspirer, and within an hour the fabric of his shirt would be ringed with sweat under the armpits and his bald head would shine.

He was hardly the worst of Mim’s boyfriends, though.

When her gaze fell on the red-haired man’s wrist and she saw the koru mark there, she relaxed a little. So it would be him. That would be better. There would be no painful memories complicating what was already an odious task.

“Girly, ain’t you heard, the drugstore’s closed,” the mustached man said, drawing the last syllable out and staring unabashedly at her chest.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought it was different for outliers,” Cass said, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “That’s what they told me, anyway.”

“Hang on.” The red-haired man’s voice was sharp, inflected with some sort of northern accent, Canadian or Wisconsin or something. “You’re an outlier?”

Cass nodded, giving him a slow, smug smile.

“C’mere.”

She hesitated for a moment and then approached him. The heavy coat tugged the fabric of the nightgown even lower.

He pulled a small penlight from his pocket and shined it on her face.

“What’s your name?”

“Cassandra.”

He played the light over her hair, her face, down her neck, then let it linger on her breasts. “Well, Cassandra. You got some way of proving that?”

Cass stared him directly in the eye and ran her tongue slowly along her lower lip, letting it linger in the corner.

There was an art to the pause; Cass had not always been a master. You had to wait longer than you thought you should, longer than was credible. So long you were sure they would find you ridiculous. But they never did, not when you let your eyelids drift down and breathed a little deeper, lips parted as though in anticipation. As though you could taste their gaze, as though you wanted more.

When it had been long enough, when his eyes had widened so fractionally she almost missed it, she spoke again, husky and low. “I might.”

“Hell, I probably got something,” the balding man said. “Back in my-”

“I’ll take her,” the red-haired man interrupted. “I could use a walk anyway. About to die of boredom, stuck here with the likes of you all night.”

“Ah, suck it, Ralston. What, you’re going to just take off? What if there’s a code?”

Ralston shrugged. “I can answer it from Tapp as easy as I can from here, can’t I?”

“That what you’re gonna tell Chen? That you figured-”

“Chen’s not interested in how I spend my time,” Ralston snapped. His voice had gone hard. For a moment there was silence between the two men, and then the guard with the mustache nodded once and fixed his gaze on the abandoned game pieces.

The koru. The hierarchy. The Rebuilders relied on a rigid structure and that meant those below had little to say about the doings of those above.

Ralston gave her a fake little bow. “After you. Cassandra.”

He took her not out the front entrance but down a corridor to a side door, which was fitted with the same sort of lowtech hardware that the Rebuilders had used to replace all the electronic locks. When he took his key chain from his belt, Cass caught a glimpse of a gun and her heartbeat quickened.

All she was hoping for tonight was to get close to Smoke, to see for herself if he was dead-or whether he had a chance.