attacked and infected, that would be a sure way to stir up so much trouble that Cass could get thrown out of New Eden. Cass wasn’t the only Beater victim ever to recover, but no one in New Eden had seen such a survivor before. And with tensions running high, there was no guarantee they’d listen when Cass offered up frantic, self-serving explanations that she was no threat to anyone… Nor was Ruthie…
“But I love the children,” she mumbled, on the verge of tears. “You can’t think that I don’t.”
“Aw, hell,” Jay said, his shoulders slumping forward, and she realized that he had been hoping he was wrong. He was a good man, a family man with no family anymore, an associate dean at Sacramento State with no one to ride herd on. And he had the broken capillaries and red nose that signaled that he too had once known his way around a bottle. “I hate this, Cass. Lord knows I don’t have any beef with you. But there’s too much at stake. I’m here to ask you to resign. From child care and picking both. You can stay on gardening-I don’t think you’ll get any argument for that, everyone knows you’re the best with the growing. And that’s enough for anyone-Hell, there’s lots of folks that don’t get a fraction of that done. We got Ingrid, we got Suzanne, we got Jasmine ready to pop, maybe we can get another of the gals to pitch in with the little ones. Valerie, maybe, she’d be good.”
His words cut deep. She understood why he said it-Valerie would have been a great mother; her patience, her soothing voice, they were perfect.
“Maybe,” she said bleakly, but it was a lie because the day that Valerie was responsible for Ruthie’s care would be the day Cass had failed utterly. Her daughter had been taken from her twice before, when other people decided Cass wasn’t a fit mother. She couldn’t let it happen again. “Or I don’t know…maybe I could take Ruthie in the field with me when I work. Let me think, okay? Just give me a day to think about it.”
Jay sighed and folded his hands over his gut. You could see in the gesture the shadow of what he had once been, a paunchy, proud, cheerful man. “That’s fine. I don’t want to take this up with the council in any official way, you know what I mean? That wouldn’t serve anybody. Just, hey, Ingrid’s a little sore with you right now.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the living room. “Let’s let her finish out the day with the kids, maybe you go for a walk, talk to a friend, whatever you feel like. An afternoon off. Looks like the weather’s breaking, maybe we’ll get a little more sun, everything’ll look different by tonight.”
“Yeah, okay,” Cass said.
She saw him to the door, and they said an oddly formal goodbye, Jay giving her a little half bow before he walked off toward the guard headquarters. He’d been right about the weather; a thick cloud scudded across the sun and was quickly gone, leaving the air warm and inviting.
She should do as he suggested, take that walk, maybe go to the far southern end of Garden Island where you could sit and stare off at the mountains in the distance, skip stones into the river. But she didn’t think she could bear to look across all those rows and rows of kaysev, the chubby deep green leaves hiding a secret killer somewhere in their midst.
And she couldn’t leave Ruthie here, not with Ingrid. She wouldn’t risk losing her daughter, ever again.
She made her decision. She went into the living room. Ingrid stood with her arms folded, glaring, but Cass did not look away. There was so much she wanted to say, but instead she tamped down her anger as she picked up Ruthie from her pallet of blankets, and carried her into the remains of a day in which, yet again, everything had changed.
Chapter 13
SMOKE OPENED HIS eyes when it was quiet in the room, closed them when the people came in. He worked his hands under the blanket, flexed his limbs, tensed his muscles, always going slack and still at the slightest sound.
He was careful, because he knew the people were waiting for him to wake up. What would happen then, he did not know. There were people who wanted him dead, who wanted him to suffer.
The great irony was that Smoke did deserve to be punished, but only one other man left on this earth knew the true reason, and who knew if he was even still alive. It was Smoke’s burden, to know what he had done and to be alone in that knowing. They could punish him for the lives he had taken, for the Rebuilder leaders he had killed, and Smoke would laugh-fighting the fascist warlords was only a tiny penance for his true crime, for that secret crime. They could send in one Rebuilder after another and he would keep killing them until he was exhausted from the effort, until he could no longer lift his blade or his gun, and he would never regret all the blood that got spilled. In that battle he had right on his side, because the battle against the Rebuilders was a battle for freedom and for hope.
But for his other crime, his first crime, he had no justification and no defense…
This was a strange prison, where people came and went freely and he was not shackled, and security was lax. A terrible miscalculation on their part. If they knew anything at all about him, surely they would know he’d bide his time and he would wait for the right moment.
Each day, Smoke let the thin gruel dribble down his face, swallowing just enough to survive. So too with the water held to his lips. And he felt his strength returning. Soon he was able to leave his bed at night to stand at the window, looking out on a moonlit yard; not long after that he was marching in place, doing simple calisthenics, returning to bed only when he was exhausted.
His body was not the same. He was missing two fingers, the flesh raggedly healed at the first knuckle, where the little and ring fingers of his left hand used to be. The skin of his face was crossed with scars he could not see; his arms, his torso, his legs, with scars that he could. There was a persistent ache in one arm and in his hip; his abbreviated walks around the room were hampered by a painful limp.
Each night he pushed himself. Each dawn his body screamed in pain at the effort. And each day he grew stronger. Emboldened by his success, he took to working his hands during the day, squeezing them into fists, getting used to the odd absence of the severed fingers. He flexed his limbs, bent and extended them. Worked as though his life depended on it.
One day soon, they would come for him. They would not expect a fight-but a fight was what he meant to give them.
Chapter 14
RUTHIE BARELY STIRRED, so Cass settled her into the stroller they kept under the eaves of the house. It was a nice one, an Italian model that navigated even the stony paths along the water without getting its wheels jammed, but it didn’t get much use now that the younger kids preferred to walk nearly everywhere.
She tucked a sweatshirt around Ruthie, draping it over her head to keep her warm, and set out along the path to her herb garden when she heard gunshots, two in rapid succession, then another a few seconds later. Shouting followed, not just one or two voices, but half a dozen or more. Cass hesitated, wondering what the latest calamity could be. Glynnis and John routinely picked off Beaters on the shore when they patrolled the river, but they lined up their shots carefully, deliberately, taking their time so as not to waste ammo.
In the end her curiosity won out, and she turned the stroller toward the community center, where people would know what was happening. As she drew close, she saw a knot of people on the edge of the lawn looking toward the water, shielding their eyes against the sun.
On the opposite shore were Beaters, dozens of them. How they’d managed to assemble so quickly since Cass was last outside-only a couple of hours ago when she took the little ones for a walk over to the drying house to watch Corryn and Chevelle lay out the metal pans of hardtack-she had no idea. Now they lined the bank for a hundred yards in either direction, and from the distance, if you squinted, they could be spectators at a game, shoppers at a department store, except for their jerking, awkward movements.
Cass nervously ran her fingers over the sun-browned skin of her forearms, a habit left over from when her arms were covered with ragged scars. But her torn skin had scabbed over and fully healed from her time as…one of them. Early on after recovering, the fear of what she might have done-whether she’d joined a pack of the things, whether she’d hunted or even, God help her,
