LITMIR.BIZ

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truth was that Cass didn’t know when the discord had started between them, the uneasiness. Things had been so good and they were still good, most of the time. They had the rhythm of a couple, the way they prepared a meal together, handing each other things without needing to speak. Laughter came easy when they walked in the evenings, swinging Ruthie between them.

      But still. They didn’t discuss Dor or what the two men talked about in the long hours they spent together. Smoke stopped telling her what he saw when he went on the raiding parties and hunting down the Beaters, and their conversation usually centered on her gardens and Ruthie and gossip about the people in the Box, the customers who came and went and the other employees they counted as friends. He often seemed preoccupied, and she sometimes woke in the middle of the night to see him sitting outside their tent, tilted back in his camp chair, staring at the stars. They didn’t make love as often, and Cass thought she might miss that most of all, the moments of release when her mind emptied of everything but him, when every horror and loss in her life faded for a moment, a gift she’d never found the words to thank him for.

      Now, she forced herself to admit that Dor might know Smoke better than she did. If anyone knew what had happened, what was in Smoke’s mind, it would be him. She tried the front gate next. Faye was there, and Charles, playing cards with one of the older guards who went by Three-High, except by his new girlfriend, who called him Dmitri. Feo sat on Three-High’s lap, chewing on a kaysev stalk that had been soaked in syrup until it was nearly fermented, the closest thing to dessert besides the pricey canned pudding or candy canes.

      “Hey, Cass,” Faye said, giving her a slanted smile, more than she offered most people.

      “Hey. You seen Dor?”

      They shook their heads, Charles and Three-High not lifting their eyes from their cards. “He was meeting with some guy, came in from the west this morning. Jarhead type.”

      “Don’t need no more of that,” Three-High said with conviction.

      Cass nodded. The guards were jealously protective of their jobs, which most agreed were the best to be had. A guard job came with room and board, access to the comfort tents, a free ticket to the raiding parties with the understanding they got a split of the spoils. Plenty for trade, whatever you wanted, and Dor didn’t much care what you spent your off-hours doing, as long as you showed up sober for your shift and got the job done. Dor didn’t hire addicts; there wasn’t a single one in the crew that Cass could tell, and she had an eye for it. Hard drinkers, yes. But no pill-poppers, no meth cookers. Every one of them loved something more than a high; for most of them it was danger, adrenaline, shooting and fighting and killing Beaters. For some, it was a fierce devotion to the Box itself, a place Cass suspected was the closest thing to home, to family, that they had ever known.

      Smoke hadn’t hired anyone new since Dor turned the operation over to him. He was looking for one more, someone to start on nights, but he’d told her it was important to get this one right, to pick someone who’d fit the crew. He said he was waiting for someone who had never been in the service. He gave a variety of reasons, but Cass was still waiting for the one that sounded like the truth.

      Charles laid down a card with some authority. “This guy, he was big. Built, you know? And carrying. We took a Heckler & Koch MP5 and a clean little Walther off him.”

      “They’re not there now.” Three-High jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the locker where everyone but the guards were required to check their weapons upon entering the Box. “I was in there half an hour ago, didn’t see ’em.”

      Faye to set down her cards, eyebrow raised.

      “You sure?”

      “Sure I’m sure. Shit, Faye, I—”

      “Okay, okay,” Faye said. “Don’t cry or nothing. I just meant I didn’t see him come back out.”

      “Probably day shift checked him out,” Charles suggested.

      “Maybe.” Faye seemed skeptical. “But still, that would have been a short visit.”

      So none of them knew the visitor had been a Rebuilder. Of course, if they had, word would have been all over the Box as soon as he’d come through the gates. The stranger must have saved that information for Dor, who’d either killed him or found a way for him to leave without drawing attention.

      The former was unlikely, since the Rebuilders always had a plan—plans. If the man didn’t make it safely back to his rendezvous point, they’d return in larger numbers, make a show of force, demand a meeting. Or maybe they’d escalate straight to armed conflict, and either attempt to take prisoners, or simply burn the place down.

      The peace between the Rebuilders and the Box was uneasy. No one liked it, except possibly Dor, who, as far as Cass could tell, was without loyalties to anyone but himself and his meticulously tracked empire. But everyone realized that the balance was a delicate one, and any provocation would end up with a lot of dead on both sides. The Box was recognized as neutral, and while the Rebuilders no doubt intended to take it someday, for now they would have a hard time outgunning Dor’s arsenal and security force.

      Cass decided to keep the information to herself, at least until she knew what the hell was going on.

      “Maybe we didn’t have whatever he was shopping for,” Three-High said, yawning. “Kinda thin stock these days.”

      Feo, finished with his snack, wriggled off his lap and darted away without a word. It was his way; he was a restless boy, frequently affectionate, but easily bored. No one tried to get him to sit still, especially not his self-appointed guardians, who saw nothing wrong with his prowling and occasional thieving and who had made him a bed in a staff bunkhouse, where they could hear him if he cried out in his sleep.

      “What are you talking about, the shed’s practically full. And we got a shitload of new stuff this morning from those guys from…where was it…Murphy’s?” Faye ticked items off on her fingers: “Tampons and toilet paper. Tea bags, olive oil, a couple dozen of those South Beach bars, liquid soap and detergent, all that shampoo. And an unopened bottle of Kahlúa and a case of Diet Canfield’s and twenty-two bottles of Coors Light.”

      “That stuff tastes like piss,” Three-High said.

      “You’d drink it, though—tell me you wouldn’t.”

      “Hell, yes, I’d drink piss if it got me buzzed.”

      The raiders had recently cleared a house where Beaters had been nesting on the far east side of town, and they’d come back with a good haul, but they’d lost a man in the raid. They missed a Beater who’d been sleeping in a powder room. It was weak and injured, bones showing through its flesh in several places and one foot twisted at an odd angle, and the others had probably left it behind when they moved on. It had taken only one bullet to kill, but not until it had clamped its festering jaw on Don Carson’s ankle.

      It had cost a second bullet to take Don down.

      The raiding was growing more dangerous. When Cass had first arrived in San Pedro in the summer, Dor’s people had cleared the town of nearly all the Beaters. The Order in the Convent paid well enough for live Beaters to use in their rituals that it was more worth Dor’s while to scour the streets for them. But trade with the Order had dried up, and as the weather turned cold, Beaters had begun stumbling their way south, apparently traveling by some instinct unknown to their human brethren. With their preference for more densely populated areas, Beaters were quick to nest once they reached San Pedro, and quick to hunt. Dor still kept the main roads clear, and the guards picked off any who came too close to the Box—but come in on any of the less-traveled paths and you were taking chances. The Beaters had learned to stay away from the stronghold, though they roamed just out of sight. You could sometimes hear their moans and nonsense jabber carried on the winds.

      When they caught someone, you could hear the screaming, human and once-human.

      Recently it seemed like they were getting bolder. Last week Cass had been trudging back from the bathroom shed at the first light of dawn,

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