Sophie Littlefield - Horizon

“Sammi, oh my God, Sammi.” Kyra came running up, holding her side, wincing.

“Kyra, what are you doing, you’re not supposed-”

“It’s Jasmine. Sun-hi sent me. It’s bad. The baby won’t come and-”

Sammi exchanged a look with Sage, who was trying to get a struggling Dirk back into his clothes.

“Go ahead, we’ll watch them,” Sage said, her face pale.

“Who does she want?” Sammi asked. “Does she want you to get Zihna?”

Kyra nodded, gulping air.

“Yeah, I just, I can’t catch my breath-”

“I’ll go.”

She ran over to a clump of people sitting on the ground on the stream bank. Zihna was sitting and talking with Cass, slightly apart from the others. Sammi skidded to a stop with her arms wrapped awkwardly around herself.

“Jasmine’s baby won’t come,” she said, out of breath. “Kyra says it’s bad. Sun-hi needs you.”

“Take me there.” Zihna transformed instantly from earth mother to all business, though she held Sammi’s hand as they ran, and Sammi squeezed back. They raced back up the incline to the ugly building, around through the parking lot to the front. One of the side doors of the panel van was open and next to it, on the ground in the shade of the car, was a pallet made of blankets unpacked from someone’s luggage. Jasmine lay on it, naked from the waist down, her legs impossibly pale and still, with blood-soaked towels covering her belly and between her legs.

Sun-hi was holding a baby.

It was the ugliest thing Sammi had ever seen. There had to be something wrong with it-it was purple and wrinkled and dented and covered with slime, a disgusting kinked cord hanging from its belly, its mouth wide with fury and its eyes squinched shut, and it was wailing, the most terrifying hiccupping cries Sammi had ever heard. It didn’t sound like a regular baby, even-it just sucked air and wailed over and over again.

“Dear God,” Zihna said, so it must be bad. When Zihna put a strong hand on Sammi’s shoulder, she stayed put. “Wait here a minute,” she said, and jogged the rest of the way.

She and Sun-hi conferred quietly and Zihna examined the freak baby. They looked down at Jasmine, who was apparently dead, and back at Sammi, who was suddenly cold. Freezing, even, shivering as the wind blew trash up off the asphalt and skittered it along under cars.

“Sammi.” Zihna’s voice was gentler, but still urgent. “This is important. You need to get your dad and Cass. Hurry, okay?”

“Cass? Are you sure?”

“Sammi, it’s obvious she’s an outlier, I’ve known it since I met her. She has all the characteristics.”

“But some people think-”

“They’re just scared. By morning they’ll realize she’s not a threat. But for now, we need her here.”

So Sammi made the trip back, jogging more slowly this time. Her dad and Cass-well, that was just great. Figured that they’d have to work together on whatever came along. In there, in the mall, it had been the two of them that finally got the door unstuck. It was like no matter what happened in their lives, they were thrown together. It had to be the two of them. What did they know about babies? Other than they’d both had one-but then again a lot of the people in New Eden had had kids, once.

Besides, Smoke was here, Smoke was doing fine, he’d made his miraculous recovery, shouldn’t Cass be with him now? He was a hero again after the mall, so why wasn’t she back with him? Why couldn’t she just leave her dad alone?

For a minute Sammi considered disobeying Sun-hi and Zihna and bringing back Smoke instead of her dad. She was pretty sure he could do whatever her dad could. Only, Smoke looked like he was going to pass out, and besides…

Jasmine

Sammi squeezed her eyes shut hard for a moment, nearly tripping on a clod of dirt. She’d seen about a million dead people, some of them way more disgusting than Jasmine, people who were eaten or rotted or burned. Compared to that, Jasmine just looked like she was sleeping, and it wasn’t like Sammi was a little girl or anything, she didn’t need her dad to tell her it was going to be all right, because she’d figured out a long time ago it wouldn’t, so it wasn’t that, but only yesterday she’d seen Jasmine in the morning with her hands on her huge belly, stretching with her eyes closed and this little smile on her face and Sammi had wondered what there was to be so happy about. Jasmine wanted that baby so bad, she’d told Kyra that after she turned forty she figured she’d never get to be a mom, and she had about thirty names picked out, for boys and girls, and she said she’d just know, she’d take one look at her baby and she’d know what its name was meant to be.

So maybe it was a good thing she’d died, maybe it was a good thing she hadn’t seen the disgusting thing she’d given birth to. Sammi reached the others and practically collided with her dad, and to her surprise she was crying so hard she could barely get the words out.

SUN-HI SHOOK HER head when they ran up, and Cass knew that Jasmine had died. But then Zihna lifted the soft blanket and showed them the baby in her arms, and she was beautiful, face bunched and lips puckered, suckling air, her tiny hands in fists and faint pink lines at the bridge of her nose. Angel kisses, they called them, harmless little birthmarks; Ruthie had them too, but they’d faded away over time.

The baby’s head was a little misshapen from the labor. “Unproductive” labor, they called it, when the baby wouldn’t come-just one of many horrible euphemisms for the pain of becoming a mother. Cass had delivered Ruthie in a stark hospital room in the wee hours of the morning, and it had been an unremarkable labor, according to the doctors, but to Cass it had been one miracle after another. She’d suffered plenty-they wouldn’t give her painkillers because she was an addict-but thinking about what Jasmine had suffered before she died, before Sun-hi had taken the baby from her lifeless body, made Cass want to weep.

But this was not the time for weeping.

“We can bury her by the creek,” Dor said. “The soil will be soft there.”

“All right,” Sun-hi said. She sounded exhausted. Cass could only imagine that the disastrous labor had crushed Sun-hi, mentally and physically, as she tried to hold on to Jasmine’s life while the others battled for their own lives inside.

Dor was already wrapping the body. Cass saw his tenderness, his reverence; such a sharp contrast to the man most people thought they knew.

“I think there’s a little bit of evaporated milk in one of the cars,” Zihna said, her brow furrowed with worry. “But not enough. Oh, Cass, what are we going to do, this poor little thing-”

“I have an, an idea,” Cass said, the audacity of it making her stammer.

She told the others. They were all silent for a moment. It was far from ideal.

But nothing was ideal anymore, and after a moment they nodded and she took the baby in her arms-so tiny and precious, memories of holding Ruthie coming back like it had been yesterday-and she and Zihna set out to try.

It was too dark to dig another grave tonight. So while the others carried Jasmine’s body carefully to the shed attached to the building, Cass found an unlocked extended-cab Ford a few rows over and waited there with the baby.

Zihna was back soon with Ingrid, whose flustered, bewildered expression told Cass that she didn’t know. When she saw Cass, her face went stony.

“To what do I owe the pleasure?” she asked sarcastically.

For a moment Cass feared she’d made a terrible mistake. Ingrid with her judgments, Ingrid with her certainty that only she knew what was right, with her righteous condemnation-how could she be the one?