and jagged rocks protruded, ready to trip the inattentive.
Cass reached the water’s edge, and shuffled slowly out onto the dock. The river was wide here, the water calm and lazy; it seemed to flow more rapidly on the other side of the island where the bridge to the mainland was. She knelt at the point where it sagged, and a thin skim of water slid over the slimy wood, inches from her knees. Cass watched the water’s behavior for a moment as she lined up her things-a toothbrush, a cloth, the plastic box of baking soda that she used under her arms-and thought about how pretty it was, the way it followed a design as endless in its variety as it was inevitable. Lapping, dripping, sluicing into every crevice in the wood, every pock and hollow in the shore.
It would be so easy to slip soundlessly into the water, let it find its way into her nostrils, her eyes, her mouth, the breath bubbling out of her as she drifted slowly down into the reeds and muck.
The February-cold water would scour away the stale film left by last night’s wine, the guilt-pall from Dor’s bruising kiss.
A sound interrupted her treacherous train of thought: a crowing burbled cry carried across the water, sharp on the misty morning, sharp and close. Cass jerked her head up, and there, across the twenty yards of sluggish river that separated the island from the shore, were Beaters.
Cass fell back on her ass, the impact jarring her body, and scuttled backward several feet until she got herself under control. Twelve, fifteen…
So many of them. Their rage was nothing new, but ever since the first wave appeared, nearly a year back, they had steadily evolved, like the old Time-Life picture books Cass’s mother brought home from garage sales-evolution presented in glorious saturated colors, ancient dogs and apes turned slyly toward the reader with expressions of self-confident conspiracy. In no time the Beaters started searching each other out and building nests. In mere months they had learned to work together to take down a citizen, in groups of four so there would be one to pin each of the victim’s flailing limbs. Not too much later, they discovered that larger groups could divide responsibilities so that some kept would-be rescuers at bay while others spirited the prey away for a group feast.
Gathering clothes and rags for their nests. Dragging their victims’ remains away and stacking them into bone- piles. But some things remained beyond them-putting on warm clothes when the weather turned cold, or scaling walls, or driving machinery or building fires.
And-most significantly-
It was the only thing that kept New Eden safe. No one had ever seen a Beater even approach waterways with intent, though surely in the crowd of lurching, bumbling creatures on the other shore there must have been some accomplished swimmers. Perhaps one of them had swum for Cal, another had been a pretty young mother who floated her laughing toddler in water wings in a backyard pool, yet another maybe wakeboarded on New Melones Lake only a few short years ago, splendid and muscular and sun-sparkling in his joyful youth.
No more. Even at this distance Cass could make out the hallmarks of the advanced stages of the disease. Some of them were missing huge chunks of flesh, and their bones flashed white and vulnerable-looking. Others had chewed off their own flesh, the thin skin covering their fingers, their nails, their own lips, tearing scabbed craters in their shoulders. When they could not find fresh uninfected flesh, the Beaters would nibble dispiritedly at each other, drawing blood and painting themselves with it, tearing off strips of flesh, but their hearts were not in it. They could tell the difference and the difference was evidently considerable. They would even eat kaysev when they grew truly hungry, and as far as anyone knew, no Beater had perished from starvation.
Eventually, they died-even the freakishly supercharged immune system that was left behind by the blueleaf fever was not enough to save them from the endless insults to their systems, the breaking of bones and rending of flesh and unstaunched bleeding. Occasionally the raiding parties came across Beater carcasses bent and splayed in the streets, left by their companions where they fell. The huge black carrion birds that had appeared last fall were not interested in dead Beaters. Only maggots would eat Beater flesh, and Cass had heard the stories of raiders rolling over a corpse to reveal its underside split and leaking a tide of fat white pupae onto the pavement.
Cass’s stomach rolled and heaved and she retched and retched into the water, the remains of a meal so long ago she had forgotten it, bare lean tendrils of bile. Retching until there was nothing left, until it felt like her soul itself was expelled.
At last she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and returned to the path without looking again at the opposite shore.
It was her duty, as a member of New Eden’s community, to take this bad news straight to the council, where it could be absorbed and disseminated and acted upon.
But as Cass remembered what she’d done on the dock only hours ago, she knew she would shirk this mean duty as she had so many others. Someone else would have seen what she saw, surely. Someone else would act. Someone else would have to save them.
Chapter 8
THE DAY WAS a scorched and stretched expanse of time. Cass was grateful-her gratitude lousy with guilt-that it was not her day with the kids. Tomorrow was her day in the babysitting rotation and she would not drink tonight. Or at least she would only drink a little, almost nothing. And she would not see Dor tonight. And, definitely, she would visit Smoke. All of that. She just had to get through the day first.
Earl showed up as promised and they walked the bank together, boots squelching down into the sodden soil near the bank, clumps of reed stems going pale where they met the earth, crushed flat under their feet.
“I don’t know,” he said, finally, when they reached the southern tip of Garden Island. Looking north from here toward the other islands, you could see only the rooftop of the community center and a few of the other buildings. A lazy plume of smoke swirled up into the clouds, the remains of the breakfast fire. Lunch was always a cold meal, a lean repast of kaysev in its humblest forms-greens for salad, hardtack made from the everyday flour.
Cass had been skipping lunch too often, she knew that. She was much too thin, her muscles taut and sinewy across her shoulders, her back, her arms. She would go join the others, just as soon as they were finished here. She would eat extra, she would nibble sustenance like a squirrel.
“Maybe hold back on this one area,” Earl said, indicating a section of Cass’s planned lettuce patch. “I don’t think it’s gonna go, but this winter’s been bad for rain.”
Cass nodded. She’d expected as much. She had the rows sketched in twine tied to sticks sunk into the spongy soil, waiting for a dry day to plant.
Earl hitched up his pants, their business concluded. He was a kind man, Cass knew that, the leathery kind of sixtysomething man who would have been a putterer, a retired gent who refereed Little League games and built sunrooms and gazebos for his wife. He never complained about the arthritis in his joints though it was clear that mornings brought him almost debilitating stiffness. As they walked slowly back along the path, he favored one leg; if a trove of Advil or Tylenol popped up, there would be some relief for him-but that was as good as wishing for helicopters or snow cones, since everything good had been raided from the easy scores long ago.
“So you got your crew coming down after lunch,” Earl said amiably.
Cass was surprised he kept track. Benny, Carol, a few others who pitched in occasionally-they came to Garden Island on the afternoons when Suzanne watched the kids, everything revolving around the child-care schedule. The kaysev field was separated by footpaths into six long and narrow sections, and on picking days the crew worked alongside Cass, bent-backed like the migrant workers who used to dot the strawberry fields along Highway 101 from Salinas down to San Luis Obispo fifty miles to the west. It was hard work, painstaking and slow, making sure they didn’t miss a single blue-tinged leaf. The markings could be subtle-on the youngest leaves in particular, there was nothing but a light tint at the base of the veining, only the slightest crenellation along the edges of the leaves. In a mature plant the signs were unmistakable-the leaves were ruffled prettily and the underside had the blue shade of the veins on a fair-skinned woman’s breast. For that reason Cass discouraged her team from picking any of the young plants at all.
Benny and Carol had become as efficient as she was and so she no longer double-checked their baskets. They were a good team, close-knit. The dynamics had shifted, Cass knew that-at first she and Benny and Carol stood
