Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

She’d been a child there, still. It had been a long while since she felt like that.

Her father was going around talking to people about what they wanted to bring along. He was acting like some kind of expert, like someone had put him in charge. Like he was king of the council all of a sudden, when last week he was digging a new trench for the latrines. Sammi knew-she’d seen the way people talked to her dad, like they thought they were better than him. It was a long way from when her dad was a big financial trader, that was for sure. Somehow, here in New Eden where there were rules for everything, her dad never really fit in. Even when he took up with Valerie-and everyone liked Valerie, she was so perky and perfect-people still didn’t warm up to him. And if Sammi was really, really honest with herself, that had hurt. He’s not perfect, she wanted to tell people, but you have to know him like I know him.

Only, then she’d seen another side of him and decided she didn’t really know him at all. It started with him getting all overprotective, after not giving a shit what she did or where she went for all those years. It was like he wanted to keep her locked up all the time. Her mom had been protective, but at least she had reasons, at least she’d been like that as long as Sammi could remember. With her dad it was just stupid. And then, seeing him and Cass together-as though nothing else mattered, not her, not Valerie, not the job he was supposed to be doing.

But now he was like some kind of hero, going around and talking to people, and everyone wanting to know his opinion. All because of what he’d done today, him and Cass, going out in the boat and shooting all those Beaters. Sammi didn’t know exactly how she felt about that. She’d been watching out the window of the community center with Kalyan when they first set out in the canoe, and she’d been so scared she didn’t have actual thoughts but just a crazy buzzing spin of fear that didn’t go away until they were back onshore.

For a while there, when her dad and Cass were helping Glynnis and John, giving them the ammo or whatever, it looked like they were all screwed for sure. There were just so many of them. It got to the point where Sammi couldn’t bear to look. She turned away from the window and Kalyan put a hand on her shoulder and she went very still until he got the message and went away and then Sage came up and wrapped her arms around Sammi and told her everything that was happening in a soft voice: “They’re paddling upriver…Cass has this one gun where you have to hold it with two hands…damn, she nailed that one…oh shit, there’s-no, she got that one too…”

Sage kept that up until the Beaters retreated and her dad turned the canoe around and only then did Sammi stop shaking and find the courage to look again.

Now she listened to her dad talking and tried to find in his voice the man she most missed. But this was more like the dad he used to be before he moved out. He used to order her mom around, not in an asshole way but in a way like he was just used to being in charge. It wasn’t like her mom put up with it anyway; she always did whatever she wanted. Maybe that was what finally broke them up, they both had “boss” personalities. He used to tell Sammi what to do all the time too, but, back then, she mostly didn’t mind because he liked to spend time with her and they had their own things they did, just the two of them, like watching reality shows together and yelling at the TV, or going out for Gizmos Garlic Fries whenever they got a craving.

“Sure, sure,” he was telling the Patels, one of those rare intact fairy-tale couples from Before who clung all the more firmly to each other in the face of all the dangers around them. “I know you want to take all your family stuff. But you’re really going to have to pare it down. See if you can get it into just this one suitcase here, the one with the wheels, and I’ll be back in a while to see how you’re doing.”

And then he was on to the next group.

Sammi hadn’t seen Cass at all tonight, since she came to get Ruthie. She hadn’t come down to the shore with piles of bags, like almost everyone else on the island. For a second Sammi wondered: the decision she’d made, to tell Mr. Swarmer about her drinking-

All she’d wanted…what had she wanted, anyway? At the time it had seemed pretty clear. Cass was drinking, everyone knew it-well, maybe not everybody, but the other women in the Mothers’ House for sure knew about it because Jasmine had told Roan, and Roan told Kyra, and Kyra told them. In the Mothers’ House they weren’t happy about it, not by a long stretch, and supposedly they’d had a come-to-Jesus meeting where they told Cass if she ever drank while she was watching the kids she was not only out of the babysitting rotation but out of the house too. Somehow they all seemed to believe Cass only drank late at night. But that wasn’t very likely, was it? Addicts were…well, the only ones Sammi knew, maybe they weren’t addicts, technically, meaning by whatever rules or whatever these things were determined, but the girls at school who were stoners and pill poppers and the ones who brought vodka to school in water bottles?-they were for sure doing it during the day, despite Grosbeck Academy’s zero-tolerance policy, and despite those letters they sent home assuring all the parents they had the best record on drug use of any private girls’ school in Central California, which was a blatant lie, but then again that was part of what her parents used to pay Grosbeck twenty-five thousand bucks a year for, was to be lied to and feel good about it. They all wanted to believe it so they wouldn’t have to acknowledge that they were too busy or didn’t care enough to pay attention to their kids themselves.

And that’s what was going on here too, right? The other mothers didn’t want to lose Cass because they needed her to babysit. Jasmine would join in eventually, she was going to have the kid any day now, but she’d been on bed rest for weeks because she was so old and Sun-hi thought she shouldn’t move around much. And after the baby came she’d be too busy to watch all the other kids for a while.

So they didn’t want to lose Cass, so that meant someone else had to be responsible and step up and say something because it was just plain dangerous for her to be left with the kids. Which was why Sammi had gone to Mr. Swarmer.

Only.

If she’d really wanted to punish her, Sammi would have told Dana, not Mr. Swarmer. Underneath his whole “nobody’s in charge here” thing, Dana totally thought he was in charge. He was always ordering people around and pretending he had the council behind him. Or maybe he did, but Sammi would bet he did a lot of behind-the-scenes ass-kissing and favor-trading and threatening to get his way.

And Dana was such a Goody Two-shoes. If he knew about Cass, he’d probably make an example of her, publicly humiliate her, like he did when they found Mitchell Keller stealing the box of cocoa mix off the raider cart. Dana had suggested public stocks. And while the council had voted that down, they had given the thumbs-up to the reparations chair. Mitchell had to sit there for two days, with a sign he’d written saying what he’d done and how he was sorry, and he wasn’t allowed to say anything until the two days were done and then Dana made a big deal about forgiving him in a big speech up on the steps of the community center.

All over a box of cocoa mix. What would they do for something as serious as what Sammi told Mr. Swarmer?

Because she hadn’t exactly said that Cass never drank on the job. She said she didn’t know. Which was true, sort of, but really, Sammi knew Cass would never do anything to endanger a child. Especially Ruthie. No one could say that Cass didn’t love her daughter, and even though Sammi was angrier than ever, if that was possible, about Cass and her dad, she was starting to feel a little guilty-okay, a lot guilty-about telling Mr. Swarmer that she “didn’t know” what time of day Cass drank or who she got it from.