Rebirth Part 16

"I didn't eat dinner," the girl continued. "I haven't been eating much lately. We were living over in Brill-do you know Brill?-it used to be a resort." She didn't wait for Sammi to answer. It was like she was just talking to hear a voice. Sammi thought that if she could just get back into herself she would feel sorry for the girl, but she felt outside, and above, anchored to her body only by the unfurling thread of red energy that leaked out from inside it.

"We were sheltering in the office of the main hotel. There was a room there with no windows, my uncle said that was best. The other people got the regular rooms. No one wanted the cabanas. I mean, you're in your own building, no one can help you, you know? The Beaters got Jillian-she was this woman my uncle was kind of with, sort of-anyway, they got her last week. When the Rebuilders came everyone thought it was the Beaters again. I mean, not the people on duty, I guess they knew what was happening because they saw the truck, but it was before dawn and there was a lot of screaming and that's why people thought Beaters."

"Oh," Sammi said. How bad would it be to ask the girl to be quiet, she wondered.

"Don't worry about them," the girl said, misunderstanding her shortness, pointing at the front seat, where the man and woman were staring straight ahead, not speaking, not paying attention to anything but the road. "They haven't said anything to me at all since they came to get me."

Sammi knew she was supposed to talk next, to ask a question or say where she had come from. They passed playing fields on the left, and to the right was a woods. They were driving in a circle, weren't they? But wait, there was the wall, the one she'd seen that they were building around the whole place. To keep out Beaters. To keep people like her locked in.

She and Jed used to watch Beaters out the windows of the middle school's little fake lookout tower, their favorite place to hide out after their day care shift; they weren't the only people who used it for privacy, so they couldn't make out or anything, but they held hands and watched the little groups of Beaters bashing themselves against the walls surrounding the school, trying to get in. They always eventually wandered off.

Sammi and Jed amused themselves by trying to spot the repeaters. It was hard to do because of the way the Beaters deteriorated. The new ones-of which there were few these days, though there was a rumor that a new wave was beginning since people had started eating the blueleaf roots again-didn't look too bad, mostly messy and scratched. The worst were the ones who'd been around since the beginning; whole big patches of skin would have fallen off, with the muscles and guts and bone showing through. They were missing teeth and even their lips, since they usually ended up chewing them off, and their arms and fingers were bony, red gooey messes, their hair pulled out and their scalps crusted and bruised. The old ones, you couldn't even tell half the time if they'd been men or women.

Sometimes Sammi and Jed could make it out by the clothes. It was pretty rare for a Beater to put on new clothes, although they could always surprise you. They spent ninety percent of their time doing the same things over and over, picking and gnawing at themselves and each other and wandering around in their lurching, drunken little gangs, picking up anything shiny that caught their eyes. But once in a while they would do something, well, human, which was actually really freaky. Like last week, Jed had pointed out a short, heavy one-a man, they decided-who was trying to shove something into the heavy locked metal box that held the sprinkler system's controls, out beyond the decorative benches on the parking lot side of the school. There was a narrow slot above the lock, and the Beater worked for a long time, pushing and jamming the object, and when it finally gave up and wandered off, they saw that it had been trying to push a magazine through the slot that was too small for it. Jed thought the Beater was trying to return a book, that it thought the school was a library. Sammi thought it was trying to mail a letter. The magazine flapped in the wind for a while, sodden and damp, and the next time they were up in the watchtower it was gone.

They never told anyone what they saw; they kept it to themselves. Somehow, when it was just the two of them, it could be funny, sometimes. If Sammi tried to tell her mom, she was likely to get started on one of her crying jags that ended with her pulling Sammi into her arms as though she wanted to just hold her forever. Sammi hated that; she always wanted her mom to let go, but that seemed rude, and she would just stare over her mother's shoulder, smelling her body odor and feeling her tears falling on Sammi's shoulder and wetting her shirt, waiting until her mother finally released her. It wasn't like that with Jed.

But Jed was gone.

Sammi felt a sob fighting its way up from deep inside her and she didn't want that, couldn't deal with whatever this girl and the people in the front seat would do. She didn't want their pity, and she sure as hell didn't want anyone interrogating her. So she squeezed her teeth together and forced the sadness back down. There would be time-eventually-for that.

But just then the driver pulled into the parking lot in front of a C-shaped, concrete-sided building three or four stories tall. The car coasted to a stop in the entrance in the middle of the C. Sammi tried the door handle, but they had the child locks on.

Inside this building it was just a repeat of the morning. Rebuilders in army-type clothes with weapons, lots of paperwork everywhere-it was still a shock to see everyone with actual clipboards rather than ePads and smartphones. The man who'd driven them disappeared, but there were others. The older woman from the car ushered them here and there and then disappeared with the other girl, and Sammi didn't see either of them again.

A plaque mounted near the front entrance said Genevieve Sanders College of Nursing. So it was a school for nurses. And come to think of it, the lobby reminded Sammi of the home where her mother's mom, her grandma Beth, had lived until Sammi was eleven, when she'd died at the end of a long summer. Sammi and her mother visited a couple times near the end, when Grandma Beth was confined to her bed and not talking anymore, and Sammi always held tight to her mother's hand as they went through the hushed lobby with its shuttered snack stand and the pretend beauty salon where volunteers did manicures during the day.

After the other girl was led off to some other part of the building, Sammi was taken up to the third floor by a woman who introduced herself as Mrs. Henderson. She was old enough to be her mom, but she seemed so tired and disinterested that Sammi wondered if she'd been woken from a deep sleep to tend to her. Only a few bulbs burned on the floor, but the floor was polished and clean, and the furniture in the sitting area was arranged neatly.

"Keep your voice down," Mrs. Henderson said, not bothering to mask her irritation. "Everyone's asleep. I'll take you to your room but we'll wait until morning to show you around." Sammi followed silently, trying to tread softly so her footsteps didn't echo in the hall. When they passed a bathroom they heard the sound of someone throwing up, moaning in between bouts of retching.

"Wait," Sammi said, finally stirred to a reaction. "Shouldn't we, like, check if she's okay?"

"She's fine," Mrs. Henderson said impatiently, but Sammi remained rooted to the spot. All day she'd just stood by and done nothing as every person she'd ever known was taken from her, as she was finally taken herself. She'd thought she was done caring. But hearing someone's misery like that...she couldn't walk away.

"I could just check real quick," she offered.

"It's just morning sickness. Half the girls here have it, it's nothing."

Understanding dawned slowly on Sammi, chilling her to the core. This wasn't just a dorm for girls-it was for pregnant girls.

"There's been a mistake," she said, her voice sounding strange and thin. "I'm not-I'm not pregnant. I shouldn't be here."

The woman finally looked at her, really looked at her, for the first time. In her expression Sammi saw a combination of pity and contempt. "Not right now," she muttered, "but a month or two from now, you'll be in there with her tossing your cookies like all the rest of them."

It was only when Mrs. Henderson opened the door to Sammi's new room that she noticed what she'd missed before: that spiral tattoo on the woman's wrist, the same one the guards had who'd attacked the library, the ones who'd burned the place down and killed everyone.

What the hell kind of place was this? Sammi had started to shake right after Mrs. Henderson said the thing about getting pregnant, but she'd tried to hide it. Every time she thought things couldn't get any worse, it somehow got worse. She wanted answers, but she wouldn't get them from this woman. Maybe, in the morning, she could ask her roommate.

Mrs. Henderson gave her a tiny flashlight, the kind you'd get on a key chain at the dollar store. Sammi swept it across the objects in the room: two twin beds, a single dresser, drapes drawn tight. A pair of flip-flops tucked neatly under the other bed, where a sleeping figure lay facing the wall. Mrs. Henderson pointed to the towels folded neatly on a chair, to the plastic bucket that she called a "potty," and told her not to sleep through the breakfast bell because there wouldn't be a second one.

Then she told Sammi not to wake her new roommate, whose name was Roan.

R-O-A-N-she spelled it before she left.

Sammi went to her new bed, suddenly more exhausted than she ever remembered being, and ran a hand over the blanket. Cotton, rough-knit-like the cheap ones they had back at the Grosbeck Academy in the nurse's office, where Sammi had gone only once, when she got her first period in the middle of Spanish and she had to wait for her mom to come with a change of clothes and a sanitary pad. Her mom had surprised her by taking her out of class for the rest of the day, and they'd gone to the best restaurant in town and her mother had ordered Sammi one Shirley Temple after another and a glass of pinot blanc for herself, twisting it by the stem rather wistfully.

Go with them, Sammi.

Sammi shut down the thought as fast as she could but it hadn't been fast enough. A little had gotten in, the memory that could only lead to others and, inevitably, make her face the loss that was bigger than her whole life. Her mother in the nice restaurant that day, after the lunch crowd had come and gone, bars of sunlight making their slow way across the white tablecloth. Her mother smelled of Kenzo Flower, her favorite perfume, and she'd worn a soft green jacket and one of the silver necklaces that her friend Dulcette was always making after her husband ran off. She had carefully lined her eyes with a deep shade of purple-on another woman it might have been garish but on her beautiful auburn-haired mother it was just right, exotic without being too out-there. Men noticed her mother. Even her father-Sammi had memories from when she was really little, back when they were still getting along, her father catching her mother reaching into the tall cabinets for a platter or a cookbook, up on her toes, and he would run his big hands over her waist, her hips and pull her to him like he couldn't believe his luck.

But that had been a lot of years ago. They hadn't been in love for a long time. Her dad was in the office most nights, and he left before she got up in the morning. Honestly, when he moved away, it wasn't like she saw him much less. Those weekends at his place-the giant charred burgers he made for her, "Sammi style" he called them, dripping with provolone and crisscrossed with bacon, even though she hadn't eaten anything like that since she got to high school and had to force herself to eat even half...the awful pink satin comforter he'd bought for her even though pink hadn't been her favorite color since she kindergarten-those had been awkward, for sure.

But what she wouldn't give for one more.

28.

CASS RUBBED AT HER EYES. IN THE DARK NO ONE could see the way her face got blotchy when she cried. No one would be able to tell that her fine pale hair was matted to her forehead with sweat, or that she scratched long furrows in the tender skin of her wrists, a nervous habit that summoned just enough pain to keep her mind from spinning out of control.

Ruthie had wedged herself in the crook of Cass's arm. The bed was narrow, but usually she could sleep easily with Ruthie next to her. Tonight was different. Tonight, Ruthie was restless and couldn't seem to get close enough. As Cass lay awake trying not to cry, Ruthie burrowed and flailed and sighed and whispered half words, caught between sleep and waking.

Just as Cass had decided that she might as well get up, maybe sit in the straight-backed desk chair pulled up to the window and stare out at the moon for a while, she felt Ruthie's eyelashes flutter against her neck.

"Shh, shh," she whispered automatically, wrapping Ruthie in her arms and rubbing her back. She'd always been able to soothe Ruthie back to sleep, but now her daughter fought her, wiggling and pushing her away. "Mama."

Cass froze, then leaned up on her elbow so she could look at her daughter's face in the moonlight. Ruthie's voice, even though she'd heard it now half a dozen times, even though she rejoiced at its return, still seemed fraught with dark enchantment. Ruthie's eyes were open but unfocused, and she reached for Cass's arm and held on, her little fingers digging in tight. Cass stroked her cheek, and found it hot and damp.

"What is it, Babygirl?"

"Help Smoke." Ruthie's eyelids fluttered shut and she rolled over and pushed her fist against her mouth, but when Cass grabbed her hands she came willingly, burrowing back into Cass's arms.

Cass barely dared speak, her heart thudding and her mouth suddenly dry. "What did you say, Ruthie?"

"Help him, Mama."

Then she seemed to relax, her body going limp. After a moment she yawned, a long, luxurious yawn, and in seconds she was asleep again, tucked up against Cass. It was almost as though the words had fought their way out and, now that Ruthie had finally spoken them, she was able to rest.

Cass lay very still for a long time, her mind racing. Once before, Ruthie had insisted she help, but she hadn't been able to, that time. Devin was dying, Devin might well be dead already, and there was nothing Cass could do about it, nothing she had done about it, besides give his mother false hope, besides leaving them behind and being relieved by that.

Now Ruthie was insisting again. Ruthie knew something was wrong. Ruthie knew Smoke needed help. Call it a sixth sense, or intuition, a gift or a curse-it didn't matter. Ruthie knew things and she saw things, and there was no way for her to un-know or un-see them.

Moments ticked by, Cass barely remembering to breathe, as Ruthie's command took on the shape of a plan, risky and costly and inevitable.

Finally, Cass slipped out of the bed. The nightgown they'd given her was too small. The fabric was stretchy and thin, and molded itself to her ass and thighs as she tucked the covers back around Ruthie, shivering in the cold night air. It would be far more practical to change back into the clothes she had been wearing earlier-but as she thought through her next moves she decided to wear the nightgown.

She knelt on the cold synthetic tile floor and trailed her fingertips through Ruthie's soft hair and hummed very softly, decorating the edges of her daughter's dreams with her voice, a faint soundtrack that would linger and soothe her fears if she woke up before Cass returned.

Dor slept a few feet away, his arm up over his head, his hands fisted. He did not snore. He barely appeared to breathe, but Cass saw his chest rise and fall very slowly in the light from a glowing digital clock on the nightstand.

She rested her hand on Ruthie's back and gave herself one last chance to change her mind. Going out into the cold night meant leaving Ruthie here alone with Dor. Ruthie was so small and defenseless and solemn, her childhood like a wilted petal that lay rumpled at her feet-but she was also an outlier. Her small teeth were sharp and white and perfectly formed. Her eyes were clear and bright. Under her soft skin her bones and muscles were strong and getting stronger. Ruthie could run faster, jump farther, climb higher than other children, and if it came down to it, she would survive other hurts better, too-the kind that came from being abandoned over and over by a mother who just couldn't keep her safe and fulfill her promises to this world.

On the other side of the equation was Smoke. Her lover, the one person on this earth who she had given everything to, the only man besides her father who she had ever trusted-he lay broken and abandoned in the basement of a building far from anything that had ever been home to him. Maybe he was already dead.

Smoke had betrayed her, and his betrayal was a weakness, but perhaps Cass was even weaker than he was because she could not forget him. She could not force herself to rip out the part of her that had been changed by him, could not toughen up the part that had gone soft for him, could not ignore the longing for him that had become as much a part of her as her own name.

She thought she could outrun Smoke by coming to Colima. Now she knew that was never going to be true, not even if he had died that day, if he'd never been brought here, not even if he'd never come back and had forgotten her and gone to live another life. Smoke was imprinted on her and would be a part of her until her own death, whether it was the next hour or whether she lived many more years.

Now Cass had to go to him, knowing she might not return. Danger waited in a dozen, a hundred different forms. She wasn't afraid of dying-she would die for Ruthie, in agony if that's what God demanded-but dying for Smoke seemed like an indulgence.

Other mothers would never leave their children's side. But Cass was not other mothers. She was the one who had traded her baby for a bottle of jack, a jug of pinot grigio, a whiskey and Diet Coke in a plastic cup. She had left her daughter crying in her crib while a stranger tore off her sweater in the next room. The very night that Ruthie had been taken from her, she had sobbed motherly anguish with her face in the carpet only until she found the strength to crawl to the refrigerator and drink every beer she had left.

The shame and regret reached up from the depths and grabbed greedily, ready to call Cass a bad mother, undeserving. But Cass resisted. She had atoned and would keep atoning. Ruthie had spoken Smoke's name. Ruthie said she must go.

And Ruthie would be safe here. In the other bed was a man who had raised his own daughter, a man who was good with children. You could see it in the way he was with Ruthie-anyone would know that Dor was a natural. When he touched Ruthie she beamed. When he teased her she sparkled with mirth; when he complimented her she swelled with pride.

Cass knew that Dor would lay down his life for Ruthie, likely would for any child. If Cass were to die, Ruthie would learn to love others. She would grow up protected and cherished and if any sane person had to choose between Cass and someone like Dor, the decision would be easy. Nothing personal. Nothing against Cass, who had tried.

So far, trying had not been good enough. Cass had failed the people she loved over and over. But she was about to try harder.

Cass bent to her daughter's cheek and kissed the damp skin, her lips trembling-but she would not cry.

She gave Dor a long, hard look in the dim light and slipped out of the room.

She heard voices the minute she opened the door of the stairwell, men's voices, low and punctuated with laughter. Her heart was already pounding, and she paused in the hallway, guiding the door gently shut so that it would make no sound.

Two men sat at a small table, the kind that might have held a drink next to a sofa, back when living rooms were full of things like cocktail parties and hors d'oeuvres and casual conversation and flirting. They had dragged the improbable table between them and set some sort of small, high-tech tripod light on top, illuminating a wooden tray filled with tiny glass pebbles, a game Cass had never seen before.

She slid the heavy overcoat she was wearing off her shoulders, revealing the scoop neckline of her thin nightgown. Her nipples hard from the cold, she had to resist the urge to cover her breasts. Instead she faked a yawn and allowed the coat to slide farther until it covered little more than her forearms and rested, drooping around her waist.

In the past she would never have gone out like this. The nightgown, though snug, wasn't truly sexy; it squeezed all of her flesh, flattening her roundness, doing nothing for her curves. Also, she was wearing heavy socks and her boots, leaving only the pale flesh of her shins exposed beneath the gown.

Still, this was enough to pass for provocation now. She'd seen it in the library, how small glimpses of flesh-less than graced the naughty stereographs of the 1940s, even-could make a man stutter and swallow hard. If a woman emerged from the bathroom stalls wiping her bare damp forearms on her pants, eyebrows would rise. A woman who brushed her hair in the conference room at night, revealing a triangle of her neck in the light of a candle, this could stop a man.

Cass stood in the circle of light cast by the lamp and pretended to scratch an itch on the top of her thigh. "Excuse me," she said in a bored voice.

Cass felt that chameleon self coming on. She'd studied hard, and the stakes had been high; life was harder before she learned to interpret and predict the interplay of emotions between her mother and her many lovers, especially once Byrn had taken up residence. She'd built a nearly encyclopedic understanding of what a man's moods could signal-and from there it had been a simple enough step to copy them herself.

"I'm new," she continued. "And I'm sorry to bother y'all but I get headaches? And they said something about maybe I could have something for it. Just a Tylenol, one's all I need."

She waited, knowing the timing was important; the men glanced at each other skeptically but were barely able to tear their eyes from her body. One of the men was tall and stocky, red-haired with a sharp cleft to his chin, his face all harsh planes. The other had a thick, gray-peppered moustache and a ring of longish hair around his bald spot. While Cass watched, he shoved his hand through his hair in a vain attempt to force the hair across his head, and Cass felt a wave of revulsion. Mim once had a boyfriend who spent fifteen minutes at the mirror every morning arranging and spraying his thin strands of hair on top of his head. He was an unusually strong perspirer, and within an hour the fabric of his shirt would be ringed with sweat under the armpits and his bald head would shine.

He was hardly the worst of Mim's boyfriends, though.

When her gaze fell on the red-haired man's wrist and she saw the koru mark there, she relaxed a little. So it would be him. That would be better. There would be no painful memories complicating what was already an odious task.

"Girly, ain't you heard, the drugstore's closed," the mustached man said, drawing the last syllable out and staring unabashedly at her chest.

"Oh, I'm sorry, I thought it was different for outliers," Cass said, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "That's what they told me, anyway."

"Hang on." The red-haired man's voice was sharp, inflected with some sort of northern accent, Canadian or Wisconsin or something. "You're an outlier?"

Cass nodded, giving him a slow, smug smile.

"C'mere."

She hesitated for a moment and then approached him. The heavy coat tugged the fabric of the nightgown even lower.

He pulled a small penlight from his pocket and shined it on her face.

"What's your name?"

"Cassandra."

He played the light over her hair, her face, down her neck, then let it linger on her breasts. "Well, Cassandra. You got some way of proving that?"

Cass stared him directly in the eye and ran her tongue slowly along her lower lip, letting it linger in the corner.

There was an art to the pause; Cass had not always been a master. You had to wait longer than you thought you should, longer than was credible. So long you were sure they would find you ridiculous. But they never did, not when you let your eyelids drift down and breathed a little deeper, lips parted as though in anticipation. As though you could taste their gaze, as though you wanted more.

When it had been long enough, when his eyes had widened so fractionally she almost missed it, she spoke again, husky and low. "I might."

"Hell, I probably got something," the balding man said. "Back in my-"

"I'll take her," the red-haired man interrupted. "I could use a walk anyway. About to die of boredom, stuck here with the likes of you all night."

"Ah, suck it, Ralston. What, you're going to just take off? What if there's a code?"

Ralston shrugged. "I can answer it from Tapp as easy as I can from here, can't I?"

"That what you're gonna tell Chen? That you figured-"

"Chen's not interested in how I spend my time," Ralston snapped. His voice had gone hard. For a moment there was silence between the two men, and then the guard with the mustache nodded once and fixed his gaze on the abandoned game pieces.

The koru. The hierarchy. The Rebuilders relied on a rigid structure and that meant those below had little to say about the doings of those above.

Ralston gave her a fake little bow. "After you. Cassandra."

He took her not out the front entrance but down a corridor to a side door, which was fitted with the same sort of lowtech hardware that the Rebuilders had used to replace all the electronic locks. When he took his key chain from his belt, Cass caught a glimpse of a gun and her heartbeat quickened.

All she was hoping for tonight was to get close to Smoke, to see for herself if he was dead-or whether he had a chance.

Chapter end