miscarriage as she pretended to be.
Which Sammi kind of got. At least if you had a baby, there would be something to do all day long. And someone to love you back. For you, not for who people wanted you to be. Everyone was so messed up, from everything they’d seen, everything that had happened. A baby wouldn’t be like that—a baby would never have seen cities getting blown up and burned down, whole fields and farms leveled, all the plants dead. And now, with the kaysev and all, a baby would never go hungry.
Of course, there was still the Beaters.
Sage lifted the oversize T-shirt Kyra wore as pajamas, and sure enough, there on her still-mostly-flat stomach was a faint gray line running from her belly button down. And a few black hairs lying flat against her skin.
“Shit,” Sammi said, impressed.
Kyra sighed and shifted in her sleep and Sage pulled the covers back up over her, then snapped off the flashlight. They sat on the floor with their backs to Sage’s bed. Sammi, who saw well in the dark, could make out the shapes of Kyra’s bottle collection on top of the dresser, a few wilted weeds stuck in some of them.
“I saw Dad with Cass tonight,” Sammi said, surprising herself. She hadn’t planned to tell. Sudden tears welled up in her eyes and she pushed them angrily away.
“What do you mean, with?”
“Like, with his tongue down her throat and his hands in her pants. And she wasn’t exactly saying no. They were down on the dock doing it like, like dogs.”
They weren’t exactly doing it, of course, and not like dogs either, but Sammi was pretty sure they’d been headed that way. And she’d bet this wasn’t the first time.
“Oh wow,” Sage said, seeming genuinely shocked. “I never would have thought that.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“I thought she was, like, with—”
“Smoke? Yeah.”
There was a silence, and Sammi figured they were both thinking about Smoke, how messed up he’d been when they first got here, bone showing through his skin, scabs oozing pus, missing a couple of fingers, scars crisscrossing his face and body. For a while Sammi visited him a few times a week, and then she just sort of stopped. She felt guilty about that—guilty as hell, since Smoke had always been there for her and her mom back when they all sheltered at the school. But she couldn’t stand looking at him half-dead, because it reminded her too much of when her mom and Jed and all the others were killed. And none of them even killed by Beaters, but by supposedly good humans.
Smoke didn’t even know she was there, anyway. Sun-hi said he might never come out of his coma. Zihna said his “energy was growing stronger,” but that was just the hippie way she talked all the time.
“So…what about Valerie?” Sage asked.
“What about her?” Sammi snapped, and then regretted it. She had wondered the same thing. Valerie was always trying to get close to her, asking her about her friends, Sage and Kyra and Phillip and Colton and Kalyan and Shane, offering to make snacks for them all, offering to loan her clothes that Sammi wouldn’t be caught dead in. Valerie was nice, in her boring way—but there was no way Sammi needed another mom.
“Well, Cass is kind of…way hotter than her. I mean, you know?”
“Yeah, but—” But it was still her dad. “I mean, it would be one thing if Dad wasn’t on my shit all the time about every little thing I do. His new thing? Now he doesn’t want me going off the island without telling him first. I’m like, I always tell Red or Zihna, and he says that’s not good enough. If he’s off working or whatever I have to wait until he gets back.”
“Sammi…he’s worried about you. I mean, you’re his kid.”
There was a hollowness to Sage’s voice and too late Sammi remembered the thing that made her an asshole with her friends sometimes—that she still had a parent, which was one more than most of the others here.
Sammi said she was sorry like she always did, and Sage said it didn’t matter like she always did, and they smoked for a while and then they lay down, Sage in her bed and Sammi on the floor under borrowed blankets, and after a while Sage fell asleep in the middle of talking about which actor from Before Phillip looked most like, and Sammi lay awake and tried not to think of her dad and Cass and what they were doing and the sounds they were making, and instead imagined sliding across the wooden floor on her knees like the little kids, being seven again with her mom on the sidelines clapping and saying, Go, go, Sammi-bear.
Chapter 6
“I ALREADY KNEW that,” Luddy said, taking back his guitar after Red had showed him exactly how the chord progression went. They had been among the last people in the community center, the party having wound down to the dregs, all the good food gone and most folks having wandered home with a full belly and a pleasant buzz.
The chord progression was a tricky one, and Red remembered with wistful clarity the day he’d learned it himself. He’d been crashing in a guy’s apartment in San Francisco, not too far from the Haight. Red had a little of Luddy in him back then: insecure and ambitious. He didn’t dare let on how much of a rush he got just being that close to where it all started. Hendrix, Joplin, Garcia—back in those days everyone still remembered the greats.
Red used to get up before the rest of the guys and walk over to the park with his guitar and find a bench. He’d stay a couple of hours, dicking around just for the sheer joy of it, going through the set list first for whatever dive Carmy had managed to book them into—and then he’d play his own stuff. Some of the songs were polished, as perfect as he could make them; others were just a few bars here and there, inspirations that came to him in the early hours of the morning while he lay in bed thinking and smoking after a gig.
Back then, people used to try to give him money all the time, and what the hell, Red didn’t discourage it. A “hey, man” for the guys, a wink for the ladies. He got other offers, too, and now and then he’d take one of the girls home, or if he and Carmy were sharing a room, to her place. It never meant anything. It was just part of the journey, and Red back then was always on a journey. It was in his blood, in his bones. The original ramblin’ man, that was him.
Not anymore, though. Red counted every day that he woke up in the same place, Zihna at his side, as a good day. And the kids—the girls who lived with them, the teenage boys who hung around the house—they were a kick. He taught them all guitar, just for fun. On a good day, it was pure magic. On a bad day, well, then it was still pretty good.
His favorite nights were when the girls got bored and came downstairs looking for something to do. Zihna made tea and snacks, and Red got out board games or cards, and they laughed and played until the girls got sleepy. On nights like that, it sometimes seemed like he had all the time in the world. That was an illusion, of course. Red was fifty-nine this year and well aware that he looked a decade older than that. All that hard living was catching up to him.
There was one more thing he needed to do before he was dead. He’d tried and failed more times than he could count on one hand. Still, he was biding his time. Making a move too soon would be even worse than waiting too long. And he had a feeling he’d have only one more chance.
Chapter 7
IN THE MORNING Cass woke before Ruthie. For a while she lay with her daughter tucked in the curve of her body, wrapped in her arms, watching Ruthie’s hair ruffle in the gentle current of her breath, feeling her good sure slow heartbeat and marveling for the hundredth, the thousandth time at the perfection of her eyelids. They were porcelain fair, with a single faint crease and long curved dark lashes, a tiny miracle, evidence of grace she didn’t deserve.
Her head was thickly cottoned, sharp thorns of ache punctuating the fuzz. Her stomach rolled and burned, and she had a powerful dry-lipped thirst and a faint dizziness. She eased herself out of the covers and