LITMIR.BIZ

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a recent sleepless night, Cass’s restive mind had spun a dream-image of the sun sinking down to the earth. The great golden globe came to rest in a field, and the Beaters stopped what they were doing and ran toward it, throwing themselves at it—at its trillions of watts of light—swarming with the same fevered passion that they attacked the living.

      Their hunger was insatiable. A Beater feasting on its victim made sounds of such sensual release that they almost sounded sexual; a Beater denied would throw itself against walls and fences until it bled, unmindful of the pain in its longing and need. In Cass’s dream, the Beaters—all the Beaters in the world—raced toward the light, plunging into the million degrees of the fire, flaming and dying in the ecstasy of their need. They were incinerated to nothing, their bones burned to powder that floated away on brilliant flames, the sun flickering only for a moment before it blazed down again as it had for all time.

      If only.

      But even then it would not be over. Because as long as the blueleaf strain of kaysev grew, as long as some citizen somewhere mistook the furled and tinted leaves for the ordinary kaysev and ate it, more would be infected, and more would die.

      “Here’s what you have to understand, Cass,” Dor said. “People believe what they want to believe. They always have, and they always will. They want to believe the Beaters will go away. So the mind keeps coming up with ways. You’ve probably heard as many theories as I have.”

      She had: the Beaters would age out. They would turn on each other. The first hard freeze would kill them. They would go to the ocean, like lemmings, a plague of them following the summons of God.

      Still, Dor’s cynicism rankled. Cass had little hope, but she had the decency to pretend, for others’ sakes. She couldn’t help thinking that he, of all people—a leader, a benefactor even, if a reluctant one—ought to do the same. People listened to him. People cared what he thought.

      “People say crazy things, yeah, but isn’t it just as irrational to always expect the worst?” she challenged him.

      “Come on,” Dor muttered, “you don’t really think that.”

      A moment later, though, he stopped, putting a hand on her arm, turning her so she had to look up at him. “Cass.”

      In the twilight Dor’s eyes looked even darker. He was half a foot taller than she was, and her gaze fell to his throat, his collarbones, to the twisted fronds of the tattoo that wound around his arms and shoulders and almost met under the hollow of his throat. In this moment he seemed returned to that larger-than-life, invulnerable avatar. He was so close that she imagined she breathed the same air he did, and—trick of the moment—her lungs seemed to expand, to want to drink in more. From where the errant impulse came, she had no idea. Something visceral and instinctive, nothing more than a sensory trigger. She stepped back, trying to get away from the marked air.

      She had come for Smoke. She had come to ask Dor to change Smoke’s mind.

      But Dor pulled her closer, his fingers closing tight around her arm. “There are things you need to know. Things are going to get worse before they get better—if they ever get better, which seems unlikely.”

      “I know,” Cass whispered fiercely. “I’ve seen what’s left of the stores. I see what the travelers bring. I know that all the easy raids are long gone. And…”

      She didn’t say the last: that there were fewer travelers and more Beaters all the time. People blamed it on all kinds of things: people were waiting out winter before they ventured out; or they had heard that the Convent had locked down; or they were afraid of Rebuilder parties; or they had gone in the other direction, to the bigger cities. The blueleaf, which had appeared to be on the wane, had merely been hibernating, and those not trained to look for the subtly shaded leaves could too easily mistake it for its benign cousin.

      The words slipped out before she could stop herself: “How could you let Smoke go out into that?”

      Dor shocked her by laughing, a short, bitter sound. “Woman, do you think I control what your man does? You think I control what any man does? Far as I know, it’s still free will around here.”

      Cass recoiled, wrenching her arm free. “He does what you ask him.”

      “I never asked him to go after anyone. And definitely not that crew. I’m not in the vengeance business, sister. Only business I’m in is my own.”

      “But you could ask him to stay—”

      “It’s not my place.” Just like that the laughter was gone, his expression stony. “Not my place, or anyone else’s. He’s a grown man who set his way, and paid his accounts through already.”

      “You could—influence him. That’s all I’m asking.”

      “No,” he said emphatically. “You think that’s what you want, Cass, but you don’t. Not really. You start trying to change someone, you lose them. Smoke’s doing what he has to do. What he needs to do. You get in the way of that, he’ll just resent you, until the day it builds up in him so strong he goes anyway and with a bitter taste in his mouth. He’ll blame you. You don’t need that.”

      Cass forced herself to breathe, blinked away the threat of tears. “Ruthie needs him,” she whispered. “I need him.”

      “No.” Dor shook his head. “You don’t. You’ve come this far without him. Survived things no one else survived. Done things most people would say are impossible.”

      His gaze flicked across her face, lingering on her eyes, which she knew were different since she’d survived the fever—brighter, greener. Smoke wouldn’t have told him her terrible secret, that she’d been attacked and lived—would he? Dor’s tone was almost admiring, which gave her pause. The man had never had any use for her…had he? From the moment they met there had been wariness between them, distrust and dislike.

      “You don’t need him,” Dor repeated. “And believing you do is giving your strength away. I don’t have to tell you that between your girl and yourself, you don’t have any extra to spare.”

      He hesitated, then reached for her hand. He squeezed it once, roughly, then slid his hand up her arm to let it rest on her shoulder. The gesture was awkward—she could sense that Dor meant it to be a comfort. But it was not. It was something both more and less, something needful, and he must have felt it too because he jerked his hand away as though the touch burned him.

      “Stay in the Box,” he muttered, turning away. “Don’t worry about trade. Everything’s covered. In the spring when your garden comes up you’ll be producing enough to share. I’ll set it all up. I’ll make sure you have what you need.”

      “You’re leaving, too,” Cass said, realization dawning on her. “You’re going to Colima. You’re going to look for Sammi.”

      Of course—she should have known it from the moment Smoke told her what happened at the library. Cass herself had risked everything to find Ruthie, so why did the notion of Dor doing the same for his daughter fill her with such bleak hopelessness? And when Dor nodded, jaw set hard, it seemed as though the air got even colder.

      “You won’t be alone. Cass, I’ll tell Faye. I’ll tell Charles. They’ll look after you. I’ll send word if I can, and so will Smoke. We’ll both be back…you need to have more faith in him. He beat them once already—there’s no reason he can’t do it again. He’s well armed and well trained.”

      “Your training,” Cass said bitterly. “Your guns.”

      As if that made Dor responsible.

      A disproportionate number of the citizens who’d survived this long had done so because they had a strong desire for self-preservation along with the skills to back it up. Skills that came from time spent in law enforcement, or in the service or jail or a gang. Dor’s forces were all ex-something—ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Norteño…all except for Smoke.

      Smoke had told Cass only that he’d been an executive coach Before,

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