Horizon (03) by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online

prey away for a group feast.
    Gathering clothes and rags for their nests. Dragging their victims’ remains away and stacking them into bone-piles. But some things remained beyond them—putting on warm clothes when the weather turned cold, or scaling walls, or driving machinery or building fires.
    And—most significantly— swimming.
    It was the only thing that kept New Eden safe. No one had ever seen a Beater even approach waterways with intent, though surely in the crowd of lurching, bumbling creatures on the other shore there must have been some accomplished swimmers. Perhaps one of them had swum for Cal, another had been a pretty young mother who floated her laughing toddler in water wings in a backyard pool, yet another maybe wakeboarded on New Melones Lake only a few short years ago, splendid and muscular and sun-sparkling in his joyful youth.
    No more. Even at this distance Cass could make out the hallmarks of the advanced stages of the disease. Some of them were missing huge chunks of flesh, and their bones flashed white and vulnerable-looking. Others had chewed off their own flesh, the thin skin covering their fingers, their nails, their own lips, tearing scabbed craters in their shoulders. When they could not find fresh uninfected flesh, the Beaters would nibble dispiritedly at each other, drawing blood and painting themselves with it, tearing off strips of flesh, but their hearts were not in it. They could tell the difference and the difference was evidently considerable. They would even eat kaysev when they grew truly hungry, and as far as anyone knew, no Beater had perished from starvation.
    Eventually, they died—even the freakishly supercharged immune system that was left behind by the blueleaf fever was not enough to save them from the endless insults to their systems, the breaking of bones and rending of flesh and unstaunched bleeding. Occasionally the raiding parties came across Beater carcasses bent and splayed in the streets, left by their companions where they fell. The huge black carrion birds that had appeared last fall were not interested in dead Beaters. Only maggots would eat Beater flesh, and Cass had heard the stories of raiders rolling over a corpse to reveal its underside split and leaking a tide of fat white pupae onto the pavement.
    Cass’s stomach rolled and heaved and she retched and retched into the water, the remains of a meal so long ago she had forgotten it, bare lean tendrils of bile. Retching until there was nothing left, until it felt like her soul itself was expelled.
    At last she wiped her mouth on her sleeve and returned to the path without looking again at the opposite shore.
    It was her duty, as a member of New Eden’s community, to take this bad news straight to the council, where it could be absorbed and disseminated and acted upon.
    But as Cass remembered what she’d done on the dock only hours ago, she knew she would shirk this mean duty as she had so many others. Someone else would have seen what she saw, surely. Someone else would act. Someone else would have to save them.

Chapter 8
    THE DAY WAS a scorched and stretched expanse of time. Cass was grateful—her gratitude lousy with guilt—that it was not her day with the kids. Tomorrow was her day in the babysitting rotation and she would not drink tonight. Or at least she would only drink a little, almost nothing. And she would not see Dor tonight. And, definitely, she would visit Smoke. All of that. She just had to get through the day first.
    Earl showed up as promised and they walked the bank together, boots squelching down into the sodden soil near the bank, clumps of reed stems going pale where they met the earth, crushed flat under their feet.
    “I don’t know,” he said, finally, when they reached the southern tip of Garden Island. Looking north from here toward the other islands, you could see only the rooftop of the community center and a few of the other buildings. A lazy plume of smoke swirled up into the