After (71 page)

“It must mean a lot to him, your friendship.”

For some reason, John saying that made Nix feel ashamed. She'd tried so hard, so many times, to push Gareth away.

“I'm scared he won't stay,” John whispered. He looked so sad. So afraid. “That it'll be too hard for him, all these strangers trying to suddenly be his family. I'm scared I'll wake up in the morning, and he'll just be gone. But it'll be easier, if that happens, knowing you're with him. That he's not alone.”

Nix tried to smile, tried to nod.

“But I do hope he'll stay. At least for a while. I know you're his friend, not mine.

But I hope, I mean please, please don't let him go before we've had a chance to get to know each other.”

When she got back to their room, Gareth was still in the shower. The notebooks stacked at the end of the dresser were tempting. But they were Gareth's treasure, not hers. Nix stripped out of her gear and got into bed. Behind the bathroom door, she heard the squeak of a valve, the sudden silencing of the humming pipes, the drip and plop of the last few dribbles of water. A minute later, Gareth emerged in a cloud of steam, wearing a t-shirt and pants.

Looking at her, he smiled. “Alright if I come to bed?”

“You're not going to look at the journals?”

“Not tonight. I'm tired. And I don't want to rush through this. Meeting two fathers is enough for tonight. I'll meet her tomorrow.”

“Then come to bed.”

Looking uncertain, Gareth stripped off his pants and came toward the bed.

“Take that off, too,” she said, waving an index finger at his tee.

He pulled the shirt over his head and tossed it onto his bag, slumped against the wall by the dresser, and climbed into bed, carefully clinging to the edge, his back to her, giving her space. After his shower he was radiating heat; it filled the air between them, between the mattress and the covers. Pulled to him by those magnets, buried inside each of them, she touched his arm, coaxed him down onto his back, and slid against him.

“Is that alright?”

He looked at her, smiled and nodded.

As she touched, running her fingers along the length of his arm, he softened against her, sighed faintly at the sensation of her fingers in his hair, her caress on his face, his neck, his shoulders, drawing out whatever anxiety the shower had left behind.

“They seem different, John and the major,” he said. “Not like the men west of the line, and not like the Sewanee men, either.”

“Maybe they're like how people used to be, before the dying.”

“Maybe.” He was quiet as she feathered her fingers over his chest, his arm, his side. Then he said, “I really look like him, don't I?”

She laughed. “More like a clone than a son.”

“So I guess it's really true. He's really my father.”

“Yeah.”

“So, maybe I'm not like my dad, the one who raised me. Maybe I'm like him.”

* * * *

In the morning when they went downstairs, Nix and Gareth found John, the major and Nadia gathered around the table in the nook off the kitchen, eating breakfast. Nix hadn't seen a scene like that since the dying, the family meal.

“We didn't want to wake you. Join us,” the major said, rising and pulling out two chairs. He smiled at them both, but Nix caught the probing gaze that settled on Gareth.

“Did you two sleep alright?”

“Fine. Thanks,” Nix said, feeling genuinely grateful for her second decent night's sleep since she'd been attacked.

“And you, Gareth?” Again, Nix sensed more than politeness behind the major's question.

Gareth met his gaze and returned his smile. “Yes. Fine.”

The unasked question, had Gareth read the journals, thickened the air, but Nadia and John and even the major were all smiles as they passed over platters of eggs and the loaf of bread and the basket of apples and pears while Nadia hinted excitedly about what they'd see in the course of the morning's tour of the facility. Listening to her, John beamed, reaching over now and then to pet her hair or stroke her arm, while the major just listened with a bemused grin. At the end of the meal, John and Nadia cleared the table, ardently declining Gareth's help when he offered, and when it was time to rendezvous with the others for the tour, John hugged and kissed Nadia good-bye affectionately. The major merely smiled from his chair and gave a teasing admonishment that he expected a minimum of a ninety-percent recruitment rate from the resistance group.

“John is very...loving with you,” Gareth said to Nadia as they walked to meet the others.

“And the major, not so much,” she said, smiling, but Nix thought there was a sad twinge in her voice. “It's hard for him, I think. He doesn't mean to blame me, but she died giving birth to me. And I look so much like her. Sometimes I can see it in his face, it hurts him, just looking at me. Papa does love me, though. Even if he's not as demonstrative as Daddy.”

“You think of them both as your fathers?” Gareth asked.

“Both of them are my fathers. West of the line, I know paternity's a big deal. Each man wants his own child.”

“His own son,” Nix corrected.

“Yes. His own son,” Nadia ceded. “Here, it's different. My mother wanted it to be different for one reason, but it's taken on another purpose. For her, things were so volatile here, this small group of men, different factions—military and civilians, authority and the masses, so to speak—all on the brink of conflict. It was partly a strategic choice, mom's decision to have John and the major and Riggs father her child. Father you, Gareth. It was for your protection. Which turned into a tragic bit of irony.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I was an accident.” Again, that subtle undertone of sadness. Nix actually felt a little sorry for that buoyant, glowing girl who seemed to feel her mother hadn't really wanted her, and that she'd killed her being born. “Now, though, with the men outnumbering the women eight-to-one, and so many of the women unable to get pregnant, it's a way for most men to get to father and raise children. And this way, too, the little ones have a nice big family to love them.”

“But don't you care? Whose you are? Whose blood is in your veins?” Gareth asked.

“I'm Papa's. Is that what you want to know?”

“But you love John as much as the major?”

“It's like any kind of love, I think,” Nadia said, sounding a little far away. “They're different people. I love them differently. But I don't love Papa more, just because I have his eyes. And if I try a little harder to make him love me, it's not because I'm his biological child. It's just that Daddy loves me so easily. Without meaning to be, Papa is a little harder.” She smiled and looked up at Gareth. “And even though you're Daddy's, I know Papa is as excited as he is, you being here. He's missed you, worried about you just as much, even if he doesn't let you see it.”

They arrived at the meeting site, a low gray concrete cube. Through the glass double doors, down a long hallway of linoleum floors waxed to gleaming and walls painted the same yellowy beige, lit from above by luminous rectangular panels.

Electricity. They had electricity. Nix had almost forgotten what it was. Almost forgotten that as a child, she'd lived in a world of televisions and computers and air conditioners and lights that turned on and off when you moved a little switch with your finger.

“It's one of the big civics projects,” Nadia said as she kept herding them down corridors. “Finding engineers to train others and get power and water, the sewers, all that working again. Same with medical personnel. We have a teaching hospital set up in the city, and doctors deployed in all the settlements.”

Inside a rectangular room walled entirely in glass along one of the longer sides, the others were waiting for them, animatedly talking and devouring a breakfast identical to the one Nix and the others had just eaten.

All her bouncy girlishness evaporated as Nadia called for the group's attention and tersely outlined the day's agenda. Nix wondered how anyone could alter their manner so suddenly and so completely. But Nadia's change in demeanor was good.

Effective. That pack of resistance women wouldn't be inclined to put much faith in the bubbly girl she'd been the night before, introducing Gareth to her fathers, or this morning at the breakfast table.

While Nadia spoke, a vast wave crashed down on Nix, heavy and cold, knocking her back against the wall. Char and Jan should have been there. Especially Jan. She'd fought so long, so hard. That feeling of being crushed, of being washed away to cold, dark depths. She couldn't breath. So cold, no air, all that weight. Gareth saw and touched her hand under the table. That warm, soft touch and that cold, drowning pain.

You couldn't pull them apart.

Nix opened her hand and let Gareth weave his fingers between hers.

* * * *

Down in the sterile cool of the Faraday bunker—more vast than the base itself had seemed while they were above-ground—Nix's heart pounded. Her veins swelled, gorged on adrenaline, her blood surged hot as her heart pumped, each pulse coming harder, harder, faster, faster. Just standing there in her worn-down boots on that perfectly smooth, perfectly uniform concrete, no enemy before her, no knife, no gun in her hand, she gasped with that sudden surging sense of her own power.

Row upon row upon row, fifty columns deep, grid after grid of monstrous, squat, armored vehicles, their motors preserved against the EMPs beneath their protective shield, their engines modified to run on the biofuel produced and stockpiled for decades that side of the line. Tanks, Nix recognized from a picture she'd seen once. The others Nadia called “Humvees.” Massive guns angled out from turrets above toothy tracks, and on the Humvees, heavy steel brackets waited to cradle their own artillery—the stockpile of weapons Nadia had shown them two hours earlier, a bulk of which Nix had silently dismissed as too cumbersome for an army, however rich in horses, to lug across a thousand miles of enemy terrain. Four women with two of those vehicles armed with those weapons could hold back an entire town's worth of guards and bounty hunters while a crew got every last captive woman into a train like the one that had carried her over the line.

Nadia stood between the resistance recruits and the machines that could carry them to victory after victory, her voice unfurling in the cool, sterile air, images rolling over them like cloud shapes, visions of a vast, trained army ready to man the machines, to roll over the entire west and destroy the slave world, house by house, hotel by hotel, town by town.

If they wanted to, they could stay, train to drive the tanks, to fire the guns. Nix hardly heard the volley of questions and answers. She was gone, strapped into a convoy whisking dust into the air over a brown-gray ribbon of highway stretching west.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

After spending a few hours with the resistance recruits following Nadia's pitch, Nix returned to the house and found Gareth sitting beside John on the porch bench swing. Again she was struck by how alike the two men were in looks and demeanor.

John older, Gareth harder, but so alike.

When they retreated to their little room at the end of the hall, they didn't ask each other what they'd do. If he would stay, if she would go. She took a shower, and after, Gareth picked up the stack of notebooks from atop the dresser, found the first of them, and started reading. So Nix would know everything, too, he read aloud.

Except for his voice lifting Eva's words from the pages of her journal, they didn't speak. Now and then Gareth turned his eyes from that page to look at Nix, his chest swelling and sinking as his breath sped.

So, they'd raped her.

All three of them. Every one of Gareth's fathers, more or less. It almost comforted her, somehow. Knowing that this side of the line wasn't some fairy world beyond her capacity to believe. It should have comforted Gareth, too; suddenly the bar wasn't so high. But he looked hurt. Crushed under that heavy truth.

Under a pang of sympathy for Gareth, Nix felt hope bloom, warm and bright.

Here, it had started just as it had there. A pack of men had taken possession of the lone woman. Made her theirs for sex, for sons and daughters. So, if there could be a place like this, an army with women commanding men, a place like Sewanee, then maybe things could change there, too, on the other side of the line.

But then her hope faded. Withered.

Eva was impossible. If that was what was needed, the world would never change. It would go on, seething and spreading until it buried Sewanee and everything east of the line under its putrid stench.

How? How could she? John, maybe. Nix could almost understand forgiving him.

Almost.

But Riggs? No. And the major. Smith. Eva's Avery. If it had all been a strategy, Nix could have understood. In the end, though, she'd loved him. Loved him even more than John. He'd used all his power against her, and she'd made him her lover. Father of her children.

And then he'd changed. Major Smith had given in to her, given her a say, let her guide him. Had let her go to the others, even though it hurt him. Had risked precious fuel and men at her request, taken her in search of survivors. Started rescuing women.

All alone, Eva had done it. Bent twenty men to her will. Saved not just herself, not just the child, the girl that had turned up in the seventh month of her pregnancy. She'd started it all. The rescues. The asylum east of the line. She'd done it all in little more than two short years. And she'd done all of it without a knife, without a gun, without even once strangling a man to death with his own belt.

* * * *

In the dark, beside her, heavy and deep and even, Gareth's breathing. But all her muscles were taut and twitching, her heart beating hard, her mind racing. All that power, those heavy, cold machines under the earth, waiting to conquer the west.

Nix crept down the hall, past Smith's door and Nadia's and John's, down the stairs, down into the dark warm belly of the sitting room. Dark and warm and quiet. Not silent.

Something in the not-silence, in the dark heat made her go still, made her core go icy. The not-silence made her touch the healing rope-burn at her throat. The dark smelled like her first man. The collector.