Rebirth (19 page)

“Use it how?”

“Think about it. Afternoons, back in the Box, Charles and them, they’re looking ahead to quitting time. Travelers come along and Faye’s more likely to give ’em a few extra chits just to get ’em through the door rather than haggling. Now we show up in Colima, we have a story that
almost
sounds likely…well, they’re less likely to ask a lot of questions we can’t answer.”

“We can answer anything they ask.” Cass felt her face go hot. “We just have to keep it simple. We’re together, the three of us.”

Dor narrowed his eyes. “That’s not much of a story. What if they ask for details? We don’t really know each other.” His voice grew even colder. “We’re strangers.”

“You didn’t ask for this.” Cass cut him off before he could say anything else. “I
know
. You don’t have to say it again.”

Dor handed her the smaller of the two packs. She slipped it on, feeling her muscles flex and respond to the extra weight. It had been a long time since she’d freewalked, but her work in the gardens kept her limber and strong. She dug rich dirt from the creek banks a few blocks from the Box; she turned her flower beds with a sturdy shovel Three-High had brought back; she carried creek water in heavy buckets. When she had settled her pack, she bent to pick up Ruthie.

But Ruthie skipped out of her way, smiling mischievously.

“Come on, Babygirl,” Cass said, trying to be patient as Ruthie ran to Dor and lifted her arms in the air.

Dor picked Ruthie up without hesitation and set her on his shoulders.

“You don’t have to do that.”

“It’s no big deal. She doesn’t weigh anything.”

Ruthie grinned down at her triumphantly.

“Why don’t you wait,” she said. “Ruthie can walk for a while anyway. We can take turns—”

“It’s nothing,” he said.

They walked the straight road and though the late-afternoon breeze was sharp and chill, they quickly settled into a steady pace that warmed Cass. As they went, she thought about what Dor had said—that the burden of carrying her daughter was nothing—and about the way she’d taught herself to choose among the things she knew to be true, to keep only those that would allow her to go on and then banish the rest to a place of forgetting; to consider all the ways she could lie to herself, and choose among those as well; to cherish her carefully chosen lies, to nurture them so they could flourish in the arid landscape of her mind.

Dor carried Ruthie with a straight back and confident stride, but after a while there was perspiration at his brow. From time to time he hitched her up straight when she grew tired and flagged forward. Her little hands seized his hair, pulling hard, but he didn’t complain. Cass found herself falling back a few steps so she could watch them, marveling at the easy way her daughter wrapped her arms around Dor’s head—a
stranger’s
head—and wondered why she trusted him so easily.

When they were close enough to make out the figures of the guards at the gate, he hitched Ruthie up and turned, waiting for Cass to catch up with him. “So the story—”

“What?”
Cass snapped, embarrassed to be caught watching him.

Dor glanced at her curiously, turning his whole body to ensure that Ruthie kept her balance on his shoulders, and Cass almost ran into him. She kept her eyes fixed on the road. Up ahead, the uniformed men stood on either side of an opening in the finished part of the wall, their weapons loose across their chests, the sort of guns soldiers carried in videos Before in ground conflicts everywhere: black and smooth enough to be toys, powerful and deadly enough to bring down entire crowds at a time.

“I thought we should go over the story one more time.”

“It’s not that complicated,” Cass said in exasperation. “I’m an outlier. I ask for Evangeline, I tell them I met her before. That Evangeline invited me to come. That Ruthie and you…”

But it wasn’t that easy.
That Ruthie is yours.
She had to say it, not just now but again when it counted. Evangeline did not know that Cass had a child; she and Smoke had come to the library empty-handed and left with only what the resistance gave them. Now she had to pretend that she was a childless woman traveling with her lover and his daughter. She’d deny Ruthie, and there was no way to make her daughter understand what she had to do, the weight of betrayal heavier because Cass had betrayed her daughter before.

“You can still back out,” Dor said, reading her thoughts. But Cass knew that it wasn’t true. An hour ago—yes. She could have taken the Jeep that they had left behind the downed billboard, secured Ruthie in the backseat and pulled back onto the road and driven back to the Box. She could have passed the corpses of the fresh Beaters lying in the middle of the road, the house where they’d sheltered the night before, the house where the ruined girl had been chained to the bed. She could have stayed strong through all of that, all the way back to the Box and back to their bed and their tent, for Ruthie.

Now it was too late. They’d be seen and she could not turn around; the Rebuilders would never let her go.

“That Ruthie is yours,” Cass said, ignoring him and making her voice hard. “Your child. You lost your wife and we’re together now. We want to work. I used to be a florist, Before. You served in the reserves.”

“That’s right,” Dor said, and he didn’t give her anything more, he refused to acknowledge how hard it was to say the words. And that was as it had to be. It didn’t matter that it was hard. Cass repeated that to herself as they covered the last of the distance to the wall:
it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter
.

Up close the men waiting for them were nothing like Faye and Charles and Three-High…nothing like Smoke. They wore various unmatched shades and patterns of khaki and camo, and their hair was cropped short and they wore sunglasses that made their expressions unreadable.

“Put the little boy down,” the first soldier said, cradling his rifle with assurance. His partner took a single step forward. He wore a cap embroidered with the initials FDNY, a retro item that had become popular since the twentieth anniversary of the Manhattan tragedy. “Take off your packs and drop them on the ground. Then hold your open hands out to your sides, thumbs down.”

Of course they thought Ruthie was a boy, with her clothes and her short haircut, but somehow the mistake disrupted Cass’s fragile composure and she froze. When she saw that the soldiers were growing impatient, she snapped to and let her pack slip from her shoulders to the ground.

Dor set Ruthie down gently next to her, and Cass reached for her hand automatically. Ruthie pressed her face against Cass’s leg, wrapping her arms around her knee. She was frightened, and Cass wanted to sweep her up and hold her close. But she could not, and she held her breath and squeezed her daughter’s hand more tightly.

“I’ll search the child first.” The second soldier knelt down in front of Ruthie and held out his hands. “Hey, buddy.”

Ruthie clung more tightly to Cass. “She’s a girl,” Cass said. “She’s scared. Isn’t there any way you could—”

“Only take a minute.” The guard pried Ruthie away from her and Cass waited for flailing, maybe even screaming, but Ruthie went limp and allowed herself to be led. Which was almost more upsetting to Cass, who wondered for the thousandth time what had happened in the Convent to make Ruthie so compliant, to drain her fighting spirit.

“Hello, princess, what’s your name,” the guard asked in a bored voice as he unzipped Ruthie’s jacket and patted her down. He didn’t seem to care that Ruthie didn’t answer. He pulled her boots off one at a time and checked them, shaking them upside down, then patted Ruthie’s feet through her socks before finally nodding at Cass. “You can get her back in her clothes.”

Cass dressed her with trembling fingers, whispering that it would be okay and hating that she’d betrayed her daughter yet again, forced her to submit to a stranger, maybe to relive some unknown horror. How many times would she drag her daughter into fresh, unknown dangers?

As often as it took. The words echoed in her mind and Cass bit her lip just enough to taste the blood, sealing her own deal with herself. As often as it took, and now that the Box was growing more unstable every day, her job was to find somewhere new, for Ruthie and for herself, and that wouldn’t be easy, or safe. Dor was their ticket. This place was their next hope. That was just how it had to be.

Their own pat-downs were brisk and professional and Cass barely registered the soldier’s hands on her. Their weapons went into a plastic box, which one of the soldiers loaded onto a small cart, along with their packs, before wheeling it into the interior of the compound and out of sight. He came back a few moments later with a short young woman in a close-fitting ski-jacket and shearling boots.

“This is Nell,” the soldier said, already turning back to his post. “She’ll conduct your intake interview.”

Cass swept Ruthie up in her arms and followed the woman, Dor close behind. Nell gave them a distracted smile and walked briskly down the wide walkway that led straight into the heart of the campus. Other than the fact that few people were outside the classroom buildings and dorms, it looked remarkably like it had Before.

Cass had been to Colima one time that she hadn’t told Dor about—hadn’t told Smoke or anyone. It was when she had begun her hopeful, short-lived savings account, when she thought she might really attend college. She’d come down, taken the tour, picked up the applications, but by the end of the day the voices in her head—cowed by the stacks of paperwork, the trim navy suits and polished heels worn by the administrative staff, the laughing knots of students who raced between classes—joined in a chorus of derision, reminding her she was too old, too stupid, too damaged to ever come here, and she’d gone to a bar on her way out of town instead.

The news had been full of images of the campus after the first strike. Students swarmed the green to protest the dean’s decision to cut the semester short and send them home. They jeered as he solemnly announced the unanimous decision of the trustees that adequate security could not be promised. It hadn’t been the first time UC-Colima had been in the news in recent years. Well before the bioterror attacks, students organized regular protests of the genetic engineering research that was rumored to be going on there. There had been footage of students ringing the biotech building holding hands and chanting—there,
that
one, that squat flat-roofed building with the curved entrance. They ran footage of minor scuffles, bricks thrown through windows, campus administrators hung in effigy. And again, later, while students were being escorted from their dorms by the National Guard, hadn’t protesters set fire to a couple of buildings? There, possibly—a stubbled field across the green, empty except for tall piles of bricks, some of them singed black at the edges—could they have carted off the rest of the rubble? Or were they using the remains of the building to build the section of the wall out front?

Cass squinted against the setting sun. The wall-in-progress extended past her line of vision, around behind the campus buildings. A man wearing coveralls stood at a window nearby doing something painstaking. Puttying perhaps, or fixing hardware.

Elsewhere, a crew worked at a copse of dead sycamores, sawing off branches high in the trees, throwing them on a growing pile. Cass thought of the little crape myrtle seedling she’d been nurturing back in the Box. It was too early to know yet what color the blossoms would be—it would take at least another growing season before it bloomed—but it had the stout countenance and silvery bark of a lavender Muskogee, rare among the pink-flowering varieties. A row of them—they grew to a tidy twenty feet, rarely taller—would fit beautifully in the rectangular bed where the men were working, shading the tall windows of the classroom building and the pair of limestone benches.

Stop,
she thought. She was not here to create a garden.

Halfway up the side of what she assumed was a dormitory, perhaps six or eight floors off the ground, clothesline was strung from one window to the next. A few shirts and pillowcases fluttered in the wind, and Cass thought she could make out the silhouettes of people in some of the windows.

Nell led them through the campus, skirting the deserted green, thick with dormant kaysev and, here and there, dandelions and weedy peppergrass. Cass spotted a couple of mugwort, which, if they were left alone, would grow a few feet tall and attract bees. She wondered if anyone here knew what they were doing, and scanning the flower beds, she imagined them planted with ornamental olives and weeping cherry and baby’s tears between the paving stones.

She could make something of this place. The hardscape had been well-planned, the earth amended and fertilized. Things would grow here, beautiful things, and Cass could do the work she had always imagined, planning and creating gardens that would sustain people. So she would live among those whose beliefs about Aftertime were different from her own…would that be so bad? Would that be so different from living alongside some of the Box’s residents?

Cass forced herself to put the gardens out of her mind as they entered the lobby of an unremarkable single-story building. Inside it smelled of something she could not identify, something fruit-chemical with a faint undertone of decay.

“You two sit there,” Nell said, pointing to a pair of chairs pulled up in front of a plain desk with a three-ring binder and two pens neatly lined up next to it. “And here. For the kid.”

She dragged a third chair from the corner of the room, then sat across the desk from them. Her own chair was improbably luxurious, soft leather upholstery on a swivel base that looked like it had been looted from a law office somewhere. Who knew—it probably had.

Ruthie scrambled up onto her chair. The room was considerably warmer than it was outdoors. Late-afternoon sunlight splayed gold patches on the floor. Cass remembered the solar panels fixed to many of the red-composite roofs on the campus, providing free heat, without any mechanical investment. Before, she had always considered them ugly. Aftertime, there were a lot of “if-only” thinkers who pointed out that the seeds of a more energy-independent society had been there for decades, only to be quashed and obstructed by big-money industry and special interests. California had even been at the forefront, introducing and enforcing the Reid-Kohlm energy acts of the teens—and yet even a year ago the state was only drawing a tenth of its energy from wind and sun and other renewable sources. Every new politician made it their soapbox, until they won.