Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

“Smoke will be back, you know,” Dor said suddenly, as though reading her mind. “When he told you he’d be back, he meant it. The only thing that will stop him is if he gets killed.”

“I know that. But what are the odds? It’s just him against everyone, every Rebuilder out there from here down to Colima. It’s hundreds of square miles. They’re all going to be looking for him, and by the time he finds those guys they’ll probably have gotten themselves killed some other way. But there will be more to take their place.”

“Cass. You don’t understand. I have more…information than you realize. People inside the Rebuilders who talk, for a price. About where they go. Their routes, their plans. Smoke knows all of this, and he’ll be able to find the ones he’s looking for. They’re not just raiding randomly, you know.”

“So, great, so he’ll find the guys who set the school on fire-he’s still outgunned.”

“Not necessarily, Cass. He’s got the best weapons I could give him, enough ammo to do this ten times over and the element of surprise. Things go well, he’ll take ’em out clean, get home before we do. Look, I don’t take sides, but on this one I’m with Smoke and I’ve done everything I can to get him back safe.”

“And you think you can trust your spies? What’s to prevent them from turning around and double-crossing him? For all you know they’re just waiting for him-”

“ Yeah, Cass, there’s a risk.” Dor, usually unprovokable, cut her off angrily. “But you ought to know by now that I pay well.”

“Fanatics don’t care about-”

“These aren’t fanatics. Just opportunists. Like me. People who recognize that there’s not really much difference between the people on the outside of the gate and inside.”

“ Not much difference? I can’t believe you’re saying that-not after they took your daughter. Killed the mother of your child and a lot of other innocent people.”

“I hate what they did,” Dor said, “and I’m going to get Sammi back, no matter what I have to do. I’m not going to sit here and pretend to be a pacifist. Or an idealist, for that matter. I’ll kill them if need be. I’m not naïve enough to think that there’s going to be peace in this new society or new world or whatever the fuck we have now.”

“It’s not idealism to- I mean there’s right and there’s wrong and-”

Cass was so caught up in the argument that when Dor’s hand settled lightly on her shoulder she jumped. Then she was embarrassed, and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened, but she was sitting on a cramped sofa in a house that had never been hers, with a man who was not her lover, talking about the violence that they might have to commit. She felt like she might cry, and hated that most of all.

“There’s not enough to go around anymore, Cass,” Dor said, his voice gentler. “That’s the bottom line. One way or another, the population’s going to come down to what the earth can support.”

“That’s not true,” Cass protested-even though she suspected it was. “Three-quarters of the people in California are already gone, dead. With kaysev there’s enough food for everyone who’s left. If people would cooperate-share skills, share the rest of the resources-there would be enough for everyone. It’s just when people start trying to profit from other people’s misfortune that it all goes wrong.”

“Is that meant to be a dig against me? Because I run a business? Let me tell you, Cass, if I wasn’t bustin’ my ass to coordinate supply with need, things would be a hell of a lot worse for everyone than they already are.”

Cass started to argue and then she stopped herself. Because he was right, at least a little.

Most of her anger, Cass knew, was not at Dor, even though it was easy to blame him. Much easier than admitting that much of her rage had nowhere at all to settle, that it was years’ worth of stored anger at people who were long gone, at herself, at circumstances that had been forced on her, at-messes she’d made and hadn’t had the strength to clean up. She’d earned this fury every time Byrn let his eyes linger on her body, every time his furtive hands found her in the dark; she’d stoked it with each man to pass through her doors and back out again; cherished and honed it when Ruthie had been ripped from her, when every scar was laid open at once.

This was a dangerous road to take, and one she had found was drawing her more and more in recent weeks. Until now, until the library burned and Smoke left her, things had started to feel settled. She had started to believe she might be able to have the family she’d never dreamed she could have.

It was everything she ever wanted, so why did she feel so restless? The old A.A. answers were there, right outside her consciousness, asking to be let in-but she didn’t want to try, didn’t want to do the hard work of living with her discomfort and feeling her feelings and all of those words that were just words. Maybe, if the whole world hadn’t gone to shit, if she had time to herself to do anything beyond the daily struggle of just living, if there was even the luxury of a single A.A. meeting to go to-maybe then, she could try to work through the bewildering maze of her own head. But in the Box, there were plenty of addicts but very few people who had any desire to do anything about it; it was hardly the place for practicing the twelve steps.

Still, she was sober . She hadn’t had a drink in almost a year. Wasn’t that enough? Why didn’t that calm some of the anger?

She fell silent and Dor didn’t seem to mind one way or another. He gave her shoulder a final squeeze, and folded his arms across his chest. His legs were extended out in front of him and he crossed his ankles at his feet and settled himself lower in the sofa. He looked like he ought to be sitting in front of a fireplace, or a football game on TV.

He didn’t have the itch. Cass had pretended she’d obliterated the itch the first time she was sober, but that had been a hard lesson…pretending it away just weakened the dam and made room for the tiny rents that allowed it to make its insidious slow way back in. The itch was sneaky; it gained strength from the most unlikely sources. Self-doubt was manna. Shame was its lifeblood.

And there was the stupid part, the part Cass hated more than anything-the part that she would tell God, if there was a God, was a flaw in His design, unfair, counterintuitive, doomed: the genetic part. She still didn’t want to believe it was true, that she, her body, her family history might have been selected in the genetic lottery to betray herself. Some people just weren’t addicts, didn’t have the potential, couldn’t become one if they tried. Cass had learned to identify them only by learning to identify who they weren’t. She could spot an addict from across a room or a bus or a party, and gradually she figured out who didn’t have the itch.

Like Dor.

Cass sighed. This, of all the pointless places for her thoughts to go right now, was probably just about the most pointless. But there were ways to deal with that.

Of the many insipid-sounding A.A. catchphrases and acronyms, one of the most cloying had to be HALT-Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. If you were any of these, it was a signal to stop, take yourself out of circulation, get what you needed, treat yourself gently, rest. Come back strong.

And Aftertime, there couldn’t be a bigger joke. Hungry? The bioterrorists had pretty much set the stage for that, and while kaysev kept you alive, it never, ever completely satisfied you. Angry? Fucking kidding me? Lonely…well, Cass could teach a graduate seminar on lonely, on all its shades and flavors. And tired: everyone was tired, all the time. Deep, dreamless sleep had gone the way of hot showers and electric toothbrushes.