Rebirth. Sophie Littlefield

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СКАЧАТЬ the errant impulse came, she had no idea. Something visceral and instinctive, nothing more than a sensory trigger. She stepped back, trying to get away from the marked air.

      She had come for Smoke. She had come to ask Dor to change Smoke’s mind.

      But Dor pulled her closer, his fingers closing tight around her arm. “There are things you need to know. Things are going to get worse before they get better—if they ever get better, which seems unlikely.”

      “I know,” Cass whispered fiercely. “I’ve seen what’s left of the stores. I see what the travelers bring. I know that all the easy raids are long gone. And…”

      She didn’t say the last: that there were fewer travelers and more Beaters all the time. People blamed it on all kinds of things: people were waiting out winter before they ventured out; or they had heard that the Convent had locked down; or they were afraid of Rebuilder parties; or they had gone in the other direction, to the bigger cities. The blueleaf, which had appeared to be on the wane, had merely been hibernating, and those not trained to look for the subtly shaded leaves could too easily mistake it for its benign cousin.

      The words slipped out before she could stop herself: “How could you let Smoke go out into that?”

      Dor shocked her by laughing, a short, bitter sound. “Woman, do you think I control what your man does? You think I control what any man does? Far as I know, it’s still free will around here.”

      Cass recoiled, wrenching her arm free. “He does what you ask him.”

      “I never asked him to go after anyone. And definitely not that crew. I’m not in the vengeance business, sister. Only business I’m in is my own.”

      “But you could ask him to stay—”

      “It’s not my place.” Just like that the laughter was gone, his expression stony. “Not my place, or anyone else’s. He’s a grown man who set his way, and paid his accounts through already.”

      “You could—influence him. That’s all I’m asking.”

      “No,” he said emphatically. “You think that’s what you want, Cass, but you don’t. Not really. You start trying to change someone, you lose them. Smoke’s doing what he has to do. What he needs to do. You get in the way of that, he’ll just resent you, until the day it builds up in him so strong he goes anyway and with a bitter taste in his mouth. He’ll blame you. You don’t need that.”

      Cass forced herself to breathe, blinked away the threat of tears. “Ruthie needs him,” she whispered. “I need him.”

      “No.” Dor shook his head. “You don’t. You’ve come this far without him. Survived things no one else survived. Done things most people would say are impossible.”

      His gaze flicked across her face, lingering on her eyes, which she knew were different since she’d survived the fever—brighter, greener. Smoke wouldn’t have told him her terrible secret, that she’d been attacked and lived—would he? Dor’s tone was almost admiring, which gave her pause. The man had never had any use for her…had he? From the moment they met there had been wariness between them, distrust and dislike.

      “You don’t need him,” Dor repeated. “And believing you do is giving your strength away. I don’t have to tell you that between your girl and yourself, you don’t have any extra to spare.”

      He hesitated, then reached for her hand. He squeezed it once, roughly, then slid his hand up her arm to let it rest on her shoulder. The gesture was awkward—she could sense that Dor meant it to be a comfort. But it was not. It was something both more and less, something needful, and he must have felt it too because he jerked his hand away as though the touch burned him.

      “Stay in the Box,” he muttered, turning away. “Don’t worry about trade. Everything’s covered. In the spring when your garden comes up you’ll be producing enough to share. I’ll set it all up. I’ll make sure you have what you need.”

      “You’re leaving, too,” Cass said, realization dawning on her. “You’re going to Colima. You’re going to look for Sammi.”

      Of course—she should have known it from the moment Smoke told her what happened at the library. Cass herself had risked everything to find Ruthie, so why did the notion of Dor doing the same for his daughter fill her with such bleak hopelessness? And when Dor nodded, jaw set hard, it seemed as though the air got even colder.

      “You won’t be alone. Cass, I’ll tell Faye. I’ll tell Charles. They’ll look after you. I’ll send word if I can, and so will Smoke. We’ll both be back…you need to have more faith in him. He beat them once already—there’s no reason he can’t do it again. He’s well armed and well trained.”

      “Your training,” Cass said bitterly. “Your guns.”

      As if that made Dor responsible.

      A disproportionate number of the citizens who’d survived this long had done so because they had a strong desire for self-preservation along with the skills to back it up. Skills that came from time spent in law enforcement, or in the service or jail or a gang. Dor’s forces were all ex-something—ex-cop, ex-Marine, ex-Norteño…all except for Smoke.

      Smoke had told Cass only that he’d been an executive coach Before, and didn’t elaborate in the months they’d been together, always deflecting her questions, turning the conversation elsewhere. Cass hadn’t pushed; she wasn’t ready to tell him everything about her own past, so she hardly felt entitled to demand the same from him.

      Smoke’s background may have been inauspicious for survival, much less commanding Box security, but he had some penchant for enduring—plus the legend of the rock slide, which was enough to earn the respect of the others. He’d been a decent shot before joining their ranks; now he was excellent. He’d been fit; now he was hard-muscled and lean. When Smoke slipped out of the tent before dawn to shoot at cans or practice strikes with Joe or put his body through ever-harder workouts, Cass tried to tell herself, He is doing this for us, for our little family, and ignore the fact that he was turning from someone she hadn’t known long into someone she didn’t know well.

      “Look, Cass.” Dor looked as though he was going to reach for her again and Cass shrank away from him. “He asked me not to say anything. He’s leaving tonight. He’s… He didn’t want to have to say goodbye.”

      Cass made a sound in her throat. Smoke wouldn’t do that, wouldn’t leave without telling her—would he? Smoke, who’d grown more silent with every passing week, whose mind drifted a thousand miles away. Who reached for her less and less often in the night.

      “He didn’t want to hurt you more than he had to. I don’t—if he…he just didn’t want to hurt you.”

      “Well, it’s a little late for that, isn’t it? He knew damn well he was hurting me—us—he just wasn’t brave enough to stick around and watch.”

      She didn’t bother to mask her bitterness, biting her lip hard to keep her angry tears from spilling. She expected Dor to turn away from her, that having tried to mollify her, he would consider his duty done and return his attentions to his own problems, his own imminent journey.

      But Dor did not look away, and Cass, whose despair made her want to hit and kick and scream, forced herself instead to think of Ruthie. She thought of her baby and took deep breaths and dug her fingers СКАЧАТЬ