Horizon. Sophie Littlefield
had been altered to raise only a few inches—enough to slide in a plate of food or a cup of water, but not enough for anyone to crawl out of.
The house, of course, was locked from the outside. Only Dana and two other council members had keys.
The quarantine house had apparently been used twice before, both false alarms. It wasn’t that New Eden hadn’t lost citizens to the Beaters—it had, more than a dozen—but in every case it had been from attacks on the mainland, and those unfortunates had either been dragged away to their fates or mercifully shot by the citizens.
One of the false positives was Gordon Franche, who now kept to himself. People said that the experience of being locked in the house, waiting to see if he was infected, had caused him to lose his mind. His illness had just been a virus, evidently, because after six days he was let out and welcomed back, but he withdrew from all social events and mostly spent his days reading quietly now.
The other one, a woman, had died soon after, drowning in the shallow waters off the mud beach up at the north end of the island. Supposedly, she had been an excellent swimmer. No one talked about her anymore.
“There you are,” Karen said behind her, and Cass fixed a smile in place before she turned around to greet her. They lined up with the others, in two rows before the porch, and stood facing each other, shivering a little in the shadow cast by the building.
“Temperature,” Dana called, and everyone put the back of their hand to their partner’s forehead, like thirty-five concerned mothers checking on sneezing toddlers.
“Eyes,” he said after a while, though by then most people had already checked. It was disconcerting; Cass realized the first time she did this exercise that in reality she rarely actually looked directly into people’s eyes, focusing instead somewhere around their mouths, watching their lips move as they spoke. Dor, of course, was the exception, like Smoke and Ruthie, all of whose eyes she knew like the familiar rooms of a house in which she’d lived forever. Perhaps, she thought, the feeling was a self-protective fear that eye contact might alert people to the bright green of her own irises. It was something she preferred not to think about.
Karen’s eyes were an unremarkable brown, and they were nested in wrinkles, the upper lids drooping and reddened, the lashes thin and pale. But her pupils were a healthy normal size.
Cass was about to make some pleasant, harmless comment, beating Karen to the punch for once—the importance of covering her ass socially was not lost on her—and other pairs of partners were breaking up and returning to the tables or walking off to start their workdays, when Milt Secco surprised everyone by walking up onto the porch and joining Dana. His face was pinched, and he leaned in close to speak. But Cass was close enough to hear him say, “A word, if I might, Dana—”
And she was far from the only one who turned to look at Dana’s partner, who stood frightened and lost-looking, alone at the edge of the yard.
It was Phillip.
Chapter 11
SAMMI AND SAGE ran, taking the shortcut behind a little row of prefab houses. There was a small crowd clustered around the quarantine house, Dana and Zihna conferring on the porch, Earl visible through the front door that Sammi had never seen open before. Phillip stood with his back against the house, under the overhang a few feet from Dana, looking as though a strong gust of wind would blow him away. Phillip looked smaller, standing there. How many times had Sage gone on and on about how buff he was? Even Sammi had to admit he was the best-looking boy on the island, his blond, blue-eyed good looks saved from being too perfect by that nose of his, which had been broken in a ski accident. Now, though, he was wearing a paper mask on the lower half of his face, the sort that the dental hygienist would wear back when Sammi went in every six months with her mom.
“Phillip!” Sage burst ahead of Sammi and broke through the crowd. People stepped out of her way, but before she could get to the porch, Old Mike grabbed her arm and she flailed in his grasp, grunting and pushing off of him.
Sammi caught up to her and took her other arm. “Sage, stop.”
“They think he’s got the fever, Sammi, they’re gonna lock him up—”
“Calm down, you have to, just listen to me, come here a minute....” Sammi talked fast but softly. The way Zihna talked to the girls when they were upset. The way Valerie sometimes talked to her, which she hated, but Sammi didn’t have a lot of experience with trying to calm people down, though she did know one thing, and that was that Sage could not win this one.
Sage’s eyes welled with tears and she was leaning out of Old Mike’s grip, trying to use her body’s weight as leverage. But Old Mike—who wasn’t really all that old but still rather older than Fat Mike—was stronger than he looked. He used to be a mechanic at the airport, and his stance said he was determined to hold his ground.
Earl stepped out onto the porch and looked out at the crowd. Saying nothing, he put a hand on Phillip’s shoulder and pushed him back into the doorway. The boy went mutely, shuffling, and now Sammi could see that he was trembling. He didn’t look sick, though with that mask on she couldn’t see much. He just looked scared, scared as shit, and since his mom had died in the first round of fever and his older brother and his girlfriend had set out for Sacramento in December and not been heard from since, he didn’t have anyone to come to his aid.
Except for Sage. They’d been together since before Sammi got to New Eden, and it was as serious as any couple she knew about, even if they were young. They sat together during Red’s crazy homeschool sessions, and both worked part-time in the laundry so they could spend their work hours together, too. Phillip was always trying to make her laugh, and he gave her the best parts of his meals and took her plate to the washtub. They had been close enough that occasionally Sammi felt left out, and on those occasions she just hung out with Kyra and told herself it didn’t matter, not everyone had to be her best friend all the time, except some days were so lonely that she would have traded everything to have a best friend and on those days she would have picked Sage, if Sage wasn’t obsessed with Phillip and didn’t already have someone more important in her life than Sammi, just like everyone had something more important to them than her.
Like a certain parent who couldn’t even be bothered to be here now. If he was, he would know what to do, Sammi thought and then immediately felt angry. Well, her dad used to be in charge of a whole town or whatever, to hear the way Cass talked, and Cass said he was fair and brave and took care of things and even set up a whole system of commerce and laws and shit. Which, if she really admitted it to herself, Sammi had felt secretly proud of. But where was he now? When there was a real crisis, when Phillip needed him—when Sammi needed him—when someone had to step up and take care of things, and it was so stupid with New Eden having this whole collaborative-governing shit. No one was ever really in charge and whenever the least little thing went wrong it was like this with all the adults standing around staring at each other and no one doing anything that would actually make things better.
“Let him go!” Sage screamed, her voice wild and unfamiliar. “He’s not sick, just look at him, he didn’t do anything, you just want to throw someone in there to make it look like you’re doing something—”
But Sammi caught her breath, because Phillip was looking back at them, his hand on the doorjamb to steady himself, most of his face obscured by the white mask except for his eyes, which were frightened and beseeching—
—and his pupils had almost disappeared.
Tiny black specks in the sky-blue of his eyes. And his skin… Phillip was fair, so fair he wore a big straw hat to avoid getting sunburned during the day, and it looked like a woman’s gardening hat so that Shane and Kalyan sometimes called him Ladyhat.... His skin was not so pale today. It had a burnished-gold tone, and there was a sheen to the skin above his eyes, that faint perspiration that made a person seem to glow.
A person with the fever glowed that way.
Sammi dug her fingers more tightly into Sage’s arm and yanked her back.