Rebirth by Sophie Littlefield Read Free Book Online Page A

rankled. Cass had little hope, but she had the decency to pretend, for others’ sakes. She couldn’t help thinking that he, of all people—a leader, a benefactor even, if a reluctant one—ought to do the same. People listened to him. People cared what he thought.
    “People say crazy things, yeah, but isn’t it just as irrational to always expect the worst?” she challenged him.
    “Come on,” Dor muttered, “you don’t really think that.”
    A moment later, though, he stopped, putting a hand on her arm, turning her so she had to look up at him. “Cass.”
    In the twilight Dor’s eyes looked even darker. He was half a foot taller than she was, and her gaze fell to his throat, his collarbones, to the twisted fronds of the tattoo that wound around his arms and shoulders and almost met under the hollow of his throat. In this moment he seemed returned to that larger-than-life, invulnerable avatar. He was so close that she imagined she breathed the same air he did, and—trick of the moment—her lungs seemed to expand, to want to drink in more. From where the errant impulse came, she had no idea. Something visceral and instinctive, nothing more than a sensory trigger. She stepped back, trying to get away from the marked air.
    She had come for Smoke . She had come to ask Dor to change Smoke’s mind.
    But Dor pulled her closer, his fingers closing tight around her arm. “There are things you need to know. Things are going to get worse before they get better—if they ever get better, which seems unlikely.”
    “I know ,” Cass whispered fiercely. “I’ve seen what’s left of the stores. I see what the travelers bring. I know that all the easy raids are long gone. And…”
    She didn’t say the last: that there were fewer travelers and more Beaters all the time. People blamed it on all kinds of things: people were waiting out winter before they ventured out; or they had heard that the Convent had locked down; or they were afraid of Rebuilder parties; or they had gone in the other direction, to the bigger cities. The blueleaf, which had appeared to be on the wane, had merely been hibernating, and those not trained to look for the subtly shaded leaves could too easily mistake it for its benign cousin.
    The words slipped out before she could stop herself: “How could you let Smoke go out into that?”
    Dor shocked her by laughing, a short, bitter sound. “Woman, do you think I control what your man does? You think I control what any man does? Far as I know, it’s still free will around here.”
    Cass recoiled, wrenching her arm free. “He does what you ask him.”
    “I never asked him to go after anyone. And definitely not that crew. I’m not in the vengeance business, sister. Only business I’m in is my own.”
    “But you could ask him to stay —”
    “It’s not my place.” Just like that the laughter was gone, his expression stony. “ Not my place, or anyone else’s. He’s a grown man who set his way, and paid his accounts through already.”
    “You could—influence him. That’s all I’m asking.”
    “No,” he said emphatically. “You think that’s what you want, Cass, but you don’t. Not really. You start trying to change someone, you lose them. Smoke’s doing what he has to do. What he needs to do. You get in the way of that, he’ll just resent you, until the day it builds up in him so strong he goes anyway and with a bitter taste in his mouth. He’ll blame you. You don’t need that.”
    Cass forced herself to breathe, blinked away the threat of tears. “Ruthie needs him,” she whispered. “ I need him.”
    “No.” Dor shook his head. “You don’t. You’ve come this far without him. Survived things no one else survived. Done things most people would say are impossible.”
    His gaze flicked across her face, lingering on her eyes, which she knew were different since she’d survived the fever—brighter, greener. Smoke wouldn’t have told him her terrible secret, that she’d