Horizon

“There’s enough for everyone,” Cass repeated. “You don’t have to keep them all yourself.”

“She bit me,” Dane repeated stubbornly. “Biting is not okay.”

And it wasn’t, of course; biting was one of the things that could get a kid thrown out of child care, Before. That and not being current on vaccinations. Or a failure to potty train. All offenses that seemed ridiculously irrelevant now.

“Biting is not okay, but neither is not sharing,” Cass said through gritted teeth. What she really wanted to do was seize all the plastic coins and put them in a box and put the box up on the counter where none of the kids could reach it, and keep taking things away from them every time they fussed, until they had nothing, nothing, and maybe that would keep them quiet, just long enough for her to get her strength back, just long enough to think.

“Maybe Ruthie’s got the fever,” Dane said, watching her closely, a mean little smile at the corner of his mouth.

Cass froze. She ground her fingernails into the palms of her hands, forcing herself not to react. “Don’t you ever say that,” she finally whispered, her own voice sounding strange to herself, stripped bare and dragged over coals.

There must have been something in her tone or expression that finally got through to Dane, because the smirk left his face and his lower lip wobbled and he looked down at the carpet.

“Don’t you ever say anything like that, Dane,” she repeated. Because if an adult could accuse, who was to say that a child couldn’t, as well? She was nearly positive that Phillip had the fever, but if more cases popped up, there was sure to be hysteria, finger-pointing, blame. There were people in New Eden—the weak ones, the easily swayed and those with a tenuous grip on reality—who might latch onto an accusation, even a groundless one, even one that came from a child. “None of us have the fever. We are careful. We are healthy.”

Before long she managed to distract the boy with a stub of crayon and pages torn from a microwave manual. The densely printed instructions were in English, Spanish, Japanese, but there was plenty of white space, which Dane and the other kids set to filling in with colorful scribbles at the kitchen table while Cass made preparations for lunch.

Long ago, Cass had practiced affirmations, little phrases from a book someone had given her at A.A. Live life on life’s terms. Faith chases away fear. Some days they seemed utterly worthless, sentimental drivel, mindless pleasantries. And some days they worked, a little.

I can do this I can do this I can do this, Cass repeated soundlessly to herself, turning away from the children and forming the words on trembling lips. It wasn’t much of a mantra. It lacked imagination and substance.

Worst of all, Cass seriously doubted whether it was true.

But she did. She got through lunch, settling only one disagreement over who got the last of the cookies. She managed to eat a few herbed kaysev crackers and the crusts of Ruthie’s sandwich, and after cleaning up the kitchen she got all the children to lie down for a nap, even Dane, who was not much of a sleeper these days. When she was sure they were all out, she lay down between Ruthie and Dirk, thinking she would just close her eyes for a moment, perhaps catch fifteen minutes’ rest before one of the children woke her up.

But images of the morning’s discovery kept her awake. Bubbles had risen to the surface of the water after the Beater went under. Was it possible that she had imagined the other—the sudden paddling of its hands?

The sound of the front door opening yanked Cass out of her thoughts. She scrambled to her feet and smoothed her clothes. There was already enough trouble between her and the other moms without them thinking she wasn’t doing her part with the children. She picked up the closest book—one of the historical romances Suzanne liked—and put her finger between the pages so it would look like she’d been reading, and sat in the recliner.

Ingrid came into the room, followed by Jay Swarmer, who headed up the security rotation, guarding the bridge and dragging away dead Beaters from the shore. His presence here, in the middle of the day, caused an uneasy cramp in Cass’s stomach. As for Ingrid, her onetime friend’s lips were set in a thin line and twin red spots stood out on her cheeks, and she refused to meet Cass’s gaze.

“What’s going on?” Cass said quietly. Getting no answer other than grim looks, she set the book down on the coffee table. “Let’s talk in the kitchen so we don’t wake the kids.”

“I’ll stay with them,” Ingrid said primly. She settled herself cross-legged on the floor, the long wool skirt she wore draped over her muddy boots.

Cass followed Jay wordlessly into the kitchen, wondering if she should offer him some of the cold tea left over from the morning. They’d all grown accustomed to drinking it cold; though the cooks kept a fire going through most of the day, the hearth was usually in service for one task or another, everything from slow-cooking rabbits on a spit, to baking flat breads, to boiling river water to purify it. There was no time for heating tea or leftovers, barely even for warming one’s hands over the flames.

But Jay spoke before she had a chance. “This is a hell of a thing, Cass.”

She was surprised at the approbation in his voice. He leaned back against the counter, his jeans slung low under a gut that had been slowly disappearing ever since Cass had known him. No matter how much kaysev a person ate, it wasn’t enough to make or keep them fat. Even Fat Mike was lean these days, though the nickname stuck.

“What do you mean?”

Jay winced, closing his eyes for a moment as if the conversation pained him. “Sammi’s been to see me.”

Cass set a hand on the back of a kitchen chair to support herself as she absorbed this fresh bad news. Sammi had told. Despite Cass’s deep anguish over hurting Dor’s daughter, she had never considered that Sammi would want revenge against her. But of course, Cass would be much easier to hurt than her father. Their affair didn’t go against any of New Eden’s covenants, and there were those who might even admire him for keeping a couple of women in play…but Cass had trouble fitting into New Eden from the start and this would only make people that much more reluctant to befriend her—

“She told us all about it. How she’d had her suspicions, about how people were talking.”

Somehow the knowledge that Sammi suspected the affair troubled Cass even more. Would that have been enough—would knowing that they were hurting her have been enough to make them stop? Cass hoped the answer was yes, but there would be no way to know now.

“Look, I know we messed up. But I never meant to, to hurt anyone. We just, it was private, it—”

“‘We’?” Jay’s gray eyebrows, thick and untrimmed, knitted together in consternation. “Who’s we?”

They stared at each other for several seconds, Cass spinning possible scenarios wildly through her mind.

“I am talking about your drinking, Cass. If there’s other folks—I mean, the issue’s judgment, if there’s partying going on, people who need to keep their wits about them to do their job, when it affects all of us—look, we’re not trying to go on a witch hunt here.” Jay wiped a callused hand across his forehead. “The only reason it was agreed we needed to do something was, first of all, the mistake that’s got a boy down in the quarantine house. If your little problem made you careless, then hell yeah, I think it’s community business, and at the very least we need to think about taking you off the harvest detail. But as Ingrid pointed out, and I’ve got to say I agree with her, leaving you in charge of the kids when you’re high as a kite ain’t much better. I mean, I know I won’t have an argument from you when I say they’re our most precious resource, right? These little ones?”

Throughout his speech, Cass was trying to keep up, trying to assimilate what Jay was saying. Why hadn’t Sammi said anything about what she’d seen on the dock? But the answer hit her with blinding clarity: because it wasn’t enough to hurt her, not in a big enough way. By revealing her drinking, the girl could hit her on every level that mattered—calling into question her commitment, her competence, even the wisdom of letting her have a role in the children’s lives.

Of course, there was one secret Sammi still hadn’t shared. If she ever told the others that Cass had been attacked and infected, that would be a sure way to stir up so much trouble that Cass could get thrown out of New Eden. Cass wasn’t the only Beater victim ever to recover, but no one in New Eden had seen such a survivor before. And with tensions running high, there was no guarantee they’d listen when Cass offered up frantic, self-serving explanations that she was no threat to anyone.... Nor was Ruthie....

“But I love the children,” she mumbled, on the verge of tears. “You can’t think that I don’t.”

“Aw, hell,” Jay said, his shoulders slumping forward, and she realized that he had been hoping he was wrong. He was a good man, a family man with no family anymore, an associate dean at Sacramento State with no one to ride herd on. And he had the broken capillaries and red nose that signaled that he too had once known his way around a bottle. “I hate this, Cass. Lord knows I don’t have any beef with you. But there’s too much at stake. I’m here to ask you to resign. From child care and picking both. You can stay on gardening—I don’t think you’ll get any argument for that, everyone knows you’re the best with the growing. And that’s enough for anyone—Hell, there’s lots of folks that don’t get a fraction of that done. We got Ingrid, we got Suzanne, we got Jasmine ready to pop, maybe we can get another of the gals to pitch in with the little ones. Valerie, maybe, she’d be good.”

His words cut deep. She understood why he said it—Valerie would have been a great mother; her patience, her soothing voice, they were perfect.

“Maybe,” she said bleakly, but it was a lie because the day that Valerie was responsible for Ruthie’s care would be the day Cass had failed utterly. Her daughter had been taken from her twice before, when other people decided Cass wasn’t a fit mother. She couldn’t let it happen again. “Or I don’t know…maybe I could take Ruthie in the field with me when I work. Let me think, okay? Just give me a day to think about it.”

Jay sighed and folded his hands over his gut. You could see in the gesture the shadow of what he had once been, a paunchy, proud, cheerful man. “That’s fine. I don’t want to take this up with the council in any official way, you know what I mean? That wouldn’t serve anybody. Just, hey, Ingrid’s a little sore with you right now.” He hooked a thumb in the direction of the living room. “Let’s let her finish out the day with the kids, maybe you go for a walk, talk to a friend, whatever you feel like. An afternoon off. Looks like the weather’s breaking, maybe we’ll get a little more sun, everything’ll look different by tonight.”