Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

Cass nodded, giving him a slow, smug smile.

“C’mere.”

She hesitated for a moment and then approached him. The heavy coat tugged the fabric of the nightgown even lower.

He pulled a small penlight from his pocket and shined it on her face.

“What’s your name?”

“Cassandra.”

He played the light over her hair, her face, down her neck, then let it linger on her breasts. “Well, Cassandra . You got some way of proving that?”

Cass stared him directly in the eye and ran her tongue slowly along her lower lip, letting it linger in the corner.

There was an art to the pause; Cass had not always been a master. You had to wait longer than you thought you should, longer than was credible. So long you were sure they would find you ridiculous. But they never did, not when you let your eyelids drift down and breathed a little deeper, lips parted as though in anticipation. As though you could taste their gaze, as though you wanted more.

When it had been long enough, when his eyes had widened so fractionally she almost missed it, she spoke again, husky and low. “I might.”

“Hell, I probably got something,” the balding man said. “Back in my-”

“I’ll take her,” the red-haired man interrupted. “I could use a walk anyway. About to die of boredom, stuck here with the likes of you all night.”

“Ah, suck it, Ralston. What, you’re going to just take off? What if there’s a code?”

Ralston shrugged. “I can answer it from Tapp as easy as I can from here, can’t I?”

“That what you’re gonna tell Chen? That you figured-”

“Chen’s not interested in how I spend my time,” Ralston snapped. His voice had gone hard. For a moment there was silence between the two men, and then the guard with the mustache nodded once and fixed his gaze on the abandoned game pieces.

The koru. The hierarchy. The Rebuilders relied on a rigid structure and that meant those below had little to say about the doings of those above.

Ralston gave her a fake little bow. “After you. Cassandra.”

He took her not out the front entrance but down a corridor to a side door, which was fitted with the same sort of lowtech hardware that the Rebuilders had used to replace all the electronic locks. When he took his key chain from his belt, Cass caught a glimpse of a gun and her heartbeat quickened.

All she was hoping for tonight was to get close to Smoke, to see for herself if he was dead-or whether he had a chance.

Would she be able to tell? Would it be obvious? Cass thought it probably would-everyone had become connoisseurs of death since the Siege. At first it was just the fever; one learned that when the sheen evaporated and the flush deepened, when the skin went from rosy to grayish-crimson, that the coughing was close behind and the final hours of demented mumbling were imminent.

Later, when the streets were empty except for Beaters, when there were no hospitals and doctors had no tools or medications to practice with, they learned about other kinds of death. In the library, Cass had watched a man die in anguish from a burst appendix; his writhing grew so terrible that Bobby had finally put the man over his strong shoulders and taken him outside the gates; when he returned alone no one asked questions. Later a pregnant woman arrived, carried by two men; her labor had begun in the house where they’d been squatting, and when she failed to deliver in the first twenty-four hours they brought her to the shelter; she was almost unconscious when she arrived; the men’s coats were slick with her blood, and she died after only a few weak cries, sodden with more blood than Cass had ever seen, even after all this time.

During the riots people were trampled and beaten, and Cass saw blood on the streets whenever she went out. A human body, crushed and dragged, could leave a stain far greater than you’d ever imagine. Was that what had happened to Smoke? Had his blood been spread across the cracked concrete of a road, or the dried thatch of kaysev in a field?

Her need to see him spurred her along and she followed Ralston outside into the cold air. He wrapped an arm around her before they’d gone three steps, and she caught the odor of his breath, stale and faintly tinged with chewing tobacco.

“You must be cold.”

Cass laughed. “Not really, not now.”

“What are you really after? I can get you some pop bottle crank. Maybe hollies. I can’t get you into the medical supplies, though, honey, not even with this.” He held up his wrist; even in the moonlight, augmented by the occasional spotlight at the entrances to campus buildings, she could make out the black smudge.

“I’m not…that’s not what I want,” she said.

“Yeah? Don’t tell me you really do have a headache, darlin’, cause that’s gonna cut into our fun.” He laughed at his own attempt at humor. “That’s what you had in mind, right? A little fun? Listen, I can get us into a party, a few people I know. Real discreet. They know how to-”

“I need to get in the basement of the Tapp Clinic,” Cass interrupted, slipping her hand into his waistband. “Where the prisoners are. I need to see one of them. That’s what I really want. I’m willing to…show my appreciation.”

“Hold on a minute.” Ralston stopped, gripped her arm hard above the elbow. They were behind the building, in between a couple of aluminum storage sheds sided by sharp-branched dead bushes. Above, the moon emerged from blowing wisps of clouds and glinted off his hungry eyes. “Are you out of your fucking mind? If there’s a detail summons while we’re over there, how’m I gonna know? I can’t miss again-”

“Your friend can come get you,” Cass said silkily. “He could be there in two minutes. He’ll do it, if you tell him to. Nothing’s going to happen in two minutes.”

“But the basement’s guarded.”

“Where we just were is guarded.” Cass knew she needed to play this just right, and she made her voice go lower. This was the trick-blow out most of your breath, speak on the dregs. A whisper with a promise. “Look, I just need to see my friend for a minute. Nothing illegal, I promise. Just to make sure it’s really him in there, okay? You can make that happen for me, right?”

“Not unless I cash in every chip I’ve got. Do you know how many-”

Cass stepped in closer and reached down, her fingers finding him and squeezing before he knew what was happening. A vulnerability they never thought of until too late.

He was hard already, harder instantly beneath her hand. Good. She traced a fingernail along the taut fabric of his pants, and leaned in to whisper in his ear. She darted her tongue out as she spoke so that it just brushed lightly against the inside of his ear, and he moaned before she got the first three words out. “I know what I’m doing.”

He seized her hips and ground against her, backing her up against the shed. The metal was shockingly cold even through her coat.

“Show me.”

“I can do things you’ll remember,” she said, for the moment letting him crouch and buck against her. Distaste eddied in her mind, but she focused on Smoke, on the reason she was here, and made herself go outside herself, let herself drift up until she was outside of her body, looking down. From that vantage point, somewhere in the thin winter night, drifting above the unlovely blocky sheds, the dead landscaping, she saw Ralston hump and heave, and considered something that she hadn’t thought about in a long time:

Sex was ridiculous, nothing more than homely rutting. The expression of the basest of instincts, twitching and spasming, hormones unleashed and sloshing through the body’s systems. A cock, a cunt-God’s joke, a jigsaw puzzle simple enough that even the dumbest beasts could figure it out. The lengths that people went to to organize and ornament it… Every species, the males mounting and holding fast with claws and paws and flippers and, when those failed, with teeth-blood and pain and yowling and violence were just part of the process. The system was gamed against the females, who fought and cried out as they were fucked and impregnated and then left to stagger off to dens and warrens and shitty apartments, bruised and savaged, reminded of the terrible imbalance of nature’s arrangement.