with a tight build and a hole where his front teeth used to be, a scar twisting his lip. He either wasn’t afraid to fight or had been in one that had been stacked against him. Either way, it was something to worry about.
He was reading a magazine-on the cover was a celebrity chef Cass remembered from the magazines she stocked in the QuikGo, had a restaurant in New York or New Orleans or somewhere that pretty people used to go. Cass hung back in the shadows as Ralston said a few quiet words to the man. He called him Jimbo and grabbed his own crotch, and motioned for her to step forward. Jimbo looked her over, up and down, not even trying to hide his interest. Cass wondered if she’d have to do him, too.
It didn’t much matter. Ten minutes on the ground didn’t mean much to her right now other than a few scrapes on her knee, a crick in her back. The way her lips got numb and swollen from her teeth. Nothing. Less than nothing.
She was about to see Smoke. She craned her neck, looking down the hall, which darkened to inky black at the end. The guards had a single lamp between them, a bulb in a socket tied to a pipe, the way that was so common nowadays. No shade, so you could get away with low wattage. The CFL bulbs were probably good for a few more years, anyway, and that was a longer horizon than anyone was worried about these days.
“Who is he to you, anyway?” Jimbo demanded, taking a toothpick from a shirt pocket and going to work on his yellowed teeth. “Boyfriend?”
“None of your business,” Cass muttered. But the notion seemed to occur to Ralston for the first time, and he hitched himself up a little taller. Great. Perfect time for dick-measuring.
“Well, come on, let’s see if he’s croaked yet.”
Down between the cots, Jimbo leading, Ralston behind him. A powerful stench rose from a figure huddled on a blanket on one of the cots they passed, urine and vomit that no one had bothered to clean. Cass wondered what Jimbo had done to deserve this rotation.
When they were close to the end of the row, Cass rushed ahead, past the man she’d just pleasured and the one with the cruel eyes, unheedful of the risk, of the imbalance of power. There. The last cot, covered like all the others in a dark, rough blanket, a figure bent and flung, silent in sleep or death.
Suddenly the thought of him burst through her like every flavor she’d ever tasted, every sunrise that ever blinded her eyes, every pain that ever touched her nerves. A memory- Smoke as he turned away, Smoke moments before he left her to seek the sort of justice she didn’t believe in. His eyes were blue, October skies and buttonweed, shaded with sadness. His hands work-rough and strong, clenched at his side. His mouth…his mouth that she had kissed a thousand times, full and sensuous, tensed now with rage.
He’d been ready to die, she knew that, and she had hated him for it, for wanting revenge more than he wanted her. Only that knowledge had kept her from running after him, for sinking to her knees outside the gate and wailing for him to return to her.
Instead she had hardened herself against him. She was not an ordinary woman, she had not lived through ordinary trials and she did not have ordinary strength on which to draw. She had been hurt so often that she was more scar than flesh, and when Smoke left her Cass had carved flint-edged fury from the shards of her devastation. It was not a comfortable thing to bear, but she’d done what she had to, followed Dor in the opposite direction from where Smoke had gone. Now she understood that she would have chosen death herself if it hadn’t been for Ruthie, and so she’d taken this path, a man who could keep her child safe, a chance to burn herself out bright if that was to be.
Only now she was inches away from Smoke, who she never thought she would see again, and the furious heart of hers disintegrated and the jagged pieces were made dust and everything was gone but him. And her longing for him. And she gasped from the shock of it and knelt down next to the cot.
There was no smell of death, no smell of rot, but still the air was tainted with the cold metal scent of blood. Cass tried to say his name but nothing came to her lips; her throat was dry. She lowered her hands to the mattress, crushed the cheap fabric of the blanket in her hands and pulled it gently away, and lowered her face to his chest. If he was dead-but no, through the filthy blood-matted fabric of his shirt she felt the warmth of him, and he shifted and moaned and she felt his chest vibrate with the effort to speak.
And she was crying. Just like that, hot tears streaming silently from her eyes. Behind her the two men began arguing, but she blocked them out and focused on Smoke alone. She found his face with her hands and gasped to feel the scabbed flesh, the jagged uncleaned wounds and she jerked her hands away.
“Shine the light on him,” she demanded, croak-voiced, and someone put a boot to the side of the bed and gave it a vicious shove, causing Smoke to cry out in pain.
“Fucker took out Calder and Boone.” Jimbo’s voice was cold and hard.
“Boone’s dead?” Ralston sounded shocked. “I didn’t even know he was on that detail.”
“Yeah, him and Calder and Zhao and Lorenzo, Lorenzo just got promoted to Detail Five, this was his first recruiting trip.”
Cass remembered the name Calder-one of the guards who’d taken over the library when she and Smoke got there. He’d been a prematurely gray man who spoke little but had a habit of touching the handle of his blade every few minutes. Had he burned the school? She supposed he must have; Smoke would not have executed him otherwise.
“They say he shot Calder in both knees and elbows with his own gun,” Jimbo went on, as though reading her thoughts. “Told him he was going to keep going until he’d used up every Rebuilder bullet they had. Calder choked to death on his own blood while he was begging for one to the brain to finish him off. Death in a warm bed is too good for this one.”
“No shit,” Ralston said, but he clicked his penlight on and shone it on the bed, no doubt curious about a man who could go up against four men and kill two of them before they got him.
Cass was not prepared for the sight of Smoke-he looked even worse than he had hours earlier, when Mary’s scrutiny prevented her from looking too close. Now she could see that his nose was broken, his eyes blackened and swollen shut. His lips-his beautiful mouth-were split and bloodied, black crusted blood on his chin.
His head rolled back and he tried to raise his one arm, but it lay at a wrong angle and only twitched before falling back. Broken. The other arm, the one with the ruined fingers, was bound in dirty rags; blood had soaked through the knotted fabric and Cass saw that flies were settling and swarming around it. She realized the flies were the source of the buzzing that she’d thought was only in her head.
“Zhao got ’im,” Jimbo muttered. “Pretended he was down and when this asshole was done with Boone he went to drag the body-he’d already got Calder stowed, don’t know what he was fixin’ to do with ’em-anyway he holstered up and Zhao shot him clean through the shoulder. Missed the bone and came out the other side. Lorenzo was trying to get off a shot but he’d been lying on his gun hand, it’d gone numb, is what he said.”
Ralston made a grunt of disbelief. “Lorenzo’s a douche. He just made a shitty shot, is all.”
“Yeah, maybe. But he’s the douche who brought Smoke back here along with Calder and Boone’s bodies.”
“You proud of your boy?” Ralston demanded, crouching down next to Cass and nudging her shoulder. “Proud of him torturing an unarmed man?”
Cass said nothing, focused on Smoke. As gently as she could she pried his eye open, saw that the eyeball was rolled up in his head. Whatever sounds he made were from deep within his semiconscious state, but that didn’t stop her from trying.
“I’m here,” she whispered, and bent to kiss his cracked and torn mouth. She tasted his blood, felt her tears splash on his wounds.
“That’s foul,” Ralston said. “Don’t put your mouth on that, not when you owe me the next hour. I don’t want none a his nasty.”
They didn’t know, and Cass forgave that comment even as her fingers traced lightly on his shirt, looking for the wound, the bullet’s exit. They didn’t know what Smoke had been avenging. They’d heard only one account, riddled with inaccuracies and outright lies. They didn’t know that the Rebuilders Smoke killed had lined up the residents of the library, shot the older men one by one before moving on to every resident who dared to object. She remembered Nora, her nervous quick movements, her badly cut hair, the way it fell around her face, making her gaunt cheekbones look somehow elegant. Her sad black-brown eyes.
And Sammi’s mother, the first and only time Cass ever saw her, when she dragged Sammi in from the fields to the safety of the school shelter. The way Jessica had fallen to her knees when she saw that her daughter was safe, the wildness in her expression that spoke of frantic worry.
