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A footstep on gravel, a figure cutting moonlight—Cass nearly missed him, focused as she was on the orange glow of the remains of the bonfire. But it could only be one person, the one man who knew her habit of sitting out here late into the night while the community slept, the sentries at the bridge the only other souls awake in the small hours.
“Thought you were going to turn in early,” Dor said, lowering his tall, sinewy body next to hers.
Cass shrugged. “You knew I wouldn’t.”
“Yeah, I guess I did.”
For a while they sat in silence. Dor drank the dregs of homegrown wine. When he got to the bottom, he held up his plastic cup—the flimsy kind that college kids used to serve at keggers—and stared at it from several angles in the light of the bonfire a hundred yards away.
Then he crushed it in his hand as though it was nothing. Cass raised her eyebrows in the dark.
“Better not let Dana see you do that.”
Dana was the compliance leader, tasked with making sure everyone reused and recycled and composted—and the most vocal member of the New Eden council. The council operated on principles of concordance and had sworn off hierarchy, which only seemed to make Dana that much more dogged about getting his way whenever an issue was brought before it. He also seemed to delight in taking rule-breakers to task, though there was no formal punishment structure, only admonishments to do better. You got the feeling Dana would have welcomed more authority as long as he was the one wielding it.
Dor flashed a bitter grin that quickly disappeared. “Dana can go fuck himself. I’ve just spent eight hours up to my ass in rotting siding and I have the splinters to prove it. If I want to stomp one cup under my boot for old times’ sake, I’d guess I’ve earned the right.”
But rather than tossing the cup on the ground, he took the twisted, torn mess and tucked it into the pocket of his shirt. No one littered in New Eden, not even Dor—the three islands were all they had.
“Ruthie sleeping?” he asked after a while, and when his words were followed by his warm, rough fingertips on the strip of skin at the small of her back between sweater and jeans, Cass swallowed hard, because he could take her to the other place that fast.
“Yes,” she whispered hoarsely as his fingers traced circles, drifting slowly lower. This went on for a while, moments, hours, who knew…it was always like this, him barely touching her, both of them going white-hot in seconds. They never talked about it. Sometimes he would keep talking—about the things he was fixing, about nails and shingles and broken asphalt; about a bird he’d seen lighting on a fence post, or a book the raiders had found somewhere; about his daughter’s latest project, a mural she was painting on the wall of their building or a jean jacket she was embellishing with Valerie’s help. He would talk, and Cass would murmur in the appropriate places, the lulls and silences in their conversation, and if someone had been listening to the two of them, unable to see where his hands were going, they would never know there was anything going on except conversation. Dull conversation.
“I might take a ride out with Nathan tomorrow,” Dor went on, without inflection. “Go out toward Oakton, see what we can find.”
Cass nodded. Nathan siphoned gas from wrecked vehicles, using a system he’d rigged from a pump, a length of hose and some custom couplings—along with a sledgehammer and crowbar for dealing with tank locking devices. He drove out in his tiny hybrid in the mornings and came back with his cans and jugs full. Cass suspected Nathan did it more for sport than anything else—and that Dor went with him for the same reason.
“Be careful,” she said unnecessarily. Beaters had been showing up more often lately along the shore, five or six times a week, where they could easily be picked off while they screamed in frustration, unable to swim. There was a certain fascination in watching Glynnis and John, the best shots on the island, taking the skiff out and shooting them at almost point-blank range, dropping them with a single shot to the head or spine, the only sure way to kill them quickly. Cass never let Ruthie watch, but she’d joined the other spectators half a dozen times, borrowing Jasmine’s binoculars so the burst of blood filled her vision through the lenses.
But meeting them on land was another story entirely. Especially since Nathan and Dor had to get out of the car to siphon.
“I will,” Dor growled as he pulled Cass toward him, his big hand wrapped around her arm, his warmth seeping into her skin even through her jacket.
She went wordlessly, straddling him in the dark, and her mouth met his with a hoarse cry deep in her throat. Her knees ground against the hard, cold concrete as she levered herself more forcefully against him. She could feel his hardness between her legs, and his hands slid down her back, against her ass, pulling her against him. Her teeth knocked against his, and his mouth was hot and hungry on hers. She plunged her hands into his hair—long enough to snarl in her fingers—and felt the bristle of his beard against her thumbs.
It was like this with Dor, this hunger, this need to consume him and be consumed. There was nothing tender about it. Every time, she had bruises. Sometimes one of them would break skin with their teeth, their nails. But every time, this feeling.
“Where is she?” Cass gasped, wrenching herself away from the kiss. She could feel Dor scowl, his jaw tightening under her hands.
“Can’t be sure,” he said, kissing the soft skin under her chin, scraping against it. He knew she meant Sammi, not the woman. Twice—only when both Valerie and Sammi were safely on the sparsely populated northern island for the day—Dor and Cass had fucked in his room, the luxury of a bed intoxicatingly heady but almost distracting, because they were so accustomed to sheds, abandoned boathouses and, most often, the cold ground at night. They’d rutted in between the rows of plants in Cass’s garden on moonlit nights and on the rocky, muddy shore on moonless ones, and Dor had taken her standing up in a narrow space between trucks in the auto shed. Many times, working in the thin winter sun by herself, Cass thought about what they did and wondered if it was the shame of it, the degradation of hiding, that made it that much more intense.
She tasted the liquor on his mouth and licked it greedily. She could not get enough of the taste of him. So it would be another time in the open, another morning when she would wake in filthy clothes, dirt ground into her knees, her elbows, twigs and pebbles in her hair.
Well, so be it.
Dor stood, half carrying her until she wriggled from his grip and found her footing. Dor, who had been an investor Before, who had spent his days under fluorescent lights working at a computer, had been hardened Aftertime. Until they came to New Eden, he’d run the Box, a fenced-in pleasure mart, and he’d trained with former cops and gang members, learned martial arts and shooting and put his body through a demanding regimen until it was as imposing and strong as it could be.
And Smoke had done the same, right along with him. What else was there to fill their days?
Everyone was lean and basically fit now. Life demanded it. Physical labor filled everyone’s hours. But Dor ran the length of the islands at dawn, and he lifted weights in the lean-to where sports equipment was haphazardly stored, on both fine days and rainy ones. He was even more hard-muscled now than when they arrived, and Cass suspected it was because he was no longer in charge of anything, no longer a leader, and too much energy accumulated inside him with nowhere to go. His skin against hers was hot; his muscles had been hardened by his own punishment.
He led her ungently down the rocky path to the water’s edge. Here, on the southeast end of the middle island, a wooden dock extended twenty feet into the water, its pilings loose, water lapping over the far end. Soon someone would need to either fix or salvage it. But that was not for tonight. Dor led her to the center, which was dry, if splintered and rough, and pulled her against him. His breath was hot on her neck; his teeth grazed against her skin. She seized handfuls of his shirt, threw back her head and let go of conscious thought. For a moment he crushed her against him, and Cass’s eyelids flickered at the sensation of her body joined all the length of his, the bonfire a golden, shimmering, wavering illusion in the distance, before she let them drift shut.
If she’d kept them open, she might have seen her coming.
By the time her footsteps clattered on the wooden boards and her shocked gasp reached their ears, by the time Dor and Cass disentangled from each other, it was too late to do anything but try to keep their balance as the dock swayed and rocked.
A flashlight’s beam arced wildly across the dock, skittering over the water, until it leveled at them, shining it directly into each of their faces in turn. Cass blinked hard, but when Sammi lowered the light, she saw that the girl’s eyes were filled with tears.
“Dad?” she gasped. “Oh my God—Cass—what are you doing?”
Cass backed away from Dor, as though to erase what the girl had seen, but really, even a fifteen-year-old couldn’t mistake what they were doing for anything but what it was.
“Wuh…we were just—” Cass stammered. Dor’s hand shot out and he grabbed Sammi’s hand, but she jerked it back.
“Oh my God!” she repeated. “I can’t believe— Her? Her?”
And then she was running, but at the edge of the shore her shoe caught on the lip of the dock and she went sprawling. Dor raced to help her up. Cass stood, with her hand to her throat, unable to breathe, knowing what they had broken, the enormity of it buzzing in her head.
Sammi refused her father’s hand, crawled away from him, got to her feet and paused for only a second, her arms hugging her slender frame.
“I hate you!” she cried. “I hate you both!”
And then she was sprinting away, the light’s beam ricocheting wildly across the landscape, back toward the bonfire, and disappearing completely around a wide building.
Dor watched Sammi go. Cass watched him watching. She ached for him, even as her skin still tingled with the memory of his touch.
Sammi wasn’t supposed to see them, not ever. No one was. How they thought they could keep doing this without anyone ever finding out, in a place as small as these islands, she had no idea.
But neither of them had been able to stop. Not once.
Chapter 5
SAMMI’S FEET HURT like hell but you had to take your shoes off to climb up the tree without making noise. She’d taken her socks off, too, because once before she hadn’t, and snagged one on the bark. It ended up stuck there because she wasn’t about to go back for it once she got into Kyra and Sage’s room, and at, like, three in the morning she had to sneak back to her room with just one sock. And her boots were nasty, rank and worn-out, and sticking her foot in them without a sock made her want to hurl.
So tonight, even though she’d run all the way here, even though her lungs ached from the effort and she felt like the entire island could hear her breathing, she took the time to stuff her socks into her pockets before she shimmied up the trunk. The party had ended but there were still a few stragglers making their way back to their houses, the paths crisscrossed with flashlight beams and candle glow, laughter spilling over into the darkness. The adults were drunk, some of them, which shouldn’t be any surprise because they were all so fucking hypocritical, Sammi could hardly stand it.
Dad and Cass
No. No. She wouldn’t think about it, wouldn’t let herself remember the way they were groping each other, hands all over each other like they’d just die if they couldn’t—but no.
The adults were drunk.
Earlier tonight she’d been having fun, the kind of fun that came along unexpectedly sometimes when you had no expectations at all. When you had resigned yourself to the idea that everything was going to suck, and then some small thing would shift or change and suddenly it was like you were in grade school again and it was chocolate cake for lunch, or your best friend gave you an invitation to a party, or your mom painted your nails with a brand-new bottle of nail polish. Sammi remembered feeling that way, that pure clean happy feeling that used to be part of her life, just like Sunday pancakes and riding in the BMW convertible her mom bought herself for her fortieth birthday—but she had forgotten what the feeling felt like, if that made sense, which was somehow sadder than all the rest of it put together, and then there would be a moment like tonight when it all came back for just a second or a minute, enough to trick her into feeling like maybe things would be okay.
Tonight it was when Luddy and Cheddar and their stupid friends with their lame-ass retro-emo band were messing around, and Sage and Phillip were making out in the corner, and Sammi and Kyra were helping set out the pies, and then all of a sudden the Lazlow kids were in the middle of the room where the ladies were trying to set up tables, and they started dancing. Only not really dancing. They were taking running starts—or Dane was, anyway, since Dirk was too little, and then flopping down on his knees and sliding across the polished wooden floor like some sort of old-timey break-dancer. Dane got on his back and kicked his legs in the air, and Sammi was reminded of a time when she was six or seven, when she used to take classes at Tiny Troup but she couldn’t keep up with the other girls, she couldn’t do a plié for anything, so her mom told her it was okay if they quit and they went home and cranked the speakers and got on the floor and made up their own dance, right there in the living room of the house in the mountains, under the fake log beams and the elk-antler chandelier, they jumped and danced and rolled until they were piled in a heap, the two of them, laughing so hard her sides hurt. And her mom had said, Who needs any stupid Tiny Troup? and Sammi said, Yeah, who needs those guys?
Of course, her mom had been dead two months and twenty-four days, and so had Jed, and Sammi kept a count in silver Sharpie on the inside of the plastic box she stored her last few tampons in, the days since she stopped being her old self and started being…well, her half self. Because that was how she thought of herself now, as half of what she used to be.
Not that you could tell from the outside. That was all fine, and from the way the boys looked at her, more than fine, and Sammi knew she looked good—she had sun on her face even though it was so damn cold all the time, and her hair had gotten really long and kind of wavy since she stopped using the flatiron. So the outside, yeah. But inside she was only half there at any given time. Sometimes it was her thinking half that was there, like when she was working on her chords, Red tapping out time on the back of a folding chair in the music room. And sometimes it was her bad half, her remembering half, the one that kept hold of all the things she wished she could let go. And other times it was her numb half—yeah, that was three but who was counting—the numb self she’d learned to call up from deep inside with the help of the herb cigarettes that Sage made for them. She swore they got you high and Sammi wasn’t so sure but what did it matter, eleven herbs and spices or whatever was good enough for her, so she and Sage smoked like they’d been smoking forever and that was what mattered, putting that paper to your lips and sparking it up and sucking it down, with your friend beside you. And getting to the numb.
Thinking. Remembering. Going numb. But never all at once.
Right now, pulling herself up the low branches, swinging up to the ledge, the different parts were coming and going. That thing with Cass and her dad—
What the hell? Her dad would fuck anything that moved, but he wouldn’t even let Sammi walk down to the water with Colton after dinner. But she couldn’t think about it tonight. That had to wait. So she was pushing back on the thinking half and calling up the numb half. She was just killing time, it was nothing.
“Sage,” she said kind of soft, tapping on the window glass. She had one arm wrapped around the branch, the wood digging into her inner elbow painfully, leaning down against the cold window. Sage and Kyra were no doubt sleeping, they’d left the party at least an hour ago, Kyra looking like she was going to puke again, which was nothing new. Kyra had been puking since they got to New Eden, so much that Corryn had started making her special crackers out of kaysev flour, she even poked holes in them to make them look like saltines.
“Sage!”
But Sage was already there, pushing the window open, yawning.
“You scared the shit out of me. What are you doing?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” Sammi lied. “Dad’s snoring again.”
It was a pretty good lie. Her dad did snore, sometimes, if he’d been out all day on the road with Earl, or if he’d been doing something hard-core like cutting wood with the axe or hauling stumps with chains. Sammi figured snoring was just one of the ways old people dealt with physical exhaustion. Which was okay—would have been okay, anyway, back when they lived in a six-bedroom house and her mom and dad were, like, in a whole other wing—except that now they shared a trailer barely big enough for one person to live in, much less two, and it was nice of her dad to let her have the bedroom except he slept in the living room, which was the only other full room in the trailer, and she couldn’t even go to the bathroom without having to walk right past him, which was just wrong since her dad was longer than the twin mattress he’d put on the floor and he always had a leg or arm falling off the side. She didn’t want to see her dad like that and she figured he for damn sure wasn’t proud of it either.
Of course, that was all before she knew about him and Cass. Cass! When he was supposedly with Valerie, who was totally boring except at least she was old and normal, someone her dad should date—not Cass, who had been cool until they got here when she had some sort of breakdown and barely even cared about Smoke anymore and besides she had a kid for God’s sake, but evidently Aftertime meant that parents could just fuck around and do whatever they felt like and to hell with the kids even while they were still ordering them around.
“I thought I’d hang out,” Sammi said quickly, not wanting to go down that path. “You know, I thought we could be quiet if Kyra’s, like, needing her sleep or whatever.”
“Oh, dude, get this,” Sage said, forgetting that she was exhausted and pulling the window open wide so Sammi could scramble inside. Sage and Kyra were roommates in the House for Wayward Girls, which wasn’t actually what the place was called, just their nickname for it. Red and Zihna, who were really old, were like the housemom and housedad and had the big bedroom downstairs. Kyra would probably have to move over to the Mothers’ House when her baby came, but that was months and months away. Sage had been impregnated at the Rebuilders’ baby farm too, but she had miscarried right after they got to New Eden so it was kind of like she hadn’t even been pregnant. “Kyra’s getting this, like, line on her stomach.”
“What do you mean?”
“I guess it’s a pregnancy thing. That’s what Zihna says, anyway. Zihna says it’s probably going to be a boy because the line’s from testosterone and you get more testosterone in your system if you’re having a boy.”
“Like with the bacne?”
“I know, right? That’s so disgusting.” Sage made a face. “Here, look, she won’t wake up.”
As Sage tugged the blanket carefully off their sleeping friend and shone a flashlight on her, Sammi thought about how Sage always acted like pregnancy was the worst thing that could happen to anyone. Not around Kyra of course, because that would be mean, but when she and Sammi were alone. And that made Sammi wonder…maybe Sage wasn’t as relieved about having had the miscarriage as she pretended to be.
Which Sammi kind of got. At least if you had a baby, there would be something to do all day long. And someone to love you back. For you, not for who people wanted you to be. Everyone was so messed up, from everything they’d seen, everything that had happened. A baby wouldn’t be like that—a baby would never have seen cities getting blown up and burned down, whole fields and farms leveled, all the plants dead. And now, with the kaysev and all, a baby would never go hungry.
Of course, there was still the Beaters.
Sage lifted the oversize T-shirt Kyra wore as pajamas, and sure enough, there on her still-mostly-flat stomach was a faint gray line running from her belly button down. And a few black hairs lying flat against her skin.
“Shit,” Sammi said, impressed.
Kyra sighed and shifted in her sleep and Sage pulled the covers back up over her, then snapped off the flashlight. They sat on the floor with their backs to Sage’s bed. Sammi, who saw well in the dark, could make out the shapes of Kyra’s bottle collection on top of the dresser, a few wilted weeds stuck in some of them.
“I saw Dad with Cass tonight,” Sammi said, surprising herself. She hadn’t planned to tell. Sudden tears welled up in her eyes and she pushed them angrily away.
“What do you mean, with?”
“Like, with his tongue down her throat and his hands in her pants. And she wasn’t exactly saying no. They were down on the dock doing it like, like dogs.”
They weren’t exactly doing it, of course, and not like dogs either, but Sammi was pretty sure they’d been headed that way. And she’d bet this wasn’t the first time.
“Oh wow,” Sage said, seeming genuinely shocked. “I never would have thought that.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“I thought she was, like, with—”
“Smoke? Yeah.”
There was a silence, and Sammi figured they were both thinking about Smoke, how messed up he’d been when they first got here, bone showing through his skin, scabs oozing pus, missing a couple of fingers, scars crisscrossing his face and body. For a while Sammi visited him a few times a week, and then she just sort of stopped. She felt guilty about that—guilty as hell, since Smoke had always been there for her and her mom back when they all sheltered at the school. But she couldn’t stand looking at him half-dead, because it reminded her too much of when her mom and Jed and all the others were killed. And none of them even killed by Beaters, but by supposedly good humans.
Smoke didn’t even know she was there, anyway. Sun-hi said he might never come out of his coma. Zihna said his “energy was growing stronger,” but that was just the hippie way she talked all the time.
“So…what about Valerie?” Sage asked.
“What about her?” Sammi snapped, and then regretted it. She had wondered the same thing. Valerie was always trying to get close to her, asking her about her friends, Sage and Kyra and Phillip and Colton and Kalyan and Shane, offering to make snacks for them all, offering to loan her clothes that Sammi wouldn’t be caught dead in. Valerie was nice, in her boring way—but there was no way Sammi needed another mom.
“Well, Cass is kind of…way hotter than her. I mean, you know?”
“Yeah, but—” But it was still her dad. “I mean, it would be one thing if Dad wasn’t on my shit all the time about every little thing I do. His new thing? Now he doesn’t want me going off the island without telling him first. I’m like, I always tell Red or Zihna, and he says that’s not good enough. If he’s off working or whatever I have to wait until he gets back.”
“Sammi…he’s worried about you. I mean, you’re his kid.”
There was a hollowness to Sage’s voice and too late Sammi remembered the thing that made her an asshole with her friends sometimes—that she still had a parent, which was one more than most of the others here.
Sammi said she was sorry like she always did, and Sage said it didn’t matter like she always did, and they smoked for a while and then they lay down, Sage in her bed and Sammi on the floor under borrowed blankets, and after a while Sage fell asleep in the middle of talking about which actor from Before Phillip looked most like, and Sammi lay awake and tried not to think of her dad and Cass and what they were doing and the sounds they were making, and instead imagined sliding across the wooden floor on her knees like the little kids, being seven again with her mom on the sidelines clapping and saying, Go, go, Sammi-bear.
Chapter 6
“I ALREADY KNEW that,” Luddy said, taking back his guitar after Red had showed him exactly how the chord progression went. They had been among the last people in the community center, the party having wound down to the dregs, all the good food gone and most folks having wandered home with a full belly and a pleasant buzz.
The chord progression was a tricky one, and Red remembered with wistful clarity the day he’d learned it himself. He’d been crashing in a guy’s apartment in San Francisco, not too far from the Haight. Red had a little of Luddy in him back then: insecure and ambitious. He didn’t dare let on how much of a rush he got just being that close to where it all started. Hendrix, Joplin, Garcia—back in those days everyone still remembered the greats.
Red used to get up before the rest of the guys and walk over to the park with his guitar and find a bench. He’d stay a couple of hours, dicking around just for the sheer joy of it, going through the set list first for whatever dive Carmy had managed to book them into—and then he’d play his own stuff. Some of the songs were polished, as perfect as he could make them; others were just a few bars here and there, inspirations that came to him in the early hours of the morning while he lay in bed thinking and smoking after a gig.
Back then, people used to try to give him money all the time, and what the hell, Red didn’t discourage it. A “hey, man” for the guys, a wink for the ladies. He got other offers, too, and now and then he’d take one of the girls home, or if he and Carmy were sharing a room, to her place. It never meant anything. It was just part of the journey, and Red back then was always on a journey. It was in his blood, in his bones. The original ramblin’ man, that was him.
Not anymore, though. Red counted every day that he woke up in the same place, Zihna at his side, as a good day. And the kids—the girls who lived with them, the teenage boys who hung around the house—they were a kick. He taught them all guitar, just for fun. On a good day, it was pure magic. On a bad day, well, then it was still pretty good.
His favorite nights were when the girls got bored and came downstairs looking for something to do. Zihna made tea and snacks, and Red got out board games or cards, and they laughed and played until the girls got sleepy. On nights like that, it sometimes seemed like he had all the time in the world. That was an illusion, of course. Red was fifty-nine this year and well aware that he looked a decade older than that. All that hard living was catching up to him.
There was one more thing he needed to do before he was dead. He’d tried and failed more times than he could count on one hand. Still, he was biding his time. Making a move too soon would be even worse than waiting too long. And he had a feeling he’d have only one more chance.
Chapter 7
IN THE MORNING Cass woke before Ruthie. For a while she lay with her daughter tucked in the curve of her body, wrapped in her arms, watching Ruthie’s hair ruffle in the gentle current of her breath, feeling her good sure slow heartbeat and marveling for the hundredth, the thousandth time at the perfection of her eyelids. They were porcelain fair, with a single faint crease and long curved dark lashes, a tiny miracle, evidence of grace she didn’t deserve.
