Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

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-”