Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

This lot had not given up, though. They were the ones who survived, who had been tough enough, determined enough, angry enough to keep going, eventually finding their way to New Eden. But as Cass watched Mrs. Kristobal shuffling along with tears leaking silently down her face, as she watched Luddy and Cheddar race along the edge of the crowd on their longboards, taking greater and greater risks, as she glimpsed Dor walking alone, face set in rigid fury, disgraced and powerless-as she took in all of this she knew it was Siege days all over again and she feared for their future.

First they faltered. Then they panicked. And then they began to give up. That was how the cycle went, and Cass knew in her bones they were going to see it all happen again.

When the sun was low in the sky, they had gone a dispiriting ten miles. Mayhew and the other riders stopped in front of a big house set back along a road lined with dead saplings, and the cars pulled off the road and the people followed.

“We’ll go in and clear, but we won’t say no to a couple of you coming along,” Mayhew called out to the crowd, as he jumped to the ground.

“I can take care of the horses.”

Valerie stepped from the crowd. Cass had seen her a few times earlier, walking with Collette’s crowd. At lunch she’d helped serve people, gathering up the cloths and bags in which the cold kaysev cakes had been packed, making sure everyone got some water. Cass had hoped this return to her usual generosity signaled that she was doing better, that she was coming to terms with what had happened between her and Dor, but she meant to keep her distance.

Now she went up to the white horse and stroked its muzzle and patted its muscular neck, speaking quietly to it. She and Mayhew exchanged a few words that Cass couldn’t hear, and then one of the other men helped her tie them to the split-rail fence that lined the drive.

Smoke started to limp toward the men assembling in front of the crowd and Cass ran after him, stopping him with a hand on his arm.

“What are you doing?”

“Going to check out the place.”

“Smoke, don’t be crazy, you’re not strong enough, you can’t-”

Smoke put a hand on her face, forced her to look at him. A couple of days in the sun had restored some of his color, and he looked far better than he had in his sick bed. “I’ll do what I need to to protect my own,” he said coldly. “I’ll thank Dor, later, for taking care of you when I couldn’t. But I’m here now and I’m taking the job back.”

Cass felt the sting of his words, the unspoken anger. Smoke blamed Dor, not her, and that wasn’t right, it wasn’t the whole truth.

When they arrived in New Eden, Dor had been willing to stay away from her. He’d kept his part of the bargain, and for weeks they’d avoided each other, until the day when she begged him to…

Cass felt her face burn with shame, remembering the things she’d begged Dor to do to her, with her, anything to make her forget for a little while, anything to make her feel alive when her path had gone so terribly wrong. All the time she’d told herself she would stop, that she could stop, anytime she wanted. But just the memory of him, two nights ago or the time before that or any of the times, just the flash of memory was enough to make her breath catch in her throat.

And she knew now that she couldn’t have stopped. He was her addiction, her vice, her crutch, and just as she waited for that first burning swallow of kaysev wine each night, so she waited for his touch, thinking about it even while she worked the fields or waited for sleep to come, or endured the judgment of the other women.

Cass realized that Smoke was waiting for her to say something, to respond to his declaration. “I still can’t believe you’re here,” she said, a poor substitute for what he wanted to hear, and pressed her face against his chest so he wouldn’t see the turmoil in her eyes.

For a moment they held each other, and then Cass finally pushed him away, not having the right words to make a promise that she wasn’t sure she could keep.

“Go,” she muttered, and it was a condemnation as much as an entreaty.

TILDY CARMICHAEL JOKED that the house looked a little like her old pool house in Sacramento, but her eyes were red from crying. Her best friends-Collette and Karen and June-were all missing and presumed dead back on the island, blown up in the community-center explosion. Rumors flew about the blast: someone had been careless while packing the explosives for travel; it had been a suicide bombing by Milt or Jack, who had finally been missed enough for people to really begin to speculate upon; it had been a mercy strike meant only for the quarantine house but had somehow jumped to the community center in a secondary explosion. The dead had been counted and then not spoken of again, as though the Edenites feared that the mere mention of their names would bring more bad luck.

The house was enormous, constructed a couple of decades ago when relatively cheap land was enough to entice people to build the houses they could never afford in a city, maybe grow a few grapes or keep some cattle and retire a twenty-first-century DIY gentleman farmer. A for-sale sign still stood, barely, in the yard, rusting. One of hundreds they’d seen so far, sad reminders of the waves of financial crashes that came even before the Siege.

Whoever had built this house had gone in for details that might have looked a little more at home in Tildy’s old neighborhood than in the dusty central valley. The arched windows and columns and faux shutters had not stood the test of time well, cheap construction that was easily defeated by the rigors of Aftertime. The stucco walls had been crushed in places; window glass lay in shards on the ground; and most unsettling, someone had dragged a couple of roomfuls of furniture out into what had been a rose garden. The brocade sofas and chairs were overturned and mildewed, a home to rodents. Some were stained a suspicious red-brown that might have been blood baked by the sun.

Still, there was an empty five-car garage that would make perfect shelter for passing the night. People wandered the rest of the house while there was still daylight, the dormant habit of browsing closets and master baths mindlessly awakened. Open houses used to be one of Mim’s favorite pastimes; she’d pretend that she and Byrn were “looking for a little more space” and poke around the most extravagant listings in Silva, running her fingers along granite countertops and custom draperies and five-inch moldings with all the other looky-loos. The few times Cass went along as a teenager, she looked for clues to the people who lived there, reading the titles on the spines of books, checking out framed photographs and the grocery lists people left on their fridges. She was desperately trying to figure out how other people managed to live.

She suspected that the others, exhausted from fear and the journey, were doing something similar, looking for stories that reminded them of another time. Looking for echoes of their own lost lives in the remains of the American dream.

The house had already been picked bare by raiders and vandalized, mirrors smashed and the remains of unidentifiable food and cleaning products strewn across the floors. There was an abandoned Beater nest in the formal living room, a pile of rags whose stench drove them to close the French doors. Still, if you didn’t look too closely, if you let your imagination fill in the holes, you could imagine the holiday dinners that had taken place in the dining room, the kids who might have lived in the rooms upstairs with their wallpaper borders of ballerinas and airplanes.

Cass took the kids to the backyard with Ingrid and Suzanne. A play structure stood more or less intact, and Cass pushed the little ones by turns in the bucket swing, trying to come up with the right words to talk to the others, who sat at a picnic table chatting quietly.