Rebirth Part 18

Dor figured Ruthie would be fine. After all, he'd been through fourteen years with Sammi; fourteen years of heart-stopping terrors and humbling corrections, the usual drill for a first-time parent. He'd overprotected, sure, but at least he'd been wise enough to let Sammi go when she needed to test herself. That was something Jessica had not been able to do. Jessica smothered-she was a great mother, at times, but now Dor could only pray that some of his lessons had taken root, that Sammi understood she had the strength inside her to face whatever was happening to her.

Tomorrow he would find her. He didn't know how, and he didn't know where. But he would find her.

Tonight he had to find Cass.

He knew something had gone wrong. Sensed it the way he observed coming changes in the weather, the moods of his people or the stores coming in for trade. Dor was so finely attuned to the energy around him that it was painful at times. That was why he lived apart, in the trailer that was little more than a tin prison; it was better than being in the midst of all those lives being lived around him. The static could be almost unbearable on days when he was weakened by a lack of rest or a too-strenuous workout-all those people, their tempers and desires and jealousies on display for anyone who looked.

Well, for people like him, anyway. And he'd sensed the change in Cass immediately. He just didn't know what it was. Still didn't. But in the time she'd been gone in the afternoon and come back, something had changed. Something at the Tapp Clinic had stripped her of her fragile strength, hardened and wounded her.

Dor scooped Ruthie up in his arms. She was so light, hardly a burden at all. He hated bringing her. She should stay and sleep, but it wasn't safe yet; he didn't know who to trust. That had always been his strength, choosing those he could trust. But now he had only himself. So Ruthie would come.

It would be awkward and it would increase the danger for both of them. But what other option did he have? Waiting it out, waiting for Cass to come back, might be the smartest thing to do; after all, he was here for Sammi. Venturing out would require him to use resources that were meant for her. He would risk showing his hand, alerting the Rebuilders that he wasn't who he pretended to be. In the worst case, he would endanger his own mission, and his chances to get Sammi back.

Nothing mattered more than his daughter. He would trade any living soul for her without hesitation-even Cass's, if it ever came to that.

But leaving Cass to an uncertain fate was not an option, either. He had always told Sammi that she had to stand up for the things that mattered. And Cass, despite their awkward relationship, despite the things they had done-or maybe because of them-mattered.

There was no other way. He put the silver box back in his pocket, careful to make sure it was properly closed first, protecting the soft rubbery ball with its cells of gel and powder separated by the thinnest membrane. He shifted Ruthie so that he could hold her in one arm. In the other he held one of the darts he'd smuggled in the hidden pocket along with the silver box. And he set out down the darkened hall.

The way the tree had grown, struggling for purchase on the slope behind the fence that marked the far end of the park, made a perfect saddle in which Cass could sit with her legs dangling above the creek. The creek was dry in all but the few rainy months of spring, dotted with stones submerged in cracked earth, tall dead weeds, jackrabbit warrens. It wasn't much to look at, certainly not compared to the park, which the developers had situated at the end of the broad avenue that ran through the neighborhood, so that you could see it from the entrance and the mouth of every cul-de-sac. They'd made it nice, nice enough to justify the prices they charged for what were just glorified tri-level tract homes.

Mim had fallen in love with the development-granite countertops, his-and-her sinks in the bathrooms, three garage stalls, architectural columns separating the dining room from the great room-and would not be swayed, especially when a bank-reclaimed model came on the market cheap. She and Byrn spent their weekends shopping for outdoor furniture and bar stools, and Cass wandered down to the park and found this secret place where no one came.

The developers put in the usual specimens, agapanthus and gaillardia, dwarf Japanese maples and society garlic. Hedge roses lined split-wood fencing, and ornamental plums shaded banks of New Guinea impatiens and dianthus, snapdragons and alyssum. But after all the houses were sold, the association hired a cut-rate gardener who did little more than mow and blow, and within a year the plants were stunted and dying.

Hardly anyone came to the park. Kids in this neighborhood-with the exception of Cass-were overscheduled after school: lessons, sports, art classes. And there were no old people. Other than a few mothers with toddlers, it was usually just Cass.

Her special tree was really an overgrown madrone bush. Cass had been attracted to its red-brown smooth bark and gnarled branches. Along the base of the trunk where she liked to sit, the bark had peeled away, revealing a silvery-green surface underneath that she loved to run her fingertips along. It was so smooth, smoother than any other tree she'd ever seen. Cass had always been fascinated by different types of bark. On the old redwoods she'd seen on a class trip to Muir Woods, it was so light and porous that it seemed impossible it could protect a tree so massive. Sycamore bark was scaly and split. The old oaks in the foothills were rough and splintery.

In the late summer, little red berries appeared on the madrone's branches. The berry clusters had sharp thorns, and Cass broke them off and wove them into long strands, like a necklace of teeth, of claws. She peeled away the bark with a fingernail, leaving curls of it like wood shavings to fall to the dried grasses. Sometimes she gathered stones from the creek and made little cairns around wildflowers that took root in the richer soil of the creek bed. Later, much later, she would learn the names of the plants, but then she thought of them by their flowers. Fringed purple; bright yellow puff; white-going-to-pink star.

She sat in the embrace of her tree and ran her hands along the smooth bark and breathed the faint sage scent of the sunbaked weeds and listened to dogs barking several blocks away, the faraway roar of the freeway half a mile to the south. She concentrated hard on all of these things, sense-memories and wishes, and in this way she made them disappear-the two men who'd dragged her to the broom closet, the one who held her hair in his fist and the one who was unbuckling his pants-taking herself back in time to her secret garden.

She breathed the scents of that other place and time and thought of the butterflies and ladybugs and bees that landed on the leaves of the shrubs and flowers, and when there was an enraged shout and her head was jerked up hard, her eyes flew open just in time to see Jimbo teeter and fall as a second and third burst of sound echoed off the room's walls.

A man stepped into the light of the lantern Jimbo had set on the floor.

Dor And clinging to him, her arms wrapped tightly around his neck, her face pressed to his shirt, was Ruthie. "Take Ruthie. Go in the other room," Dor growled.

Cass reached for Ruthie, seized her out of his arms.

"Wait for me there," he said.

Cass did.

The man had gone down on his good knee, clutching the other one where blood was spurting out, basting his boot with hot red blood. The other, the one who'd been stripping off his pants-Dor's vision went black at the thought-was slumped to the ground. The dart was imbedded in his shoulder; even if only a fraction of the toxin entered his system, he would be out for many hours, and not feel very good when he woke-especially when he saw what Dor had done to him with his own blade.

Dor grabbed the unconscious man's collar and dragged him to the side of the small room, his belt buckle banging against the floor as he went. The man was not light, but adrenaline and fury pounded in Dor's blood and it felt good to slam the man's limp form into the wall.

Dor snapped on the man's flashlight, arcing it back and forth. The room had been used for a supply closet of some sort; on one high shelf were spray bottles partially filled with pinkish liquid, but otherwise there were only cans of powder, a few crumpled pieces of paper, water stains on the walls, tiny black pellets on the floor signaling that rodents still thrived down here. A bucket in the corner had the stink of human waste; Dor guessed that the guards used it as a lavatory, emptying it only at shift change.

In the beam of the flashlight the man on the floor looked even paler, his eyes wide with fear, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a parody of a grin.

"What do you want," he said.

"What's your name?"

"Ni-Nigel Ralston."

"Where are you from?"

"What the fuck do you care? What do you want?"

Dor delivered a rake-fist jab to Ralston's sternum, a baji quan move he'd practiced a thousand times. Ralston coughed and cried at the same time, doubling over. That seemed to make his knee hurt even worse, and Dor waited until he stopped writhing.

"I want to know something very specific from you," Dor continued, crouching down so he could look the man more or less eye to eye. "I want you to answer right the first time. I don't want to hear 'I don't know.' It will go badly for you if I hear 'I don't know,' which I can appreciate is not what you wanted me to say right now, seeing as there's a good chance that you won't be able to help me."

Dor waited for the man to nod that he understood.

"If you can't help me, and you tell me that, I'm going to kill you."

The man made a frightened little gasp.

"I know, I know, it's not fair, is it? Just like it's not fair that you were about to rape a defenseless woman a few minutes ago."

He leaned in closer. Inches from Ralston's face, he could see that tears leaked from the outer corners of his eyes, and a thin line of drool trailed down his chin. The stench grew stronger; the man had soiled himself. Well, a shattered kneecap probably hurt like hell.

"A girl was brought here in the last few days. Fourteen years old. Dark hair, light brown eyes, five feet four inches tall. She was with a group sheltering in a school half a mile southwest of Silva."

"I wasn't there when they came in, I didn't see them, I don't-"

Dor jabbed the barrel of his stolen gun into the soft flesh along the man's jaw. "Don't say you don't know," he said softly. "Shut the fuck up for a minute and listen, and think about the fact that I already killed one man tonight." He waited until Ralston nodded, choking back a trembling whimper.

"I'm going to let your buddy on the floor there live. You saw what I did to him-he's gonna have a hell of a time pissing for a while, but he might live, if he practices good hygiene."

Ralston squeezed his eyes shut and nodded harder.

"Okay. I don't care about any of the people that were brought in except that one girl. I need to know exactly where they would have taken such a girl and how I can get there. Tell me everything you know about security, who and what I'll need to bypass in order to get to her. Think hard and convince me you're not leaving anything out, because you know what happens if I'm not convinced-I kill you."

Ralston told. He cried while he did it, ropy threads of mucus running from his nose, and his voice cracked and broke, but he told. When he was done it took everything Dor had not to kill him then, not to take his boot and crush the man's skull against the floor.

Instead he choked down his own bile and fury and made Ralston tell him where and how to get a car.

And then Dor killed him. A single bullet to the temple.

He'd broken his word, and he felt a faint compunction about it. But lies were going to be the least of his sins tonight.

31.

CASS SANK INTO THE STRAIGHT-BACKED CHAIR where Jimbo had been sitting when she arrived, settling Ruthie into her lap. She cupped Ruthie's face in her hands, willing them not to tremble, and channeled everything she had into a mother's lie.

"Everything's going to be fine, Babygirl," she murmured and kissed Ruthie's cool cheeks over and over. "Dor brought you for an adventure, didn't he? I know you were sleeping, and now it's time to go to sleep again. We'll do a magic trick-you'll fall asleep right here, with me, and when you wake up again..."

Cass stopped herself. She had been about to make a promise to Ruthie that she could not keep: she was about to say that Ruthie would wake up in a nice bed, with Cass, everything snug and warm around them.

But after what had happened...

How could she have been so stupid?

Ruthie yawned and her eyes blinked heavily, and Cass smoothed her hands down her pajama-clad back and tucked Ruthie under her chin, and in seconds her daughter was sleeping again, soothed and unafraid.

Cass stared into the gloom, down the row of cots. At the end, in the silence and dark, was Smoke. There were no sounds, no movement from that direction; in the other direction, around the corner in the anteroom, Cass heard a sharp exhalation and the sounds of retching. Please don't let it have been Dor, she thought. She needed Dor to live. To prevail. Whatever he'd done, whatever magic he'd summoned to get past the guards at the dorm, at the doors of the Tapp Clinic, past anyone he met along the way-she needed him to keep doing it.

Cass was past the point of wondering how Dor had managed anything. She'd seen him do the impossible too many times before; it was his particular alchemy, procurer of the unimaginable, keeper of the peace in times of anarchy. He was larger than life in his person, taller and broader, with his glowering good looks-he was like the animated heroes in the old video games and the newer holographs.

The vomiting turned to pleading, and Cass turned away from the sounds. Dor could kill Jimbo, he could kill Ralston, and Cass would not care. But that still left the problem of their next move.

If Smoke was dead, Cass could leave him here. She was not sentimental about his body after death; she'd seen enough bodies in enough states of damage and decomposition that she had no romantic illusions about what remained behind. Beaters. The dead. Human tissues were fragile, unlovely things; they grew cold and waxy and then they began to turn to rot and pus and slime. If Smoke was dead, the place inside her where she carried his loss would be scoured and cauterized and she would stumble out of here a broken woman, but she would be able to do what she had said she would do, to follow Dor to the end of his quest, however it turned out.

If Smoke was alive...

She had to know. If Smoke was alive she could not leave him here. She did not know what would happen, how she would care for Ruthie, if she could barter herself for Ruthie's safety. But for now she only had to know about Smoke.

She cradled Ruthie in her arms, adjusting her shifting and sighing sleeping body to fit in the crook of her arm, and she stole down the corridor in the darkness. How long had it been since Ralston and Jimbo had dragged her to the closet-an hour? Less? More?-long enough for things to happen, for the angel of death to come and take his own.

The puddle of light coming from the closet did not reach this far. Cass used her free hand to feel around like a blind woman as she navigated the last of the cots. Under her hand a figure moaned but it was not Smoke. An empty cot...another...and then a wall.

A wall. Empty cots.

Panic ignited inside Cass-where was he? Where had he gone? She stumbled back to the last cot, felt frantically along its lumpy surface, the sheets and blankets that were still damp and hot. Still holding Ruthie, her back in agony from the strain of crouching down with the extra weight, Cass knelt and began feeling around on the ground.

A few feet away, a movement, a rustling, a faint cough.

Cass crawled toward the sounds, touched something, fabric, patted, a limb, a leg- "I dreamed you came."

It was Smoke's voice. Weak, thin, broken-but it was Smoke. Cass gasped and barely caught herself from falling on him, she could crush him, she could hurt him, she scrambled for his hands, found one and held on.

And then suddenly they were cast in light.

Dor stood above them with a flashlight, his pants covered in blood. On the floor Cass got a good look at Smoke. He'd been trying to crawl down the corridor toward the exit. His head lolled against the floor, his eyelids lowered and quivering, his mouth slack.

Had she imagined his voice? She pressed his cold hand to her face, felt his fingertips brush her eyelashes. Dor's face grew stony.

"Cass," he sighed. "At least now I know why you left the room. Is he dead?"

"Not yet," Cass whispered.

"Stand up," Dor said. "Can you carry Ruthie?"

Dor bent and gathered up Smoke's body. It sagged lifelessly as Dor slung him over his shoulders and prepared to carry him back out of the subterranean basement.

"Where are we going?"

"Someplace safe. I had thought it would be just you and Ruthie...but. Well. As soon as you're safe, I'm going after Sammi."

"How-where-?"

"I made him tell me."

"Who?"

"The tall one."

Ralston.

"I'm...sorry, Dor." Cass felt her face flood with shame. She hated that he'd found her that way, burned with the memory of not just her near rape but also what she'd done earlier in the evening. Everything she'd done was for Smoke, to save him, but Dor had seen her on her knees with two men standing over her, and she hated that he had seen her defenseless, had seen her with the fight gone out, that he might believe she had given up. Jimbo had seemed to enjoy her fear; he'd only gotten more excited when she resisted-so she'd stopped resisting.

"You have nothing to apologize for."

She searched his face, his hard-set jaw and flinty eyes, and found compassion there, even stronger than his anger. And she breathed.

"How did you know where to look for me?"

"I talked to the other guy. Back at the dorm."

"And he just told you?"

Dor scowled. "After a bit. Look, Cass, I didn't come here to kill innocent people, but anyone who's made it up to being a guard in the Rebuilders-they're not exactly innocent. It's not like in the Box."

Cass didn't doubt it. "But how...they took everything from us when we got here. Where did you get a weapon?"

"No, not everything. My shoes...my jacket, I had them made specially. There were places to hide things."

He slipped a thin, double-sided blade from his pocket. "Japanese ceramic. Harder than steel."

"But how did that help you get past the guard?"

"It didn't. I have Joe to thank for that."

Cass remembered all the times that Smoke disappeared early in the morning to practice with Joe, the obscure martial art involving rigid fist strikes that could break a branch, a plate. "That guard, he trained in the Marines. You can always tell a guy who learned to fight in the Marines-they all train to the same standards. I learned that from Three-High."

Chapter end