safety, a meal, a high-if you didn’t know better, you might read tension into this scene. You might suppose that Faye and Smoke and Dor meant to face down the others, who stood exhausted on their feet and stinking of sweat and fear, the perfume of every raid.
But it wasn’t like that, not really. Smoke was a good man and fair, given to contemplation, the first to listen and late with an opinion. When he did talk, he had a soft-spoken command that could quiet a gathering instantly, everyone straining to hear. When he was wrong he owned it, but that was not often. And he was Cass’s own, her heart’s solace.
Faye was quicker tempered, a fiery woman who threw fuel on her losses and grief each day by walking her solitary beat around the outside of the Box, her hand on the holster at her belt. Faye loved to kill Beaters, screaming out her rage at everything that had been taken from her as she gunned down and hacked at the creatures that had lost their humanity for a flesh hunger.
But she was ready to lend anyone a hand with any undertaking, and she was gentle with Ruthie.
The six of them all worked together, even Dor. They trained together, buried the dead and shared gate duty and got drunk on kaysev wine. They were each other’s family, their consolation. As members of Dor’s security detail, they possessed a fierce unity. Which wasn’t to say that they agreed on everything-far from it. But they had found a rhythm, a way to talk things out, and they always came to an accommodation of one sort or another. They would not fight among themselves when there was so much to fight outside the ten-foot-high chain-link walls.
“No kids,” Faye said pointedly, fixing her gaze on Dor. The policy she spoke of was his-as were all policies, even if they were rooted in public discussion. What Dor said became law, and the unspoken subtext was that if you didn’t like it, there was the wide-open world out there elsewhere for you to go and form your own opinions.
“There’s Ruthie,” Sam said quietly. Not arguing, not pleading, something in the middle. Cass couldn’t see his expression through his dark glasses, but she didn’t need to in order to know what he was asking. Moving slowly down the path because of her daughter’s weight in her arms, she stopped short of the cleared space, semihidden by the farthest row of tents. Until that moment she hadn’t been trying to hide her approach, but now she hesitated in the shadows, avoiding the wide pool of yellow light cast by the xenon bulb wired over the door of Dor’s trailer. He ran it off his own private generator, the perk of authority; his home alone was lit up bright every night as he dreamed his solitary dreams within.
Cass did not breathe, hearing her daughter’s name. The only child in the Box, Ruthie was tolerated only because she was swept in on the terrible wave of events that brought Cass and Smoke here a month ago. Ruthie had been stolen by the religious order living in the stadium across the street; Cass had snuck in and taken her back, in the process killing several of the order’s most dangerous leaders. Among Box citizens, Cass’s actions were counted a win, a miracle, a rare enough reason to celebrate-so when she brought Ruthie into the Box, not yet three years old, shaved bald and made silent as a stone, there had been rejoicing. For Ruthie, symbol of victory over a vile neighbor, exceptions had been made, and no one complained, not even Dor, who might have lamented the resulting loss of trade with the Convent. It helped that Ruthie was silent and shy, that she ate little and demanded nothing. It helped even more that Smoke was with her, and that he was so valuable to Dor.
But Feo had not come in triumph. He was merely one more spoil of a raid, an incidental that came at a significant cost since he would have to be fed and clothed and would require far more sustenance than Ruthie. And what of the old woman? There were few tasks left for the old, and this one looked too weak even to shell kaysev beans or fold clothes on the fence drying lines. A bad smell wafted from her, she had soiled herself not once but many times and though Cass didn’t doubt that the boy had done his best. A woman that far gone could not last long under the care of a once-upon-a-time orthopedist with a painkiller habit.
“Let us take him tonight,” Smoke suggested quietly. “Cass and I will find out what his story is. And then we can all talk again tomorrow, when we know more. Makes no sense to decide now. It’s getting dark and folks need to be getting to bed, and it’s not like either of them are going anywhere.”
If Faye objected, she kept it to herself.
Sam brought the boy out from the medical shed, dressed in a borrowed sweater that hung off his bony frame. Someone had combed his hair and washed his hands. When Sam said goodbye, he crouched down to look in Feo’s eyes, but the boy turned away and stared at a rusty nail that had been pounded flat against a post. His fingers ruffled the hem of the borrowed sweater so gently that he might have been petting a newborn chick.
He came with them without objection, though, when Smoke outlined the simple plan. He could see his grandmother in the morning. There would be food in the tent in case he was hungry. If he needed to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night, Smoke would take him. He would not be left alone, not even for a minute.
Feo listened, and at the end of Smoke’s little speech he was silent for a moment. Then he shrugged.
“Okay.”
In the time it took to walk to their tent, Ruthie heavy and sleepy in Cass’s arms, they found out that he was almost nine. That the old woman was his father’s mother and spoke no English. He described what had happened to her by hooking a finger in the corner of his mouth and tugging it down, pulling at the skin under his eye. A stroke, then, though neither Smoke nor Cass said the word. When Smoke asked Feo how long she’d been that way he shrugged again, a gesture that Cass realized constituted the better part of his repertoire.
“I don’t know,” he said to the ground. “What day is today?”
Cass and Smoke exchanged a glance. In fact, they knew the answer: Tuesday, September 15, if anyone cared.
“Was it more than a day or two?” Smoke pressed.
“Maybe…five. Or seven.”
Inside the tent, Cass showed Feo the beautiful soft Oriental carpet that had come from an earlier raid on Festival Hill, and told him he could sleep there, that she would borrow some blankets and a pillow. Ruthie had fallen asleep in her arms, so Cass settled her into the small bed that had been fashioned from a shipping crate. Feo stared at her with mild interest.
“This is my daughter, Ruthie,” Cass explained. “She can sleep through just about anything once she goes down, so it’s okay if we talk.”
“I had a sister. Before.”
There was nothing to say to that, of course.
“Why don’t we get you a shower,” Smoke suggested, gathering his kit, a plastic tub containing a cake of kaysev soap, two folded cloths, a disposable razor whose blade had been carefully removed and sharpened several times. “You’re kind of tough on the sinuses.”
Cass opened her mouth to protest, to say that
It was true, he smelled terrible, the odor lingering in the tent after the two left. Cass laid her hand gently on Ruthie’s face, feeling her soft skin, the regular pulse in the hollow of her jaw, before slipping out on her own errand, leaving one canvas flap rolled and tied to let in air.
Aftertime, parents lucky enough to still have surviving children took to sleeping with them sandwiched between them, one arm draped across the only precious thing they had left and the other curved around a trigger or blade. Beaters and marauders and all the other evils that invaded shelters made deep sleep a lost art. Fear pressed at your nostrils and lungs when you drifted off and was lying in wait when you startled awake. Dreams disappeared, and even the nightmares receded as one desperate day melted into the next.
But in the Box it was possible to sleep again. No Beater could scale the tall razor-topped fences; no outsider made it inside the front gates without surrendering his weapons. Those who drank or got high spent their restless nights and dead-limbed stupors in the cots that edged the front wall, or in the nightly rental tents, or slumped against the logs circling the bonfire. The innermost neighborhood of tents, the ones reinforced with posts and plywood and plastic tarps, were the domain of the Box’s permanent employees, and they looked out for each other. Someone was always awake, reading in front of his tent or walking the edge of that little neighborhood. No outsider stood a chance of getting in. Ruthie was perfectly safe, sleeping in the tent open to the star-dusted night. If she were to wake and cry or even whimper, Coral Anne in the next tent over would be at her side, holding her, shushing her, until Smoke or Cass returned.
Cass slipped between the tents, her feet sure and quick. It was a perfect September evening, warm and scented with the burnt-spice smell of flannel bush and wild sage, native species that had started to return as
