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“I know where that is.” It was a good fifteen-minutes’ walk on the other side of the settlement. “I have a roommate called Cadence and our cabins are nowhere near each other.”
“Aurora Rae, I’m dead on my feet. They’re trying to break me with manual labor and roughing it.”
“They don’t know you well.” It would take a lot more than that.
“I’m feeling pretty freaking broken right now. They want me to earn the right to pack a weapon. They want me to find a woman and get her pregnant.”
Which meant. “Oh shit.”
He yawned again. “The good news is the building site is close to the forest drop site. Any sign of the signal jammer?”
“No, but I have a plan.” That plan involved letting herself into HQ and doing a thorough room-by-room search, followed by the nursery, the school and every other building she hadn’t already checked out, including wherever the hell Orrin lived.
Whatever expression she’d been wearing made him react, grabbing her hand. “I’m so fucking glad to see you. What have they done to you?”
Stick together. He’d been worried too. “You need to get clean and rest. We can talk later. How long do we have before they separate us again?”
“Till Sunday afternoon when we go back to the site.” He squeezed her hand. “Walk me home, Aurora Rae.”
Since she was on corner duty half of Saturday, that wasn’t a lot of time. She wasn’t ready to let him out of her sight and she wasn’t making him walk fifteen minutes in the dark. She took him the five minutes to her cabin.
He blinked at the blue flowerpot. “Novel idea of a cow skull.”
?
??Your cabin is too far. You can stay with me tonight.” She pushed the door open—there were catches but no locks—to reveal Cadence sitting crossed-legged on her yoga mat.
“Hi, this is Zack.” She dragged him inside, pulled the pack he wouldn’t let her carry off his shoulder, and dumped it on the floor. “He’s going to stay tonight.”
“No. No.” Cadence scrambled to her feet, tripping on the end of her mat and almost body-slamming Zeke.
He steadied her with the flat of his hand to her shoulder. “Whoa there.”
She reeled back, her hand going to where Zeke’s had been. “You can’t stay here.” She pointed at the open door. “He can’t stay here, Rosie. There’s no room. We don’t have room.”
“He can sleep in my bed.”
Cadence rolled up her yoga mat. “It’s not a good idea.” She was flustered and couldn’t get it to go back into its cloth bag.
“He doesn’t know where his cabin is.” A lie with enough truth in it. “And he doesn’t have a flashlight to go stumbling around in the dark anyway.”
“You do,” Cadence said, and then flinched because she’d essentially admitted to having gone through Rory’s things.
“Cadence, right?” Zeke held his hand out to shake. After an awkward beat, Cadence abandoned the mat and its recalcitrant bag, stepped forward and took Zeke’s hand for the fastest-ever greeting. “I’m sorry we didn’t check with you first. I just need somewhere to wash and to crash. It’ll only be one night.”
Cadence had moved all the way across the small central room while Zeke spoke, and stood with her arms folded over her chest and a scowl the depth of a volcano on her face.
“What are you afraid of?” Rory said. Was she afraid of Zeke? It was certainly possible, he looked rough and menacing this way.
Cadence turned her back to them. “I’m not afraid. This is my cabin and I don’t want him here.”
Rory shot Zeke a look and mouthed, I’m sorry. “You won’t know he’s here,” she said.
“Sure I will,” Cadence turned back to them and jammed her hands on her hips. “We might never be able to air the stench out.”
Her humor was unexpected. Zeke lowered his face and laughed and when Rory laughed too, Cadence allowed herself a smile.
“Okay. Okay. I don’t like it, but okay.” She pointed to her bedroom. “I’m going to bed. I get up at five, it would be really good if you and whatever you used as cologne were gone by then.”
