Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

Cass forced herself to put the gardens out of her mind as they entered the lobby of an unremarkable single-story building. Inside it smelled of something she could not identify, something fruit-chemical with a faint undertone of decay.

“You two sit there,” Nell said, pointing to a pair of chairs pulled up in front of a plain desk with a three-ring binder and two pens neatly lined up next to it. “And here. For the kid.”

She dragged a third chair from the corner of the room, then sat across the desk from them. Her own chair was improbably luxurious, soft leather upholstery on a swivel base that looked like it had been looted from a law office somewhere. Who knew-it probably had.

Ruthie scrambled up onto her chair. The room was considerably warmer than it was outdoors. Late-afternoon sunlight splayed gold patches on the floor. Cass remembered the solar panels fixed to many of the red-composite roofs on the campus, providing free heat, without any mechanical investment. Before, she had always considered them ugly. Aftertime, there were a lot of “if-only” thinkers who pointed out that the seeds of a more energy-independent society had been there for decades, only to be quashed and obstructed by big-money industry and special interests. California had even been at the forefront, introducing and enforcing the Reid-Kohlm energy acts of the teens-and yet even a year ago the state was only drawing a tenth of its energy from wind and sun and other renewable sources. Every new politician made it their soapbox, until they won.

Cass helped Ruthie off with her parka and hung their coats on the back of the chairs as though they were seated in a restaurant. The moment struck Cass like so many of them did-quaint, pointless in a way; deeply sad in another; loss the faint undercurrent that ran through the simplest interactions that were now acted out, rather than simply done.

“What was this room?” Cass asked.

Nell barely looked up from her notebook. Cass spotted tiny sapphire earrings, a thin chain with a silver heart pendant, a delicate scar at the corner of her mouth, the kind of thing a little bit of concealer would have made quick work of. “It was the development office. They sat in here all day, calling up the rich alumni and asking them for money.”

Cass tried to imagine the room buzzing with activity, desks where people worked and talked and laughed. Perhaps there had been pots of Boston ferns and spider plants. Children’s drawings. Mugs with funny sayings and framed family photos. Paper decorations for the holidays and bakery cakes to celebrate birthdays.

“Did you ever see the campus, you know, Before?”

“I lived in Colima my whole life.” Nell sighed and wrote on a sheet of paper in the binder, her fingers tight around the pen. “My sister used to work in the Engineering school as a departmental assistant. And I had a cousin who went here a while back.”

Finally Nell looked up from the pad, on which she had been writing, and made eye contact. Her eyes were rimmed in red. “’Course, I’m the only one left, now.”

“Look,” Cass said, refusing to let herself think about Nell’s story, about her losses. “I think maybe I can save you some time, maybe even cut your paperwork in half. I was, uh, kind of invited to come here? By Evangeline? I’m an outlier.”

The change in Nell was immediate. She pushed the tears impatiently from her eyes and laid down her pen. When she focused her gaze on Cass it was ice cold.

“And I’m the princess in the Rose Parade.”

“No, really, I-”

“Shut up, just save it, okay? I’m tired of people like you, thinking you can come in here and-I mean, do I look stupid to you? Do I? No one gets invited to come here. You come on your own or they haul you in, one or the other.”

“But we were-”

“I said, shut up. ” Something about the woman’s tone convinced Cass to be silent. She wasn’t going to listen, no matter what Cass said.

And the truth was that if she was in her shoes, Cass wouldn’t either.

A SEARCH-A MORE INVASIVE ONE THAN THE pat-down they’d just received-would offer more convincing proof: the deeper, more pronounced scars on Cass’s back, where the Beaters had torn off strips of her flesh with their teeth.

Even peeling back her sleeves might help her make her case. But her scars were so faint that they could have been anything, the mottling from a long-ago sunburn maybe, or the shadow of recent bruises. They would prove nothing, even though they were reminders of the Beater attack that Cass could barely remember.

“Look…we’re not trying to make any trouble for you.” Cass hesitated, not wanting to risk pushing Nell too far. Next to her, Ruthie looked frightened, sitting on the edge of her seat with her feet far off the floor, fingers curling and uncurling around the armrests. Pick her up, Cass willed Dor, but he didn’t notice the girl’s anxiety…and why should he? Ruthie wasn’t his, no matter how hard they pretended.

“Just ask Evangeline to come see us,” he said evenly.

Nell leaned back in her chair and stared at him. “You want me to just walk away and leave you guys here, alone, while I fetch her? Give you the run of the place? Do you know what happens to me if I lose you before we finish the documentation?”

Cass exchanged a glance with Dor. His expression was impassive; he was playing this all wrong. Nell needed to be in control. She was frightened, too, of the leaders, of her position in the Rebuilders, and her only defense was to be in command of situations like this one. Wielding power where she could. Give her that, Cass figured, and she would be more inclined to help them. “We’re not asking for any special treatment-”

“You got anything valuable, like for collateral? Something to guarantee you’re not going to try to run?”

“Your people took all our stuff outside the wall.”

“I could take your little girl with me, I guess,” Nell said, ignoring Dor’s comment. “That might keep you out of trouble.”

“Don’t,” Cass said, alarmed.

“What’re you, like her new mama or something?” Nell glared at her. “All you convenient little families running around-just add water, right?”

“Do you have children?” Dor asked. Cass could have killed him.

“No. Never. But that doesn’t mean I do my job any different.”

“What did you do, Before?” Cass asked, trying to change the tone of the conversation.

For a moment Nell looked like she was going to answer, and Cass instinctively leaned a little closer. Nell was only a few years older than her, the sort of woman who might have been her friend…if she had friends. It was like at the bath; she felt the stirring of something, a long-buried need for community, for friendship. For a girlfriend.

But then Nell’s eyes narrowed. “That’s probably enough questions for now. Here’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to take all your basic information down. You can lie or tell me the truth. I don’t much care. Hell, you can say you’re Tinkerbell and Captain Hook if you want to. But I’d recommend telling the truth because it just gets harder from here. Smarter people than you have ended up sorry they tried to game the system.”

“I’m not trying to game anything,” Cass protested, but Nell ignored her.

She read a series of questions from her binder, taking notes as she went, and Cass answered them by rote. Her weight, the last time she knew it. Height. Family history for heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, a dozen other things. Sexually transmitted diseases? Abortions? Cass felt her face burn as she answered the questions, her shameful past on display, though in this regard at least she had nothing damning to reveal. Even on days when she couldn’t remember coming home the night before, she remembered to take her pill, and she made guys use condoms, no matter how drunk she was.