Horizon (03) (29 page)

Chapter 43

IN THE VESTIBULE of the old church Cass found a bride’s dressing room. It looked like it had once had some other function; perhaps it was a supply closet before a steady stream of city brides discovered this perfect little setting that practically guaranteed enviable photos, with the drifts of wildflowers and the mountain backdrop. All those brides…they’d adjusted their veils in the mirror, checked their makeup, quelled their nerves and stepped out with breathless anticipation in their satin high heels and French manicures and updos constructed with a hundred tiny hairpins. All of this to launch marriages that, more often than not, would end in tears and bitterness and regrets.

Nevertheless, here she was, alone in the twilight of an early March day in the year 2022, wiping a year’s worth of dust from the mirror, regarding her reflection and thinking about love. When Ruthie was born, Cass had sworn off all love but that which she had for her daughter. Back then it had seemed that her damaged heart would have to struggle the rest of her life to be worthy of her daughter, that it would have to work overtime learning the lessons of devotion and faith and support. But all of that had come instantly, hard, crushingly, the moment she held Ruthie in her arms.

Then there had been Smoke. They’d come together in the threat of the unknown, first loved each other while on the run and then—when she’d rescued Ruthie and they were safe at last—clung to each other and built something real from the tender shoots. They’d had three months together in the closest thing to bliss that Cass had ever known. She’d been shocked to discover that she had learned to trust him; at the end of each day he came back to her and that was a sweet miracle, that alone was enough.

But then he’d left her. It had to be: he could never have been at peace knowing he hadn’t tried, that he hadn’t avenged the loss of those he cherished. Smoke could not have continued to love her if he hadn’t made the quest. And now, finally, after this journey, Cass accepted it. She’d forgiven him for leaving, he’d forgiven her for Dor, and she trusted that he was ready to love her again.

Why, then, was she hesitating?

Cass leaned closer to the mirror, dust motes swirling prettily in the last beams of fading light, and looked at herself critically. She was different—different than she was a year ago, different than she’d been after the attack, even different from the start of this journey. There were the obvious things: they were all thinner, their bodies pushed to the limit each day, with little to eat other than kaysev. But the changes that eluded her, things she noted as one sees shadows from the corner of one’s eye, were as compelling as they were subtle.

Her eyes were still the startling clear green of those few who survived the fever, her pigment altered forever. But there were depths to them, a weariness accumulated from all the stories of hurt and loss that she’d not only witnessed but lived through. Phillip, Jasmine, Terrence…all the lives she’d moved through had changed her, both hollowed and intensified her.

Her hair was startling, too. It had grown long and thick and fine, silvery-white strands supplanting her old honey blond. At times she thought it looked like a botched dye job, but in this mirror it looked startling and lovely, like an ice queen from a book of European fairy tales, flowing around her shoulders and tumbling over her forehead no matter how many times she pushed it back.

But even these were not what she was looking for. Cass was convinced there were answers to be found in the set of her lips, the cant of her cheekbones, the fine lines that had appeared on her brow. Somewhere inside her was the knowledge of whether she could truly ever be with a man, and if so, who she was
meant
to be with, and it was hard to resist the notion that if she just looked long and hard enough, she might find it here, in the glass.

But the harder she looked, the more it eluded her.

There was a soft knock at the door, and it creaked open.

Smoke.

“Okay if I come in?” he asked. “I’ve got room service.”

“Oh, are they serving dinner?”

“Yeah, if you can call it that. Kaysev again. But I have something special…” He rattled something in his pocket, and took out a small can of smoked almonds. “Not even opened.”

“Oh wow, where on earth—”

“Nadir gave it to me. He’d been saving a few things for tonight. He and Dor and Bart are drinking twelve-year-old scotch right now, if I’m not mistaken. I asked him if it was okay if I took mine to go.”

“Oh.” Cass’s mouth watered at the thought of real food, but she hesitated. “I guess someone probably told you by now. That I was drinking again.”

“And that you stopped.”

“It’s been hard.” That was an understatement; a dozen times each day she yearned for the sharp taste of the first swallow, the oblivion that followed.

“Which is why I’m here and the bottle’s not.”

Cass smiled. “Thank you,” she said softly.

Smoke sat down on the upholstered bench, and Cass sat next to him. He popped open the can, but for a moment neither of them moved to eat.

“It’s not going to work out between us, is it?” Smoke finally said quietly.

Tears sprang instantly to Cass’s eyes. “Oh, Smoke…”

He closed his hand over hers and squeezed gently. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I did, Before.”

Cass blinked and looked at him carefully. His face was lined and scarred, and the past months had left a permanent wistfulness that lifted when he smiled, but always settled back into place afterward.

As long as Cass had known him, he had been a man of secrets. He’d told her only that he’d done something that he could never make right, but it was clear that guilt and self-recrimination were never far from his mind. She often found him staring into space, or soaked with sweat from a workout that was never hard enough to drive the memories away. She’d asked him to tell her what was wrong a hundred times, a thousand, but he’d always brushed off the question, saying it was nothing, or not saying anything at all.

And only now, when she’d finally let go of her need to know, was he ready to tell her.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said softly.

“I’m not telling you for your sake. I’m— I need to. For me.”

Cass swallowed. Now that they were on the brink of it, she wasn’t sure she was ready to know. But she owed him this, the freedom he might earn from the telling. It was one gift she could still give him. “All right.”

“I told you what I did Before, right?”

“You were a corporate coach.” The phrase he’d used, on the day they met, as they walked through the streets of Silva, was “career consultant of last resort.”

“Yeah. And I was damn good. You want to know my specialty? Weak guys. Guys who lacked resolve. Guys who were…” Smoke’s expression was pained as he made air quotes around his words: “‘Weak on follow-through.’ ‘Soft leadership.’ ‘Unable to build consensus.’ But those are all just euphemisms, Cass—you want to know what for?”

His self-contempt was as clear as if it was painted on him.

“No balls. Those are all MBA-bullshit ways of saying a guy’s got no stones. And when that happened, they’d bring in the fix-it guy. Me. I charged heaven and earth for my services, but I gave a guarantee—you give me your hopeless case, I give you back a man who can whip it out when he needs to. Six hundred twenty-five bucks an hour, that was my top rate, and there were half a dozen clients in San Francisco who couldn’t get enough of me. Hell, I had a waiting list—seemed like there was no shortage of guys who tended to freeze in the clutch or hide behind the other guys’ skirts.

“What I’d do, I’d get a guy on his own turf. His office, sometimes his house. His club, for the ones who’d made it a little ways up the corporate ladder. See, Cass, they weren’t stupid. They were never stupid. They knew I was there because they were failing, and they wanted to
impress
me. It was fear, that was what drove most of them, fear that they didn’t measure up, as if my opinion of them mattered at all. But a lot of these guys, their daddies told ’em they weren’t worth shit and they got into the office and all of a sudden the guy in charge can seem damn intimidating. Bring in Ed Schaffer, the guy who listens, and they’d tell me their golf handicap, the women they’d bedded, hell, the car they drove. Take me out and buy me drinks even though their companies were paying me a goddamn fortune. I ate a hell of a lot of rare filet and drank my share of single malt in those days.”

Smoke laughed, a hollow sound that chilled Cass to the core. “I’d listen and drink their booze, and all the time I’m reading them, figuring out where their fear came from. Once I knew that, I had all I needed. I broke them down and built them back up, tore down the fear, taught them to go in for the kill, to man up on the job. ‘There’s a leader inside us all’—that’s what I had printed up on my business cards, Cass, but you know what it really should have said was ‘There’s a scared-shitless fuck inside us all’ and all you get for your six-fifty an hour is learning how to turn
that
guy into the bully. Go from the stepped-on to the guy who kicks sand into everyone else’s face.

“And the amazing thing was that no one ever figured it out. They loved me. ‘Ed, you’ve changed my life.’ ‘Ed, I feel like I can do anything now.’ I just smiled and bought them a final round and cashed my checks and never told them what they were really feeling was
power.
I didn’t teach anyone to lead, Cass, I taught ’em to
take.
To look at the world as their candy store and start turning over the shelves. Hell, I got Christmas cards from guys saying they’d dumped their mousy little girlfriends and finally told their families to fuck off and wasn’t it great, and deep down I knew what I was doing was not something I could be proud of—but I didn’t care. Because I think my biggest client was me. I was never a hopeless case, I wasn’t the class loser or the guy who couldn’t get a date or the one who got stuck in an entry-level job. I was just…unexceptional. But when I hung out my coach sign, it was like telling the world I knew things they didn’t. I liked the mystique. Hell, I
used
the mystique.”

Cass remembered how Smoke had described his old life: the sports cars, the mountain getaways, the skiing and boating and women. It was hard to imagine the man she knew—so carefully unassuming, so determined to maintain his low profile—in the picture he was painting. But she let him talk.

Chapter 44

“SO AROUND THE holidays a couple years back, I get this call from Travis Air Force Base. You might remember, I told you I used to work in that area, in Fairfield, and drink with some of the guys from the base after work. That wasn’t exactly true. They hired me, on a consulting basis, to come in and work with one of their guys who was losing his shit. Big project, top secret, very hush, I had to sign all these papers and I wasn’t allowed to talk about the project
itself when I met with him, only about his job in general terms. The brass was in a tough situation because their leadership on the base had been stretched thin—I mean, it’s not hard to figure out why, now.”

In the summer of that year, bioterrorists attacked livestock in the U.S. and Asia; by fall there were reports of dead livestock on every continent. Overseas travel was halted and remote nations began to go dark, and skirmishes escalated and nuclear tensions were on the rise. Banks began to fail and currency was devalued worldwide.

“My guy Charlie—Lieutenant Colonel Charlie Benson, right out of central casting, looked like he’d been painted in his uniform by Norman Rockwell—he had somehow risen to be the number-two guy on the base. Only, the top guy, he got called to Wright-Patterson after the Christmas strike. Charlie was losing his shit because he had personnel problems, discipline problems, protesters every day right outside the gates. They send me in and for a while things are going okay. At first he’s just repeating everything I tell him to say. We take a tough stance, zero tolerance, a civilian guy misses a shift because his wife’s injured in a protest at a bank, we can him. We go out into the protesters one day with tear gas—next day it’s rubber bullets. The shit was hard-core, Cass, and it didn’t even matter because the media had bigger stories than a few tree huggers getting their feelings hurt.

“Only Charlie—he surprised me. He may have been the only guy I ever worked with who wasn’t a coward. He just wanted to think everything to death. How he got that far in the military I’ll never understand, because old Charlie’s response to everything was to commission studies and conduct interviews and draft plans. And he didn’t really have a taste for power, either. His heart wasn’t in it. At first he went along with what I told him to do because he was worried about his job. But as the country fell apart and we started hearing from the top brass less and less, he began to push back. He didn’t want to act, he wanted to wait. ‘Let’s see what the outlook is in six weeks,’ he’d say. ‘Let’s not respond out of panic,’ that was one of his favorites. Made me fucking nuts.

“I guess by then I figured this was the last big job I’d have until things sorted themselves out. It might sound funny but I wasn’t too worried about my own future. I had my place in the mountains, it was well stocked because we were always having power outages up there anyway. Nobody really believed this was the end of the world back then, more like a hell of an inconvenience that might wipe out the underclass and decimate a few island nations no one had ever heard of.

“So one day we get this order. The K734IV order, the one that went to all the bases around the country. By then I was reading Charlie’s mail before he did, confidential and otherwise. There’s about three hundred pages of scientific crap about the plant, but all we were concerned about was the flight schedule and maps. It’s a direct order, there’s no decision to be made.

“Except that the order has an attachment for bases in California only. Says how down in UC-Colima, they’ve developed this second strain that appears to boost immunity. They’re making it available on an optional basis, recommending a seed mix that includes two percent of this strain, which has some long name with initials and numbers, just like kaysev did back then. There wasn’t time to get approval in any other state. And on the back page there’s a test schedule and you can see they haven’t done even a quarter of the tests, and the results of the ones they have are either blacked out or marked ‘inconclusive.’

“So Charlie, he gets on the phone with the other guys, in Beale and Edwards and so forth. He wants to know what they’re thinking of doing. Now this is
exactly
the sort of behavior we’ve been working on for a month now, how he’s going to be accountable, immediate and decisive.
A-I-D,
that was his acronym, and I made him repeat it every morning when we started the workday. So when I hear him dicking around, should we do this, should we do that, I pretty much lose my shit. ‘This is where you
take charge,
’ I tell him. ‘This is where you come out strong, make a name for yourself.’ I ask him if he wants to go back to driving a desk in a cubicle when this is all over, or if he wants to be remembered as the guy who saved California’s ass—at least, a few more asses in his region than elsewhere.

“And
still
he fights me. There wasn’t enough testing, the results are inconclusive, the blacked-out data is troubling, blah blah blah. I’m ready to deck the guy myself. We’ve got a 4:00 p.m. deadline to make the decision, and by three o’clock all the other bases have checked in as no. They all lack the balls—at least, that’s the way I see it, that’s what I tell Charlie. I lock the door to his office and I start screaming at him. I can feel this vein in my forehead standing out, I’m giving it everything I’ve got, everything in the Edward Schaffer bag ’o tricks, calling him names, questioning his manhood, and he just sits there staring at me, shaking his head. Finally, when I have to stop for breath, he says to me in this calm, tired voice, ‘Ed, the only way that call’s getting made is if you do it yourself.’

“He didn’t mean it, of course, he never believed I’d do it. And, Cass, I’ve thought about it a thousand times and I didn’t ever think I’d do it either. I was giving him one last chance—that’s what I really believe—and I just wanted him to
act,
he could have punched me in the face and that would have been better than him sitting there with his dick in his hands waiting for the apocalypse and letting the inmates run the prison.

“So I pick up his phone and all the time I’m thinking he’ll stop me, and then I’m dialing and we’re staring at each other, neither one of us blinking, and the guy comes on the line and I say, ‘Benson here,’ and he says, ‘Yes, sir,’ and still I’m waiting, I give it an extra-long pause and the guy on the other line is like, ‘Sir, sir, are you there?’ and Charlie, he does something that— He gets out of his chair and he goes to the window and he turns his back on me. He turns his fucking
back
on me, and I tell you Cass, every cell in my body turned into the bully I’d failed to make him into and I remember thinking I’d show him, I’d
show him what it means to lead,
and I gave the order.”

Smoke was perspiring as he came to the end of the story. “After that I went home. It was the last time I ever saw Charlie, actually. After—later—I tried to find him. But you know what happened to the base and…well, I didn’t try all that hard. After a week or so it didn’t matter anyway. And by the time I realized what I’d done…”

Cass listened, horrified, as Smoke’s voice trailed away.

This was it. The thing Smoke had done for which he could never forgive himself, the sin that he would spend his whole life atoning for, putting ahead of everything and everyone else—including Cass.

And she knew how he saw it: Smoke believed he had single-handedly unleashed the Beaters. If he hadn’t made the call…if the mixed seed had never been loaded into the planes alongside the otherwise fine kaysev seed…if the first blueleaf had never sprouted…

“But you can’t believe it’s all your fault.” The words burst from her before she had a chance to think. “There were a thousand parts to play in what happened. The people who developed it, who were supposed to test it, Charlie’s commander…”

But she realized that Smoke wasn’t really listening. He was looking off into space, reviewing the story that would never leave him.

She wanted to make him see, to shake him, scream at him, until he finally gave up his steadfast determination to suffer. But Smoke wouldn’t even listen.

Anger bubbled below the surface of Cass’s sorrow. It was a terrible waste, throwing his life away like this, over something he could not change, a mistake he never intended.

But what was worse—he’d thrown away more than his life. He’d discarded their love the day he left the Box, abandoned it as though it was worthless. It was no wonder, Cass realized, that she’d felt so hurt. Because even though his error had terrible consequences, even though it had changed him irrevocably, it still was not enough. Not enough to trade her for. Not enough to have made her feel so small, so hurt—to have driven her into the arms of another man.

But no. That was wrong. She would not blame Smoke for that. When she went to Dor, she went willingly, and when she loved him, she loved him fiercely.

Cass held Smoke’s hand for a while longer, considering and eventually abandoning her anger, forgiving a man who did not seek her forgiveness. Finally it was time to leave the darkening little room. By then Cass finally understood why Smoke had to leave her back in the Box, why he would always have to leave her for one justice quest after another. He could never fully give himself to her, because he’d already given himself over to the job of punishing himself, forever, one agonizing day at a time.