Rebirth

by Sophie Littlefield

  “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, s
he 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.

  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.