Rebirth

by Sophie Littlefield

She searched his face, his hard-set jaw and flinty eyes, and found compassion there, even stronger than his anger. And she breathed.

  “How did you know where to look for me?”

  “I talked to the other guy. Back at the dorm.”

  “And he just told you?”

  Dor scowled. “After a bit. Look, Cass, I didn’t come here to kill innocent people, but anyone who’s made it up to being a guard in the Rebuilders-they’re not exactly innocent. It’s not like in the Box.”

  Cass didn’t doubt it. “But how…they took everything from us when we got here. Where did you get a weapon?”

  “No, not everything. My shoes…my jacket, I had them made specially. There were places to hide things.”

  He slipped a thin, double-sided blade from his pocket. “Japanese ceramic. Harder than steel.”

  “But how did that help you get past the guard?”

  “It didn’t. I have Joe to thank for that.”

  Cass remembered all the times that Smoke disappeared early in the morning to practice with Joe, the obscure martial art involving rigid fist strikes that could break a branch, a plate. “That guard, he trained in the Marines. You can always tell a guy who learned to fight in the Marines-they all train to the same standards. I learned that from Three-High.”

  So it had been the Marines. Three-High sometimes talked about the Three Borders War, the last one anyone was left to report back from, when the U.S. won a decisive ground battle over enemies who’d already exacted their revenge in advance with their avian poisons. He was one of the few people Cass had seen Dor spend much time with, besides Smoke. It was a sign of Dor’s determination that he had learned enough in the months since he started the Box to take down a professional fighter.

  “Anyway, Joe’s trick shut the guy up long enough for me to get him restrained.” Dor frowned at his blade and slipped it back into his pocket. “I had to use that a little to convince him that I really wanted to hear what he had to say. Turns out he didn’t care all that much about revealing where his friend was, after I…showed him I was serious.”

  Dor dug in his pack and came up with two more guns. The ones from Ralston and Jimbo. “And now we have these, too. Which one do you want?”

  She chose the smaller one, a small black semiauto. It wasn’t so different from the one Smoke had insisted she practice with on several occasions. “I don’t know how much good I’ll be. With, you know, carrying her.”

  “Hopefully you won’t have to carry her for long. Are you…all right to walk?”

  For a moment Cass didn’t understand the question, and then she realized that Dor was carefully not looking at her, at her body; he focused on a place over her shoulder, but his face was lined and sorrowful, a dozen years older than he’d looked even that morning.

  He’d spoken to the guard. He knew what she’d traded.

  Cass’s face flamed. “I’m fine.”

  “I’d just leave you here, it should be relatively safe now that they’re down…but I don’t know when shift change is, and it’s already nearly dawn. And besides, the other guy’s going to be waking up in an hour or two.”

  “He’s not dead?”

  “No. Like I said, it was never my intention to kill when I came down here. I brought some darts, the blade. I had hoped it might be enough…that was probably naïve.”

  “How many darts do you have left?”

  “Three.” He grimaced. “And there’s a problem with them, you have to be close enough to jam them in by hand, because I couldn’t figure out a way to bring a tranq gun in here. I nailed the guy in there because I was practically on top of him when I came around the corner. And I had it in my hand. Otherwise…”

  “So you just left him there?”

  “Not…without a souvenir. Something to make sure he doesn’t do this again, to some other woman.”

  “What…”

  Dor made a slicing motion. “Assuming he doesn’t bleed out, or die of infection, he’s gonna be pretty damn tender for a while.”

  Cass felt no pity. Despite the fact that she had given herself away to get here, down to Smoke’s prison, there was still a difference between what she had given Ralston in trade and what Jimbo meant to take from her without compunction.

  “What did you find out about Sammi?”

  Dor’s face went dangerously blank. “She’s in a dorm, where all the girls her age live. It’s not too far from here, maybe half a mile.”

  “What aren’t you telling me?”

  “Nothing. They just…the girls live together, the young women. There’s about forty of them and four guards on duty at night. I made him tell me. Two more come on at six in the morning, so we need to move fast.”

  “How are we going to find out which room she’s in?”

  “Leave that part to me,” Dor said. “But listen, here’s the problem. I can’t carry Smoke that far. He’ll slow us down too much.”

  “I’m not leaving him,” Cass said quickly. “I can’t leave him.”

  “Cass…” Dor’s face was shadowed with anxiety and something else, some dark thing. “Look at him. He’s lost a lot of blood from his shoulder. He’s been beaten, probably tortured. There’s a good chance he’s bleeding internally. There’s no guarantee he’s going to make it. Is it worth the risk…?”

  “You can go without me,” Cass said. “I know you need to go to Sammi. I understand. But I can’t. If they find me and Ruthie…I can convince them I’m innocent. I’ll tell them you shot them when you found us together, that you went back to, I don’t know…”

  It was all tangled in her mind, the men who had been killed tonight, the trail of violence and cruelty that had brought them here. “I don’t know, I’ll figure out something. I’m an outlier, Dor, they need me. I have something valuable to trade with them.”

  His eyes narrowed with anger. “No. You can’t stay here. You don’t know what they mean to do with you.”

  “I know they mean to keep me hostage, okay? And I know there’s no guarantee they’ll ever find the vaccine, and I could spend the rest of my life being poked and studied for nothing-but is that so bad? I’ll be with Ruthie, and we’ll be safe, and-”

  “Cass!”

  There was something so dangerous and fierce in his voice that Cass shut up and listened.

  “They’re not making a vaccine. They’re not studying outliers. They’re using them…harvesting them. For breeding.”

  For a moment Cass didn’t understand.

  Harvesting…

  And then she put it together.

  The young girls, in the dorm.

  The woman, with her legs in stirrups.

  “They’ve made a baby farm,” she whispered.

  “They mean to populate this entire place with outliers,” Dor said. “They’re using outliers to make embryos, and sterilizing everyone else.”

  “They can’t-I don’t know, make a vaccine, like Evangeline said?”

  Dor shrugged. “Sure, maybe-if they had all the time in the world, equipment, the best scientists. But selective breeding-that’s easy to do-hell, look at history.”

  “But who would-I mean, there aren’t enough outliers…”

  “All they need is donor eggs and sperm-it doesn’t take all that many outliers to produce those. They create the embryos, then use the youngest, healthiest girls to incubate them. The babies get taken away to be raised by the Rebuilder leaders, and the girls keep on breed-”

  “Oh, God…”

  “And they took Sammi there. Cass…she’s only fourteen.”

  In her arms, Ruthie stirred, her body soft and warm against hers. Her baby, her life. She would never have brought Ruthie into this world if she knew what it was going to become. And now the Rebuilders had made it worse. They meant to doctor up embryos in a lab and grow them inside little girls-prisoners-only to rip them away before they could even hold the babies they’d given life to.

  A memory flashed of the day Ruthie was born. It had been an easy labor, made all the e
asier because Ruthie had been early and small. In the midst of her labor pains Cass had sobbed because she believed that if only she hadn’t been drinking before she knew she was pregnant, in those early weeks, she could have carried Ruthie to term. In her third trimester she had begun dreaming that her baby was born dead, a shriveled and wounded thing, doomed by her demons.

  The doctor on duty had been kind enough; one of the nurses wiped the tears from her face with a cool cloth. But it wasn’t until Ruthie had been placed, pink and wriggling and healthy, on her chest that Cass finally believed. And in that moment everything changed.

  She’d been thinking of giving her baby up for adoption, had met with the social workers already and begun the paperwork. She knew she wasn’t ready, or worthy. But when Ruthie lay in her arms and Cass heard her cry for the first time, she knew that everything good and worthy in her life would, until the day she died, revolve around this tiny person. That redemption was possible. That she could be someone who mattered. And that God had given her this chance and she must not squander it.

  Her first words to Ruthie, whispered so softly that the doctors and nurses did not hear, that no one save her baby girl would ever hear, were, “You’re mine, and I am yours.”

  Here in Colima, they were taking newborns from girls’ bodies, leave them hurting and bereft, only to impregnate them again and again. She thought of Sammi, that beautiful girl, the dusting of freckles on her nose, her glossy ponytail. Cass would offer her own body, give away her own eggs, if it would save even a single one of the girls from such a fate-but as long as the Rebuilders survived, all would be in danger.

  Dor cupped her chin with his free hand. “Cass. Look at me.”

  So she did. She looked at him as though for the very first time, into his black eyes, the hard planes of his face. This was a man she’d used and who had used her. She’d blamed him for things that were not his fault and sought from him things that were not his to give. She’d clung to him and run with him, and tonight she’d nearly ended his journey before he got Sammi back.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered, tears pooling in her eyes. She wanted to say she should never have come, but that too would be a lie; she had to be with Smoke, and Smoke was here.

  It was Smoke who should never have left, but she finally understood that without seeking vengeance Smoke would have withered and died from within. He had been willing to trade his life for those that burned the library, and he had succeeded.

  Perhaps he was ready to die. Perhaps, in his brief lucid moments, he even planned to die.

  I dreamed you were here.

  It might have been his dying dream, but Cass intended to prove him wrong.

  “We’ll all get out,” she said to Dor, but this promise was meant for Smoke.

  32

  CASS DOUBTED DOR KNEW THAT THE PLACE HE’D left them had once been a wisteria arbor.

  Now the vines were little more than sticks. Their leaves had fallen and their delicate branches snapped. It wasn’t ideal cover, but it had the advantage of being close to the Tapp Clinic, down a service road at the edge of the wide campus lawn. Dor had propped Smoke up so that his head rested on a swell in the recently landscaped earth that somehow made her think of Gloria’s grave mound.

  As Dor slipped away into the predawn, Cass sat cross-legged and held Ruthie in her lap and took Smoke’s hand, hot with fever, into her own and thought about all the dead in the world, how there could never be enough memorials, enough trees planted, enough marble stones to stand for everyone. Time passed.

  Far off to the east, the first faint glow of morning appeared at the horizon, and the stars began to dim. Cass thought about the fact that these were the same stars that studded the sky over the world Before; they would continue to shine whether the world renewed itself or failed. They were the same stars that witnessed her birth and the ones that would shine on the night of her death, whether it was this day or one many years from now, and in theses thoughts she found comfort.

  They were wedged in a narrow space between the wall of a classroom building and the latticed arbor twined with dead vines, sitting on a bed of landscaping bark. Few sounds reached them in their hiding spot-a machine starting up somewhere several buildings away, the crunch of gravel underfoot as people passed by across the lawn once or twice, guards doing their security detail.

  Once the wall was completed, there would be little reason for guards to roam the campus. Only the highest levels of the Rebuilders were armed. The rest-the newcomers, the workers, the baby makers and children-were powerless, incapable of revolt or even posing an inconvenience. Already, as the community was still being built, it relied on order: schedules and timetables and hierarchies, weights and measures and zero tolerance in judgments. Cass didn’t doubt that, for many, this was welcome. For every person who chafed under the Rebuilder rule, there were probably several more who were so grateful for the shelter, the promise of safety, that any tradeoffs they made in terms of personal freedom seemed like a bargain.

  Even, she thought with a shudder, the baby farm. As horrified as she was by the prospect of human eggs being systematically harvested, fertilized and implanted, she could imagine that for some women the tradeoff might feel like a reasonable one. And there was no doubt that the first-generation outliers, even though they were little more than glorified breeding machines, would enjoy freedoms and benefits that others would not.

  Cass brushed Smoke’s hair, damp against his fevered skin, away from his face. She had adjusted his filthy dressings as well as she could, retying the torn bandages and wiping away as much grit and dried blood as she could. Now that they were outdoors he began to shiver. She took off her own jacket and covered him with it. She wore only the nightgown, her underwear ripped and abandoned back in the closet, but she was warm enough, overheated by exertion and adrenaline.

  Smoke hadn’t woken from his fever coma, but occasionally he muttered pieces of words and once she thought she heard him say her name.

  More time passed. Ruthie fidgeted, half asleep, too.

  Cass tried not to focus on how long Dor was taking. His plan had been a simple one: break into the motor pool much as he had broken into the Tapp Clinic, using the darts if possible, the guns if not. Once he’d secured a vehicle, he would come back for them and then they would go together to break Sammi out.

  He had tried to talk to her about what she would do if he wasn’t back by the time the campus began fully waking up. He wanted her to leave Smoke there, to take Ruthie and turn herself in. But Cass knew they were past that stage.

  The first thing she heard was the grinding of gears. It sounded like a lighter version of the dump trucks that used to drive past a house her mother had once rented. Before she met Byrn and was still scraping to get by. The house was located near a quarry, and in the afternoons the trucks would drive by, loaded down with rough limestone, switching into first gear when they hit the hill at the corner of Creasy Springs Road. Before she identified the sound she felt it reverberating up through her body. Smoke must have felt it too, even in the depths of his unconsciousness, because he rolled to his side and his eyelids fluttered. So intent was Cass on making sure Smoke was all right that she didn’t actually see the vehicle until it rounded the corner and approached along the service road.

  It was a FedEx truck, the logo still painted on the sides, its back cargo area open, its doors missing. Only the running lights were on and Cass wasn’t certain it was Dor until he parked and jumped down from the open driver’s seat. And even then it took a moment, because he was wearing the fatigue pants and khaki shirt of the Rebuilders, a black baseball cap pulled low above his eyes.

  “In the back,” he said. “Hurry.” Without waiting for a response he picked Smoke up, not gently. Cass wanted to tell him to take care, but she was too afraid. She carried Ruthie to the cargo area and clambered inside, boosting Ruthie up to the waist-high floor first. Flattened cardboard boxes lined the floor, an improvement over the hard metal on which she’d ridden tw
o nights earlier. Bungee cords dangled from the walls, and dust and broken bricks cluttered the corners. Whatever they’d been using it to haul had left the floor and walls dented and creased, and the rope net someone had rigged across the back opening had torn free and lay in useless coils.

  After settling Smoke on the floor of the truck, Dor paused before jumping down to the ground. “I’m driving straight there,” he said sharply. “If I have any trouble with the guard, I’m going to have to shoot. I can’t risk him warning the dorm that we’re coming.”

  “What about the darts?”

  “I only have two left. Here.” Dor reached into his pocket and handed them to her. They were like small syringes with synthetic feathering at one end. “You have your gun, but use these if you can, first. Just jam them in.”

  “Why? Why won’t you take them?”

  He looked into her eyes, searching for something. “You haven’t killed anyone yet,” he said softly. “I have. It won’t cost me nearly as much to do it again.”

  Dor had changed. Something was missing, some light had left him. He was no less determined to free Sammi-if anything he seemed more amped than ever. But his eyes no longer held the promise of hope.

  Cass slipped the darts into her socks as the truck began to move, the only place she had to stash them. As the tires hit potholes, Smoke cried out in pain. A good thing, because it meant that he was still aware, if only dimly, of his body.

  The smell of exhaust was strong in the truck, and Cass coughed; she was coughing the first few times Ruthie spoke so it took her a while to realize that her daughter’s voice wasn’t just in her imagination. “Mama.”

  Cass looked down to see Ruthie had got up on her knees and was holding on to her arm for support, her face only inches away.

  “Ruthie, what-? Ruthie,” Cass said, breath caught in her throat. She didn’t want to make a fuss, to draw attention; she had worked so hard to convince Ruthie that it didn’t matter if she talked, that she could heal at her own pace.

  “Is Smoke okay?”

  Ruthie’s face was tight with worry, her wide eyes sad, her rosebud lips pursed in concern.