Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

“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.

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 turning, 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.