Aftertime. Sophie Littlefield

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      “Sure. Look, Cass—” he glanced at her, eyes flashing in the moonlight “—let’s get this straight, okay, seeing as neither of us knows what’s coming tonight or tomorrow or next week or next month. You can ask me anything you want. If I don’t want to tell you, I won’t. But I don’t see where some sort of notion of, of, I don’t know, propriety or whatever is going to help any of us now. And talking might help.”

      Might help what? Cass wondered—help to pass the time, or keep her mind off the dangers and worries, or make her forget who and what she was and how she’d got that way? But she didn’t ask for clarity. “Deal,” she said.

      “Okay, so … I was an executive coach.”

      “A what?”

      “I helped people figure out what was holding them back in the professional workplace.” Smoke’s voice carried some dark emotion. Regret, maybe. “And then I showed them how to change.”

      “So you basically told other people how to do their jobs? And got paid for it?”

      Smoke laughed bitterly. “I guess that’s one way to sum it up. On paper, my job was to guide people to be more effective in their work through an exploration of their skills and goals and challenges.” He looked away, into the night-black forest. “I was good at it. Too good.”

      “How could you be too good?”

      “I got a lot of my clients because they were struggling at work. They’d been put on performance review and were in danger of losing their jobs. I was like the career consultant of last resort. And looking back on it, a lot of them were probably in trouble for a reason. I should have let things play out the way they were meant to.”

      “You mean, and let them get fired?”

      “Not everyone’s suited for every job,” Smoke said through gritted teeth. “Sometimes people need to fail so they don’t fuck things up for others. Sometimes systems are designed so that people who should fail do fail.”

      Cass was taken aback by his barely controlled anger. She knew she should stop, should leave the subject alone—but for some reason she longed to keep him talking.

      “You went around rescuing their jobs for them. Just like you did at the church, the fire. You’re the rescuer. That can be your new job description.”

      “Don’t make me better than I am, Cass,” Smoke snapped, and Cass knew that she had gone too far.

      She felt herself flame with embarrassment as Smoke stalked ahead of her, his body tense. But after a few moments he waited for her to catch up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—It’s just that I didn’t do anything much, no matter what they told you.”

      “You got people out of the fire.”

      “Nothing that anyone else wouldn’t have done. I was already there, it wasn’t any big deal to bring the others with me.”

      Cass knew he was downplaying the event. She understood the impulse; being talked about got you noticed, and being noticed made you public, and then people expected you to reveal more and more of yourself.

      She could respect Smoke’s desire for privacy. She knew well the need to keep to the shadows. So why did she want so much to know more?

      11

      THE ROAD INTO SILVA WOUND THROUGH MOSTLY unbuilt land, its cracked edges sloping into a rocky outcropping at the edge of the forest. The dead trees could not maintain their grip on the earth where the road carved its path, and their black roots bore clots of earth like hungry tumors. Pinecones from forgotten seasons lay crushed by cars that had long since stopped running.

      They walked in silence.

      Before, this land was shaded no matter what the season, the evergreens thick against the sky. Then the toxins had blanketed the land, and the trees shed their needles and withered in defeat, their xylem choked and strangled, their bark black and peeling. The sun bore down on the ravaged earth during the day; at night, as now, even the moonlight reached all the way to the earth, covering everything with a frisson of silver.

      Here and there a cabin was set back among the few remaining trees, mostly hunting cabins built decades ago, before the Sierras were discovered by city types looking for vacation homes with easier drives than Tahoe. In some, curtains hung neatly in the windows, cheery ruffles and valences hinting at brisk, no-nonsense women with feather dusters and oil soap. In others, the panes were broken, and window boxes hung askew, spilling dirt and dead flowers to the indifferent ground.

      When they rounded a bend and Cass saw the familiar glass shop that shared a parking lot with a fireplace and hot tub store, her pulse quickened. Now she knew exactly where she was. Around the next bend, small frame houses would give way to larger ones. And then the strip mall with the KFC and the Orchard Supply Hardware. Another half mile took you to the city offices, including the old town hall with the basement where Cass had attended hundreds of A.A. meetings.

      A few blocks from that was the library.

      Suddenly Cass wasn’t sure she was ready.

      “You know where you are now,” Smoke said. “You all right?”

      She swallowed hard, staring across the parking lot at the ruined businesses. There were cars in the lot, but their tires had been slashed, their windshields bashed in. It was shocking, the way nearly everything had ended up in ruins during the final weeks of the Siege. Some said America had been lucky: while the country struggled with outages and dwindling resources, Canberra reported they’d run out of potable water and Seoul’s citizens lay sightless and bleeding from their ears in the streets, victims of a last plague attack that no one bothered to claim. And still, across the U.S., citizens raged and rampaged. Brooklyn saw twelve thousand die in the East Water Riots. The senselessness of it amazed Cass—how a car that was of no use to anyone now that fuel was impossible to find was attacked and ravaged until it was a heap of steel and fiberglass, every part of it assaulted and broken.

      But equally surprising was the care people took in other ways, the attention they gave the smallest or most unimportant details, gestures made all the more poignant because of the unlikelihood that anyone would ever appreciate them.

      The glass shop’s windows were gone, the interior open to the elements, and even in the near darkness Cass could see desks overturned, computers lying on the floor. But next door, Groat Fireplace and Spa was shuttered up tight, the blinds drawn in the front door, the patio table and chairs stacked and covered.

      And there was the neat pyramid of smooth stones piled in front of the door.

      No one knew how the stone piles started, but before long everyone knew what they meant: there were dead inside. Bodies that had been left because of panic about contamination, or because they had reached a stage of decomposition that made it hard to move them easily, or simply because there wasn’t time—and now, with the threat of attack weighing heavy on every raiding party, there was never

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