Sophie Littlefield - Rebirth

Instead he choked down his own bile and fury and made Ralston tell him where and how to get a car.

And then Dor killed him. A single bullet to the temple.

He’d broken his word, and he felt a faint compunction about it. But lies were going to be the least of his sins tonight.

CASS SANK INTO THE STRAIGHT-BACKED CHAIR where Jimbo had been sitting when she arrived, settling Ruthie into her lap. She cupped Ruthie’s face in her hands, willing them not to tremble, and channeled everything she had into a mother’s lie.

“Everything’s going to be fine, Babygirl,” she murmured and kissed Ruthie’s cool cheeks over and over. “Dor brought you for an adventure, didn’t he? I know you were sleeping, and now it’s time to go to sleep again. We’ll do a magic trick-you’ll fall asleep right here, with me, and when you wake up again…”

Cass stopped herself. She had been about to make a promise to Ruthie that she could not keep: she was about to say that Ruthie would wake up in a nice bed, with Cass, everything snug and warm around them.

But after what had happened…

How could she have been so stupid?

Ruthie yawned and her eyes blinked heavily, and Cass smoothed her hands down her pajama-clad back and tucked Ruthie under her chin, and in seconds her daughter was sleeping again, soothed and unafraid.

Cass stared into the gloom, down the row of cots. At the end, in the silence and dark, was Smoke. There were no sounds, no movement from that direction; in the other direction, around the corner in the anteroom, Cass heard a sharp exhalation and the sounds of retching. Please don’t let it have been Dor, she thought. She needed Dor to live. To prevail. Whatever he’d done, whatever magic he’d summoned to get past the guards at the dorm, at the doors of the Tapp Clinic, past anyone he met along the way-she needed him to keep doing it.

Cass was past the point of wondering how Dor had managed anything. She’d seen him do the impossible too many times before; it was his particular alchemy, procurer of the unimaginable, keeper of the peace in times of anarchy. He was larger than life in his person, taller and broader, with his glowering good looks-he was like the animated heroes in the old video games and the newer holographs.

The vomiting turned to pleading, and Cass turned away from the sounds. Dor could kill Jimbo, he could kill Ralston, and Cass would not care. But that still left the problem of their next move.

If Smoke was dead, Cass could leave him here. She was not sentimental about his body after death; she’d seen enough bodies in enough states of damage and decomposition that she had no romantic illusions about what remained behind. Beaters. The dead. Human tissues were fragile, unlovely things; they grew cold and waxy and then they began to turn to rot and pus and slime. If Smoke was dead, the place inside her where she carried his loss would be scoured and cauterized and she would stumble out of here a broken woman, but she would be able to do what she had said she would do, to follow Dor to the end of his quest, however it turned out.

If Smoke was alive…

She had to know. If Smoke was alive she could not leave him here. She did not know what would happen, how she would care for Ruthie, if she could barter herself for Ruthie’s safety. But for now she only had to know about Smoke.

She cradled Ruthie in her arms, adjusting her shifting and sighing sleeping body to fit in the crook of her arm, and she stole down the corridor in the darkness. How long had it been since Ralston and Jimbo had dragged her to the closet-an hour? Less? More?-long enough for things to happen, for the angel of death to come and take his own.

The puddle of light coming from the closet did not reach this far. Cass used her free hand to feel around like a blind woman as she navigated the last of the cots. Under her hand a figure moaned but it was not Smoke. An empty cot…another…and then a wall.

A wall. Empty cots.

Panic ignited inside Cass-where was he? Where had he gone? She stumbled back to the last cot, felt frantically along its lumpy surface, the sheets and blankets that were still damp and hot. Still holding Ruthie, her back in agony from the strain of crouching down with the extra weight, Cass knelt and began feeling around on the ground.

A few feet away, a movement, a rustling, a faint cough.

Cass crawled toward the sounds, touched something, fabric, patted, a limb, a leg-

“I dreamed you came.”

It was Smoke’s voice. Weak, thin, broken-but it was Smoke. Cass gasped and barely caught herself from falling on him, she could crush him, she could hurt him, she scrambled for his hands, found one and held on.

And then suddenly they were cast in light.

Dor stood above them with a flashlight, his pants covered in blood. On the floor Cass got a good look at Smoke. He’d been trying to crawl down the corridor toward the exit. His head lolled against the floor, his eyelids lowered and quivering, his mouth slack.

Had she imagined his voice? She pressed his cold hand to her face, felt his fingertips brush her eyelashes. Dor’s face grew stony.

“Cass,” he sighed. “At least now I know why you left the room. Is he dead?”

“Not yet,” Cass whispered.

“Stand up,” Dor said. “Can you carry Ruthie?”

Dor bent and gathered up Smoke’s body. It sagged lifelessly as Dor slung him over his shoulders and prepared to carry him back out of the subterranean basement.

“Where are we going?”

“Someplace safe. I had thought it would be just you and Ruthie…but. Well. As soon as you’re safe, I’m going after Sammi.”

“How-where-?”

“I made him tell me.”

“Who?”

“The tall one.”

Ralston.

“I’m…sorry, Dor.” Cass felt her face flood with shame. She hated that he’d found her that way, burned with the memory of not just her near rape but also what she’d done earlier in the evening. Everything she’d done was for Smoke, to save him, but Dor had seen her on her knees with two men standing over her, and she hated that he had seen her defenseless, had seen her with the fight gone out, that he might believe she had given up. Jimbo had seemed to enjoy her fear; he’d only gotten more excited when she resisted-so she’d stopped resisting.

“You have nothing to apologize for.”

She searched his face, his hard-set jaw and flinty eyes, and found compassion there, even stronger than his anger. And she breathed.

“How did you know where to look for me?”

“I talked to the other guy. Back at the dorm.”

“And he just told you?”

Dor scowled. “After a bit. Look, Cass, I didn’t come here to kill innocent people, but anyone who’s made it up to being a guard in the Rebuilders-they’re not exactly innocent. It’s not like in the Box.”

Cass didn’t doubt it. “But how…they took everything from us when we got here. Where did you get a weapon?”

“No, not everything. My shoes…my jacket, I had them made specially. There were places to hide things.”

He slipped a thin, double-sided blade from his pocket. “Japanese ceramic. Harder than steel.”

“But how did that help you get past the guard?”

“It didn’t. I have Joe to thank for that.”

Cass remembered all the times that Smoke disappeared early in the morning to practice with Joe, the obscure martial art involving rigid fist strikes that could break a branch, a plate. “That guard, he trained in the Marines. You can always tell a guy who learned to fight in the Marines-they all train to the same standards. I learned that from Three-High.”

So it had been the Marines. Three-High sometimes talked about the Three Borders War, the last one anyone was left to report back from, when the U.S. won a decisive ground battle over enemies who’d already exacted their revenge in advance with their avian poisons. He was one of the few people Cass had seen Dor spend much time with, besides Smoke. It was a sign of Dor’s determination that he had learned enough in the months since he started the Box to take down a professional fighter.