For a moment, Cass had a vision of the torn bodies clogging the river, a peninsula of broken flesh permitting them to cross to her and Ruthie.
The one in the water had rolled onto its front and began splashing its way toward the canoe. The water went farther up its body until it went under, only the top of its head visible, black curls floating, and after a moment it came up sputtering and coughing. It flailed and slapped at the water and went under a few times, but then it seemed to establish a rhythm-an inefficient and clumsy one for sure, but enough to keep it from drowning.
Yelling, from the people in the boats and the people onshore, competed with the Beaters’ cries. Parker fired again, but the shot went wide, cutting the water harmlessly, and the Beater bobbed and splashed closer. Neal twisted his body in the canoe, trying to get out of the way. Parker shouted something that Cass couldn’t make out over the din of the crowd, but as he turned back around and aimed at the paddling Beater-it was a can’t-miss-shot, only ten feet-Neal plunged the paddle deep into the water and spun the canoe.
He’d exerted too much force, and the canoe dipped far to the left. Parker’s shot missed, unbelievably, landing somewhere in the inky water, and as Neal tried to correct, the canoe lurched the other way and the two men scrambled for balance and Cass sucked in her breath and swore she could feel it too when the canoe went over and both of them were dumped into the icy water.
Screaming rent the air as John turned his own canoe toward the upended one. Glynnis took a knee and fired without seeming to aim at all and there was a burst of blood from the swimming Beater, the side of its head shredded and running with crimson. The crowd called to the men in the water to hurry, hurry, hurry-
– and then there was a splashing commotion in the water that took Cass away to long ago with her dad, when he took her fishing on Lake Don Pedro. He’d borrowed a friend’s gear, and they didn’t catch a thing all day, but as the sun climbed in the sky and Cass got sleepy and leaned against her dad, her tummy full of peanut-butter sandwiches, her dad’s flannel shirt smelling pleasantly of coffee and tobacco, a bird had swooped down to the water and hooked its talons into a sizable fish. But the prey was too large to be carried off so easily. The bird screamed and fought the mute, desperate fish. They flailed for their lives, the water frothed by the fish’s body slapping the surface of the lake and the bird’s wings beating at it, and they spun and fought until their bodies blurred together, and Cass hid her face in her father’s shirt and cried until it was all over, until the bird finally gave up and flew limp-winged away and the fish sank to the depths, torn up but free to die-
It seized Parker and sank its teeth into his neck. Parker screamed and fought, but the bleeding creature held tight.
Glynnis shot Parker first. A neat hole appeared in his forehead and he went still. When she fired again, the Beater stopped flailing, but it never let go, and the pair sank below the water locked in their deadly embrace.
There was a shocked silence. Only Glynnis’s voice never stopped as she yelled at John to turn around.
“This is a goddamn train wreck,” Dor muttered. “Cass, we’ve got to take out the boat. I’ll row, you shoot.”
“I can’t,” Cass said, horrified. “I have Ruthie.”
“Leave her with the others. It won’t be for long. It’s already getting dark.”
“Dor…” Panic sparked pain behind her eyes. How could she tell him, how they all hated her, how no one trusted her? Who would be willing to help her now?
But as he looked deeply into her eyes, whatever he was about to say died on his lips. Somehow, he understood-not the specifics, but the shape of her fear.
“Okay,” he said. “Okay. Then leave her with Sammi. Tell her I said she should watch Ruthie until we get back. She’s just inside the hall. I’ll go grab my gun and meet you right back here in a few minutes.”
“But-someone else, can’t you get someone else?”
“Cass!” His voice exploded, so loud and desperate that people turned to stare at him. “There
Dor was a rogue, a renegade, and he knew it, knew how he had squandered the others’ trust to pursue his own hell-bent pastimes. In that moment Cass finally understood how ill suited he was to New Eden, how much he must hate the collaborative government, the council with its endless deliberations, the constant hedging and search for concordance-it must have been torture for Dor to try to find his place here. No wonder he left the islands when he could, no wonder he took the brute-force jobs that left his mind free to stew and boil.
Dana, Harris, Neal-none of them liked Dor, none of them had ever asked him to serve on a committee or take part in a planning session. They were content for him to do the menial labor that kept him occupied and uninvolved.
It was true. None of them would shoot with Dor-because none of them would take direction from him.
“Go,” Dor said, and then he bent in close and brushed his lips against hers-once, and then a second time. He lingered, and it was not so much a kiss as a demand, a promise, an acknowledging of the need they never spoke of, and his mouth on hers was hot and hard and bruising.
Cass broke away and rushed toward the hall, pushing the stroller in front of her. It jounced over a root and Ruthie woke and began to wail, and Cass pulled her from the stroller, abandoning the thing in the middle of the yard, and ran the rest of the way.
She was putting her daughter in danger once again, trusting her to someone else’s care once again. What kind of mother set her child aside to go on a suicide mission? Cass-Cass was that kind of mother. She’d risked Ruthie for the bottle, she’d risked her for a moment’s pleasure in the sun, for stolen moments of desperate passion, and now she was risking her to plunge headlong into a mission that was bound to get her and Dor killed, a mission no one was asking her to undertake, on behalf of a community of people who hated her. If by some miracle she saved anyone, they would never thank her.
But she had no choice. Because if she did nothing, again, then she didn’t deserve to be anyone’s mother, anyone’s guardian. Not in these times. Not in what the world had become.
Chapter 15
INSIDE THE HALL she blinked and paused, her eyes adjusting to the dim interior. There-near the window, all of them, clustered on the long couches. The boys in the front, the girls huddled behind them.
“Sammi!”
Cass called her name, already running toward her. When the girl turned Cass saw not the hatred she expected, not the bitterness and rejection-but pure terror. It was written on all of their young faces, and Cass knew that they had seen: the swimming, and the upending of the canoe, Parker going down and the Beater and Glynnis’s two killing shots.
“Please, I need you to take care of Ruthie,” she said, out of breath. “Just for a little while. Your dad and me, we have to help.” She kissed Ruthie-both cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids.
“Mama,” Ruthie whimpered.
“Mama needs to go help Dor. You stay with Sammi and be a good girl, hear? And I’ll be right back, I promise. I promise.”
“Should we come?” one of the boys said-Kalyan, the reckless one. “Do they need us?”
“Right now they need you to stay here,” she said, as calmly as she could. “Someone will come. Soon. To tell you what’s going on.”
Sammi held her hands out for Ruthie, who snuggled into her arms as Cass turned away and ran.
She passed the stroller in the yard, pitched sideways with one wheel lodged in a divot in the earth. She’s fine,
The crowd near the shore had grown-it looked like every Edenite was there. Cass scanned the crowd and found Dor near the front. He held the Glock against his leg, and in his other hand was a gun Cass didn’t recognize, a small steel semiauto.
