Rebirth

by Sophie Littlefield

  “You know that he is an enemy to our work, our vision. That he murdered some of our people who were on a peaceful mission.”

  “I…had heard, later.”

  She forced herself to stay completely still, giving away nothing, as Mary watched her, frowning. At last, the deep-etched lines on her forehead relaxed, and she sighed.

  “I suppose you couldn’t have known that when you met him. I have to say, it’s a real shame that the people at that school engaged my team and made bloodshed unavoidable. Of course we would have liked to accommodate all of them. But more to the point, the school was a more than serviceable shelter, and they had laid in enough stores to last through the winter.”

  Cass’s uneasiness intensified; she had little doubt that those stores had been taken and brought to Colima along with Sammi and the few other survivors of the battle. And she was equally sure that the bloodshed there could have been avoided if the Rebuilders hadn’t unilaterally attacked the shelter and brutalized the people living there. But she forced herself to remain quiet.

  “Anyway, perhaps I should just show you what I brought you here to see, instead of talking on and on and on. Ha!”

  And with that odd punctuation, they had reached the bottom of the stairs.

  Mary took a key from her pocket and unlocked the scarred metal door before them. She pushed it open and stepped out of Cass’s way, giving her an unobstructed view of a large, open, murky corridor lined with half a dozen hospital cots and a couple of straight-backed chairs. Men in Rebuilder uniforms rose from the chairs. People lay in several of the cots, motionless and covered with blankets, their forms but lumpy masses in the dark. Doors leading off the corridor opened into a mechanical room, where the building’s HVAC equipment sat silent and still.

  “We reserve this little area for our special cases-our patients who are headed for detention, assuming they survive.”

  Cass took a closer look at the beds. A large man lay on his side at an awkward angle; it took Cass a moment to realize he was handcuffed to the bed frame. His eyes were closed and his lips were dry and rimed with crusted spittle, and a soiled white bandage wound around the top of his skull. His chest rose and fell with quick, shallow breaths, but otherwise he didn’t stir. It seemed likely that he needed more care than he was getting.

  Neither of the uniformed men made any move to join Mary and Cass. One stood with his feet planted a few feet apart, hands clasped behind his back; the other slouched against the wall, eyes roving back and forth over the beds as though he expected their occupants to make a run for it at any moment.

  “Are these guys doctors?” Cass asked, already knowing the answer.

  Mary barked a short laugh. “Hardly, but they’re Detail One, the highest security rank. Alvin, come here a moment, if you’d be so kind.”

  The slouching guard ambled over with the clumsy gait of the extremely muscular. His neck was so thick he couldn’t button his khaki shirt all the way, and his sleeves were tight over his biceps.

  “This is Cassandra Dollar. She’s an outlier.”

  Alvin nodded. “Ma’am.”

  “I believe she will have a particular interest in the patient in bed number two. He’s still out, I take it?”

  “Yes, Doc dosed him again ’bout an hour ago. They’re keeping them all quiet for us.”

  “Can’t question the wisdom of that decision,” Mary said dryly, but the irony seemed lost on the guard. “If you’ll be so kind, I think we’d like to see the patient for ourselves.”

  She led the way to the end of the row, Cass staring at the cots as they passed. One of them held a woman with greasy black hair that fell past what was left of an eye, now little more than a sunken socket. Both her arms were casted, so there seemed no need for shackles, but as they passed Cass saw that her ankles were circled by metal cuffs. A thin trail of red-tinged drool leaked from the corner of her mouth and a fly buzzed around her motionless head.

  Cass wondered if she was dead.

  When they reached the last cot, Alvin carefully folded down the blanket and sheet covering the man lying there. A weak moan escaped his lips and a tremor racked his body.

  One arm was bent at an unnatural angle across his chest, the hand splayed against a torn and filthy shirt. The fabric was ripped in several places, and a long gash of his exposed arm was crusted with grit and seamed with yellow pus, the wound extending under the fabric of what remained of the shirt. As Cass’s gaze traveled down the wounded arm, she saw that the hand had been badly mangled, the little finger and part of the next one missing, the stumps ragged and oozing, black with dried blood.

  Cass drew in her breath. “Why…?”

  “This is a special case,” Mary said, and there was something odd and breathy about her voice, a sense of anticipation, of excitement. “One of the ones who was injured in the skirmish yesterday up north, brought in on the truck. I’m a little surprised he’s still with us, to be frank. In our charter it’s written that we do not provide aid or succor to perpetrators of war crimes on either side of an engagement, and you can witness that we haven’t. He has received no pain medication, no antibiotics, no dressing for his wounds. He was tried in absentia at the time of his crimes, and he would already be in detention except that the nature of his crime calls for solitary confinement and we didn’t quite have that ready for him-he’ll be our first such prisoner and there’s a bit of urgency to get this one right.”

  A feeling of terrible inevitability was uncoiling inside Cass, a horror that was building and drowning out the sound of Mary’s voice. Tried in absentia…crime calls for solitary…first such prisoner…

  “Who…?” she whispered, licking her dry lips, suddenly unable to speak.

  “Of course, they patched him up a little, because no one wanted him to die on the trip down here,” Mary continued, and Cass could feel her unblinking gaze on her. “He and these other two, they were lashed to the back of a flatbed we use for supply transport. Didn’t want them soiling any of our passenger vehicles. Tell me, Cass, are you familiar with Clausewitz’s ‘Principles of War’?”

  Cass forced herself to meet Mary’s relentless gaze. Answer her, she commanded herself desperately, because to do otherwise would bring suspicion down on her, suspicion she could not afford.

  “No, I’m…afraid I’m not.”

  “Well, that will make for a fascinating discussion one day soon. If you’ll indulge me. Clausewitz was a nineteenthcentury Prussian soldier and a brilliant strategist. He said everything in war is simple, but the simple is difficult.”

  “Oh…I see.” But she didn’t see, didn’t have any idea what Mary was trying to say.

  “So many of my staff, they’ve lost any appreciation for history they might once have had. But I like to think I’m a true student of history, one who searches for meaning in the shape of what has come before and-well.” She chuckled modestly. “Cass, may I speak frankly with you? I feel like we have a special affinity, me with my-well, what some people call my crackpot theories about society, and you with your genetic anomaly…”

  Mary droned on as Cass willed Alvin to get out of the way so she could see the broken man’s face. Finally, having adjusted the linens to his satisfaction, he stepped deferentially out of the way.

  And Cass got a look.

  But what was left of his face was smashed, mangled, crushed. The skin was swollen and blackened. The lips were split and bloodied. The eyes were purple and swelled shut, and a gash across his cheek revealed the muscle below, a glint of white tooth. His hair was matted with red-black blood, and it was impossible to tell what color it had been, but Cass didn’t need that clue, because around his neck the man wore a simple leather cord from which, unbelievably, a small token still dangled.

  Under a layer of blood and grime, the facets of the tiny crystal teardrop barely sparkled.

  Cass had stolen the crystal from a man who had shown her great kindness. A squatter who lived with his memories and a dwindling cache of weed in the middle of Sil
va, not far from the library where she’d once lived with Ruthie. Cass had accepted his offer of shelter for the night, and in the morning she stole the pretty little suncatcher, slipping it into her pocket without ever knowing why.

  The next day someone else had stolen it from her. Pretty things had no place Aftertime; it seemed almost fitting that it should slip through her fingers before she ever had a chance to cherish it.

  But one other person had been with her when she’d first pocketed it, had been there when the thief took it from her.

  That person was Smoke.

  Cass felt the cry building deep deep inside, gathering speed and urgency as it traveled along the tendons and nerves and veins of her body, ready to burst from her lips in a desperate anguished keening. It was Smoke who lay before her, beaten and unconscious.

  Smoke. Her lover. Her betrayer. Here, on the edge of death.

  He was the first and only man she loved and in this moment Cass realized that she hadn’t even begun grieving his loss, that she didn’t know the first thing about grief. She felt she could lie down next to him and welcome the blade to the throat, the steel barrel to the temple. That she could die right here next to him. Her fingers twitched with the urge to clasp his savaged hand; his blood would flow on her skin, and she would press herself to him, cradling the ruins of his body, and she would breathe in the presence of Death hovering, and she would say, Take me, too.

  Cass was frozen-she was made of ice and of glass and of marble. Mary was watching her. Mary was observing and calculating and judging. Cass no longer cared. Let the woman have what she wanted. Let the crazy woman with her history and her plans and her schemes-let her have the death of Smoke and Cass and every other innocent on her hands. In death they would all be free.

  Except

  Except for the thing that always brought her back, every single time.

  Ruthie, whose voice had been bound and locked, had spoken her name today. Mama. Ruthie clung to her, Ruthie trusted her. She could not let Ruthie down. She could not die now-I’m sorry but I must decline your generous offer, oh, Death, she could not lie down here and could not breathe out for the last time and mingle her blood with Smoke’s.

  She had to deny him. Even as she accepted the terrible truth, she was steeling herself, composing her features; her eyelids lowered in a virtuoso approximation of indifference and her lips curved in a bored frown. She turned away from him and looked deep into Mary’s eyes, and traded one heartbreak for another.

  “I feel the same way,” she lied, and her lie was deft and convincing because it had to be. “I’ve always loved history. But if this…man did the things you say he did… I’m sorry, I guess I just can’t handle it with calm the way you do. The pain he caused…”

  She stutter-stepped backward, faking a stumble, letting her voice go frail and shaky. Mary’s hand shot out to steady her and Cass forced herself not to react to the woman’s clammy grip.

  “I’m sorry,” she repeated, deliberately turning away from her broken, wounded lover. She could not look at him, not now, not while she told her lies. “Only, right now, I think I need to get back to David. He’ll be wondering where I am. It’s been a long day.”

  Mary studied her for a long moment and then nodded. Alvin didn’t have to be told twice; he was already adjusting the blankets around Smoke, straightening the pillow. Mary walked back down the corridor toward the stairs, ignoring the other prisoners. The other guard had remained standing the entire time; he nodded fractionally when they passed by.

  “What will his punishment be, anyway?” Cass asked as casually as she could.

  “Considering that he murdered two people who were traveling on a mission of peace, and attacked one of our teams this morning, while they were on their way to rescue a group of endangered shelterers-I’d say there’s little chance of leniency.”

  So he’d found them, Cass thought. The ones who’d burned the library. “Oh,” she said as neutrally as she could, hiding her disgust at Mary’s casual use of the word peace.

  “We’re still tracing the intelligence breach, trying to figure out where he got his information,” she added. “Earlier, when I told you I’d been talking to Evangeline…she thought you and he might have been close.”

  “Me and him?” Cass feigned confusion. “But I don’t know anyone here. I mean I just got here, how would I…?”

  And there it was, the moment when she had to pretend the hardest thing. To stave off the pain of what she was about to do, she let herself spin back into a memory.

  A spring morning two decades earlier, following a long winter of heavy rains. An El Niño winter. Her mother had been irritated that the rains had washed out the gravel from the flower beds; weeds had begun poking through the matted layer of sodden leaves that had collected there. Mim had never been much of a gardener, even before her dad began taking longer and longer trips up and down the coast with his band. And now, trying to juggle her job and Cass, she didn’t even pretend to make an effort.

  Under a clump of sycamore leaves, Cass found tender green shoots that were unlike any others. She was waiting for Mrs. Cross, who drove her and Shelby Cross to school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When it was Mim’s turn to drive, Mrs. Cross always waited in the driveway with Shelby, wearing her ratty old terry cloth robe and sneakers. Mim dressed in a satiny gown and matching slippers but there was no way she’d ever come outside to wait, and so Cass had been poking around at the edges of the garden, saying the names of the plants she knew from the books she checked out of the library. Foxglove, anemone, hyacinth. And there: palest green, stems twined together.

  She’d knelt down, trying to keep her knees off the soggy ground-her mother would throw a fit if Cass went to school dirty-and gently pushed the leaves out of the way, exposing rich black dirt, a couple of roly-polies, the mound of new growth. The pale green shaded to pure white at the base of the stems, and in the center of the mound was the beginning of a cluster of tiny flowers. Each fragile white blossom was encased in the thinnest possible corona of leaves, and as Cass wove her fingers into the stems, loving the way they felt against her fingers-dewy and full of potential-they trembled and quivered. Cass gently twisted and braided the shoots, thinking that the plant would grow that way, its stems twined and inseparable as they grew tall and strong, and everyone who passed by would wonder how they came to be that way.

  Cass remembered exactly how the plant had felt in her hands all those years ago, even if she didn’t know where the memory had been hidden or why she’d kept it for so long. But this was what she thought of in the second that the strings of her heart were gathered and knotted and tied so the lifeblood would no longer flow through them, when she betrayed the only man to ever take her heart.

  The day after the rains, Cass had come home from school with a plan to make a circle of pretty, smooth stones around the plant, to protect it from neighborhood pets and kids on bikes-and found it mown down by the gardener, who’d blown the leaves and the topsoil out and left the flower bed shorn and empty and that was how it stayed all the long season until all that remained was the dead and dried skeletons of a few abandoned plants and the weeds that nothing would stop.

  “Oh,” she said, faking sudden realization. “Do you mean Smoke? That guy who came to the library with me? That’s him? We didn’t exactly get to know each other very well…”

  “I see,” Mary said, as the door shut behind them with a solid click. “Well, Evangeline wanted to be sure you had the chance to see him. See if there was any, you know, unfinished business between the two of you.”

  “Unfinished or otherwise-there never was anything to begin with.”

  As they walked across the campus that had once been home to tens of thousands of students with bright futures and now housed only schemers and the desperate, Cass wondered if she’d settled her debts, now that she’d betrayed the man who’d betrayed her first.

  27

  SAMMI LAY IN THE NARROW BED AND WONDERED if she hated Jed’s killer enough
to give her a reason to live. She had never killed anyone, not even a rabbit, but she thought she could kill the man who drove the truck. She imagined her blade slicing through his flesh. She thought about how his blood would spurt and how she would feel when the blood finally slowed and the man was dead.

  She glanced across the gulf between the two beds. Roan had stayed up late with her, whispering and whispering. They brought Sammi and one other here last night after it was dark.

  Sammi had finally fallen into a dreamless sleep and when she woke up the sky was pink and orange and the truck was parked behind a big, ugly concrete building that smelled like garbage, and the guards were yelling at everyone to get up.

  She knew where they were: Colima, which used to be the university but now was where the Rebuilders built their new town. All the adults in the school hated the Rebuilders, but Sammi hadn’t given them much thought until last night. They weren’t real until they set the school on fire. Until they started killing everyone. Now as they yelled and pushed, Sammi felt like she herself was only halfway real, like part of her was somewhere else entirely. Not with her mother, and not with Jed, though she would have liked to be; she wished she was dead with them but instead she was here, and as she stood shivering with her back against the truck, having to pee, her hair stuck to her face with snot, she felt the first tiny pocket of rage split open in her gut, because the Rebuilders had kept her alive after they took the only people she cared about.

  Sammi was nearly fifteen, and in her life she’d been angry and she’d been pissed off and she’d been irritated, bored and upset and every variation on mad-and scared, definitely scared-but she had never felt quite like this. She wrapped her arms around herself as the guards took her and the others-only eleven of them now, since Jed’s parents had been taken somewhere else when his mother wouldn’t stop screaming-for a walk through campus, noticing the way this new kind of fury was the color red and blinding, which was interesting because she couldn’t really see it. It started with that one little pocket but then it turned out there was more of it, way, way more stored up inside her and as they walked it sort of expanded and reached its hot tiny bursts out into the rest of her body, up into her chest and her throat, out along her arms to her fingertips, which she flexed and clenched experimentally. They were still her hands, her fingers…but they were the hands of someone different now, too. Someone who had no one, who was alone in the world.