other, and Cass could only imagine what they were thinking. She’d caught people staring-at her, at Dor, at Valerie- and she could only guess where she fit into their assessment.
“They’ve got a system,” she said, avoiding his eyes. “And it’s only one night. We can-”
“It’s
“They’ve gotten us this far…we haven’t lost anyone since they got here, right?”
“Cass,” Dor muttered, voice like grinding metal, abrading her senses. He was angry, yes, but something else, as well.
Not pleading, but-
A man like Dor did not plead. He did not even ask. But in his way, in ordering her around, he was-what? Staking his claim on her? Reminding her that she belonged with him, at any rate. And Cass knew she should rebel, because no one told her what to do anymore, she did what was right for Ruthie and right for her, and now for Smoke, and everyone else would just have to look out for themselves because she couldn’t let them matter.
So why was she still standing here, rooted to the spot, the dangerous connection between them unbroken, staring into his flinty ebony eyes, letting her gaze drift down to his mouth, that mouth that was both hard and soft and-
“We’ll talk later,” she snapped, forcing herself to look away, and then she took Ruthie out of the swing and walked purposefully past the other women. She gave them a fake smile to cover the fact that she was shaking all over, and went around to the front of the house where they were setting up the evening meal.
At dinner she sat with Red and Zihna and the girls. Sammi was there, and though she said nothing, she moved over to make room for Cass on the soft patch of kaysev where they were sitting.
“Won’t Smoke be joining us?” Zihna asked, and Cass followed her gaze and saw that he was sitting with what Cass supposed had emerged as the new leadership. Two of the men from the East were busy with the horses; that left Mayhew and Bart, along with Shannon and Harris and Neal, engrossed in what looked like urgent conversation.
At the fringe of the group sat Dana, his back to the others, facing Owen, who sat alone twenty feet away. By morning, Owen would be cleared to rejoin the group-the fever never took more than a few hours to take hold, and the physical signs quickly followed. For a moment Cass’s heart constricted at the thought of Phillip, abandoned in the quarantine house, blown into a thousand pieces, dead and disappeared on a deserted island where nothing human remained.
Still, that was a better fate than the alternative. The slow madness, the feverish twitching. The picking of the skin and pulling of the hair that slowly morphed into an unnatural, unquenchable hunger. The first nip at your own skin, finding it pleasing, the pain was nothing against the need. The hunger, growing and overwhelming, whispering in your ear as the last of your sanity slipped away, stoking the furnace of desire, until you went out into the world, no longer human but a thing of singular purpose: a hunter of flesh.
Cass had known it.
She felt her blood warm in horror and shame. This was a place she never let herself go. This was dangerous. But there was Owen…and in his expression was the faintest doubt, wasn’t there? A darkness that weighed on his features, even as he joked with Dana and spit kaysev beans off into the side yard. He was wondering, wasn’t he? Wondering what it would be like? And Cass was the only person here who could tell him.
Except she couldn’t remember.
Frustration racked her, stinging her eyes with tears and making her dig her fingers into the dry earth, breaking her nails and scraping her knuckles. Pain helped, pain always helped; it was her last and often her only defense against the burgeoning anxiety. Cass was masterful with pain, having learned early; during the bad days with Byrn, after Cass realized that even her mother would not listen and would not help, she learned to use the pain to control the panic. After…he was done, she would go to the bathroom, and once she’d scrubbed herself raw she would get the nail clippers out and use them to snip away bits of her flesh. Places no one would ever see, the tough skin of her heels, the calluses on her fingers and the soles of her feet. And when that wasn’t enough, she got the X-Acto knife from the garage, and made tiny, delicate, curved designs on her thighs, her sides. So pretty, the way the blood bloomed in the tiniest droplets, the stinging making her bite her lips.
Why couldn’t she remember?
The scars on her arms had disappeared completely, the ones on her back, where the Beaters had torn into her, had faded to burnished whorls. One of the hallmarks of the very tiny percentage of the population to recover from the fever-along with the startling bright irises and the elevated body temperature and the speed at which her hair and nails grew-was the hyperefficient healing, and even scars from childhood had virtually disappeared.
Cass knew with absolute certainty that she’d been attacked, and then recovered. It was everything that happened in between that haunted her. Several weeks were unaccounted for. She’d come to in a field in the foothills, thirty miles down mountain from Silva, in clothes she didn’t remember, her wounds still weeping and excruciatingly painful, her hair pulled from her scalp. In a stranger’s clothes.
Owen set down the plastic bottle of water from which he’d been drinking, and his gaze landed on her. For a moment he just stared, and then his mouth curved in a slow, calculating, cruel smile. As if he knew what she was thinking, as if he knew what had happened to her.
As if he knew.
Cass looked away, face burning. She had been one of them. A Beater. The thought never failed to bring a wave of nausea; usually she was able to force it back with sheer will, but this time her gut rolled and lurched and she knew she was not going to be able to contain herself.
“Excuse me,” she muttered hoarsely to Zihna and Sammi, who’d been talking across her. She got shakily to her feet and hastened around the corner of the house where the remains of a pergola was twined with dead vines. It wasn’t a very effective screen, but it would have to do.
Cass knelt on the ground, the thoughts swirling relentlessly along with the pounding of her head and the roiling of her stomach. She’d been a Beater, a devourer of flesh. After she pulled out her own hair and savaged her own skin, she’d hunted. They all did. She would have. She had hunted and if any human quarry had crossed her path she had done what Beaters do, because they were driven by one need. Cass had wished and prayed and offered her soul in the bargain, those nights when she could not avoid facing the thing that had happened to her, if only she had never hurt a person, a man or woman or child, while she was changed.
But that was stupid and she knew it. Her stomach heaved one last time and Cass brought up bitter bile, gasping and coughing and retching onto the cracked earth. Beaters did one thing. It would have taken some miracle to keep
Cass emptied herself onto the ground while not far away children played and people shared a meal and survivors dared to hope. She was only allowed to be a part of this community because they didn’t know. If they knew what she was, they would most likely banish her. They might even kill her.
And she wasn’t sure she blamed them.
When she returned, having wiped her face on her sleeve and chewed a few kaysev leaves plucked from a plant that had rooted along the house’s foundation to cleanse her mouth, Cass returned to the gathering as nonchalantly as she could. Zihna gave her a concerned look but Red was in the middle of a story so Cass just forced a smile and pantomimed that she was fine, then settled back into the group and watched people finish their meal.
Dor was sitting with a group that included Jasmine and Sun-hi. Jasmine had ridden in the panel van all day, but she looked drained and exhausted, her enormous belly clearly making it difficult to get comfortable on the ground. When Dor dragged over a dusty ottoman for her to lean against, she smiled at him gratefully.
Dor was incapable of sitting still; he was always on the lookout for things that needed doing. She was watching him rig a footrest from a sofa pillow when voices raised in argument caught her attention.
“Aw, man, let him,” Luddy said. He was talking to Dana, the sack that had held his dinner dangling from his hand. Luddy and Dana had never gotten along-punk and do-gooder, Cass figured there were probably some sort of father issues going on there-and it looked like Luddy was trying to provoke him, as usual. “Come on, if he had it you’d know by now.”
Owen looked on, chewing on hardtack. Luddy was right, he looked fine from a distance, and it did seem cruel, leaving him alone at the edge of the group after their long day. Dana said something quietly and shrugged, but now they had the attention of the rest of the group.
