Somewhere behind DeWayne’s speedier truck, Taneesha and Bobby drove horse carts piled with bags of foodstuffs from the farm, kegs of salted or smoked meat, some of Scott’s lab equipment. He’d apparently had an argument with Emily over what went and what stayed, but Scott must have pulled rank because it seemed to Lillie that most of it was here. There was also a precious box of weapons and ammunition.
“We don’t want them,” Cord said, but Lillie had spoken to him quietly and changed his mind. The mountains, too, had warmed and changed their ecology, although not as much as the desert, and it was possible they might encounter black bears, mountain lions, wolves.
Or leftover humans.
She didn’t say this last to Cord. Her favorite child, still idealistic, still prickly. But all of them knew how to use a handlaser on a rattlesnake, and Alex and Keith could fire everything in that sealed box.
Somewhere behind the horse carts, Spring and Dakota rode herd on a few dairy cows that would be left with Lillie. So would two horses. Spring, Bobby, Dakota, and Taneesha would return with Jody at nightfall, in the empty truck. And after that Lillie would see them… when?
Not soon, she knew. Away from her newest babies, the others’ memories of the children’s monstrosity would grow. That’s the way the human mind worked. Unless Lillie sent someone on horseback to fetch help, it might be a very long time before she saw the people she’d lived with for fifteen years, including her daughter.
Not Lillie’s choice. But innocence never meant you were spared punishment.
“We’re nearly there,” Jody said from the driver’s console. “Does everybody understand the route back?”
Lillie didn’t answer.
Six thick-walled cottages, of roughly equal size. This place had been a vacation compound, maybe a tourist resort. Four of the cottages were guest houses, each with three small bedrooms, comfortable large living room, and spectacular glass-walled view. The roofs had working solar panels, although the windpowered electric generator was no longer functional. The fifth, slightly larger cottage was a communal dining room with the kind of kitchen Lillie hadn’t seen in decades: steel appliances, smart ovens, servos. None of them worked. But the dining room had a woodstove and a huge fireplace, and water still ran in the sinks and toilets and tubs.
“Nice big tubs,” Jody said, grinning without mirth, “and you should have enough water. It won’t be as hot up here, either. Good thing, with those glass walls. Stupid building design.”
There had once been air conditioning, Lillie thought but didn’t say. Possibly Jody had never experienced air conditioning.
“Jody,” Scott said, “why don’t you all move up to the mountains?”
A reasonable question. Once, Tess and her husband had had to live where they owned land, and it was their good luck that it was in an area that the warming had made wetter rather than drier. Then, the farm people had huddled together for defense. After that, isolation from the bioweapons. But now there was no reason to stay in that exposed, hot, drying place. The world, or most of it, was empty.
Jody said, “Oh, we’ve always been there.” To him, Lillie saw, it was a reason. His farm, his roots, his mother’s grave.
“When are you starting back?” Alex said. There was some tension between him and Jody. Alex had always idolized the older man. No longer.
“Can’t go until tomorrow,” Jody said. “There’s a big storm coming up”
“You should stay as long as you want,” Lillie said deliberately. “You’re always welcome with us.” Jody looked away.
Everyone helped unpack. Lillie and Scott took one cottage, with Gaia, Rhea, and Dion. Keith, Loni, and their children took another, as did Cord and Clari and little Raindrop. Alex was offered the third bedroom in Cord’s cottage but said he preferred to put a bunk in what they were already calling “the big house,” the dining room/kitchen. Scott declared the vacant cottage his laboratory. The sixth remained what it already was, a storehouse bursting with supplies.
Did Alex miss Kezia? It was hard to tell. She had refused to come with him, and Lillie knew that unlike some of the men, Alex had never felt much personal attachment to Kezia or to the children that the pribir-mandated sex had given him. Kezia didn’t seem to mind. For her, too, the driven interlude seemed to have been total hormonal. And maybe Alex simply wasn’t very parental.
She had known, once, what that felt like. No more.
When everyone was settled, dinner over, and the infants asleep, Lillie went outside. Scott remained in their cottage, using the ancient computer. For a brief moment she let herself imagine what it would be like if Mike sat there instead. She suppressed the thought. Don’t dwell on it. No use in pointless pain.
How strange it felt to be completely surrounded by trees again! Pine and spruce instead of cottonwood and cedar. But the ubiquitous pinons were here, too. The trees blocked sections of the sky, which Lillie was used to seeing whole and vast and limitless. Not here.
When she looked more closely, she could see that some of the trees were dying. The climate was starting to dry off, just as it was on the plains; the process just hadn’t yet advanced as far. She didn’t know which flora had migrated here when the warming accelerated and the rains increased, but those plants were probably again in retreat. How long would it take?
Lillie felt the wind rise: Jody’s storm. It whipped tree branches this way and that. She didn’t venture very far; she didn’t know either the terrain or the area’s vermin, and it was black as a pit in the windy dark. She stumbled back to the house and went inside. Two candles glowing in the living room, and Scott looking up from the computer with a weary smile, and, above all, the faint smell of her babies, asleep in the next room, as living and welcome as the scent of water.
At the end of October, three months after Lillie moved to the mountains, Spring and Jody and Kella visited overnight. Kella did not bring her triplets, Lillie’s grandchildren. The visitors didn’t bring much news, or carry any away, since the two homesteads communicated by computer almost every day. Kella exclaimed over how much her brothers’ children had all grown. She didn’t look at her mother’s children, and Lillie saw that Kella was trying to stay away from them. It was a miserable visit.
It was another year before Spring returned, and Kella didn’t come with him.
It was remarkably easy to live in the mountains. Crops grew easily. Water was more plentiful, although the growing season was shorter. Game was plentiful. Keith, Loni, and Alex learned to make snares. On the entire mountain, they never met another person.
Keith tended the cows, and Cord devoted himself to farming. Clari became pregnant again, and gave birth to a girl they named Theresa.
Scott grew frailer, but his mind was sharp and clear, mapping more of the children’s gene expressions every year. At the farm, Robin died. Natural causes, Emily e-mailed; Robin’s heart just gave out. Lillie wondered if anyone genuinely mourned. Angie bore another child, a single baby, not triplets. Evidently Pam had had some mercy. Susie had a baby; Felicity had identical twins boys. Kella had a baby Lillie had never seen.
In the mountains the four older children turned two, three, five. They ran barefoot through the woods and learned to trap, fish, farm, read, add, and write code. The old computer held out. “Cheap Japanese parts,” Scott joked, and only Lillie understood what he meant. The real miracle was that the Net still functioned. It would, Scott said, as long as the telecom satellites stayed functional in orbit.