Days passed. Nights passed.
The next time he came back, the toes, feet and legs were still there and now so were arms. Fingers-these he found interesting enough to dwell on for a while, especially since they felt…incomplete. Memories of touching things, grabbing them, holding them, breaking them. His stomach. His neck. So, it was mostly all there, then. He was all there, and apparently had been for some time. Again, that struck him as funny and he smiled or thought he smiled, though maybe he only imagined either event.
Wait…there was something. Something important. The woman. The woman and the girl. Cass and Ruthie. Those were their names. Hair like corn silk, eyes like green agate.
The memories and sensations coming back too sharp and too fast now, bringing with them pain. Smoke groaned, remembering a kiss-that would be Cass. She tasted like sun and iron and oranges, her skin was silk and velvet and he wanted it.
Wanted her.
He had been at a crossroads, had been choosing the forgetting place, except now he’d remembered Cass and there was no longer a choice, only Cass, only the Cass-shaped hole she’d left in him.
Once, he thought she came to him. He struggled to come up from the wavery not-here. He was willing to accept the pain of returning, willing to let go of the lovely forgetting, if only he could see her, touch her, and he tried, God how he tried. He called her name, but he had no voice because it, too, was still caught in the gone place.
The grief of this loss was as real as what he’d left behind. Whether she was a prisoner, too, or a spirit, he didn’t know-only that she’d been here. That was enough, that and the memories. They strengthened him and girded him for the pain.
The nothing was gone. The pain was waiting. He breathed in deep and pushed off from the edges and broke the surface, and with a mighty effort, he opened his eyes.
Chapter 4
WHEN DOR CAME around, the sounds of partying in the distance had mostly died down. Earlier, there had been the occasional shout, laughter carrying on the breeze, a couple of firecrackers-where they had come from, Cass had no idea, since nearly everything that could be ignited or exploded had been set off a year earlier when the Siege splintered weeks into riots and looting and people fighting in the streets.
Back then, Cass had trouble sleeping through the sounds of car crashes, screaming, gunshots, things being thrown and driven over and crashed into. By the time she finally left her trailer for the last time, joining those who were sheltering at the Silva library, the street in front of her house smelled of damp ash and rot, and smoke trailed lazily from half a dozen burned structures throughout the town while corpses rotted in cars and parlors and survivors learned that the Beaters weren’t so easy to kill.
Sleep had been hard then, because sobriety meant you had to let it all in, every sound, every thought, every memory. Doing A.A. the right way meant handing over your denial card; those who held on too tight never lasted long, and Cass had been in the program long enough to see people come and go. So when she lay awake in her hot, lonely trailer, tears leaking slowly down her face, she accepted the sounds as her due, just one more surcharge of sobriety.
Of course, none of that was a problem now.
Cass sat on the rough poured-concrete stoop behind the house, sipping and watching the bonfire burning down to embers in the middle of the big dirt yard in front of the community center a ways off. On warm days people played football and volleyball there. In the spring there would be picnics; if Cass managed to patch things up with Suzanne by then, they could take the girls there to make wreaths of dandelions and wild loosestrife.
The building’s doors had been thrown wide and people spilled out of the party room holding their cups and plastic bottles. Drinking wasn’t forbidden in New Eden, and it wasn’t even exactly frowned upon, but you didn’t see much of it except on nights like these. It had been hard to get used to, after the indulgent ethos of the Box- sometimes the mood of New Eden seemed like a hoedown or a revival, wholesome to the point of cloying.
Sometimes Cass missed the edge-walkers. The despair-dwellers. The ones who routinely lost their battles with themselves.
And sometimes she wondered if people like that were just another species doomed to extinction. Aftertime was not hospitable to weakness. It offered too many outs, too many reasons to quit.
Cass couldn’t quit, though, because she had Ruthie. So when she fell off the wagon, she fell with excruciating care. She did not actually enjoy a single drop of her cheap kaysev wine as she slowly sipped it down. She wanted to gulp, to drown in it; instead she parceled out not quite enough, every night-and never before Ruthie went to sleep- enough to get just a little bit out of herself. Cass thirsted for complete oblivion; instead she medicated herself to a painful place in the shadows cast by what she couldn’t escape.
A footstep on gravel, a figure cutting moonlight-Cass nearly missed him, focused as she was on the orange glow of the remains of the bonfire. But it could only be one person, the one man who knew her habit of sitting out here late into the night while the community slept, the sentries at the bridge the only other souls awake in the small hours.
“Thought you were going to turn in early,” Dor said, lowering his tall, sinewy body next to hers.
Cass shrugged. “You knew I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
For a while they sat in silence. Dor drank the dregs of homegrown wine. When he got to the bottom, he held up his plastic cup-the flimsy kind that college kids used to serve at keggers-and stared at it from several angles in the light of the bonfire a hundred yards away.
Then he crushed it in his hand as though it was nothing. Cass raised her eyebrows in the dark.
“Better not let Dana see you do that.”
Dana was the compliance leader, tasked with making sure everyone reused and recycled and composted-and the most vocal member of the New Eden council. The council operated on principles of concordance and had sworn off hierarchy, which only seemed to make Dana that much more dogged about getting his way whenever an issue was brought before it. He also seemed to delight in taking rule-breakers to task, though there was no formal punishment structure, only admonishments to do better. You got the feeling Dana would have welcomed more authority as long as he was the one wielding it.
Dor flashed a bitter grin that quickly disappeared. “Dana can go fuck himself. I’ve just spent eight hours up to my ass in rotting siding and I have the splinters to prove it. If I want to stomp one cup under my boot for old times’ sake, I’d guess I’ve earned the right.”
But rather than tossing the cup on the ground, he took the twisted, torn mess and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. No one littered in New Eden, not even Dor-the three islands were all they had.
“Ruthie sleeping?” he asked after a while, and when his words were followed by his warm, rough fingertips on the strip of skin at the small of her back between sweater and jeans, Cass swallowed hard, because he could take her to the other place that fast.
“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely as his fingers traced circles, drifting slowly lower. This went on for a while, moments, hours, who knew…it was always like this, him barely touching her, both of them going white-hot in seconds. They never talked about it. Sometimes he would keep talking-about the things he was fixing, about nails and shingles and broken asphalt; about a bird he’d seen lighting on a fence post, or a book the raiders had found somewhere; about his daughter’s latest project, a mural she was painting on the wall of their building or a jean jacket she was embellishing with Valerie’s help. He would talk, and Cass would murmur in the appropriate places, the lulls and silences in their conversation, and if someone had been listening to the two of them, unable to see where his hands were going, they would never know there was anything going on except conversation. Dull conversation.
“I might take a ride out with Nathan tomorrow,” Dor went on, without inflection. “Go out toward Oakton, see what we can find.”
Cass nodded. Nathan siphoned gas from wrecked vehicles, using a system he’d rigged from a pump, a length of
