Burning Paradise

But it wasn’t just a pillow Beth had fetched. She was also carrying a bottle of vodka, a picture of a bearded man in a fur hat on the label. “Where’d that come from?” Leo asked as she unscrewed the cap.

“Bought it when we picked up supplies. Why not, right? Don’t tell me you aren’t interested.” She offered him the bottle.

He didn’t take it. “Did the guy at the store card you? Because that’s not such a good idea, showing ID if you don’t have to.”

“No, he didn’t fucking card me. You want some or not?”

“This isn’t a good time.”

“No? Really?” She shrugged. “More for me, then.”

Beth used an empty thermos to mix the vodka with the contents of a can of Coke. She sipped and grimaced, sipped and grimaced. Stupid waste of money, Cassie thought, but if it put Beth to sleep it might be worth it. But twenty minutes later Beth was pacing maniacally in the space between the mattress and the sofa, the floorboards creaking with every pass. When Leo suggested (with what Cassie thought was admirable restraint) that Beth might want to sit down and “give it a rest,” Beth whirled to face him, staggered and aimed a finger at his chest. “Stop pretending you feel bad about what happened!”

“Beth… come on. Seriously. Don’t do this.”

“So sad and everything. All how could I have killed that guy? Get over it, Leo. You shot him in the leg so you wouldn’t kill him. If he had some kind of medical condition, how were you supposed to know?”

“Beth, stop.”

“Maybe you should have asked me to shoot him, if you didn’t want to do it yourself. You’re the one always telling us how dangerous everything is, how we can’t take any chances, don’t call home, don’t get carded at the grocery store, watch out for strangers—”

“You’ll wake up Thomas.”

“I doubt it. He looks like he’s fucking comatose. Seriously,” turning to Cassie, “is your brother retarded or something? He barely talks.”

“He’s scared,” Cassie said. But not as scared as you are, she wanted to add. “I think we all need to get some sleep.”

“Fine. Go ahead.”

“You’re not making it very easy.”

“If you’re so fucking delicate, go sleep in the car.”

“Maybe that’s what you should do,” Leo told her. “Take your sleeping bag out to the car, get as pissed as you want, and in the morning we’ll drive the rest of the way to my father’s place. Your hangover is your own business.”

“What, are you tired of me now? You feel like fucking Cassie tonight? Is that it?”

Cassie had seen Beth drunk before. Every survivor of ’07 in Cassie’s circle had a way of lifting a middle finger to the world, and Beth’s had been her nasty style of drinking—drinking as if to punish herself and everyone around her. But now, even drunk, Beth seemed to realize she had overstepped a boundary. Before Leo could answer she squared her shoulders and said, “Fine, maybe I want to be alone.” She reached for her jacket and bundled her sleeping bag under her arm, muttering to herself.

Cassie watched from the cabin door as Leo followed Beth out to the car—ostensibly to make sure she was safe, more likely to see that she didn’t damage anything. She harangued him from the enclosed space of the backseat while he put his key in the ignition and turned on the radio, maybe thinking a little music would distract her.

But the radio wasn’t playing music, it was a

Cassie walked to the car as the newscaster finished the story: State police say they will be conducting an exhaustive investigation of this, Wattmount County’s first homicide in almost fifteen years. Then the broadcast moved on to an item about a sawmill fire in some town Cassie had never heard of. Leo switched the radio off, scowling.

I’m a criminal, Cassie thought. An accessory to murder, if not a murderer herself. We’re all criminals. At any moment the somnolent woods might fill with searchlights and bloodhounds. “Fuck!” Leo said.

“What do we do?”

He shrugged angrily. “Somebody might have seen the car, we have to make that assumption, but I doubt they’ll have a description of us. So… I guess we ditch the car in the morning and hike someplace where we can catch a bus.”

“You still think your father can help us?”

“If anyone can,” Leo said.

Cassie sat on the plank sill of the cabin door while Leo covered Beth with a sleeping bag and a couple of spare blankets. The night was cold but not cold enough to be dangerous, as long as she had some protection from the wind, and if Beth woke up achy and shivering come dawn, whose fault was that? Thomas was still asleep inside, but Cassie was too frightened even to think about bed. Eventually Leo came and sat beside her, dragging on a cigarette while she exhaled the tenuous fog of her own breath. A full moon had risen but it cast no light into the body of the forest around them.

Leo stared solemnly at the cigarette in his hand.

“That’s a nasty habit,” Cassie said. “It’s bad for you, you know.”

He gave her an incredulous stare… then they both began to laugh, quietly but helplessly.

When the laughter subsided she said, “I hope it’s true your father can help. My uncle Ethan was pretty close to him back before ’07, you know.”

“I know. In one of his letters, my father said Ethan Iverson was one of the few who wasn’t totally castrated by the attacks.” He gave Cassie a sidelong look. “His words, not mine. That’s actually pretty high praise, coming from him.”

“I like how you’re still in contact with him.” By mail, of course. The only medium of long-distance communication that wasn’t hostage to the hypercolony, and God bless Ben Franklin and the U.S. Postal Service.

“You don’t hear from your uncle?”

“Aunt Ris didn’t think it would be a good idea. Any kind of contact with anyone who was personally targeted back in 2007 is risky, she said. But I read his books… you know he wrote two books?”

“Mm. About bugs, right?”

“Insects. He’s an entomologist. But in a way the books are about the hypercolony, a way of talking about it without actually mentioning it, because it works by insect logic—hive logic. Like how you can get really sophisticated behavior without any kind of consciousness or self-knowledge…”

“I learned some of that from my father’s letters,” Leo said. “It’s true, he said, but the Society made the mistake of treating it like a philosophical question.”

“As opposed to?”

“Military intelligence. Know your enemy. Discover its weaknesses.”

That fit with what Aunt Ris had said about Werner Beck, that he was obsessed with the idea of waging war against the hypercolony. Which was stupid, she used to say, even on its own terms. Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgu

“Not necessarily. You have to ask yourself, what did the hypercolony take away from us? One answer is, the will to fight and the weapons to fight with. Every day they tell us how terrible war is, how lucky we are that the League of Nations is out there managing conflict, all that bullshit. So only a few of us are willing to make a fight of it. But even a few people can make a difference, if they have the right weapon.”

“How do you fight something like the hypercolony? A cloud of dust, basically. You can’t bomb it. You can’t take it prisoner.”