Horizon (03) (32 page)

When she got her breath she
twisted to look behind her where the bridge used to be. The earth was torn
and jagged on either side of the gorge. Down below, the rushing water had
swept most of the bridge away, a few broken edges jutting from the surface
where pieces lodged among the rocks. There was no sign of the attackers’
bodies. The river had swallowed them whole, and at its leisure would spit
them out again, indifferent as the rest of the earth to human struggles, to
right and wrong, intent only on coming back to life itself.

Chapter 48

IT WAS NEARLY nightfall in the camp. They’d put out the smoldering fires around the settlement and built a new one in the center, feeding it with the lumber from a ruined structure that Nadir identified as the ornamental gate with the symbol of the new community designed by the people of his old town, a clover with four leaves to represent the four settlements.

The attackers had actually left most of the place intact, burning largely superficial structures. Or maybe they had intended to pile the bodies on a pyre to burn, and run out of time. For now, the Edenites carried the bodies outside the edge of the settlement to a grassy clearing. Tomorrow, they would dig graves.

Smoke would have no grave, but Cass did not need one to visit. For her, the river itself would be his memorial. She would visit it in every season, she would look down at the rushing waters, crusted with ice in winter, running with fish in summer, and she would remember and honor him.

One building in the clearing was nearly complete, a long wide dormitory with windows set high in the walls and a roof framed out and nearly finished. The first-wave settlers had outfitted the building with bedding and a few personal items: photos tacked to walls, rolled-up socks and clothing stacked on the floor. They gathered these and stored them at one end, before getting the children settled for the night. Pink insulation lined the walls and roof of the structure; already, the heat of their bodies was warming the interior.

Everyone was silent. The latest losses had stunned them, the terrible memories of the attackers falling into the gorge, the bodies of the four who’d been shot while trying to cross. The daunting tasks that lay ahead of them. All of this was too much to bear at the end of this long and cursed day. Tomorrow they would take up the yoke of their futures yet again, but for now they were spent, and before long everyone went to bed.

Cass waited until Dor’s breathing became deep and even beside her, and then she got up as carefully as she could. Her body ached from her scrapes and bruises, and she limped painfully out into the night.

The moon lit her path back to the gorge, glinting off bits of mica in the earth, souvenirs from a volcanic eruption aeons ago. She shivered in the cold, but she would not be out here long.

At the edge she looked out over the river and the land beyond, the sloping trail that led back down to the camp and finally the road back to civilization. Here on this side, they were safe—for a night, a month, a season—no one could say. The future was unknowable, but she knew some other things.

She knew the sound of her daughter’s voice.

The touch of a strong man.

The friendship of people who were no longer strangers.

The love of her father.

She did not yet know the limits of her strength, but she was ready to be tested, and tested again. She would be tempted and discouraged and broken, but she would come back each time, into this world that had been bequeathed to them, into the dangers that threatened them and the joys that waited, buried but not impossible, for them to unearth and cherish.

“Thank You,” she whispered into the wind, praying to a God she was not sure existed, whose purpose she did not yet know.

Her words were plucked from her lips and carried into the night, no one to hear them but the spirits of the dead. After a moment she turned and started back to the settlement. Tomorrow she would work alongside the other survivors. Her family. Her lover. Her friends. She would do the next right thing and the next. In small and humble ways, she would begin to live again.

* * * * *

Acknowledgments

The Aftertime series
marks a turning point in my life as a writer. Because of the efforts of my
agent and editor—Barbara Poelle and Adam Wilson—I was able to take on a
challenge that was far more rewarding than it ever was daunting—and it was
plenty daunting.

Thank you, thank you, Harlequin
team! I keep wanting to pinch myself. Every writer should be so
lucky.

ISBN: 9781459220416

Copyright © 2012 by
Sophie Littlefield

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