Horizon (03)

by Sophie Littlefield

  The few pods they’d found were still young and tender enough to be eaten as is; though mature pods were edible they were tough and fibrous and usually reserved for the work studio, where they were dried and turned into a coirlike material that could be used for mats and scrubbers. But the shelled beans could be tasty if they weren’t allowed to get too large—at that point, the beans would be dried, oil pressed from them and the rest ground for flour.

  The meals would be prepared with care and presented with ceremony by the women and a few men who tended the kitchen. People needed to take pride in their work—Cass understood that. She even wished she could feel the same, and she envied the beaming servers who set out dishes garnished with lemon slices, the juice squeezed so that everyone could have a little in their boiled water.

  Cass lingered in the yard, pretending that she was caught up in a boccie game, in reality putting off the moment when she would have to face Suzanne. That was how she came to be among the first to hear the cry go up.

  “Blueleaf!”

  For a beat after the syllables hung in the clear warm air, there was silence. Cass whipped around and stared at the long table where the rinsed kaysev was laid out to dry, two of the kitchen staff—Rachael and Chevelle—frozen over a sorted pile, looks of horror on their faces.

  Cass leaped to her feet and ran to the table. Chevelle mutely handed over a bunch of leaves. Cass examined it with shaking fingers and yes—oh, yes, there it is—the cloudy blue tint at the base of the leaf, trailing up into the veining, which was almost azure before it shaded to green. The leaves were too young yet to have clearly ruffled edges and they lay cool and smooth in Cass’s hand.

  “Oh fuck,” Chevelle murmured, as Corryn hastened over, wiping her hands on her apron.

  “Is it?” she demanded in the booming voice that more than anything had sealed her position as head cook. She held out her hand for the leaves but Cass made no move to share them, only nodding.

  The worst of the discovery—the first in a month—was not that a rogue plant had grown on Garden Island, but that one of them had failed to identify it when they picked it. If it had been passed over by the kitchen staff—whose job was to cook, not inspect, the harvest—it likely would have been eaten.

  And one or more of the people of New Eden would have begun to turn.

  “Which basket?” Cass demanded, scanning the row on the wooden counter behind them. Rachael pointed, her face drained of color. “Whose basket?”

  Cass seized the basket and spun it in her hands, looking for the metal scrap that Earl had wired to each basket, initials inscribed with a nail, to identify its owner. CD.

  CD, she read, and her throat closed.

  Cass Dollar

  It could have happened to anyone. The kind words, spoken in an unexpectedly kind and tender voice by Corryn, were a branch offered to one drowning in a current, and Cass tried to hold on.

  It worked, in the moment. Corryn had ushered Cass into the storage pantry while the others checked and rechecked the harvest. Harris and Shannon joined them in the pantry for a quick consultation; it would be discussed at the nightly council meeting, and Cass knew that Harris could be counted on to quell any hysteria. Corryn, if she were called upon to recount what happened, would be fair. She was a woman who would always continue to be kind.

  These are good people, Cass reminded herself, holding her arms tight across her chest, back in the room an hour later with Ruthie. It was almost dinnertime and Cass would not let her daughter go hungry, but she did want to wait until most of the people had eaten, until darkness was settling over the dining area and they could sit alone.

  But these were good people. How could she have taken them so resolutely for granted? Why had she rebuffed all their efforts at friendship, at inclusion? But Cass knew the reason why—the reason was sitting in the wooden box. In the dimming light of evening, the bear’s gilded collar seemed to shine. The umbrella balanced on his nose as it always did; his placid canine expression remained unperturbed.

  “Can we go see Smoke?” Ruthie asked. She was playing with Cass’s bowl of earrings, taking them out and sorting them, dozens of sparkly and polished studs and dangles, some with mates, some without. Cass mostly kept the collection for her girl, since she rarely wore such things anymore, but tonight she had to tamp down her irritation and resist snapping at her daughter for the baubles spilled and snagged on the dirty carpeting.

  “I don’t know, honey.” Cass smoothed Ruthie’s hair down gently as her little girl snuggled into her lap, her skin soft and warm despite the chill of the room.

  “’Cause he misses us. He told me.”

  Cass’s fingers stilled in Ruthie’s downy hair. It needed a cut. “Did you have a dream about Smoke, honey?”

  After Cass had recovered her daughter, it had taken a while for Ruthie to begin dreaming again. At first her dreams took the form of daytime trances; they were often frightening and sometimes providential. Dreams of birds preceded the appearance of the giant black buzzards; dreams of other disasters followed.

  But recently Ruthie had only mentioned nice things. Cakes, mostly—she loved cookbooks and pored over them at night with Cass—and adventures with Twyla and sometimes Dane.

  She frowned, a tiny line appearing on her brow. “I don’t think so, Mama,” she said, her voice going even softer, almost a whisper. “He said he misses us.”

  “But—” When, it was on the tip of Cass’s tongue to ask. In which of their visits had Smoke done more than thrash or mumble in a coma-sleep? It had been weeks since they’d been to the hospital, and Cass had not discussed Smoke with anyone, least of all Ruthie.

  “It was…” More frowning. “Before. Before today. Yesterday?”

  Cass sighed. There would be no making sense of this rogue impulse, and she didn’t want to disconcert Ruthie by pressing her further. “It’s all right. We’ll go see him soon, and we’ll see what he says, okay?”

  Ruthie brightened. “And can I ask Corryn for a cookie to take to him?”

  “You may ask—but it might not be a cookie day.” Also, Smoke was still being fed his meals ground and moistened, in a spoon, his dormant body responding only enough to swallow the mush—but Cass didn’t mention that either.

  Chapter 9

  ON NIGHTS WHEN she stayed over, it was Sammi’s habit to slip out before the rest of the Wayward Girls were awake. It wasn’t that she wasn’t welcome there. She came to the House almost every day, since Red and Zihna let all the older kids hang out whenever they wanted. Sammi imagined that she could stay over whenever she wanted, that she could show up anytime, no matter the hour. The front door wasn’t locked. Doors in New Eden weren’t locked. Well, except for the storage sheds and the pharmacy cabinet, a fact confirmed by Colton when he had gone to the hospital—nothing more than a two-room guesthouse behind the community center—to get a cut on his ankle cleaned.

  The reason Sammi sneaked in on her late-night visits, and left early in the mornings, had nothing to do with whether she was welcome in this place, but with her dad. She worried about him. She used to, anyway. The way he always held on to her a little too long with his goodbye morning hugs, the way he was always checking in with her—at meals, after dinner at the community center, when she went to North Island with her friends, hell, even when she was with Valerie. It wasn’t exactly loneliness, and Sammi got that it was his job to worry about her, and the fact that they’d been separated for so long, all the terrible things that had happened, her mom’s death and everyone else’s—so yeah, it was natural that he’d want to keep an eye out for her. But with her dad it was something more. It was like his fear for her made him weak and she had to be the one to constantly remind him that he was strong, and she couldn’t let him worry too much or the weakness would grow.

  And that was why she always made sure to be home, in their crappy little trailer, by the time he got up. It wasn’t hard to do, she knew her dad had trouble sleeping and often spent the middle of the night tossing and t
urning, but even on those nights—especially on those nights—the sleep that finally found him at dawn was deep.

  But all of that was different now, Sammi reminded herself angrily.

  She was sitting on the floor of Sage and Kyra’s bedroom for the second morning in a row. The borrowed blankets were neatly folded with the pillow centered on top, tucked under Kyra’s bed, because there was too much shit under Sage’s. If—when—Sammi asked Red and Zihna if she could move in for good, she would have to ask for her own room. She loved her friends, and the mess didn’t bother her when she was just visiting, but she needed a place where she could have her things the way she liked them, everything in its place, arranged exactly the same every single day.

  She had that now, she remembered with an unwelcome hollowness. Her dad let her do anything she wanted to the trailer’s only bedroom, and didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow when she took to dusting every single day. Her things—a stone and a necklace that been gifts from Jed, a plastic barrette that had belonged to her mother and was missing a couple of teeth, her journal, a striped coffee cup holding sharpened pencils, the small pocketknife Colton had given her just last month—each had a specific place and Sammi checked them all the time, making sure they were centered on the shelves. She had begged to use the jerry-rigged hand vac, and Dana had finally relented and agreed to let her borrow it once a week, and she went over the matted beige carpet one small row at a time, walking all the way down to the shore to empty the debris into the swirling water of the river.

  All of that was hers, hers alone, and all of it was good. She would give that up by moving here. Even if they let her have her own room, she would be too embarrassed to do the same things here. Besides, she would have to share everything, and even though she had no problem sharing her clothes and her food and her books, even her treasured shampoo and conditioner and lotion and cleanser—she could not bear the thought of her special things disappearing.

  The stone, the necklace, the barrette were all she had left of Jed and her mom.

  Too bad she wasn’t more like her dad, Sammi thought bitterly. He’d started dating within a month of leaving her mom, as if their twenty years together hadn’t even happened. One woman after another—Pilates instructors and pharmaceutical reps and even, for a few strange weeks, Sammi’s old Spanish teacher.

  Her father wasn’t the type to let things get to him. She ought to ask him how he did it. Right after she asked him if it was hotter to mess around with someone who’d been a Beater and recovered. Fucking Cass. They said people like that had higher body temperatures and faster heartbeats than ordinary people, that they could heal from whatever injuries—scratches, bite marks, hickeys?—they got. Fucking Cass.

  Sammi kicked at exposed roots as she took the long way back home. The path wound along the edge of the river, disappearing in hummocks of reeds and reemerging only to dip down to the water and back up the banks. Hardly anyone came this way, and Sammi was in no mood to run into other people before she’d had a chance to change clothes and wash her face. She just wanted to spend a few minutes in the welcome order of her room. Touch the stone and the necklace and the barrette, in order, twice. Once to make sure and once for luck.

  An exhalation followed by a curse: Sammi looked up the banks and saw an uncertain figure struggling through thick overgrowth, grabbing handfuls of grass and weeds to keep from slipping down the slope on her ass. Sammi resigned herself to having to share this moment that she would have so much preferred to keep to herself.

  And then she saw who it was, the thick dark hair grazing the woman’s shoulders, the grosgrain headband. Valerie, with her bag slung over her shoulder, the canvas printed with some art-museum logo—Valerie the do-gooder, supporting the arts even after all the art museums had been ransacked and abandoned.

  “Sammi—oh, Sammi, thank God,” she called down, pushing at a stalk that crossed her path. “I’ve been looking everywhere.”

  Sammi looked past Valerie toward the community center, through wisps of mist and stumpy dead trees, to the yard. She had been so deep in thought that she hadn’t noticed the crowd forming there, people gathering in little groups, huddling in the cold.

  “How come?” Sammi asked irritably. Whatever the new crisis was, she wasn’t in the mood to be a part of it.

  Valerie slid the last few feet, stumbling and almost falling. “There was a crowd of Beaters this morning, on the west shore. Your dad saw them when he headed out this morning with Nathan and he’s been looking everywhere for you.”

  “Not everywhere,” Sammi mumbled, even as Valerie’s words—a crowd of them—sank in.

  “What’s that, honey?” Valerie’s hand—Sammi couldn’t help focusing on her nails, perfectly oval and clean—settled on her shoulder, and Sammi resisted shrugging it off.

  “I just said, I’m surprised Dad didn’t find me, I would think Kyra and Sage’s room wouldn’t be all that hard to find.”

  “But we did look there, first thing!”

  “Well—I was there.” Sammi made a halfhearted effort to keep the defiance out of her voice, but hadn’t she and her dad talked about it—she’d asked him point-blank, So Valerie’s, like, my new stepmom now? This was weeks ago, when Valerie had returned a stack of Sammi’s clothes, mended and pressed and smelling, somehow, faintly of lavender.

  No one can replace your mom, he had replied, as if he knew that Sammi was remembering her mom doing laundry back in their house in the mountains, singing while she folded clothes in the sunny laundry room.

  Valerie was better at laundry—her mom tended to mix red things in with the whites, turning everything pink—and somehow that just made it all the worse.

  “But Zihna said she hadn’t seen you,” Valerie said, twisting her hands together.

  “So what’s the big deal anyway? There’s Beaters on the shore every day.”

  “Oh, Sammi…you don’t understand. It was more than there’ve ever been before. Steve said he counted more than thirty before Glynnis and John started shooting.”

  “Thirty?” Sammi was taken aback. A crowd…by that she thought they meant eight or ten. The most that anyone had ever seen before was, like, nine, and that was two separate groups, one that came from the direction of Oakton and the other from straight across the field, dragging what turned out to be a split and rotting garden hose behind them. But thirty…Sammi had never heard of that many being in one place at one time, though she probably could have imagined it in the denser cities’ ruins. “Where did they come from?”

  “No one knows. It was so early…no one saw them coming. Glynnis and John managed to kill eight of them, and the rest ran. Nathan took off after them in the car, and he and Steve killed another seven. They’d wanted to see which direction they came from, but the Beaters just—they just panicked, I guess like they would, and ran in every direction.”

  “Dad didn’t go with Nathan, did he?”

  “Of course not,” Valerie said, eyes widening. “He hasn’t done anything but look for you since they were spotted. He’s down on Garden Island now, going row by row.”

  Guilt made Sammi blush. She should have known—but her dad loved going out with Nathan, and she could picture it—Nathan white-knuckle driving, her dad half out the window with that big Glock of his, like it was some kind of jackass safari.

  Her dad was such an idiot. Acting like it was all some sort of game, the way he went out driving around, looking for gas, blowing up cars. And he had the nerve to accuse her of being irresponsible.

  Her irritation was back in a flash. “Well, I guess you can tell him I’m fine,” she said, pushing past Valerie, taking the incline nimbly. Sucks to be old, she resisted saying, knowing Valerie would struggle even more getting back up the bank than coming down—and knowing she was a real bitch for not staying and helping, especially since Valerie had devoted her morning to searching for her. “I’m gonna head back to the trailer and take a nap.”

  “But, Sammi—”

  “Look, I’ll talk
to you later, okay? We were up late, I’m wrecked.” Sammi yawned and didn’t bother to cover her mouth.

  “No, what I wanted to say…look, they found blueleaf. They don’t think anyone ate it, the plants were young, but there’s an alert.” Her worried face sagged. “There’s a buddy-up, right after breakfast.”

  As if on cue, the breakfast bell chimed, two soulful tones carried on the mist. Sammi loved that bell possibly more than anything else about New Eden, the way it sounded like it had once hung in a beautiful old cathedral, the way it made the air still and silent and echo-y for a few seconds after it stopped ringing.

  “Fuck…”

  “I know they’re a pain,” Valerie said, not even commenting on Sammi’s language, which made Sammi want to say it again, or worse. Sometimes she wondered what it would take to get a reaction out of Valerie. Of course the woman was only nice to her because she was dating her dad—if she wasn’t, she would have snapped a long time ago, given Sammi the lecture she probably deserved. Sammi took advantage of her, but honestly, how could she not? How could anyone stand Valerie’s fakey niceness? “We could go together, though…if you want. I mean, once we get there, I’d—”

  “You’re with Mrs. Kristobal,” Sammi interrupted. “Right?”

  Valerie nodded. “But it won’t take long. You and Cindy can finish up quick and we can eat together. Your dad’ll come back, I’m sure of it—we agreed he’d come back every half hour to check in. Oh, Sammi, he’ll be so glad to see you. He’ll be so incredibly relieved. Maybe, just to make him feel better, you and I could try to stay away from the banks until we get this all sorted out. Keep to the middle of the island, with everyone else. What do you think—shall we make a pact?”

  Valerie was trying so hard to give her a brave smile that Sammi gave up and held out her hand to help her scramble up the muddy bank. Valerie took it gratefully, blinking against the sun, which had risen high enough in the sky to warm their faces.