Rebirth (20 page)

Cass helped Ruthie off with her parka and hung their coats on the back of the chairs as though they were seated in a restaurant. The moment struck Cass like so many of them did—quaint, pointless in a way; deeply sad in another; loss the faint undercurrent that ran through the simplest interactions that were now acted out, rather than simply done.

“What was this room?” Cass asked.

Nell barely looked up from her notebook. Cass spotted tiny sapphire earrings, a thin chain with a silver heart pendant, a delicate scar at the corner of her mouth, the kind of thing a little bit of concealer would have made quick work of. “It was the development office. They sat in here all day, calling up the rich alumni and asking them for money.”

Cass tried to imagine the room buzzing with activity, desks where people worked and talked and laughed. Perhaps there had been pots of Boston ferns and spider plants. Children’s drawings. Mugs with funny sayings and framed family photos. Paper decorations for the holidays and bakery cakes to celebrate birthdays.

“Did you ever see the campus, you know, Before?”

“I lived in Colima my whole life.” Nell sighed and wrote on a sheet of paper in the binder, her fingers tight around the pen. “My sister used to work in the Engineering school as a departmental assistant. And I had a cousin who went here a while back.”

Finally Nell looked up from the pad, on which she had been writing, and made eye contact. Her eyes were rimmed in red. “’Course, I’m the only one left, now.”

“Look,” Cass said, refusing to let herself think about Nell’s story, about her losses. “I think maybe I can save you some time, maybe even cut your paperwork in half. I was, uh, kind of invited to come here? By Evangeline? I’m an outlier.”

The change in Nell was immediate. She pushed the tears impatiently from her eyes and laid down her pen. When she focused her gaze on Cass it was ice cold.

“And I’m the princess in the Rose Parade.”

“No, really, I—”

“Shut up, just save it, okay? I’m tired of people like you, thinking you can come in here and—I mean, do I look stupid to you? Do I? No one gets
invited
to come here. You come on your own or they haul you in, one or the other.”

“But we were—”

“I said, shut
up.
” Something about the woman’s tone convinced Cass to be silent. She wasn’t going to listen, no matter what Cass said.

And the truth was that if she was in her shoes, Cass wouldn’t either.

20

A SEARCH—A MORE INVASIVE ONE THAN THE pat-down they’d just received—would offer more convincing proof: the deeper, more pronounced scars on Cass’s back, where the Beaters had torn off strips of her flesh with their teeth.

Even peeling back her sleeves might help her make her case. But her scars were so faint that they could have been anything, the mottling from a long-ago sunburn maybe, or the shadow of recent bruises. They would prove nothing, even though they were reminders of the Beater attack that Cass could barely remember.

“Look…we’re not trying to make any trouble for you.” Cass hesitated, not wanting to risk pushing Nell too far. Next to her, Ruthie looked frightened, sitting on the edge of her seat with her feet far off the floor, fingers curling and uncurling around the armrests.
Pick her up,
Cass willed Dor, but he didn’t notice the girl’s anxiety…and why should he? Ruthie wasn’t his, no matter how hard they pretended.

“Just ask Evangeline to come see us,” he said evenly.

Nell leaned back in her chair and stared at him. “You want me to just walk away and leave you guys here, alone, while I fetch her? Give you the run of the place? Do you know what happens to me if I lose you before we finish the documentation?”

Cass exchanged a glance with Dor. His expression was impassive; he was playing this all wrong. Nell needed to be in control. She was frightened, too, of the leaders, of her position in the Rebuilders, and her only defense was to be in command of situations like this one. Wielding power where she could. Give her that, Cass figured, and she would be more inclined to help them. “We’re not asking for any special treatment—”

“You got anything valuable, like for collateral? Something to guarantee you’re not going to try to run?”

“Your people took all our stuff outside the wall.”

“I could take your little girl with me, I guess,” Nell said, ignoring Dor’s comment. “That might keep you out of trouble.”

“Don’t,” Cass said, alarmed.

“What’re you, like her new mama or something?” Nell glared at her. “All you convenient little families running around—just add water, right?”

“Do you have children?” Dor asked. Cass could have killed him.

“No. Never. But that doesn’t mean I do my job any different.”

“What did you do, Before?” Cass asked, trying to change the tone of the conversation.

For a moment Nell looked like she was going to answer, and Cass instinctively leaned a little closer. Nell was only a few years older than her, the sort of woman who might have been her friend…if she had friends. It was like at the bath; she felt the stirring of something, a long-buried need for community, for friendship. For a girlfriend.

But then Nell’s eyes narrowed. “That’s probably enough questions for now. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to take all your basic information down. You can lie or tell me the truth. I don’t much care. Hell, you can say you’re Tinkerbell and Captain Hook if you want to. But I’d recommend telling the truth because it just gets harder from here. Smarter people than you have ended up sorry they tried to game the system.”

“I’m not trying to game anything,” Cass protested, but Nell ignored her.

She read a series of questions from her binder, taking notes as she went, and Cass answered them by rote. Her weight, the last time she knew it. Height. Family history for heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, a dozen other things. Sexually transmitted diseases? Abortions? Cass felt her face burn as she answered the questions, her shameful past on display, though in this regard at least she had nothing damning to reveal. Even on days when she couldn’t remember coming home the night before, she remembered to take her pill, and she made guys use condoms, no matter how drunk she was.

Her diligence had worked. She didn’t catch anything, she checked out clean when she dragged herself in for the occasional guilt-driven checkup. So when she found out she was pregnant she was stunned. She had already scheduled an appointment for an abortion when it occurred to her that maybe she was meant to have this child, that there might be something more at work here than a birth control failure; that someone or something—some small part of the Universe that still cared about her—actually
wanted
her to do better. Not just for herself but for someone else. “Medications?”

“What, do you mean
now?
”

“Recreational drug use?”

“No.” Cass felt herself color, thinking of the times she’d readily indulge in a little of whatever was offered by whatever man she was with. Never very much, she didn’t like the places it took her, not like— “Alcohol?”

“No,” Cass said much too quickly. “I mean, some, just. Ah. Social drinking, you know?”

No answer as Nell scrawled at her forms, not even bothering to look up.

“Why did you come here?”

Cass blinked. Nell looked at her expectantly.

“I told you. Evangeline invited me.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t come when she first asked you to, even if I’m to believe your story. Plus I have to ask. It’s the last question on the form. So why did you come here?”

Cass had come here because the Box was no longer a place she could raise Ruthie…but also because Smoke had betrayed her and she couldn’t bear to stay in the Box, where she had started to feel like someone she recognized again, only to have that ripped away from her.

She’d told herself it didn’t matter where she and Ruthie went, as long as it was away from the Box. But that wasn’t true. In all the world, at least all the world west of the Rockies, Colima was the only place that she knew still existed in a way that made any sense for raising a child. Yes, the Rebuilders were the enemy: they ruled through intimidation and fear, stole without remorse, murdered innocent people. But after the last twenty-four hours, after encountering the killers in the farmhouse and the fresh-turned Beaters, it might be the only place left outside the Box where Cass could keep Ruthie safe.

“I wanted a better life,” she whispered, neither the whole truth nor entirely a lie.

The security headquarters were housed in the main floor of the castlelike building near the entrance to the campus. Nell explained that its upper floors also served as housing for all the highest-level members of the Rebuilders, the officers.

Nothing here resembled security in the Box, which comprised the open area inside the gates with their picnic tables and camp chairs and citronella candles and sputtering propane torches. There was nothing like the metal shed that acted as supply depot, arsenal and liquor cabinet; and there were no card games or dice or Frisbees or disintegrating copies of
Penthouse
or
Hustler
passing hands.

Smoke had made few changes when he took over security for Dor, deciding that the freewheeling, hard-drinking, gutter-talking brotherhood—and sisterhood, with respect to Faye alone—wasn’t broke and didn’t need fixing. Once in a while someone was too hungover to work and had to trade shifts. Very occasionally there was a fight that resulted in a shiner or a split lip that they got from each other rather than from their peacekeeping efforts.

The front desk here was manned by a young man in a pale khaki button-down shirt who looked like a recruiting poster for the Marines. He had an old-fashioned wire rack full of papers, and he was writing in a spiral notebook. On the desk in front of him were a pager and a coffee mug.

Here, as elsewhere, the doors and windows were propped open to allow air to circulate. This room did not receive as much sun as the old preschool and the man at the desk looked cold, despite the fleece vest he was wearing, the gloves with the fingers cut off.

“Is Pace in?” Nell asked without preamble.

“Hi, yourself, Nell. Good to see you. How am I? Oh, not too bad,” the man said, ignoring Cass and Dor. Behind him, tacked to a wall, were a large map of California and a hand-lettered sign reading HOURS: 9:00-12:00, 13:00-17:00. “Nice of you to ask, since you didn’t show up to Clearings Tuesday. What’s that, twice in a row?”

“Hey, I got a different assignment,” Nell said defensively.

“Everyone’s supposed to have Clearings. No exceptions.”

“Not if you volunteer for Sanitary.”

The young man’s eyes widened. “You
volunteered?
”

Nell shrugged. “It beats Clearings. At least you know what you’re going to be dealing with. And it never changes.”

“You couldn’t pay me enough—”

“So like I said, is Pace around?” Nell cut him off. “You may have noticed I’m not alone, right? These are a couple of joiners. David MacAlister and Cassandra Dollar. David’s daughter, Ruth.”

Ruthie,
Cass wanted to correct her, but the desk jockey barely glanced at them. If this was what passed for security, maybe they could relax a little.

“Yeah, he’s back there.”

“Watch these guys for me?”

He regarded them impassively. “Yeah, whatever. I guess.”

Nell disappeared down a hallway, leaving Cass and Dor standing. There were no other chairs in the reception area. “May I use the bathroom?” Cass asked.

“Not without an escort. Not until you’re in, anyway.”

“In,”
Dor repeated. “How much more in can we be?”

The man lifted his wrist: there, tattooed in black, was the symbol Cass had seen once before—on Evangeline’s wrist. The koru, a spiral resembling a snail shell, the Maori symbol of renewal. The symbol of the Rebuilders, deceptively appealing in its simplicity.

The sight increased Cass’s sense of anxiety, but Dor only smirked. “What, you got some sort of assembly line? Everyone gets one of those stamped on their ass on the way to the welcome cocktail party?”

“Not everyone,” the guard retorted. “You have to earn it.”

“Yeah, what’d you do to earn it, buddy? Rack up a dozen merit badges? Learn to tie your kerchief in a pretty knot?”

Cass shot him a look. She didn’t doubt that Dor was baiting the man on purpose, trying to draw him into a dick-measuring contest so he would be less likely to question their story that they were together. A family. Cass was pretty sure they’d fail any kind of rigorous questioning; Dor sure as hell wouldn’t be able to prove that Ruthie was his. He barely knew her. It helped that she didn’t talk, but he wouldn’t be able to answer the simplest questions like whether all her teeth had come in or when her birthday was or what time she went down for a nap.

It was a successful performance, Cass had to give Dor that. The man looked like he wanted to take a swing at Dor, but Nell returned, followed by a tall, thin man with rimless glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard.

“I’m Bruce Pace,” he said, extending a hand as he pushed past Nell, who managed to look both irritable and chastened. “So sorry that you weren’t brought here directly. We’ll get you in with Evangeline right away—she’s most anxious to see you.”

“All of us,” Cass clarified.

“Yes, of course. You’re, uh, traveling with David and his daughter?”

“We’re together,” she said, and ran through the list of words she could add:
lovers, a family, he’s my boyfriend, we’re married
. But “together” was the catchall term nowadays.

Pace’s skepticism could be forgiven. Except Cass had to make him believe, had to make all of them believe so they could stay together and she could be with Ruthie.

She forced a smile and slipped her hand into Dor’s. He hesitated for only a second before giving it a squeeze. “Ruthie’s become very attached to me,” Cass said. “She’s been traumatized, and she doesn’t talk much—but I think I’m getting in to her.”

“Okay, right. Well, let’s get you all back to see her, then.”